Biography | Mahatma Gandhi — The Platform at Pietermaritzburg Where a First-Class Ticket Was Not Enough

People look for the birth of satyagraha in an ashram courtyard in Gujarat.

The first hard night was this platform.

Mohandas Gandhi landed at Durban on 23 May 1893, briefed by a Porbandar firm to work on a case that would be heard in Pretoria. Dada Abdulla, his client, gave him a first-class ticket on the Natal Government Railways from Durban toward Charlestown on the Transvaal border.

At about nine in the evening on 7 June 1893 the train stopped at Pietermaritzburg. A white passenger objected to an Indian remaining in the first-class compartment overnight. Gandhi refused to move to the van.

A guard and a constable put him and his luggage on the platform. The train left.

He spent the rest of the night in the station waiting-room. In the morning he telegraphed a protest to the general manager of the railways and to Abdulla.

The red-brick Victorian station still stands at 23 Rail Street. A plinth on the platform marks the eviction. A waiting-room exhibition was opened in 2016.

The photograph is the station as it looked in 1898, five years after the night.

Photo: public domain, Pietermaritzburg railway station, 1898, via Wikimedia Commons