Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People
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Always ready, in amiable and irreverent fashion, to challenge the eminent, which young Rajchandra was even in 1891-92, Gandhi on one occasion asked him, after the two had voiced agreement against the use of leather, to remove the cap he was wearing. A strip of leather was found in it, which Rajchandra promptly and quietly tore off.
One outcome of the friendship was that Gandhi was asked to speak at a public celebration in Ahmedabad of Rajchandra’s birthday. We do not know what Gandhi said on that occasion, or with what confidence he said it, but we will see the relationship grow.
In Rajkot, where he drafted applications and memorials, Gandhi found some satisfaction and a steady if modest income (‘on an average, Rs 300 a month’—A 84). A few clients came directly to Mohandas, the rest through Laxmidas, now a small-time pleader himself, and through Laxmidas’s partner, a senior pleader with a larger practice. The partner expected a commission from each job given to Mohandas, and Laxmidas pressed his brother to pay it. (‘All barristers do it.’) Despite his dislike, Gandhi went along.
Helped by the new sense of security and stability, the relationship with Kastur improved. Mohandas’s ‘love’, while by no means ‘free from lust’, was, to quote the Autobiography’s view of this period, ‘getting gradually purer’ (A 89). The couple seemed happy together, with Kastur consenting to being taught (we are not told what) by her husband and to ‘certain reforms’ (also unspecified). In October 1892 their second son, Manilal, was born. Acting on a thought that had been with him for a while, Gandhi started to write a handbook or guide for Indians planning to study in London.
But he would be denied a life of calm.
Chapter 3
South Africa and a Purpose
1893-1901
An insistent plea from Laxmidas, and Mohandas’s inability to resist it, led to what Gandhi calls ‘the first shock of my life’ (A 84). The plea was in respect of a charge hanging over the eldest brother’s head. Previously serving as secretary and adviser to the minor heir to the Porbandar throne, Laxmidas was alleged to have winked at an apparent theft of some state jewels by the heir. The Raj’s political agent (PA) in Kathiawar, a young man called E.C.K. (later Sir Charles) Ollivant, was examining the allegation.
Learning with some excitement that in England Mohandas had met Ollivant and found him friendly, Laxmidas pressed his brother to intervene. At first Mohandas declined and asked his brother to ‘submit a petition in the proper course’. It did not seem right, Mohandas added, to try to take advantage of a chance acquaintance in England. Laxmidas, who had helped finance his brother’s time in England, answered:
You do not know Kathiawar, and you have yet to know the world. Only influence counts here. It is not proper for you, a brother, to shirk your duty, when you can clearly put in a good word about me to an officer you know.
Giving in, Mohandas sought an appointment ‘much against [his] will’ and got it. The Autobiography relates what happened next:
I reminded [Ollivant] of the old acquaintance… The political agent owned the acquaintance, but the reminder seemed to stiffen him. ‘Surely you have not come here to abuse that acquaintance, have you?’ appeared to be… written on his brow. Nevertheless, I opened my case. The sahib was impatient. ‘Your brother is an intriguer. I want to hear nothing more from you. I have no time. If your brother has anything to say, let him apply through the proper channel.’
The answer was enough, was perhaps deserved. But selfishness is blind. I went on with my story. The sahib got up and said, ‘I must go now.’ ‘But please hear me out,’ said I. That made him more angry. He called his peon to show me the door. I was still hesitating when the peon came in, placed his hands on my shoulders and put me out of the room.
From, it would seem, the foyer of the PA’s imposing office, an enraged Gandhi
at once wrote out and sent over a note to this effect: ‘You have insulted me. You have assaulted me through your peon. If you make no amends, I shall have to proceed against you.’ Quick came the answer through a sowar. ‘You were rude to me. I asked you to go and you would not. I had no option but to order my peon to show you the door… He therefore had to use just enough force to send you out. You are at liberty to proceed as you wish.’
The Autobiography reproduces Ollivant’s answer without qualifying it as being ‘in essence’ or ‘more or less’ what was said. Gandhi had either preserved or memorized its contents.
Pherozeshah Mehta happened to be in Rajkot at this time, for a case. Sending Mehta an account of what had happened, along with copies of his note to Ollivant and Ollivant’s reply, Gandhi sought the great lawyer’s advice.
Tell Gandhi (Mehta said to the intermediary), such things are [a] common experience… He is still fresh from England, and hot-blooded. He does not know British officers… Let him tear up the note and pocket the insult. He will gain nothing by proceeding against the sahib and will very likely ruin himself (A 84-6).
The Gandhi who had to ‘swallow’ this ‘bitter as poison’ advice, a proud, Westernized Indian who thought he was bringing reforms to his homeland, was now attacked by three crippling emotions: guilt (he had gone to Ollivant for a wrong purpose), humiliation (he, a barrister and son to a prime minister of Rajkot, had been ejected in Rajkot by a ‘friend’ of his days in ‘dear London’) and impotence (he could not carry out a threat he had made in black and white).
Yet the shock proved useful. Gandhi had seen the face of racial arrogance, something he had not encountered during three years in England, and he had realized the folly of standing on weak ground while confronting it.
Three decisions constituted his response. Henceforth he would be alert to racial or white arrogance, though refusing as yet to call it imperial arrogance. Two, in facing it he would ‘never again’ place himself ‘in a false position’ (A 86). And, three, he would focus his anger on the arrogance rather than on the person displaying it.
This last decision could not have been easy. He was ‘no doubt at fault in having gone to that officer’, yet Ollivant’s ‘impatience and anger were out of all proportion’. Gandhi had been with him for five minutes or less. Ollivant ‘could have politely asked me to go’, but ‘power had intoxicated him to an inordinate extent’ (A 87). This is Gandhi writing in 1926. In 1892-3 his reaction would have been even stronger.
Three decades after the Ollivant episode, Gandhi would speak of his interest as a young man in writing, and of what overrode it: ‘[A]t the earliest period of my life it became one of storm and stress. It commenced with a fight against the then political agent of Kathiawar. I had therefore not much time for literary pursuits’ (Young India, 4 Sept. 1924).
Yet Ollivant’s ejection of Mohandas had set off a creative churning that would lead, fifty years later, to Quit India.
The practice of law in Rajkot lost any charm it may have had for Gandhi. The thought of having to salute Ollivant, the ultimate authority for all the courts of Kathiawar, was unbearable for Kaba Gandhi’s son and Ota Gandhi’s grandson. ‘It was beyond me to conciliate him. I had no desire to curry favour with him.’ A ministership or judgeship in a Kathiawar state seemed an acceptable alternative to Mohandas and his brother, but obtaining such a post ‘without intrigue… was out of the question’ (A87).
The ‘petty politics’ of Kathiawar—intrigue by prince against prince, sycophancy towards British or Indian political officers, and bribing the minions of these officers—now seemed more ‘poisonous’ than ever to Gandhi. This was not the idyllic Kathiawar he had presented in England to readers of The Vegetarian.
For a few weeks in Porbandar he breathed a nicer air. The state’s throne was vacant at the time, and the young heir was Gandhi’s client. From Frederick Lely, whose aid he had vainly sought before leaving for England, Gandhi secured privileges for the heir; and Lely permitted Mohandas to live for some days with the heir as his tutor, presumably in the palace. However, an Indian political officer turned down Gandhi’s plea for relief on behalf of the Mers, a warrior tribe in Porbandar state.
Discussing the feeler with Abdul Karim Jhaveri, a partner in the Dada Abdullah company, Mohandas learnt that he was envisaged as a link between the firm and its European lawyers. The firm’s head in South Africa, Jhaveri’s brother Abdullah Sheth, was not proficient in English, and his lawyers knew no Gujarati. Gandhi’s help would enable Abdullah to instruct and understand his lawyers.
‘You can be useful to us,’ Jhaveri added, ‘in our shop’. When he asked for the terms, Mohandas was told that he would be wanted for ‘not more than a year’. ‘We will pay you a first-class return fare and a sum of 105 pounds, all found.’
Gandhi promptly ‘closed with the offer’. Though fully realizing that he was being asked to go not as a barrister but ‘as a servant of the firm’, he wanted ‘somehow to leave India’. Also, he tells us, he welcomed the idea of returning 105 pounds to his brother (A 88). He was tempted in addition, he says, by the prospect of ‘fresh fields and pastures new’.1
There was more in this than the fascination of a new country. Mohandas seemed to think—or hope—that the opening would be an outlet for his hunger to reform; and perhaps, though he does not say so, he wished to take a closer look at racial arrogance.
He ‘felt the pang of parting from my wife’. For some months, and in some ways for the first time, he and Kastur had ‘both felt the necessity of being more together’. For him the separation was ‘rendered bearable’ by the ‘attraction of South Africa’.
‘“We are bound to meet again in a year,” I said to her, by way for consolation, and left Rajkot for Bombay’ (A 89).
The Autobiography does not tell us how much Gandhi knew about the country he was going to. Nor does Satyagraha in South Africa (or S), Gandhi’s account, written in the early 1920s, of his political battles in a land where, notwithstanding his agreement and expectations, he would end up living for most of twenty-one years.
The lands and resources of the Africa of 1893 had been ‘possessed’ by European powers and, following the Berlin Congress of 1885, parcelled out among them. South Africa was not yet a single political entity. Natal, on the east coast, was a Crown Colony, and the Cape, in the south-west, a self-governing colony of the British (with Cecil Rhodes as Premier), while the interior territories of the Transvaal and Orange Free State were Boer or Afrikaner republics, their culture influenced by the Dutch and by French Huguenots. Paul Kruger was President in the Transvaal.
After the varied blacks (Zulus, Xhosas and others) and the varied whites, South Africa’s third largest group (living mostly in the Cape) were the ‘coloured’: mixed descendants of Indonesians, Malays, whites, blacks, and the indigenous Khoi and San. The Indians were next in number.
Because Natal’s Zulus were thought unreliable for working the sugar plantations (first introduced in Natal in 1850), Indians were brought in as indentured workers from 1860, mostly speakers of Tamil or Telugu from south India or Hindi-speakers from Bihar and east UP. In their wake came Indian merchants and traders, to sell things to Indian labourers and also to the whites and the Africans. A majority of the Indian merchants, and all the biggest ones, were Muslims, often from Gujarat.
In 1893, Durban had a population of close to 30,000. About half were whites. The other half was made up, in roughly equal numbers, by blacks and Indians: to make it difficult for blacks to live in cities was settled policy in Natal and elsewhere in South Africa.
Gandhi’s watchfulness from the moment he would land in Durban suggests that whatever else he knew or did not know about South Africa, he was aware of anti-Indian sentiments among that region’s whites.
‘Full of zest’ nonetheless about South Africa, Gandhi boarded the Safari in Bombay on 19 April 1893. Told that all space in first class had been booked for the Governor General of Mozambique and his party, Gandhi had coolly gone up to the chief officer and asked to be ‘squeezed in’ somehow. After being surveyed ‘from top to toe’, Gandhi was given a spare berth in the chief officer’s cabin, not normally offered to passengers. The ship’s captain also befriended Gandhi, playing chess with him.
After halts at Lamu Island and in Mombasa, the Safari reached Zanzibar, where the captain invited Gandhi and an English passenger on an ‘outing’. Gandhi found out what this meant when a tout took the party to a native brothel. Each in the party was shown into a room. Gandhi ‘stood dumb with shame’ and ‘came out just as I had gone in’.
As in Rajkot seven years or so earlier, he wondered about ‘what the poor woman must have thought of me’, but this time shame quickly ‘wore away’. The woman ‘had not moved him in the least’, but he blamed himself for not having refused to enter the room (A 89-91). He thought that a merciful God had again saved him, and that the shame he had briefly experienced was false.
At Zanzibar, where passengers bound for South Africa waited eight or ten days before taking, on 14 May, the Admiral of the German East Africa Line, Gandhi obtained a few glimpses of life in Africa (he noticed that Africa’s trees and fruits could be ‘gigantic’), went to a law court to observe its proceedings, and had time to reflect on what South Africa had in store for him (A 81).
After cruising across a wide harbour and offering passengers a view of forested hills and seaside boulevards, the Admiral berthed in Port Durban on 23 May. Gandhi emerged wearing a frock coat, striped trousers, a black turban, a watch and a chain—a modernized yet Indian barrister. As he would later recall, ‘I was well dressed according to my lights and landed at Durban with a due sense of my importance’ (S 38).
He was met on the ship by Abdullah Sheth. Glancing around him with eyes sharpened by the Ollivant episode, Gandhi noticed that the whites boarding the Admiral to welcome passengers seemed scornful towards Indians. Many of them greeted Abdullah Sheth, whom they seemed to know, in a ‘snobbish’ manner, Gandhi thought. Gandhi also noticed that he himself was looked at with curiosity.
Durban’s whites had not seen an Indian dressed like him. Muslim merchants, including Abdullah, wore loose clothes, large white turbans, and thick beards. They called themselves, and were often called, Arabs. Parsis who had come from India, traders or clerks, were referred to as Persians. Hindus and Christians were called ‘coolies’ or, simply, ‘Sami’, from the suffix of many a south Indian name in Natal, derived from the Sanskrit ‘Swami’ (master). If an Indian had the cheek to answer, ‘You call me master when you say Sami,’ whites would ‘wince’, ‘swear’ or threaten violence. 2
In any case, an Indian in elegant European clothes and a turban puzzled Durban’s whites. Also puzzled was Abdullah. He knew of Christian Indians who wore cheap European clothes and perhaps a hat but never a turban. Recent converts born in Natal to indentured workers from south India, these Christian Indians often worked as waiters, of whom Abdullah did not think highly.
A shrewd if ‘practically unlettered’ man from Porbandar, owning ships and running diverse businesses in Natal as well as the Transvaal, Abdullah had amassed a fortune in the late 1880s by selling newly-discovered South African gold to India. He wondered (Gandhi thought) how this Anglicized barrister would help him and how much his upkeep would cost, and feared that his brother in Porbandar had ‘sent him a white elephant’ (A 92). However, after a few days of scrutiny and talks, Abdullah felt reassured.
By this time Gandhi had met some of Durban’s leading Indians (Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Parsis) and learnt of the racial prejudice they daily faced. He had also featured in the newspapers. Taking him, on the second or third day of his arrival, to the Durban court, Abdullah had asked Gandhi to sit next to Abdullah’s white attorney. After staring at Gandhi a few times, the magistrate asked Gandhi to remove his turban. (Men like Abdullah co
uld keep their turbans on—they were ‘Arabs’. But ‘Indians’ like Gandhi were expected to remove their headgear in a court, the more so if they hoped to speak to it.)
Yet, for an Indian, removing a turban was a humiliation, not a mark of courtesy. Indian lawyers in the Bombay High Court did not take their turbans off. Refusing to remove his, Gandhi left the Durban court. The next day the Natal Advertiser ran a story, headed ‘An Unwelcome Visitor’, criticizing Gandhi for not taking off his turban.
In a spirited if also courteous answer, Gandhi defended the Indian attitude to turbans. Written with the support of Abdullah, who had long smarted under offensive racial behaviour, Gandhi’s reply appeared in the Advertiser on 29 May, giving the young barrister ‘an unexpected advertisement in South Africa’ within days of arriving there. Though ‘severely criticized’ by some for his ‘temerity’, he felt no remorse (A 94).
Was this a new Gandhi, transformed from the man who a few months earlier had collapsed, head reeling, in a Bombay courtroom? Or was he the same person who five years earlier had stood up, when not yet nineteen, to his caste leaders, and who now felt, following the Ollivant incident, that he had to stand up to white officials?
Certainly he felt more at ease in Durban, far from Rajkot and Bombay, where he had often allowed himself to be intimidated. He also, and immediately, felt needed by the Indians of Durban, and Abdullah seemed to trust him. But going by his focus from the moment of arrival in Port Durban, and the swiftness with which he meets the leaders of Durban’s Indian community, we must conclude that the Ollivant shock and the invitation from Dada Abdulla & Co. had already done something to his soul.
By now he had gone into the details of the case for which he had come—the claim of Abdullah and his firm for 40,000 pounds against a relative, Tyeb Sheth, who lived in Pretoria, the capital of the Transvaal. That was where the case was being fought, and where Gandhi was to go.