Soon he was having to amend, if not swallow, such high-flown words as dissenters like P. S. Aiyar pointed out how far short of the legal equality for which Gandhi had once struggled his “final settlement” now fell. What had been true before the last campaign remained true afterward: not only would Indians still be without political rights, but they’d still require permits to travel from one South African province to another; still not be allowed to settle in the Orange Free State or expand their numbers in the Transvaal, where they’d still have to register under what Gandhi once decried as the “Black Act”; and they would still be subject to a tangle of local laws and regulations saying where they could own land or set up businesses. Nothing in the Indian Relief Act relieved the situation of indentured laborers still under contract who’d been the main body of strikers and marchers.
Nevertheless, the indenture system itself was clearly on its last legs. Natal had stopped importing contract laborers from India as early as 1911. The only way to keep the system going, then, was to persuade those still working off their indentures to sign new contracts when their five-year commitments were up. Now the head tax no longer figured in such deals, no longer hung over the heads of the indentured. It may be said that Gandhi deserved a measure of credit for India’s eventual decision in 1917 to shut the system down altogether by halting the shipment of indentured laborers to island colonies like Fiji and Mauritius, which had continued recruiting them after South Africa stopped, that his campaigns in South Africa had helped force the Raj’s hand by arousing indignation among Indians. But the end of the indenture system hadn’t ever been one of the declared aims of those campaigns.
In a farewell letter to South African Indians, Gandhi conceded there were unmet goals, which he listed as the right to trade, travel, or own land anywhere in the country. These could be achieved, he said, within fifteen years if Indians “cultivated” white public opinion. On political rights, his farewell letter looked to no distant horizon. This was a subject to be shelved. “We need not fight for votes or for freedom of entry for fresh immigrants from India,” it advised. “My firm conviction is that passive resistance is infinitely superior to the vote,” he told the Transvaal Leader. Speaking here was the Gandhi of Hind Swaraj who frankly scorned the parliamentary institutions for which most Indian nationalists thought they were fighting. Finally, he had to concede that the “final settlement” was not really final. While “it was final in the sense that it closed the great struggle,” he rephrased himself, awkwardly blurring the operative adjective, “it was not final in the sense that it gave to Indians all that they were entitled to.”
Smuts, who’d allowed himself to hope that he’d shelved the “Indian question” for the foreseeable future, considered Gandhi’s reformulation a betrayal of their understanding. Gandhi couldn’t express himself with his usual plainness on the question of how final the “final settlement” was because his “truth,” in this instance, wasn’t simple: the struggle had to end because he was leaving; he’d gotten all he could get. No one said it in so many words, but his departure was part of the deal.
White public opinion continued to harden, and Gandhi’s rosy forecasts proved far off the mark. The situation of Indians in South Africa got worse, not better, after he turned his attention to India. They were no better than second-class citizens and often less than that. Under apartheid, Indians were more relentlessly ghettoized and segregated than ever before, though never as severely oppressed and discriminated against as Africans. It took sixty years before they could travel freely in the only country nearly all of them had ever known, more than seventy years before the last restriction on Indian landholding had been repealed. Equal political rights came eventually—a full century after Gandhi first sought them. In the years immediately following his departure, the white government dangled promises of free passage and bonuses to induce Indians to follow him home. Between 1914 and 1940, nearly forty thousand took the bait. Immigration had been halted, but the number of Indians continued to rise by natural increase. And naturally, then, the vast majority had only faint hand-me-down memories of the mother country. In 1990, as the apartheid system was collapsing, the Indian population of South Africa was estimated to have passed one million. In Nelson Mandela’s first cabinet, four of the ministers were Indian.
Though the future for the next several generations of South African Indians would prove bleak, the leader himself was almost free. His very tentative plan had been to sail directly to India with an entourage of about twenty and settle in Poona (now spelled Pune) in western India so as to be near the ailing Gopal Krishna Gokhale. They had an understanding that Gandhi would keep a perfect silence on Indian issues for an entire year (as Gandhi put it, “keep his ears open and his mouth shut”). Gandhi now offered to nurse Gokhale and serve him as secretary. But Gokhale headed for Europe, specifically Vichy, in hopes that the waters there might be good for his failing heart. He asked Gandhi to meet him in London.
All he had to do before sailing for Southampton was complete a round of farewells. In Johannesburg, Mrs. Thambi Naidoo, who’d had the courage to go to the mines in Natal to appeal to the indentured mine workers to strike before Gandhi arrived on the scene, was said to have fallen over in a faint when her husband rose at a dinner and asked his old comrade-not-in-arms to adopt the four Naidoo sons and take them with him to India. She’d not been consulted. Gandhi thanked the “old jailbirds” for their “precious gift.” As his departure day neared, the indentured laborers with whom he’d marched became a preoccupation. He ended his farewell letter to the Indians of South Africa by penning these words above his signature: “I am, as ever, the community’s indentured laborer.” In Durban, he addressed indentured laborers as “brothers and sisters,” then pledged: “I am under indenture with you for all the rest of my life.”
Speaking for the last time to his most loyal supporters, the Tamils of Johannesburg, Gandhi concluded by dwelling on matters of caste. The Tamils had “shown so much pluck, so much faith, so much devotion to duty and such noble simplicity,” he said. They’d “sustained the struggle for the last eight years.” But after all that had been acknowledged, there was “one thing more.” He knew that they had carried over caste distinctions from India. If they “drew those distinctions and called one another high and low and so on, those things would be their ruin. They should remember that they were not high caste and low caste but all Indians, all Tamils.”
It’s impossible at this distance to know what had prompted this admonition on that occasion in that setting, this hauling into the open of a question even Gandhi had mostly allowed to recede for much of his time in South Africa. Had some Tamils on the great march, or even at this farewell gathering, shown their fear of ritual pollution? Or was he thinking ahead to what he would face in India? The exact connections are hard to pin down, but in a more general sense they seem obvious. For Gandhi, the phenomenon of indentured labor, a system of semi-slavery, as he branded it, had fused in his South African years with that of caste discrimination. Whatever the underlying demographic facts showing the proportions of high caste, low caste, and untouchable among the indentured, these were no longer two things in his mind but one, a hydra-headed social monster that still needed to be taken on.
Finally, on the dock in Cape Town, as he was about to board the SS Kinfauns Castle on July 18, 1914, he put a hand on Hermann Kallenbach’s shoulder and told his well-wishers: “I carry away with me not my blood brother, but my European brother. Is that not sufficient earnest of what South Africa has given me, and is it possible for me to forget South Africa for a single moment?” They traveled third-class. Kallenbach brought with him two pairs of binoculars to use on deck. Gandhi, seizing on them as a gross self-indulgence, a backsliding into luxury by his friend, tossed them overboard. “The Atlantic,” Rajmohan Gandhi, his grandson, writes, “was enriched.” Fatefully, the Kinfauns Castle docked the day after the outbreak of a world war. Kallenbach moved with the Gandhis into a boardinghouse for Indian stude
nts and, in preparation for a new life with Gandhi in India, tried to concentrate on his Hindi and Gujarati studies. Gandhi sent off letters to Pretoria, New Delhi, and Whitehall, searching for a chink in a bureaucratic wall that threatened to keep him from realizing his dream of having the Jewish architect at his side in India. No one was willing or able to authorize a German passport holder to take up residence there in wartime. The viceroy wouldn’t run “the risk.” Gandhi delayed his own departure, but still the door stayed slammed. Eventually, Kallenbach was detained in a camp for enemy aliens on the Isle of Man, only to be returned to East Prussia in a prisoner swap in 1917. It was 1937 before the two men met again. “I have no Kallenbach,” Gandhi lamented in his fifth year back in India.
The Gandhis leaving South Africa (photo credit i5.5)
Six months later arriving in Bombay (photo credit i5.6)
PART II
INDIA
(photo credit ip2.1)
6
WAKING INDIA
GANDHI HAD TAKEN A VOW to spend his first year back in India readjusting to the swirl of Indian life. He’d promised his political mentor, Gokhale, that he’d make no political pronouncements in that time, take no sides, plunge into no movements. He’d travel the land, establish contacts, make himself known, listen, and observe. In loftier terms, he could be seen as trying to embrace as much of the illimitable Indian reality as he could. That proved to be quite a lot, more than any other political figure on the Indian scene had ever attempted.
Welcomed at first as an outsider, he became an itinerant guest of honor at civic luncheons and tea parties, hailed wherever he landed for his struggles in South Africa. His standard response was to protest, with becoming but not overly insistent modesty, that the “real heroes” on that other subcontinent had been the indentured laborers, the poorest of the poor, who had continued striking even after he’d been jailed. He was more “at home” with them, he claimed in the first of these talks, than he was with the audience he was now facing, Bombay’s political elite and smart set. In obvious ways, it was a questionable claim, but it described Gandhi, from his first pronouncements in India, as a figure focused on the masses. It was also about as provocative as he allowed himself to be over the course of 1915, his first year home. He could have taken Gokhale’s death, just five weeks after that speech, as a release from his vow but refrained from advancing anything like a leadership claim of his own. But then, with his vow expiring in the first days of 1916, he made it plain that he had drawn some conclusions. “India needs to wake up,” he told yet another civic reception, this one in the Gujarati town of Surat. “Without an awakening, there can be no progress. To bring it about in the country, one must place some program before it.”
Once again he drew explicitly on his experience in the Natal strikes, two years earlier. To move the nation, he would need to bring education to the poorest—just as he now claims to have done with the indentured in South Africa—to “teach them why India is growing more and more abject.” Already, he’s on his way to turning his South African experience into a parable, editing out unfortunate details such as the outbreaks of violence in the sugar country, or the ambiguity of the movement’s results, especially the glaring shortfall in actual benefits for the indentured. Seasoned campaigner that he is, he’s now looking forward, not back, to the advent of mass politics in India. However flawed his analogy to South Africa, he’s declaring his ambition to jolt India with a program. It’s too soon to say what content he may give to that program, but it’s foreshadowed in some of the preoccupations he has carried with him, notably his concern for Hindu-Muslim unity and his condemnation of untouchability as a curse on India. The obvious difference is that from here on, he won’t just be striving to carve out some breathing room for a marginalized minority in a system he has little or no hope of changing. In India, he’ll have the opportunity and burden of trying to carry the majority with him, in an effort to overturn and replace the colonial rulers. Though he never voices an ambition to participate in government himself, he’ll have much to say about the direction of society under the leaders he’d eventually designate, its need for reform.
Remarkably, it takes less than six years for the repatriated politician, starting on this vastly enlarged stage with no organization or following beyond his immediate entourage, to accomplish some facsimile of the “awakening” he sought. His audacious goal, ratified by a national movement that had been revitalized—practically reinvented in his image—is captured in a slogan: “Swaraj within a year.” Swaraj, in Gandhi’s reinterpretation, remains a fuzzy goal, some form of self-government approaching but not necessarily including full independence. What’s radical is the promise that mass mobilization can make it a reality in just a year. And that fateful one year was to be 1921.
By then, Gandhi had come to be seen in a whole new light. No longer was he a guest of honor at tea parties. In the space of only two years—from the start of the hot season in April 1917, when he took up the cause of exploited peasants on indigo plantations in a backwater of northern Bihar, until April 1919, when he called his first nonviolent national strike—he had made his mark on India. Now, when he travels to promote his swaraj, massive throngs turn out numbering in the thousands and tens of thousands, crowds that were ten, even twenty times the throng he’d faced at the Durban racecourse. He makes a point of speaking in the vernacular, Gujarati or his still less than fluent Hindi—later, reaching for the broadest common denominator, he’d specify the demotic Hindustani as his preferred lingua franca—but he can usually be heard only in the front ranks of the crowds; and, when he barnstorms beyond North India, he’s forced to speak in a language that’s little or not at all understood by most of those within the sound of his voice.
It seems not to matter; the crowds keep swelling. The peculiarly Indian point of the commotion he inspires is, after all, not to hear but to view him: to gain or experience darshan, the merit or uplift that accrues to those who enter the spiritual force field of a rishi, or sage. For some in these crowds the vision of Gandhi is literally an apotheosis. They think they’re seeing not a mere mortal but an actual avatar of a god from the crowded Hindu pantheon. By the second half of 1921, as the clock runs out on his premature promise of swaraj, the prophet finds it necessary to protest his own deification. “I should have thought,” he writes, “that I had in the strongest sense repudiated all claim to divinity. I claim to be a humble servant of India and humanity, and would like to die in the discharge of such service.” It’s no time for avatars, he insists. “In India, what we want now is not hero-worship, but service.”
Early on, he’d expressed his own skepticism about these ephemeral transactions between leader and those who want to bask passively in his afterglow: “I do not believe that people profit in any way by having darshan. The condition of him who gives it is even worse.” But he allowed it to become an almost daily, sometimes nightly, feature of his life. Not just at his public appearances but often when he worked and slept outside his ashrams, there were usually stupefied congregations of piously staring onlookers, ignoring his determination to ignore them.
Occasionally, the adulation, expressed in the surge of crowds pressing forward—their members reaching out to graze the leader’s feet with their fingertips, in a mark of humility and reverence—gets to be more than Gandhi can stand. In the English-language version of his weekly newspaper Young India—reincarnating Indian Opinion, still being printed in South Africa at the Phoenix Settlement—he complains of “the malady of foot-touching.” Later, he warns: “In the mere touch of my feet lies nothing but the man’s degradation.” There’s plenty of such degradation to be had. “At night,” Louis Fischer reports, “his feet and shins were covered with scratches from people who had bowed low and touched him; his feet had to be rubbed with Vaseline.” Later, his devoted English follower Madeleine Slade, renamed by him Mirabehn, was reported by a Fleet Street journalist to “actually shampoo his legs every night.”
Gandhi’s first
Indian Boswell and faithful secretary in these years, Mahadev Desai, sees in the clamoring throngs a reflection of “the people’s love-mad insolence.” He’s writing in his diary about a specific incident in February 1921 at the last of a succession of rural train stops between Gorakhpur and Benares. At each, a crowd had been waiting, blocking the tracks, demanding to see Gandhi, who’d addressed nearly 100,000 earlier that day in Patna. “We have come for the darshan of the Lord,” one man tells Mahadev, who has gone so far at one stop as to impersonate Gandhi in a vain effort to get his adherents, who have never seen an image of their hero, to back off.
Now it’s well past midnight. Yet another big crowd, after waiting for hours, converges on Gandhi’s third-class carriage. The touring Mahatma isn’t scheduled or inclined to speak. Mahadev pleads for silence so he can catch some sleep after a strenuous day, but deafening cries of “Gandhi ki jai”—“Glory to Gandhi”—rent the night sky. At last, a suddenly imperious Gandhi rises in a rage, his face twisted in an angry scowl Mahadev has never before seen. Once again, a clamorous mob made up of his supposed followers is hanging from the footboards of the train, preventing it from moving on. The apostle of nonviolence later admitted that he felt an urge to beat someone at that moment; instead of lashing out verbally, he beats and smacks his own forehead in full view of the crowd. Again he does it, then a third time. “The people got frightened,” he wrote. “They asked me to forgive them, became quiet and requested me to go to sleep.”
This picture of an infuriated Mahatma assaulting himself in order to turn back an idolatrous, overwhelmingly rural crowd in the early hours of the morning obviously raises questions about the fundamental nature of his appeal. Gandhi by now had spelled out the program he seemed to promise in Surat. Practically all of it had been at the forefront of his thinking when he left South Africa, or is easily traceable to his preoccupations at Tolstoy Farm. Swaraj would come when India solidified an unbreakable alliance between Muslims and Hindus; wiped out untouchability; accepted the discipline of nonviolence as more than a tactic, as a way of life; and promoted homespun yarn and handwoven fabrics as self-sustaining cottage industries in its numberless villages. He would call these “the four pillars on which the structure of swaraj would ever rest.” And the national movement—more to please him than out of conviction—would formally adopt his program as its own. In Ahmedabad in December 1921, as the year he’d given himself and India to achieve swaraj expired, the Indian National Congress would give no thought to spurning him as a failed prophet. Instead, it would vote to assign Gandhi “sole executive authority” over the movement, making him, in effect, a one-man Politburo in a period when most of his lieutenants and former rivals had been removed from the scene, having been jailed by the British authorities (who hadn’t quite figured out how to handle the Mahatma himself). The revivalist in him had been tirelessly pushing the four-part program forward in his writing and itinerant preaching, declaring each part in its turn to be absolutely necessary for swaraj, its very essence. The logical connections are sometimes clear only to him. Gandhi is capable of arguing that Hindu-Muslim unity cannot be achieved without spinning. Other times the banishment of untouchability becomes the highest priority. Not everyone understands, but his words become a creed for a growing band of activists spread across the land in places he has visited. Meanwhile, by 1921, the newly empowered political tactician is threatening civil disobedience. As an expression of the discipline and mission Gandhi had taken on himself, his program offered a coherent vision. As practical politics, it could be, to put it mildly, a tricky if not impossible juggling act.
Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India Page 18
