Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  A 1908 letter from Kallenbach to his brother Simon in Germany, shortly after Gandhi moved in with him, shows that he’d been under his lodger’s influence for some time. “For the last two years I have given up meat eating; for the last year I also did not touch fish any more,” he writes, “and for the last 18 months, I have given up my sex life … I have changed my daily life in order to simplify it.” Later it is Kallenbach who points out to Gandhi the insidious tendency milk has to enhance arousal. Gandhi, ever the extremist in dietary experiments, extends the prohibition to chocolates. “I see death in chocolates,” he lectures Polak, who isn’t in this period involved in the food trials that Kallenbach readily undergoes. Few foods are so “heating,” meaning likely to stimulate forbidden appetites. He sends Kallenbach a verse on nonattachment to “bodily pleasures.” We have bodies, according to this message, in order to learn “self control.”

  The Jewish architect from Kaliningrad on the Baltic and the Bania lawyer from Porbandar on the Arabian Sea first lived together in Orchards, one of Johannesburg’s older northern suburbs, in a house called the Kraal, a Dutch word originally for homestead, now broadly applied to rural African enclosures. The inspiration for the design was African as well. Kallenbach took the rondavel—a round thatched structure with thick clay walls, sometimes whitewashed—as his prototype for 15 Pine Street, where he cohabited with Gandhi for a year and a half; it still stands (and was recently purchased by a French company with plans to turn it into a tourist attraction, yet another Gandhi museum). It’s actually two rondavels, cleverly joined and set back behind a high fence with a sign, omnipresent these days on the walls and fences of the northern suburbs, warning intruders of an “armed response.” Obviously, the warning isn’t Gandhian. When he discovered that Kallenbach had appointed himself bodyguard and started packing a revolver after the Pathan attack, Gandhi insisted he get rid of it.

  The couple then moved to an area called Linksfield, where Kallenbach was building a bigger house called Mountain View, over which Gandhi had predictable misgivings. One of his self-imposed missions in this period was to drill his housemate in the discipline of self-denial. He nagged him to rid himself of a new car and live up to the vow of poverty both had taken by slashing his personal spending. “My hope is that we will not this time have aristocratic simplicity but simple simplicity,” he writes before work on the new house has actually begun. For a time in 1910, they live on the building site in a tent. What he really wants, it emerges, is for Kallenbach to shut down his architecture practice—just as he at this point is preparing to give up the law—and return with him to a shared life of service at Phoenix. “It appears,” Gandhi writes hopefully in a laudatory profile of his companion in Indian Opinion, “that Mr. Kallenbach will gradually give up his work as architect and live in complete poverty.”

  Kallenbach professes to be tempted, but he’s not yet sold. His office remains open and active. At one point he competes simultaneously for commissions on a new synagogue, a Christian Science church, and a Greek Orthodox one. Tolstoy Farm, all eleven hundred acres of it, which he purchased, is the big spender’s way of proving he’s serious about voluntary poverty. Both he and Gandhi write to the dying Tolstoy to tell him of their plans. The farm meets an immediate need confronting Gandhi. He now has a place to house the families of passive resisters who have gone to jail as part of the fading satyagraha campaign, a place where he can also train new resisters. Also, it’s a place where he can test the pedagogical and small-economy precepts he’d just propounded in the most important piece of sustained argument he would ever write, a tract called Hind Swaraj. The title translates as “Indian Self-Rule” or, more loosely, “India’s Freedom.” Gandhi dashed it off in ten days on a ship called the Kildonan Castle, sailing home in 1909 from his last futile attempt at lobbying in Whitehall.

  In the form of a Socratic dialogue, this powerfully original little book encapsulates in one place his disappointment in the imperial system, the West in general, and modern industrial societies everywhere; also his rejection of violence as a political tactic; and his romantic feeling for the Indian village, of which he had, until then, little firsthand experience. His blanket rejection of modern ways includes modern medicine, lawyers (like himself), railroads (on which he’d rely for the rest of his life), and parliamentary politics (which Indian nationalists wanted for themselves). Capping its complicated and eclectic provenance is the surprising discovery that its immediate inspiration came not from Tolstoy or Ruskin but from the prolific Anglo-Catholic man of letters G. K. Chesterton, who, in a column in The Illustrated London News that Gandhi happened to see in London, asked what a real Indian nationalist, “an authentic Indian,” would say to an imperialist trying to establish British-style institutions and ways of thought under the Raj.

  “Life is very short; a man must live somehow and die somewhere,” the English writer’s authentic Indian declares in response to this rhetorical question. “The amount of bodily comfort a peasant gets under your best Republic is not so much more than mine. If you do not like our sort of spiritual comfort, we never asked you to. Go, and leave us with it.” In Hind Swaraj, the character Gandhi inhabits, called “the Editor,” steps forward as that authentic Indian. Chesterton hasn’t given Gandhi new ideas but has shown him how the ideas he has been gradually gathering to himself can be made to define a persona. What he does in these pages, he will soon do in life; the Editor will become the Mahatma who, twelve years later, in his first noncooperation campaign in India will act out one of the book’s themes. “The English have not taken India,” the Editor declares. “We have given it to them.” His answer is to “cease to play the ruled.” This is more than a foreshadowing of Gandhi’s later campaigns. It’s a declaration of their basic theme.

  Although written as he sails to Cape Town from a failed mission to London bearing on Indian rights in the Transvaal, the words “South Africa” never show up in Hind Swaraj. In his own mind, he has already started to repatriate himself to India, where the tract was promptly branded subversive and banned. It’s actually more subversive of the pre-Gandhi Indian national movement, with its Anglicized leadership and imported values, than it is of British colonial rule. “Those in whose name we speak we do not know, nor do they know us,” its author, who has spent fewer than five of the previous twenty years in India, boldly asserts, implicitly setting a challenge for himself. But his critique can also be applied to the movement he has led in South Africa generally, particularly Natal. An explicit part of the purpose of Tolstoy Farm is to enable Gandhi and Kallenbach—the first person to be shown the manuscript of Hind Swaraj—to close the social gap among Indians that he has finally come to recognize. Six months after he returns from London, Gandhi drafts the first of his informal contracts with Kallenbach, setting up what amounts to a basic law for the new community. “The primary object of going to the Farm so far as K. and G. are concerned,” this document decrees, “is to make themselves into working farm hands.” Nearly a year later, in May 1911, with the farm up and running, Gandhi tells Polak: “I should like to slip out of the public gaze … to bury myself in the farm and to devote my attention to farming and educating.” The farming gives him a new appreciation for the aptitudes of Africans and Indians, like the indentured, who work the land. “They are more useful than any of us,” he writes in Indian Opinion, making an explicit contrast between field laborers and a second generation of white-collar Indian clerks that’s starting to criticize his leadership. “If the great Native races should stop working for a week, we should probably be starving.”

  But it’s the school he runs six afternoons a week and every evening into which he pours most of his energy in the latter half of 1911. “That is my predominant occupation,” he writes to Kallenbach on September 9. The enrollment is small. Gandhi has one dietary requirement that helps keep it low. Students must commit themselves to a saltless diet, for he has discovered that salt “makes us eat more and arouses the senses.” Two decades later, in a notable de
monstration of ideological flexibility, he’d declare salt to be one of life’s necessities, making it the focus of his single most successful exercise in militant nonviolence, the Salt March of 1930. Now, when he eases up on his stricture against salt at Tolstoy Farm, allowing it back into the diet in modest amounts, enrollment shoots up to twenty-five, eight of them, he notes proudly, Muslims. The curriculum includes a course in sandal making. Gandhi had sent Kallenbach to a Trappist monastery near Phoenix to learn the craft; the architect then taught the lawyer, and the lawyer then taught the students. Soon they’d turned out fifty pairs, he reported, one of which he sent to his political sparring partner Jan Smuts.

  Tolstoy Farm, with Gandhi serving as schoolmaster and chief medical officer, was now for a time the foreground of his life; the fading satyagraha campaign against the racial legislation of the Transvaal receded into the background. Gandhi carried on a desultory negotiation with Smuts, now minister of defense and also mines in the new Union government, but his focus was on developing a curriculum using Indian languages and texts, as well as on diet and nature cures as wholesome alternatives to aggressive modern medicine. Kallenbach is more involved in these “experiments” than political foot soldiers like Thambi Naidoo or Polak who lead conventional married lives. His commitment to Gandhian values, as they evolve, seems wholehearted, not selective. He is more than an acolyte, less than an equal. Never, as far as we can tell, does he present an intellectual challenge to the spiritual explorer who has become his companion.

  Kallenbach, 1912, striding (photo credit i4.2)

  The original agreement specified that K. would live apart from the settlers and that G. would mostly stay with him. Then Mrs. Gandhi moves up to Tolstoy Farm from Phoenix for a period of more than a year. It’s not clear what effect this has. By then, Ba and her husband have been sleeping in separate quarters for more than five years. At Tolstoy Farm, they sleep on separate verandas, each surrounded by students from Gandhi’s school.

  What’s easy to miss in accounts of Gandhi’s life at Tolstoy Farm is how powerful a factor his feeling for Kallenbach has become in the inward turning he has taken. Not only is he bent on reforming this partner, he strives to make their association permanent. The architect wavers. He is living life on two planes. While at Tolstoy Farm with Gandhi, he has also become a Zionist and a more observant Jew; he takes Gandhi to synagogue on Passover and introduces him to matzoh. Some weeks, in preparation for a move to India, he studies Hindi; other weeks, when he wonders how much of Gandhi’s time he’ll be able to own in a still unimaginable Indian future, he studies Hebrew in preparation for a new life in Palestine. On a day-by-day basis, the surest index to the architect’s changeable mood is which language he’s studying, Hindi or Hebrew. He’s disconsolate, if not jealous, when Gandhi lavishes admiration and time on someone else. Persisting, Gandhi puts up with all this for more than two years, all the time seeking to preserve their bond.

  Kallenbach’s ups and downs can be traced in an appointments and account book he kept for 1912 and 1913, which can be viewed in the archive of Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, India. For the sake of frugality and fitness, Kallenbach and Gandhi made a regular practice of walking the twenty-one miles from the farm, near a rail stop called Lawley, to the center of Johannesburg, following a route across a great expanse of veldt that much later, in the apartheid era, was turned into the sprawling black township of Soweto. On each occasion, Kallenbach records the times. When he walks with Gandhi, often starting as early as 4:00 a.m., it takes a little more than five and a half hours to reach their respective offices in the center of Johannesburg; on his own, he usually manages to lop an hour off. On every single mention, Gandhi in these pages isn’t Upper House but “Mr. Gandhi.” The formality seems to acknowledge that their relationship, however it’s understood, isn’t one of equals.

  Today Lawley still functions as a rail stop. Next to it sprawls a large postapartheid shantytown of corrugated metal and mud huts squeezed together on virtually every square foot of some long-defunct white farm. When an attempt was made to restore Tolstoy Farm and erect a memorial there, the squatters from the shantytown soon stripped the place bare. When I visited it in 2008 there was not even a sign. All that was left were some banked brick benches, the foundation of an old farmhouse, the well-fenced dwellings of a few white stakeholders who work at an adjacent brick kiln, some burned-over eucalyptus trees, and a few fruit trees, progeny perhaps of the scores Kallenbach planted a century ago, and, finally, a view across the townships and mining slime dams to a Johannesburg Gandhi would scarcely recognize.

  In their day, Gandhi and Kallenbach continued to experiment with diet, limiting their daily intake at one stage to a single carefully rationed evening meal. And every month or so Kallenbach recorded another “long discussion” with Mr. Gandhi. Details are completely absent, but sometimes these conversations provoke resolutions on Kallenbach’s side to step up his Hindi studies and come to a decision on leaving his profession. Then someone else comes into the picture, competing for his soul mate’s attention, and a fresh shower of doubts rains down on him. The most personal and intriguing note in the diary is recorded on August 27, 1913, eight months after Gandhi has finally moved back to Phoenix. Tolstoy Farm has been wound up, Kallenbach is back at Mountain View, and Gandhi, on a visit, is staying with him. Then another of the Jews in Gandhi’s Johannesburg circle, Sonja Schlesin, his feisty secretary, shows up. By some accounts, it was Kallenbach who introduced Schlesin, seventeen years his junior, to Gandhi in 1905; their families had been close in the old country. But he has come to consider her high-handed in her claims on Gandhi’s time and, in some sense, to view her as a rival. “On account of Miss Schlesin’s coming to Mountain View walked alone to office,” Kallenbach writes. “Discussions about her brought about Mr. Gandhi’s vow. It has been an exceedingly trying day for me.”

  If this entry were an ancient cuneiform inscription, it would hardly be more difficult to decipher. Is he alluding to Gandhi’s vow of brahmacharya, or the recent vow that led to a fast the previous month over some carnal doings that surfaced at Phoenix? (In Gandhi’s mind, there could be no such thing as innocent sexual play; earlier he’d complained about a case of “excessive tickling” at Phoenix.) Neither of those vows seems to be what Kallenbach has in mind. Probably he’s referring to a vow known only to K. and G. The context is obscure, but Kallenbach’s feelings, for once, leap off the page. Rivalries and jealousies of this sort would become chronic in Gandhi’s entourage in later years. But Kallenbach is special. In leaving Joburg, Gandhi appears to have left him behind, to have broken free. In fact, he made the move at the start of 1913 on the assumption that his dearest friend would eventually follow. Recognizing that Kallenbach is “on the fence,” he asks him in a tone that’s at once wheedling and passive-aggressive “to consider the joint life as we have lived it.” But the clearest clue to his feelings is this: in packing up his own things for shipment to Phoenix, it turns out, he has also packed and shipped Kallenbach’s books and tools. Upper House is wounded when Lower House requests their return; even then he doesn’t give up. As we will see, this isn’t the end. Kallenbach eventually plunges into Gandhi’s last and greatest satyagraha campaign in South Africa, then seems to pull back again, thrown off balance by Gandhi’s newfound fondness for a British clergyman, Charles F. Andrews. “Though I love and almost adore Andrews so,” Gandhi writes, “I would not exchange you for him. You still remain the dearest and nearest to me … I know that in my lonely journey through the world, you will be the last (if even that) to say good-bye to me. What right had I to expect so much from you!”

  So much of what, we’re left to wonder. The answers can only be love, devotion, unquestioning support. In Gandhi’s words, Kallenbach was “a man of strong feelings, wide sympathies and childlike simplicity.” On another occasion, he complained of his friend’s “morbid sensitiveness,” meaning, it seems, his jealousy and susceptibility to other influences. Three months before he leaves
South Africa, Gandhi again reassures his Jewish soul mate: “You will always be you and you alone to me. I have told you you will have to desert me and not I you.” Finally Kallenbach succumbs. He sails with Gandhi when he leaves the country with the intention, soon thwarted, of accompanying him all the way to India.

  The several ties that bound Gandhi to the Transvaal—the satyagraha campaign, Tolstoy Farm, and Kallenbach—cannot easily be disentangled. But by January 9, 1913—the day Kallenbach jotted in his diary, “Mr. Gandhi and balance of Tolstoy Farm occupants left for Phoenix”—the strongest of these was the personal one to the architect. Only when it’s factored into consideration can Gandhi’s prolonged abstention from Indian politics in Natal be plausibly explained.

  The timing of Gandhi’s departure from the Transvaal and his return to Phoenix had little or nothing to do with Indian politics in Natal, from which he’d been conspicuously removed for a decade. It was dictated by a pledge that his staunch admirer and presumptive guru, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, had wrung from him at the end of his triumphal five-week tour of South Africa in 1912. The Indian leader’s visit, organized with all the pomp and circumstance usually reserved in South Africa for visits by British cabinet ministers—a blur of public tributes, crowded procession routes, and civic receptions attended by dignitaries who in that era were, by definition, nearly all white—had brought Gandhi out of his retreat at Tolstoy Farm. At its end, when Gokhale sailed for home, Gandhi and Kallenbach accompanied him as far as Zanzibar. When Indian communities at East African ports along the way turned out to welcome the leaders, they found the lawyer from Johannesburg in Indian garb for the first time in southern Africa since the London-returned dandy wore a turban into a Durban courtroom, the day after he arrived from India, now nearly twenty years earlier. The older man (“whose eyes were always on me,” so Gandhi later wrote) used the time on board to talk earnest politics. “In these conversations Gokhale prepared me for India,” Gandhi said. When they parted in Zanzibar, Gokhale exhorted, all but commanded, Gandhi to prepare to put South Africa behind him within a year and come home to fulfill his destiny. Gandhi, it appears, promised to try. Back at Tolstoy Farm by mid-December 1912, it took him just four weeks to wind up that particular experiment with truth and move his base back to Phoenix. In his own mind, this was just the start of a longer eastward journey that had always been inevitable. “I shall be there when the time comes,” he’d written when the subject of his repatriation came up. His “inner voice,” it seemed, would help him know when his “withdrawal,” as he termed it in a letter to Kallenbach, should occur.