Artist richard estes biography of mahatma

Features correspondent

After he was evicted from a train in South Africa, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi devoted his life to combatting racial inequality through passive resistance.

It was a wet, windy day on Pietermaritzburg’s railway platform, located an hour from South Africa’s port city of Durban. The 19th-Century, Victorian-style red brick station, with a corrugated iron roof, lace filigree and wooden ticket windows, was quiet. I pulled my coat closer around me and imagined how it would have felt to have stood here on one fateful night more than a century ago.

On 7 June 1893, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, then a young barrister, was on his way from Durban to Pretoria on behalf of his client, a merchant named Dada Abdulla. When the train came to a stop in Pietermaritzburg, Gandhi was ordered by the conductor to move from the first-class carriage (reserved for white passengers) where he was sitting, to the van compartment for lower-class travellers. When Gandhi refused, showing the conductor his first-class ticket, he was evicted unceremoniously from the train.

A plaque on the platform marks the approximate spot where he was push

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