While in South Africa, he protested against apartheid. Later, he would break caste barriers and minister to the untouchables of India, stressing the need to bring all people together under the newly developing nation-state. But Gandhi said this revelation of the oneness of all peoples only came to him after he was denied a seat on a stagecoach in South Africa. The racist driver made the young Indian lawyer sit outside in the hot sun on a long trip to Pretoria because of the color of his skin. Gandhi sued the railroad company and won. Suddenly, he found within himself new courage, the courage to be spokesman for all powerless peoples. Gandhi drew his nonviolent philosophy from the New Testament as well as Hindu spiritual teachings, and made nonviolent, public acts of resistance the hallmark of his resistance to British rule. Later on, Gandhi's spiritual conversion involved his adoption of a celibate lifestyle arose as way to discipline himself, not because he rejected sex as immoral. Open and honest with Fisher, Gandhi admits this made ordinary relations between his wife and himself difficult at times. This personal explication in the text, however, is not prurient, merely to show that Gandhi was all encompassing in his use of personal spiritual techniques as well as his political philosophy.

The crux of the text involves the narration of how Gandhi made great symbolic, nonviolent acts the...

After the partition, one of his greatest pains was still the continued conflict between Hindus and Muslims on the Indian subcontinent.
Gandhi always believed, until his end at the hands of an extremist, that nonviolence and making one's self into an example of good was the most important aspect of political protest. "Even in the wake of Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs... that would have been heroism," he said. Even if the reader does not agree with this particular sentiment, the idea is powerful. Turn your oppressor's evil against him, so his butchery becomes your tool of propaganda, not his.

Martin Luther King Jr. later embraced this same principle during America's civil rights struggle. King openly credited Gandhi as an inspiration during the struggle. Fisher ends his text stating that believes that Gandhi was a unique person, a great person, perhaps the greatest figure of the last nineteen hundred years. Gandhi's influence, even today, lives on, in his own legacy in India, in the American civil rights movement, and in the lives of all who practice civil disobedience to this day.