Great Soul

by Joseph Lelyveld

  And that wasn’t the end of his purification. The Gandhi family then had to give a banquet for caste members in the Gujarati town of Rajkot, where he spent much of his childhood and where his wife and son had been stashed all the time he was abroad. The dinner itself included a ritual of submission. The prodigal son was expected to strip to the waist and serve all the guests personally. Gandhi—whose torso would be naked above the waist throughout the latter part of his life—submitted. Most members of his jati were mollified, but some, including his wife’s family, never again ran the risk of allowing themselves to be seen eating in the presence of one so wayward, even after he became the recognized leader of the country. Gandhi went out of his way not to embarrass the holdouts, some of whom signaled that they were ready to ignore the ban in the privacy of their homes. He preferred to shame them. “I would not so much as drink water at their houses,” he tells us, lauding himself for his own “non-resistance,” which won him the affection and political support of those Banias who still regarded him as excommunicated.

  Or so he claims. The line between humility and sanctimoniousness can be a fine one, and Gandhi occasionally crossed it. On display here is his tendency to turn his life into a series of parables, as he dashed off his memoir in the 1920s and, as he grew older, in his everyday discourse. The fact is he’d defied the caste elders and then, even after he’d gone through the purification ceremony, ostentatiously refused to evade the ancient prohibition in collusion with anyone who worried it might still be valid. His handling of the matter might be seen as passive-aggressive: in the arena of family, a precursor of satyagraha. It’s Gandhi’s way of seizing higher ground. All that came later. On his return from London, he had strong practical reasons for getting back on good terms with his caste. His standing with the Modh Banias was bound to have a bearing on his prospects as a lawyer, for it was among them that he would expect to find most of his clients.

  The purification ceremony in Nasik and the banquet in Rajkot show that he was far from being a rebel against the strictures of caste in the interim between his return from London and his departure for South Africa. Whatever his private views, the newly minted barrister’s stand on caste and its place in Indian society was still basically conformist. The experience of becoming untouchable in his own relatively privileged subcaste had given Gandhi no particular insight into the life of the downtrodden. At most, it insinuated the notion that caste might not be an impermeable barrier. It was just a step, then, on the way to Calcutta in 1901. Naipaul is almost certainly right: that encounter might never have occurred the way it did had he not gone to South Africa. If we look closely at Gandhi’s early experience there, several critical moments of consciousness-raising appear to converge in a period of roughly half a year, starting in the latter part of 1894 as he was setting up a law practice in Durban.

  Could his engagement with Christian missionaries in that period have had something to do with the sprouting of a social conscience? It’s clear enough that British and American missionaries helped insinuate a notion of social equality into Indian thought. The thin edge of their wedge, it was always implicit and sometimes explicit in their general critique of a social order they considered wicked and in their more specific attack on the authority of Brahmans. The priestly caste was portrayed in Christian tracts as self-serving and corrupt. (“Wherever you see men, they have two hands, two feet, two eyes, two ears, one nose and one mouth, whatever their kind or country,” a letter in a missionary newspaper noted nearly three decades before Gandhi was born. “Then God could not have had it in mind to create many castes among men. And the system of caste, that is only practised in India, is caused by the Brahmans to maintain their superiority.”) However, it’s less clear that discussions of caste and social equality came up in discussions between Gandhi and the missionaries who competed for his soul in Pretoria and Durban. Everything about the newcomer’s first experiences in the emerging racial order suggests that such matters should have and may have arisen. But these evangelicals had salvation, not social reform, on their minds. From all that we actually know of their conversations with Gandhi, they were consistently otherworldly.

  Enter Tolstoy, from the steppes. At some point in 1894, apparently in his last weeks in Pretoria, Gandhi received a packet in the mail from one of his well-wishers in Britain. This was Edward Maitland, leader of the tiny Esoteric Christianity spin-off from the Theosophist movement. Inside was the newly published Constance Garnett translation of The Kingdom of God Is Within You, the great novelist’s late-life confession of a passionate Christian creed, founded on the individual conscience and a doctrine of radical nonviolence. Ten years later, Gandhi would come upon Ruskin and a few years after that on Thoreau. Subsequently, he would correspond with Tolstoy himself. But if there is a single seminal experience in his intellectual development, it starts with his unwrapping that package in Pretoria. The author of War and Peace, a book the young lawyer would have found less compelling, excoriates the high culture of the educated classes, which profess to believe in the brotherhood of man, condemning in the course of his argument all the institutions of church and state in czarist Russia. What they have in common, he rages, is bedrock hypocrisy, never more so than when they’re declaiming on the subject of brotherhood:

  We are all brothers, but I live on a salary paid me for prosecuting, judging, and condemning the thief or the prostitute whose existence the whole tenor of my life brings about … We are all brothers, but I live on the salary I gain by collecting taxes from needy laborers to be spent on the luxuries of the rich and idle. We are all brothers, but I take a stipend for preaching a false Christian religion, which I do not myself believe in, and which only serves to hinder men from understanding true Christianity.

  And this: “We are all brothers—and yet every morning a brother or a sister must empty the bedroom slops for me.”

  Here we begin to get a clear view of how the social conscience that Gandhi would bring to Calcutta in 1901 was formed. It was not just living in South Africa that inspired it. It was musing about India while living in South Africa and reading Tolstoy there as he would continue to do in the coming years. By the time he got to the Calcutta meeting, Gandhi had read Tolstoy’s subsequent jeremiad, What Is to Be Done? Here Tolstoy, continuing in his full-throated prophetic vein, tells the educated classes how they can save themselves—through an uncompromising rejection of materialism, a life of simple living, and physical labor to provide for their own necessities. (“Body labor” and “bread labor,” he calls it, language Gandhi eventually appropriates for his own use.) In this context, Tolstoy, now determined to shed the privileges of a Russian aristocrat, returns to the question of human feces. The laws of God will be fulfilled, he writes, “when men of our circle, and after them all the great majority of working-people, will no longer consider it shameful to clean latrines, but will consider it shameful to fill them up in order that other men, our brethren, may carry their contents away.”

  The deep impression Tolstoy etched on Gandhi’s soul was sufficiently conspicuous for one of his Indian critics to seize on it, years later, as proof of his essential foreignness. This was Sri Aurobindo, a brilliant Bengali revolutionary who advocated terrorism under the name Aurobindo Ghose, then lived out his long life as an ashram mystic and guru in the tiny French enclave of Pondicherry in South India. “Gandhi,” Aurobindo said in 1926, “is a European—truly a Russian Christian in an Indian body.” Gandhi, by then all but undisputed leader of the nationalist movement in India, might plausibly have retorted that Aurobindo was a Russian anarchist in an Indian body, but the Bengali’s remark either passed him by or was beneath his notice.

  The younger Gandhi, the South African lawyer and petitioner, immediately saw the contradiction between Tolstoy’s prophetic teachings and the values prevailing among Indians of his station. Evidence that he has been more than shaken soon begins to accumulate. In May 1894, he travels to Durban, presumably to close out his year in South Africa and board a ship for home
. Gandhi’s account of what happened then has been accepted by most biographers: how at a farewell party his eye happened to fall on a brief newspaper item on the progress of a bill to disenfranchise Natal’s Indians, how he called it to the attention of the community and was then prevailed upon to stay and lead a fight against the legislation. But an Indian scholar and Gandhi enthusiast, T. K. Mahadevan, noting that the bill had by then been progressing in stages through the colonial legislature for more than half a year, devoted a whole book to exposing Gandhi’s “fictionalizing” and “mendacity” in his recounting of this episode in the Autobiography. With all the vehemence of a trial lawyer addressing a jury, the scholar concluded that the young barrister was mainly looking out for himself. Rather than return to an uncertain future in India, according to Mahadevan, he wanted to establish a legal practice in Durban.

  It’s more generous and probably more accurate to allow for the possibility of mixed motives, of altruism and ambition each playing its part in the cancellation of his voyage home. In any case, by August 1894 he has thrown himself into a life of what would now be called public service, drafting petitions and, early on, a constitution for the Natal Indian Congress, a newly formed association of better-off Indians, mostly traders and merchants and, in the Durban of that time, mostly Muslim. And here for the first time, at the very outset of his career in politics, he notices and mentions poor Indians. With Tolstoy hovering at his shoulder, or so we can reasonably surmise, Gandhi lists among the seven “objects” of the new Congress two for which it’s hard to find any other inspiration in his reading or experience: “To inquire into the conditions of Indentured Indians and to take proper steps to alleviate their sufferings … [and] to help the poor and helpless in every reasonable way.” He may have done little for or with the indentured until late in his stay in South Africa, but clearly they were on his mind and conscience from his earliest days in politics.

  In 1895, with founders of the Natal Indian Congress, mostly Muslim merchants (photo credit i2.1)

  Such “objects” remained words, floating for years into a realm of high-flown aspiration, stopping far short of a program. Gandhi doesn’t immediately travel to the sugar plantations and mines to make an on-the-spot inquiry. Years later, back in India, he would attribute his hesitation to his own social anxieties. “I lived in South Africa for 20 years,” he said then, “but never once thought of going to see the diamond mines there, partly because I was afraid lest as an ‘untouchable’ I should be refused admission and insulted.” By then, his equation of British racism and Indian casteism—the notion that all Indians were untouchable in British eyes—had become the rhetorical cutting edge of his argument as a social reformer. It worked for him as a nationalist, too.

  But that was not where he started. Initially, his goal was social equality within the empire for his benefactors and clients, the higher-class Indian merchants. Indentured Indians thus weren’t invited to join the Natal Indian Congress. Its annual membership fee of three pounds was far beyond their means. Their sufferings remained unalleviated, but several months later Gandhi had his first notable encounter with an indentured laborer; it’s a case of reality crashing in. A Tamil gardener named Balasundaram, indentured to a well-known Durban white, turns up in Gandhi’s recently opened law office, where one of the clerks, also a Tamil, interprets his story. The man is weeping, bleeding from the mouth; two of his teeth have been broken. His master has beaten him, he says. Gandhi sends him to a doctor, then takes him to a magistrate.

  That’s the version of the encounter he gives in the Autobiography, what deserves to be belittled as its movie treatment. None of his biographers seem to notice how far this account, written after the passage of three decades, strays from one he wrote just two years after the event. In the earlier one, the laborer has already gone on his own to the official known as the protector of immigrants, who conveys him to a magistrate, who, in turn, arranges for him to be hospitalized for “a few days.” Only then does he land on Gandhi’s doorstep. His wounds have been treated, he is no longer bleeding, but his mouth is so sore he can’t speak. Surprisingly, he’s able to write down his request in Tamil. He wants the lawyer to have his indenture canceled. Gandhi asks whether he’d be willing to have it transferred to someone other than his employer if cancellation can’t be arranged. It takes half a year, but finally Gandhi arranges for Balasundaram to be indentured to a Wesleyan minister of his acquaintance, whose services Gandhi has been attending most Sundays.

  Balasundaram is hardly a typical indentured laborer. Instead of toiling on a sugar plantation or mine, where laborers in large numbers are confined to compounds, the gardener lives in the city, where he knows his way around well enough to be able to get to the protector and Durban’s one Indian lawyer on his own. That he’s at least semiliterate suggests that he may not be an untouchable. Gandhi, later claiming more credit than he seems to have deserved, describes the case as a turning point. “It reached the ears of every indentured laborer, and I came to be regarded as their friend,” he says in the Autobiography. “A regular stream of indentured labourers began to pour into my office.” He says he got to know their “joys and sorrows.” These broad claims have been widely accepted. (“He emerged virtually as a one-man legal aid society for these poor Indians,” a respected Indian scholar, Nagindas Sanghavi, wrote.) Evidence from this period to support them, however, is less than slight. Gandhi himself doesn’t go on to mention any subsequent cases involving indentured laborers; if there were records of such cases, they’ve long since disappeared. Apart from sketchy reports of two weekend forays late in 1895 to pass the hat for the Natal Indian Congress, there’s nothing to indicate he went out of his way to meet the indentured in his Durban years.

  On October 26, 1895, he’s said to have visited shanties near the Point Road where Indian dockworkers and fishermen lived, collecting only five pounds. (Point Road, the thoroughfare he first traveled on landing in Durban, has lately, in the new South Africa, been renamed Mahatma Gandhi Road, a well-meant tribute that has discomfited local Indians, given its reputation for prostitution.) The next weekend he ventured north with some Congress members to the sugar country, but, barred from speaking to laborers at the Tongaat estate, he concentrated on local Indian traders. A British estate owner was asked by a magistrate in Durban to report on Gandhi’s activities. The planter was no clairvoyant. This is what he wrote: “He will cause some trouble I have no doubt, but he is not the man to lead a big movement. He has a weak face.”

  Gandhi’s real attitude to the indentured in this period is made plain by the arguments he advanced on the first of his losing causes in South Africa: that of protecting the voting rights of literate, propertied Indians. Such Indians, he wrote in December that year, “have no wish to see ignorant Indians who cannot possibly be expected to understand the value of a vote being placed on the Voters’ List.”

  If the thought of following Tolstoy’s teaching on his brief foray to the sugar country on Natal’s north coast so much as crossed his mind, it hadn’t yet carried him to the conclusion that he needed to do physical labor with his own hands. Nor, it seems, did he try again to penetrate the plantations, having failed the first time. So for anyone looking for the origins of his passion on untouchability—so evident by the time he reaches Calcutta in 1901—the Balasundaram case sheds little light. The most that can be said is that it might have helped set the stage for his next revelation, which came not from actual encounters with poor Indians but from finding himself on the short end of an argument with whites. At virtually the same time, probably no more than a few weeks after the gardener’s arrival in his office, Gandhi the lawyer and petitioner was pulled up short by an editorial in a Johannesburg paper called The Critic.

  The editorial chews over Gandhi’s first venture in political pamphleteering, an open letter to the members of the colonial legislature in Natal, published at the end of 1894. In it, Gandhi took on “the Indian question as a whole,” asking why Indians were so despised and hated
in the country. “If that hatred is simply based upon his color,” the twenty-five-year-old neophyte wrote, “then, of course, he has no hope. The sooner he leaves the Colony the better. No matter what he does, he will never have the white skin.” But if the hatred was a result of misunderstanding, then maybe his letter would spread some appreciation of the richness of Indian culture and the thrifty hard work that made Indian citizens so useful. The case was different, Gandhi conceded, with indentured laborers, imported by the thousands on starvation wages, held under bondage, and lacking anything that can be described as “moral education.” In finely honed understatement, so understated it probably passed over the heads of most white readers, Gandhi writes: “I confess my inability to prove that they are more than human.” He’s saying: Sure, they’re unsanitary and degraded, but what can you expect, given the conditions in which you confine them? Maybe the image of Balasundaram, the only indentured laborer he’d met up to that point, flitted through his mind.

  The Critic seizes on that argument and turns it around. It was the caste system and not the laws of Natal that condemned Indian laborers to be “a servile race,” it said. “The class of Hindoos which swarms in Natal and elsewhere is necessarily of the lowest caste and, under the circumstances, do what they will, they can never raise themselves into positions which command respect, even of their fellows.” Gandhi, the newspaper said, should “begin his work at home.”

  It’s Gandhi’s authorized biographer and longtime secretary, Pyarelal, who brings this passage to our attention. That may mean he has come upon a clipping Gandhi—a great hoarder and indexer of clippings all through his career—had saved from his South Africa days. Or, since Pyarelal was at Gandhi’s side for nearly thirty years, from boyhood on, it may also mean that he has discussed the editorial with the man he called his “Master.” Pyarelal is given to flowery hyperbole. But writing of the editorial in The Critic, he seems sure of his ground as he describes an epiphany: