Abstract
Gandhiists, scholarly and otherwise, have consistently manipulated ‘the Mahatma image’ in accounting for M.K. Gandhi's role as a social and political ‘revolutionary’ and as the founder of ‘non‐violent resistance’. Uncritically assuming a consistent, virtually uninterrupted continuity between Mahatma Gandhi at the height of his career in India and M.K. Gandhi's career as a social and political reformer in Natal and the Transvaal (1893–1914), Gandhiists have systematically suppressed evidence which problematises their historiographical practice and ‘the Mahatma image’. In this paper I argue that Gandhi's practices in South Africa, particularly those resulting from his editorship of Indian Opinion, were often discontinuous with and even contradictory to the soothing fiction of ‘the Mahatma image’, but were at the same time significant factors in the genealogy of Satyagraha.
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