Indian Opinion

• 1. Introduction

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  Gandhi said it plainly: "Satyagraha would have been impossible without Indian Opinion." The newspaper was first published in Natal, South Africa, in 1903, and it would run until 1961. Printed in Gujarati, Hindi, Tamil, and English, it spoke to and for a community living under systematic legal restrictions. Its editors, almost without exception, served time in jail for what they printed. What drove a newspaper to become the cornerstone of a political philosophy? And how did a press that also grew its own food and shared its profits come to shape a struggle that reached two continents? The first issue reached the streets of Natal on the 6th of June 1903.

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• 2. Indentured and Restricted

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  In the 19th century, Indians began arriving in South Africa as indentured servants, brought to meet the labor demands of a growing colonial economy. Alongside other minority communities, they faced political, economic, and social discrimination. In the aftermath of the Boer War, the Boer general Jan Smuts introduced sweeping restrictions on the Indian community. These stripped away civil rights the community had previously held. Police were granted the power to search, seize, and arrest without a warrant. Every Indian was required to carry an identification and registration card at all times.

  Gandhi was working as a lawyer in the Natal province when he organized the publication of a newspaper. His aim was to educate the European communities of South Africa about Indian needs and issues. With the support of the Natal Indian Congress, his clients, and other notable Indians, he assembled a small staff and a printing press. The press belonged to Madanjit Viyavaharik, who ran the International Printing Press, and on the 4th of June 1903, the first issue was printed. Mansukhlal Nazar, the secretary of the Natal Indian Congress, was named the paper's first editor and a key organizer of its early operation.

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• 3. The Press at Phoenix

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  In 1904, Gandhi relocated the newspaper's printing operation to the Phoenix Settlement, a commune he had established on land outside Durban. The arrangement at Phoenix was unlike anything typical of a newspaper operation. Every worker had a share in the land itself. If profits arrived, they were shared. The community grew its own food to sustain itself, and producing Indian Opinion was a collective, collaborative effort.

  Hebert Kitchin, Henry Polak, and Albert West all served as editors of Indian Opinion after Nazar stepped down. Manilal Gandhi would later hold the editorial chair for 36 years, longer than anyone else. After Manilal Gandhi died, his wife Sushila Gandhi assumed the editorship in turn. The paper's early issues maintained a deliberately moderate tone toward officials in Smuts's administration. That posture would begin to break under the weight of what reporters were finding on the agricultural estates.

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• 4. Conditions on the Ground

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  The rate of suicide among indentured Indians in South Africa was, by the paper's documentation, astoundingly high. Indian Opinion brought these conditions before the public. Editorials detailed harsh employer treatment, the punishing terms of labor on the agricultural estates, and the absence of meaningful legal protection for workers. A campaign was launched to end the entire system of indenture. Henry Polak, a friend of Gandhi's, traveled to India to mobilize support there.

  In an issue dated the 22nd of October 1910, Gandhi addressed the discrimination that Africans faced under colonial rule. He wrote that Africans were the original inhabitants of the land and that the Indian community lived there only with their goodwill. Whites, he argued, had occupied the country by force. The paper also gave prominence to the African Women's struggle in the Orange Free State. It supported John Langalibalele Dube's criticism of the Natives Land Act. Brian Gabriel, one of Natal's earliest Indian photographers, provided the paper with visual coverage of local resistance. By 1906, the paper's coverage of these conditions had pushed it toward a direct confrontation with the law itself.

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• 5. The Satyagraha Campaign

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  Passes on Indians in the Transvaal were the immediate cause of the satyagraha campaign, which ran from 1906-1913. Indian Opinion became a vehicle for urging readers to challenge unjust laws. When those laws were clearly wrong, it called for outright defiance. The paper was central to the campaign's momentum. Its pages paid tribute to local resisters and helped defeat the registration drive that officials had sought to impose on the Indian community. When Gandhi eventually returned to India, he brought the lessons of Indian Opinion with him. In India, he went on to publish Young India, Harijan, and Navjivan, three newspapers that continued the tradition the press at Phoenix had established.

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• 6. Archive and Heritage

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  The Phoenix Settlement was restored in 2000, and in 2020, the South African government declared it a National Heritage Site. The pages of Indian Opinion preserved a documentary record of the legal and social conditions Indians faced in South Africa. They also documented the political life of a community that had fought those conditions for decades. Gandhi's experience with the paper and the political struggle in South Africa directly informed his approach to the Indian independence movement.

  Indian Opinion itself never operated as a commercial enterprise. It was a publication committed to serving social causes, and that commitment meant a constant financial struggle. The paper also served as a bridge to audiences in India, bringing them news of the Indian diaspora in South Africa. Today, Indian Opinion is remembered as much for its coverage of discrimination against native Africans as for its role in the development of satyagraha.

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