Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  In the political history of white South Africa, 1913 doesn’t stand out as the year that Indians marched for the abolition of a now-forgotten tax. It was the year that the Boer War generals then governing the country clashed among themselves over South Africa’s proper place in the British Empire and over which whites specifically should hold power in the land. Smuts and his prime minister, Louis Botha, embraced the British program of “reconciliation,” implying unity between Afrikaners and English-speaking whites as well as continued deference to Whitehall on imperial and international issues. Under the slogan “South Africa First,” which really meant Afrikaners first, another faction wanted the Boer War’s losers to defer to no one and to embark on a more rigorous program of racial segregation. The Nationalists, as they would call themselves when they broke away in November that year, would prove to be the wave of the future until a greater nationalism, that of the suppressed African majority, finally came crashing in.

  In 1913, white restlessness and infighting weren’t confined to the former generals at the top. The foundations of the new industrial society, based on the hugely profitable gold mines, had been severely shaken by a brief general strike by white mine workers in July; six months later, white railway men called another. In the first strike, involving nascent trade unions and, so it was alleged, allied anarchist conspirators, thousands of white miners took over the center of Johannesburg. They set fire to the railway station and to the offices of The Star, a newspaper known for following the line of the mine owners. They next turned their attention to the Rand Club, the stuffy preserve of those same interests. This was class warfare, but on behalf of whites only. (The same color-coded radicalism, a decade later, during another supposed general strike, would express itself in a priceless slogan adapted from Marx and Engels: “Workers of the world, fight and unite for a white South Africa.”)

  In 1913, Smuts had yet to build his army. The former Boer commander had to rely on two regiments of mounted imperial—that’s to say, British—troops to suppress the strikers, some of whom would have fought in the Boer War, under his or Botha’s command, against those same regiments. The troops saved the Rand Club, killing twenty-one strikers, but couldn’t contain the rioting, which stopped only when Botha and Smuts arrived personally on the scene without a security escort and succumbed to the miners’ demands. It was “a deep humiliation,” Smuts said.

  It’s in this period of turmoil—between two whites-only general strikes, as the governing party started to break apart—that Gandhi launched his campaign, which he later chronicled as if it had happened in a vacuum, as if the land had been inhabited by only Indians and white autocrats. His numerous biographers have generally followed his lead, paying little or no attention to the South African context. It wasn’t that Gandhi failed to register what was going on. He wrote a long piece for Indian Opinion summing up the whites versus whites class struggle. Using what the editors of his collected writings helpfully footnote as “a Gujarati saying,” he said it was a mountain being made out of a mustard seed. (Student of the New Testament that he was, Gandhi himself probably knew it was Matthew 17:20.) If the spectacle of white unrest had any implications for South African Indians, he failed to spell them out. But by then, in a steady stream of telegrams from Phoenix to ministers and members of the white Parliament, he’d already started to threaten a new round of passive resistance if the government held firm on the three-pound head tax and on its restrictive new immigration bill, which seemed to turn virtually all Indians into “prohibited aliens.”

  As if these grievances weren’t enough, yet another controversy burst out following a judicial ruling in Cape Province that traditional Indian marriages—Hindu, Muslim, and Parsi—had no standing in South African law, which recognized only weddings performed by judges, other officials sanctioned by the state, or Christian clerics. This meant all Indian wives, except a small number of Indian Christians, were living out of wedlock and all their children were illegitimate in the eyes of the law of their adopted country, further undermining their already tenuous residence rights.

  The marriage question helped jolt Indians in South Africa out of the despondency and resignation that seemed to have settled on the community during the years of Gandhi’s withdrawal to Tolstoy Farm. Mass meetings were held in Johannesburg in April and May, though Gandhi himself, now back in Natal, was absent. The marriage issue even made an activist out of Gandhi’s hitherto-retiring wife, according to an account he gave at the time. “Then I am not your wife according to the laws of this country,” he quoted Kasturba as saying in April after the matter had been explained to her. “Let us go to India.” Her husband replied that they couldn’t back off the struggle. She then volunteered to join it by courting arrest. Or so the story went in his telling. The idea of women doing that hadn’t previously occurred to Gandhi. Soon he had a female flying squad ready to follow Kasturba to jail, on his signal. “We congratulate our plucky sisters who have dared to fight the Government rather than submit to the insult,” he wrote after forty Johannesburg wives signed a petition to the interior minister that was probably drafted by Gandhi himself (certainly not by Kasturba, who was illiterate).

  Part of Gandhi’s inspiration for his earliest passive resistance campaigns had come from the example of suffragette demonstrations he’d witnessed in London. That example may have had something to do with his openness now to the idea of Indian women courting arrest, which was novel to the point of being countercultural. It was also a sign that Gandhi was beginning to think tactically and politically again. His attention had been diverted first to Tolstoy Farm and then, after his return to the Phoenix Settlement at the start of the year, to proselytizing for his latest discoveries in matters of health and diet. In thirty-three weekly installments, ending in August, Gandhi held forth in Indian Opinion on the efficacy of cold baths and mud packs, on the danger of vaccination against smallpox, and on the perils of sexual indulgence. But even before winding up the series, he dropped hints that the next campaign wouldn’t be a simple reprise of the last. “I have sketched out an elaborate program which I have not the time to set forth here,” he remarked in a letter to Hermann Kallenbach at the end of April. Two months later, in another letter to his confidant, he says he’s “resolving in my own mind the idea of doing something for the indentured men.” The scholar Maureen Swan seizes on this sentence as a harbinger, a turning point. “Never before,” she writes, “had Gandhi addressed himself to the Natal underclasses.” But what was that “something” he was thinking of doing? And did doing it for the indentured entail or even imply, in his early strategizing, that it might also be done with them? In letters and articles written in the months leading up to the 1913 campaign, there’s nothing besides these suggestive but vague sentences to hint that it might have. But fifteen years later, when, back in India, Gandhi got around to writing his own narrative of the period, everything fell tidily, retrospectively, into place. Here, without acknowledging that he’d dodged pleas to join an earlier campaign against the head tax, he says the “insult” to Gokhale and, by extension, all Indians over the tax issue had thrown open the door to mobilizing the indentured.

  “When this tax thus fell within the scope of the struggle,” Gandhi wrote in a second autobiographical volume, Satyagraha in South Africa, “the indentured Indians had an opportunity of participating in it … thusfar this class had been kept out of the fray.” It’s reasonable to read this as acknowledging they had been “kept out of the fray” as a considered choice made by none other than himself. Though the indentured were illiterate, he then recalled, they turned out to understand issues better than he’d have imagined. How many of them would actually join in, he goes on, remained a mystery to which he had no clues. From this we can surmise that the idea of calling out the indentured may indeed have lodged in Gandhi’s mind months before the campaign kicked off in September, but he had little confidence they’d respond.

  There’s circumstantial evidence that a turning point in his thinking
may have come in the days leading up to the violent white miners’ strike in Johannesburg, which broke out on July 3, soon after Gandhi dropped his tantalizing aside to Kallenbach about “doing something for the indentured.” Gandhi had then traveled up to Johannesburg on June 30 for negotiations on his long-pending, or rather slow-fading, compromise with Smuts. The government was too preoccupied with its own dissension and the rising white militancy on the mines for those talks to go anywhere. But Gandhi stayed on, settling down in Kallenbach’s Mountain View house for a week or so. On consecutive days, Kallenbach dutifully noted in his diary, they then went to lunch at the home of Thambi Naidoo, the Tamil leader who’d proved himself to be Gandhi’s single most dedicated satyagrahi; on the third day, they took dinner there. Kallenbach tells us nothing else; and there’s no other record. But these meals are unusual enough to command attention. The fussy ascetic that Gandhi had become by 1913 had long since ceased to dine out, even in vegetarian households. And even when he’d had a social life of sorts, it had been largely with his European friends and soul mates, not the Naidoos. Three days in a row suggests these could have been meals with a purpose, an impromptu satyagraha summit or skull session—what today might be called a retreat.

  An impression has lingered in the oral tradition of South African Tamils that Thambi Naidoo sometimes had to press his leader to lead. Could this have been such an occasion? On July 5, the day of the shootings by the troops guarding the Rand Club, Gandhi and Kallenbach walked into town from Mountain View and back. Kallenbach takes terse note of the shootings, saying only that there were “many more deaths.” That evening he and Gandhi have “another long discussion.” Did it involve the day’s events? We’ll never know. At roughly the same time, Botha and Smuts arrived on the scene downtown and, unable to do anything else, bowed to the workers’ demands. Word of their retreat would have gotten around, even without the burned-out and crippled Star to spread it. The idea that the Boer War generals had bent under pressure couldn’t be contained.

  Could the example of the white mine workers have served as Thambi Naidoo’s “mustard seed”? He wouldn’t have had to be told that indentured Indian mine workers in the coal districts of Natal were mostly Tamils. Given the fact that his meetings with Gandhi in Johannesburg coincided with the rising of the white working class there, it’s not far-fetched to think that he drew some inspiration from the white proletariat. What we do know is that on October 11, when eleven Indian women—ten of them Tamils, including Thambi Naidoo’s wife—courted arrest by illegally crossing into Natal from the Transvaal border town of Volksrust, they were accompanied by Naidoo; and when they reached the coal-mining center of Newcastle two days later and implored the Indian miners to strike, Naidoo was still their guide. The Natal Witness, published in the provincial capital of Pietermaritzburg, identified Thambi Naidoo as the “ringleader.”

  Gandhi had used the threat of a strike by the indentured to badger the government. Just two weeks earlier he’d written to the minister of the interior warning that “the step we are about to take … is fraught with danger.” That step, as the letter defined it, involved “asking those who are now serving indenture and who will, therefore, be liable to pay the £3 tax on completion of their indenture, to strike until the tax is withdrawn.” In the immediate aftermath of the strike he also acknowledged there had been a “plan” to send the Tamil women to Newcastle to agitate among the indentured Tamil coal miners “and persuade them to go on strike on the issue of the £3 tax.” The signal for the start of the walkout was to have been Gandhi’s own arrival in town, some days afterward, once the women had prepared the way. “But the mere presence of these women,” Gandhi wrote, “was like a match to dry fuel … By the time I reached there Indians in two coal mines had already stopped work.”

  Arriving in Newcastle October 1913, at the start of strikes on the coal mines (photo credit i5.1)

  Gandhi had solemnly warned the interior minister: “It may be difficult to control the spread of the movement beyond the limits one may set.” Here we see in action the passive-aggressive in passive resistance. Years later, writing as memoirist rather than activist, he said he’d been “as much perplexed as I was pleased” by the early outbreak of the strikes. “I was not prepared for this marvelous awakening,” he recalled. In his mind, though he’d hatched the movement and foretold its spreading, he was not responsible for the course it now took. Responsibility, he’d say, lay with the government for rebuffing his reasonable demands for the removal of the head tax as promised. This can be interpreted as self-delusion, opportunism, or cunning, all of which were part of the leader’s makeup in shifting proportions. It can also be interpreted as political genius. Gandhi may actually have been surprised that things worked out as he’d warned the authorities they might. But he had no hesitation exploiting the outcome he’d foreseen, even if he hadn’t fully believed his forecast.

  After the strikes, possibly in Durban (photo credit i5.2)

  He was not therefore a prisoner of events when he arrived in Newcastle on October 17, 1913. For the first time in his life, he found himself the leader of a mass movement. In Durban recently, Hassim Seedat, a lawyer whose avocations include the study of Gandhi’s life and the collection of Gandhi materials, showed me a photograph of Gandhi as he disembarked that day. In it, the advocate turned leader is once again in Indian dress as he’d last been in Zanzibar, ten months earlier, bidding farewell to the homeward-bound Gokhale. The point of the costume change was to stress his identification with the indentured by adopting their garb. Hermann Kallenbach, his architecture practice now on hold, was there to greet him. He’d arrived the day before and had already gone on mine visits with Thambi Naidoo. Natal’s attorney general reported that “a Jew Kallenbach … appears to be agitating.”

  Gandhi immediately called for the walkout to be extended to collieries still in operation. The strikes quickly spread beyond the mines. GANDHI CAUSES TROUBLE, a headline over a Reuters dispatch from Newcastle announced the next morning on the front page of The Natal Witness of Pietermaritzburg. “A peculiar position has arisen here,” the dispatch began. “Hotels are without waiters and the mines are without labor.”

  As the message spread beyond the two collieries that had already shut down, the roster of closed mines lengthened: Ballengeich, Fairleigh, Durban Navigation, Hattingspruit, Ramsey, St. George’s, Newcastle, Cambrian, and Glencoe. Within a week, all nine had been at least partly crippled by the walkout of indentured Indian mine workers. Two thousand strikers were believed to be waiting for their leader’s next command.

  Most of the strikers were still in mine compounds, still being fed by their increasingly anxious employers, still refusing to work. The strike next spread to Durban, where most services halted as indentured Indian bellmen, waiters, and sweepers, municipal menials of all sorts, stopped working. Thambi Naidoo was eventually arrested in a railway barracks in the process of enlisting even more indentured workers, threatening the shipment of coal to the gold mines and ports.

  For a week, Gandhi himself was a self-propelled whirlwind, in constant motion from meeting to meeting, rally to rally, riding up and down the rail line he’d had his first fateful venture on in 1893. From Newcastle he traveled to Durban, where he faced a meeting on October 19 of restive Indian businessmen who made up the leadership of the Natal Indian Congress, the organization he once spearheaded, whose charter he’d single-handedly drafted, in whose name he’d sent all his early pleadings to colonial and imperial authorities. Frightened by the radical turn in Gandhi’s movement that his call to the indentured seemed to represent, the Congress passed what amounted to a motion of no-confidence, effectively expelling him. (A Gandhian rump soon regrouped as the Natal Indian Association.) The leader had lost the support of most, though not all, of the Muslim traders who’d been his original backers, but he had little time now to mend fences.

  Not surprisingly, it was P. S. Aiyar, the maverick editor of African Chronicle, who gave doubts about Gandhi’s new co
urse their most cantankerous expression. “Any precipitate step we might take in regard to the £3 tax,” he wrote with some foresight, “will not be conducive to improving the lot of these thousands of poor, half-starving people.” Aiyar urged Gandhi to call a national conference of South African Indians and heed any consensus on tactics it reached. Gandhi brushed the suggestion aside, saying he could accept the idea only so long as the result didn’t conflict with his conscience. This was too much for Aiyar. “We are not aware,” he erupted, “of any responsible politician in any part of the globe making such a stupid reply.” In effect, he said, Gandhi was presenting himself as “such a soul of perfection … [that his] superior conscience was pervading everywhere.”

  No such sideline mutterings could slow Gandhi now. From Durban he shot back to Newcastle to tour some mine compounds, then scooted off to Johannesburg to rally white supporters, then went back again to Durban to face the owners of the mines. In six days, he spent at least seventy-two hours on trains. Everywhere, in speeches and written statements, he held out hope for an early end to the disruptions, even as his lieutenants worked to draw more indentured laborers into the still spreading protest. The aims of the strikers, soothing passages in his written statements and speeches seemed to say, couldn’t be more modest; all the government needed to do was honor its pledge to banish the head tax, and fix the marriage law while they were at it. The workers were not striking for improved working conditions, he told the mine owners. The quarrel was not with them. Nor was it political. “Indians do not fight for equal political rights,” he declared in a communiqué to Reuters really meant for the authorities. “They recognize that, in view of existing prejudice, fresh immigration from India should be strictly limited.”