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After an undistinguished performance in a legal practice in India, Gandhi left for South Africa in 1893 to serve as legal adviser to an Indian firm. The 21 years that he spent there marked a turning point in his life. The racial humiliations to which he and his countrymen were subjected there turned the shy and reserved lawyer into a courageous political activist. Realizing that violence was evil and rational persuasion often unavailing, he developed a new method of non-violent resistance, which he called Satyagraha and which he used with some success to secure racial justice for his people. Gandhi also reflected deeply on his own religion, interacted with Jewish and Christian friends, and evolved a distinct view of life based on what he found valuable in his own and other religions.
Gandhi finally returned to India in 1915, after the government of the Union of South Africa had made important concessions to his demands, including recognition of Indian marriages and abolition of the poll tax for them. After travelling all over India to familiarize himself with the country of which he had only a limited understanding, he plunged into politics, and soon became the unquestioned leader of the Indian nationalist movement. Almost single-handedly he transformed the middle- and upper-class Indian National Congress into a powerful national organization, bringing in large sections of excluded groups as women, traders, merchants, the upper and middle peasantry, and youth, and giving it a truly national basis.
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