This day that year: Gandhi Ji was thrown out from train in South Africa

Gandhi Ji had reached Durban, South Africa, in 1893 to serve as legal advocate to the trader  Dada Abdulla. In June, he was asked by Dada Abdulla to carry out a journey to Pretoria in the Transvaal, a trip which first took Gandhi to Pietermaritzburg. There, Gandhi was seated in the first-class rail coach, since he had bought a first-class ticket. A European who entered the coach hastened to convene railway officials, who ordered Gandhi to remove himself to the van compartment, since 'coolies' and non-whites were actually not allowed in first-class compartments. Gandhi protested and produced his ticket, but was warned that he would be forcibly removed if he did not make a polite exit. As Gandhi refused to obey with the order, he was instantly pushed out of the train, and his baggage was tossed out on to the platform. The train steamed away, and Gandhi withdrew to the waiting room. "It was winter," Gandhi wrote in his autobiography, and "the cold was extremely bitter. My over-coat was in my luggage, but I did not dare to ask for it lest I should be insulted again, so I sat and shivered" (Part II, Ch. 8). He says he began to think of his "duty": ought he to stay back and fight for his "rights", or should he return to India? His own "hardship was superficial", "only a symptom of the deep disease of colour prejudice."

In such situation did Gandhi first become alert of racism and of the severe inequities to which people are subjected on the basis of color; and thus Gandhi was to get on on a journey that would take him far beyond Pretoria. In other ways, also, this train journey, firstly aborted, from Durban to Pretoria was to be symbolic of the way in which Gandhi would cause other transgressions, and Gandhi's activities to arrive at all his countrywomen and men. Upon his permanent homecoming to India in early 1915, Gandhi would use trains to tour the length and breadth of India, and he all the time traveled by third-class. Few Indians of his era, or certainly since, acquired the understanding of India that Gandhi gained by his travels, and there can barely be any Indian who had criss-crossed the nation by train as much as Gandhi had done.

The narrative of Gandhi's travels at Pietermaritzburg Railway Station has now acquired a new life. In a moving ceremony at Pietermaritzburg Railway Station presided over by Nelson Mandela, the President of South Africa, the Freedom of Pietermaritzburg was conferred posthumously on Mahatma Gandhi on April 25, 1997. Gathered as one to right a century-old wrong, President Mandela recalled "Gandhi's glorious instance of personal sacrifice and devotion in the face of repression". Gopalkrishna Gandhi, India's High Commissioner to South Africa, received the Freedom of Pietermaritzburg for his grandfather and noted that Gandhi's experience at the railway station was something like a second birth: "When Gandhi was evicted from the train, an Indian visiting South Africa fell but when Gandhi rose, an Indian South African rose."