Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi as a young barrister in South Africa, where his first case taught him that a lawyer's true function was to settle disputes, not win them

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi stepped off the ship in Durban in May 1893, twenty-three years old, freshly called to the bar, and privately terrified of standing up in a courtroom. He had come to assist in a civil suit for Sheth Dada Abdulla, a Muslim merchant who had hired him on a relative's recommendation back in Porbandar.

The case itself wasn't complicated to describe: Dada Abdulla's cousin and business rival, Tyeb Haji Khan Mahammad, owed him somewhere around £40,000.

On paper, Gandhi thought his client's case looked solid. But the longer he sat with it, the more convinced he became that the lawsuit itself was the problem, not the solution. These were two men from the same family, running businesses that depended on each other and on the same small trading community. Push the case to a verdict, he reasoned, and there could only be one result: one man bankrupt, the other victorious, and whatever family tie had existed between them gone for good.

"My duty was to befriend both parties"

Gandhi watched the legal bills climb and the resentment between the two men harden week by week, and came to see his own profession as part of what was driving it. He wrote about it plainly: "As lawyers the counsel on both sides were bound to rake up points of law in support of their own clients. … This was more than I could bear. I felt that my duty was to befriend both parties and bring them together."

So he talked both sides into arbitration rather than letting the fight run its course in open court. They agreed. An arbitrator heard the case; and Dada Abdulla won. "I strained every nerve to bring about a compromise. At last Tyeb Sheth agreed. An arbitrator was appointed, the case was argued before him, and Dada Abdulla won," he said in the autobiography. 

Most lawyers would have called that the end of the story. Gandhi didn't. He realised that collecting the full award right away would wipe out Tyeb Sheth entirely, so he went back to his own winning client and asked him to accept the money in instalments instead of all at once. Getting Dada Abdulla to agree to that, he later admitted, took more persuading than getting both men to arbitration in the first place.

"I lost nothing thereby; not even money, certainly not my soul"

That sequence; arbitration, then a second round of compromise even after the arbitrator had already ruled; became, in Gandhi's own telling, the moment he learned what legal practice was actually for. It is one of the most repeated passages he ever wrote about his work: "I had learnt the true practice of law. I had learnt to find out the better side of human nature and to enter men's hearts. I realized that the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder. The lesson was so indelibly burnt into me that a large part of my time during the twenty years of my practice as a lawyer was occupied in bringing about private compromises of hundreds of cases. I lost nothing thereby, not even money, certainly not my soul."

This wasn't a lesson he learned once and filed away. Gandhi went on practising law in South Africa until 1914, and by his own account, pushing clients toward settlement rather than a fight to the finish became close to routine for him.

What's genuinely odd is what Gandhi did with that lesson a decade and a half later. In 1909, on a week-long voyage from London back to South Africa aboard the S.S. Kildonan Castle, he wrote Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), structured as a conversation between a doubtful "Reader" and an "Editor" who speaks for Gandhi's own views. One chapter, usually titled "The Condition of India: Lawyers," is aimed squarely at the profession he had just spent sixteen years in and he does not go easy on it.

His complaint wasn't about individual lawyers cheating or lying. It was about the structure of the job itself. An ordinary person trying to settle a quarrel between neighbours, he argued, would tell both sides they were probably both a little at fault and encourage them to drop it. A lawyer can't do that without being seen as bad at the job: "The latter's duty is to side with their clients and to find out ways and arguments in favour of the clients to which they (the clients) are often strangers. If they do not do so they will be considered to have degraded their profession. The lawyers, therefore, will, as a rule, advance quarrels instead of repressing them."

He pushed the argument further, tying the profession's financial self-interest directly to communal conflict in India: "Moreover, men take up that profession, not in order to help others out of their miseries, but to enrich themselves. … Those who know anything of the Hindu-Mahomedan quarrels know that they have been often due to the intervention of lawyers."

And then came the line everyone remembers, clearly built to provoke: "If pleaders were to abandon their profession, and consider it just as degrading as prostitution, English rule would break up in a day."

Two Gandhis, or just one?

At first glance this looks like a contradiction; a man who spent twenty years quietly earning a reputation as a dealmaker, turning around and calling his own trade degrading in print. Read closely, the two don't actually clash. Gandhi was never against resolving disputes; if anything, resolving disputes was close to an obsession for him. What he objected to was adversarial litigation fought purely to win, a version of lawyering where success meant the size of the judgment, regardless of whether anything between the two parties had actually been repaired.

For Gandhi, arbitration and private settlement weren't a way of avoiding legal work. They were, as far as he was concerned, the only kind of legal work worth doing. Elsewhere he described a true lawyer as "one who places truth and service in the first place and the emoluments of the profession in the next place only", a bar he was holding the profession to, not a case against practising law itself.

Why the story keeps resurfacing 

Indian legal writing on arbitration and mediation keeps coming back to the Dada Abdulla case, and not because it settled any point of law; it didn't. It keeps coming back because it's one of the few first-person accounts, by an actual practising lawyer, of choosing settlement over a win and then explaining, afterward, why that was the better result even for the party that had already come out on top.

The same passage shows up, reprinted, in collections of Gandhi's writing on law under headings like "Gandhiji's Thoughts on the Law and the Lawyers," usually sitting right next to the harder lines from Hind Swaraj the two halves of his thinking on the subject, packaged together.

Whatever else people make of Hind Swaraj and Gandhi's own political mentor, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, apparently expected him to quietly disown it within a few years he never did. Gandhi reaffirmed everything in it, including, implicitly, the chapter on lawyers, in 1921 and again in 1938.

Lawyers arguing for arbitration and mediation in India today still go back to Gandhi as a starting point.

Advocate Raghav Awasthi, citing Charles DiSalvo's biography of Gandhi's legal career, says: "I think Mahatma Gandhi was one of the earliest practitioners and proponents of ADR and if one goes through Charles Di Salvo's biography of him, it would be apparent that he was someone who was always interested in mediation as a means to settle disputes rather than furthering them. In a lot of countries around the world most disputes do not reach litigation and mechanisms like conciliation and arbitration are employed. As lawyers if we wish to pay tribute to Mahatma Gandhi we should ensure that matters are settled instead of litigation them in an adversarial fashion."

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