ABSTRACT
A certain historiography claims that in April 1919, the stepping in of M. K. Gandhi with a programme of passive and non-violent resistance marked the beginning of the movement for India's independence and was its unique cause. This chapter aims to question and to reconstitute a total social phenomenon (elitist, though revolutionary) prevailing during the long twenty-five years (1893-1918) that preceded Gandhi. Moreover, it had an ontological vision firmly based on an ethics specific to India. Generous in his acknowledgement of moral debts to foreign sources, Gandhi was not so fulsome about the blueprint that was left by his native predecessors, which served and guided him step by step. Discovering that Lenin considered Gandhi, the new leader of men in view on the Indian horizon, to be an objectively revolutionary, he revealed the reactionary side of Gandhi—culturally and socially—hidden behind his politically revolutionary appearance.
