Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  The tone of Campbell’s letters had been patronizing in a colonial way but not as hostile as might have been expected, considering all that had gone on at Mount Edgecombe. The Indians had refused to cut sugarcane for two weeks before the shootings. Local planters soon were calling for a show of force by mounted police to contain the agitation. Within a couple of days, bands of striking indentured laborers were reported to be roaming the neighborhood, armed with clubs and the long, razor-sharp knives used for cutting cane, stopping at residences of planters and their white managers to demand that Indian house servants come out and join the struggle. Or so the Durban newspapers reported.

  A detachment of police, “both European and Native, galloped to Mount Edgecomb” from neighboring Verulam on November 17, The Natal Advertiser said. The “native police … quickly got in among their natural enemies,” meaning the indentured Indians, until they had to be restrained. The Africans were armed with assegais, or spears, and the heavy Zulu war club known as a knobkerrie, a carved staff ending in a bulbous hardwood head that could be wielded like a medieval mace.

  In reports by journalists and officials on clashes on the mines and in the sugar lands in these weeks, a standard story line unfolds. The forces of law and order are portrayed as restrained as long as they’re kept under firm white command. The Indians are easily agitated, soon beyond reason, uncontrollable, nearly crazed, even when confronted by a well-armed constabulary with drawn firearms. The Indians fought with sticks and stones, the reports said; a handful are described as brandishing cane knives. These themes are regularly reflected in headlines in the English-language press. POLICE SHOW EXEMPLARY PATIENCE, the Transvaal Leader assured its readers, even as COOLIES RUN AMUCK.

  Here’s a judicial commission’s eventual explanation of why Indian strikers had to be gunned down in the clashes at Mount Edgecombe: “The Indians were very excited and violent, and so determined were they that, though one of their number had been killed and several wounded … they had not been intimidated.” A failure to use firearms, the commission concluded on the basis of testimony by militia officers, “might eventually have led to greater bloodshed.” Ballistic evidence, it maintained, contradicted testimony by Indians who said the first shots had been fired by Campbell’s son. The mounted police had to be called out, it explained, to deal with laborers committing the crime of disobeying a lawful order to return to work.

  The police, members of the South African Mounted Rifles, had been “overwhelmed in numbers by the coolies” who charged “with all the suddenness characteristic of the Asiatic variableness of temper,” the Transvaal Leader told its readers, hewing to the official line. The commission that looked into the Mount Edgecombe clashes also looked into a disturbance on November 21 at the Beneva Sugar Estates near Esperanza, where four strikers were killed after a display of Indian “variableness” forced the police to choose between using their weapons and leaving unarmed whites, including nearby women and children, “at the mercy of an excited crowd of almost two hundred Indians.” The indentured cane cutters, in the official account, had resisted a police order to march to a nearby magistrate so they could be charged with desertion in an orderly way. Instead, they’d fallen supine and lain on their backs. “Get off your horses and come cut our throats,” one of them unaccountably cries out in the official version, which the commissioners easily swallowed. When the police then approach on horseback, a seemingly possessed Indian leaps to his feet and smacks a trooper’s horse with a stick, so hard that the animal falls down. Then, as the troopers withdraw, some with their revolvers unholstered, they’re pursued by laborers with sticks. A witness told Reuters the Indians fought like “dervishes.”

  The Indians are regularly described as demented or nearly so, but when press accounts and official judgments get down to explaining the origins of the violence, it’s always the same story. On the sugar estates, as well as the mines, clashes had less to do with the “variableness” of the Indian temper than with orders to police and military units to use force in rounding up “ringleaders” and charging them with desertion if that was what it took to break the strike and get the indentured Indians back to work. With foremen on the mines and estates deputized as warders and given authority to swear in Africans as “special constables,” the line between law enforcement and vigilantism soon blurred. An indentured laborer named Soorzai sought refuge at the Phoenix Settlement, having run off from a nearby plantation where he’d been thrashed. He soon died. In all of Natal only one white, a planter named Armstrong, was later charged with having gone too far. Seemingly at random, he’d picked out two Indians—neither in his employ, both Muslims, one said to be an imam—and had two of his African workers tear off their clothes, then hold them while he beat them repeatedly with sjambok and fists. Later he pursued the two already-battered men, repeating the whole performance not once but twice. The Armstrong case caught Fleet Street’s attention. Downing Street then requested a report. Eventually, Armstrong was fined a hundred pounds. He was trying, he testified before sentencing, “to teach the whole tribe a lesson.”

  The reports on the crackdown that reached London also reached India, where the viceroy, Lord Hardinge, took it upon himself in a speech in Madras to voice India’s “deep and burning sympathy” for Gandhi’s followers “in their resistance to invidious and unjust laws.” The viceroy followed the speech up with a cable urging a judicial commission to look into the shootings. Since the indenture system couldn’t have existed without the Raj’s agreement, the viceroy’s intervention carried weight. The British governor-general in South Africa, more or less the viceroy’s opposite number on this other side of the Indian Ocean, reacted furiously. Lord Gladstone—youngest son of the Victorian prime minister—praised the “great forbearance” of Botha and Smuts and fumed in a cable to London over “official credence being given to outrageous charges.” The governor-general wanted nothing less than the viceroy’s dismissal. By the time of this clash in the stratosphere of the empire, the strike was all but over. By December 10, according to official statistics relayed to London, 24,004 “coolies” were back at work, 1,069 in jail, only 621 still striking. (Of those counted as strikers, some may have found themselves suddenly jobless and therefore vulnerable to deportation. Employers were now hiring Africans to fill jobs Indians had held. At the Model Dairy, a popular Durban café, “white girls” had replaced Indian waiters who struck.)

  None of this was conveyed to the man who’d started it all. By his own description, instead of the hard labor to which he’d been sentenced, Gandhi was enjoying a respite in the special-status quarters reserved for him in the Bloemfontein jail. Most of his spare time, he wrote, was being devoted to the study of Tamil, the language of most of the indentured strikers, which had been eluding him for more than a decade. The spillover of the strike from the coalfields to the sugar lands combined with the bad press his response had won Smuts at home and abroad—for its initial restraint among his domestic critics, then, in London and elsewhere in the empire, for the shootings and floggings that the crackdown entailed—led him to recognize that this tussle with Gandhi had spun out of his control, that it had become too costly. He needed a face-saving way to back down and found it in the proposal for the judicial commission, which had two tasks, judging from the outcome. One was to whitewash the shootings, the other to propose a settlement forthcoming enough to close the book on Gandhi’s satyagraha campaigns in South Africa.

  Within a week of the viceroy’s speech, the commission composed of three white men (one a longtime antagonist in Durban of Gandhi and the Indian community) had come into existence. Within a week of its appointment, it recommended that Gandhi, Kallenbach, and Polak be released, though they had nearly eight months to go on the sentences they’d received for lighting the fuse on the strikes.

  Gandhi emerged from his five weeks of a meditative life in prison in a fighting mood. He didn’t at first grasp that his campaigning days in South Africa were already at an end, that he was now only a month
away from being able to claim victory in his struggle. Freed in Pretoria on December 18, he spoke that evening to supporters at the Gaiety Theater on Kort Street in Johannesburg. He said he’d miss the solitude and peace of jail, the opportunity it gave him for reflection. But he was ready to resume “the work on which he was engaged when he was convicted.” Two days later, back in Durban, he told The Natal Mercury he’d seek “re-arrest and re-imprisonment” unless the judicial commission were enlarged to include “appointments from the European nationality known to possess no anti-Asiatic bias.” That might not seem a huge demand; he wasn’t asking, after all, for anything so precedent shattering as the appointment of an actual Indian to the panel considering the grievances of Indians; he was saying simply that Indian sentiments ought to be respected by at least some of its members. But in the Union of South Africa in 1913, it was a radical proposal, one the government instantly slapped down.

  A day later he appeared at the Durban racecourse with his head shaved, dressed again like an indentured Indian laborer—a long loose kurta worn over baggy pants—before a crowd much larger than any he could have drawn in the city before the heroic march and his jailing. Bouquets were thrust into his hands, full-throated cheers engulfed him. There may still have been pockets of dissenters, especially among the merchants in the old Natal Indian Congress, but the size of the crowd—around six thousand, the largest he’d ever faced—made it clear that the conspicuous erosion of support for Gandhi among Natal’s Indians in the months and years before his last campaign had now been more than reversed. If not unchallenged, he was once again clearly preeminent. The march had been the crowning experience of his time in Africa; this rally now crowned the march.

  Gandhi used it to prepare his supporters for more struggle, urging them to get “ready again to suffer battle, again to suffer imprisonment, to march out … to strike, even though this may mean death.” He explained that he’d put on the garments of a laborer in mourning for those who’d been shot down. The bullets that killed the indentured, he said, had pierced his heart too. So went the Mercury’s lengthy summary of his remarks. “How glorious it would have been if one of those bullets had struck him also, because might he not be a murderer himself … having advised Indians to strike?” Here he was, possibly for the first time, certainly not for the last, anticipating the end he’d meet thirty-four years later. “The struggle for human liberty,” by Gandhi’s now standard definition, was “a religious struggle.” At this point, the newspaper’s white reporter interpolated the throng’s cries of “Hear, hear” in his account. It was a struggle, said Gandhi, “even unto death.”

  Despite his play on the word “murderer,” the leader here is as solemn and free from self-reproach as a head of state laying a wreath at a war cemetery. He’s offering a demonstration of what he had been saying about satyagraha ever since 1906, even before he coined the word: that the resistance he offered might provoke violence even, or especially, if it succeeded in maintaining the discipline of nonviolence, that it demanded “self-suffering” and, sometimes, martyrs. Gandhi is saying that he himself might eventually be among them. He’s not saying that the indentured laborers who fell in the Natal shootings paid too high a price or expressing much concern about the indentured who survived who were now back at the plantations and mines, if anything, even poorer and less free. Calling it a religious struggle took care of all that. As always, he was not speaking in sectarian or communal terms. He was too much of an ecumenicist to imply that it was a Hindu struggle, or a Hindu and Muslim struggle, or a struggle against people who happened to be Christians. He called it a religious struggle because of the sacrifice his followers, his satyagrahis, were prepared to make. It was another way of insisting that their motives were pure and disinterested, that they rose up not for themselves but for a future in which they might or might not have a share. If Gandhi ever thought of the possibility, even probability, that the indentured might have an actual stake in the strike—that some of them may have realized that their futures in South Africa could turn on the rollback of the head tax—he never found public words for the thought. Satyagraha was self-sacrifice, in his view, not self-advancement.

  Gandhi is showing himself at this moment of symbolic near triumph and practical near stalemate to be anything but tenderhearted. He’s an unconventional politician, but what he’s saying is quite conventional for a leader in a conflict that remains unresolved. With the usual melodrama, he’s saying that if more deaths were needed, Indians stood ready to pay the price. A couple of weeks later, reflecting on the death in jail of a seventy-year-old indentured laborer named Hurbatsingh, Gandhi elaborated on the theme. “I saw that it was no matter for grief if an old Indian like Hurbatsingh went to jail for India’s sake and died while in prison,” he said. It was a kind of fulfillment.

  In donning the garb of the indentured and vowing to eat only one meal a day for as long as “this religious struggle” continued, he did more than declare himself to be in mourning. He completed the synthesis he’d been seeking throughout his two decades in South Africa between his public role and his questing inner self. The well-tailored attorney who went on retreats with Christian missionaries and immersed himself in Tolstoy had evolved step-by-step over those years into the leader of a movement that could capture mass support and, however fleetingly, international attention in an age when mass communications still depended on the printing press and the telegraph. As he’d later say himself, he’d found his vocation. His ongoing self-creation was now more or less complete.

  Part of it was a new regard for the poorest Indians, which in South Africa meant the indentured. Soon he’d be scolding them again on their “addictions” to meat eating, tobacco, and drink. But fresh out of jail, he was “astonished,” he wrote in a cablegram to Gokhale, “at the unlooked-for ability shown by indentured Indians without effective leadership to act with determination and discipline.” They had shown “unexpected powers of endurance and suffering.”

  He still had to deal with the reality of white-ruled South Africa. The outcome would not be clear-cut. Gandhi put on the clothes of the indentured, downtrodden, and outcaste, but they formed only a small portion of his audience at the Durban racecourse. He could speak of them and for them, but, mostly, he wasn’t speaking to them. His words wouldn’t reach thousands who’d followed his lead without ever having heard or glimpsed him and who now were doing hard time back on the mines and the sugar estates. They’d chanted religious and patriotic slogans when they marched to the Transvaal, so he had some basis for calling it a religious struggle. And he’d never promised to deliver a change in their living standard or terms of employment. It was a point he later illustrated with an anecdote drawn from the early days of the march, offered as a kind of parable. One of the strikers had asked Gandhi for a hand-rolled cigarette known as a bidi. “I explained that they had come out, not as indentured laborers, but as servants of India. They were taking part in a religious war and at such a time they must abandon addictions such as drinking and smoking … the good men accepted this advice. I was never again asked for money to buy a bidi.”

  In assigning to the strikers a purely religious motive for their rising—and assuming for himself sole authority to declare when the movement had attained its ends—Gandhi was short-circuiting normal politics, including protest politics. In the perspective of his long life, of the struggles he had yet to undertake, this too could be called typically Gandhian. One day soon he’d leave South Africa, and those who’d followed him there would be left with his word that something important had been achieved, left with the pride of having stood up and having not been cowed when they answered his call. Not a small thing, most of them may well have concluded. Meanwhile, while the leader was being lionized at the racecourse, prosecutions of his followers were continuing across the province. On the day of his release, thirty-two passive resisters, including five women, had been sentenced to three months in jail for illegally entering the Transvaal.

  With Gandhi’s
resurgence, the readership of P. S. Aiyar’s African Chronicle took a dive. Among Indians there was no longer much of a market for sharp, independent criticism of the leader. Still Aiyar battled on. Of the Durban speech, he wrote: “Mr. Gandhi’s performance of penance is a poor consolation for those who have lost their bread winners and dear ones.” Called on to end his carping, the editor vowed he’d “keep silent when he is in the grave and even there too our spirit will not be dead.”

  As the calendar turned to 1914, Gandhi made a show of boycotting the judicial commission but slipped comfortably into renewed negotiations with Smuts. Before long the outlines of an agreement foreshadowed in their discussions became the commission’s formal recommendations. Under this latest compromise the three-pound head tax on former indentured laborers would finally be scrapped; the marriage law would be amended to make room for traditional Indian marriage customs except polygamy as practiced by Muslims, which would be neither legalized nor banned; immigration would be eased for a relatively small number of Indians with a record of prior residence in South Africa; and a tiny number of “educated” Indians would be admitted so that the color bar would not be absolute. In broader—but hopelessly vague—terms was the government’s formal pledge that the laws would be administered justly. In little more than a month after Gandhi’s release from jail, he and Smuts reached their latest and last accord. By the end of June, the white Parliament had enacted the Indian Relief Act. Gandhi then declared his eight-year, on-and-off satyagraha campaign ended. The new law, he said, was a “magna carta for Indians” (the same phrase he’d used twenty years earlier to characterize Queen Victoria’s more sweeping proclamation, which now counted for nothing in the new Union of South Africa). Continuing on his verbal binge, he also termed it “a charter of our freedom” and “a final settlement.”