In 1959, Dr Martin Luther King Jr travelled to India in order to pay homage to its founding father, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. King credited Gandhi with the ability to “mobilize and galvanize more people in his lifetime than any other person in the history of the world.”

This was a bold statement, but not an implausible one, especially when we consider the transnational dimensions of Gandhi’s civil disobedience strategy, which had clearly inspired King himself.

The initial test of Gandhi’s strategy had been in South Africa, where he lived for more than twenty years, leading struggles of Indians in Natal and the Orange Free State for civil and political rights. Nelson Mandela, who later received the International Gandhi Peace Prize, drew inspiration from Gandhi, seeing him as the “archetypal anticolonial revolutionary” who was “no ordinary leader — divinely inspired.”