“My imperfections and failures are as much a blessing from God as my successes and my talents and I lay them both at his feet,” Mahatma Gandhi writes in My Non-Violence, a collection of his work produced by Navajivan, the publishing house he founded in 1929.

The necessity and value of failure emerges as a recurring theme in almost any version of a life story that goes beyond the limitations of hagiography, and historian Ramachandra Guha directs readers toward that sort of insight in Gandhi Before India, just published in the United States as the first installment of a two-part biography.

Beyond highlighting his subject's great achievements, Guha clarifies Gandhi's failures as husband and father and also explains his struggle to make it as a young lawyer in the High Court of Bombay. When an Indian merchant in South Africa invites Gandhi to help him solve a legal dispute, his migration there in 1893 is, in part, a desperate maneuver. “In truth,” Guha writes, “the decision to leave for South Africa was mandated not by the mysterious ways of fate, but by the mundane facts of failure.”

Early on in the span of Gandhi’s formative two decades in South Africa, a pivotal and very personal event ignited his voice as an activist. Thrown out of his train compartment by a ticket inspector who said first-class accommodations were for whites only, the young lawyer objected in protest. “Clearly he was humiliated, he was badly treated. It was a racially divided society,” Guha told NPR earlier this week. “And once Gandhi started his legal work in South Africa, he really became the major spokesman and advocate for Indian rights. So had he not gone to South Africa in the 1890s, he would never have become a political animal.”

The non-violent resistance developed by that political animal, which has inspired leaders including Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama, also led Barack Obama to hang Gandhi's portrait in his office when he was first elected senator. In 2008, when Oprah Winfrey still carried the unofficial title of most influential woman in the world, her endorsement of Obama served as a vital turning point in that year's presidential campaign. Consciously or not, she may have been drawn to Gandhi's influence, because in her commencement address to Harvard’s graduating class last year, she echoed him with these words of encouragement:

“There is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction. Now, when you’re down there in the hole, it looks like failure … Give yourself time to mourn what you think you may have lost, but then here’s the key: Learn from every mistake because every experience, encounter and particularly your mistakes are there to teach you and force you into being more who you are. And then figure out what is the next right move. And the key to life is to develop an internal moral, emotional GPS that can tell you which way to go.”

In South Africa, on the heels of humiliation and failure, Gandhi discovered and gave voice to his own internal GPS. If it weren’t for him finding it, where in the world would we be?