Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  Happening to be at the spot on horseback, Michael Coates saw the assault. Going up to Gandhi, he said: ‘I have seen everything. I shall be your witness in court if you proceed against the man. I am very sorry you have been so rudely assaulted.’

  According to the Autobiography, Gandhi replied that he had no intention to proceed against the guard, who ‘no doubt treats Negroes just as he has treated me’. He had chosen, Gandhi said, not to go to court over personal grievances. Coates then reprimanded the guard, who apologized to Gandhi. ‘I had already forgiven him,’ says Gandhi in the Autobiography. But he stopped using the sidewalk. ‘Why should I unnecessarily court another kick?’ (A 114)

  Blacks were banned from Pretoria’s sidewalks and could be flogged if found defying the ban. Indians too were shooed away, though successful Muslim traders, the ‘Arabs’, were permitted to use them. After 9 p.m., a black man could not be on the streets without a pass from his employer.

  To enable Gandhi to walk after 9 p.m., an Afrikaner public prosecutor, F.E.T. Krause, like Gandhi a barrister from the Inner Temple, gave Gandhi a letter authorizing him to be out of doors at all hours without police interference. Perhaps because he was often recognized, Gandhi never had to produce this letter, but he always carried it with him while out walking. He owed the letter to Coates, who had taken him to Krause.

  ‘The climax of the campaign for Gandhi’s soul,’ to quote James Hunt,6 came in October 1893, when Baker invited Gandhi to a great Christian convention in Huguenot College in Wellington, forty miles from Cape Town. Accepting the invitation, Gandhi travelled for the first time to Cape Town and the Cape Colony. It was a long journey, but, persuading officials to relax racial rules, Baker ensured that Gandhi travelled with him in the same compartment, and at the convention he and Gandhi shared the same hotel room.

  Rev. Andrew Murray, one of the biggest names in South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church, addressed the convention, as did others including Baker, but Baker’s prayer that Gandhi would ‘embrace Christianity in the atmosphere of religious exaltation’ was not answered.7

  Gandhi was impressed by the faith of the devout assemblage. He met Rev. Murray, liked some of the hymns, and saw that many were praying for him. But he saw no reason for changing his religion, and said so to his ‘good Christian friends’. They were disappointed and some were ‘shocked’. But Gandhi could not help it.

  That by his death and blood Jesus had redeemed the sins of the world was something that Gandhi was ready to accept metaphorically but not literally. That Jesus was the only incarnate son of God was ‘more than I could believe’. ‘If God could have sons, all of us were His sons’ (A 119).

  But his reading in Pretoria brought him close to two thinkers connected to Christianity who in some ways reduced the differences between Gandhi and his Christian friends. Edward Maitland of England, to whose works Gandhi was introduced by Oldfield (with whom he was continuing to correspond), and Russia’s Leo Tolstoy provided versions of Christianity (dissenting versions to be sure) to which Gandhi could respond in quite a wholehearted way.

  Leo Tolstoy. Maitland, who spoke of God in both genders, also referred to ‘the Finding of Christ’ and suggested that a Christ was to be found within a person, a mystical Christ different from the unique historical Son of God, and not very far from Hindu notions of the Self. And Tolstoy, whose The Kingdom of God is Within You, sent to Gandhi by Maitland,8 gripped Gandhi in Pretoria in 1894, offered a Christ who was not the son of God atoning for the world’s sins but the powerful author of the Sermon on the Mount. The five commandments selected by Tolstoy from the Sermon—do not hate, do not lust, do not hoard, do not kill, love your enemies—went directly to Gandhi’s heart, answering important questions that occupied it.9

  Tolstoy’s book ‘overwhelmed me’, the Autobiography says, referring also to the book’s ‘independent thinking, profound morality, and truthfulness’ (A 120). Elsewhere, Gandhi would say that reading Tolstoy saved him from violence. ‘When I went to England I was a votary of violence. I had faith in it and none in nonviolence.’10

  After returning from England, too, the experience with Ollivant in Rajkot and, later, the ordeals in the journey from Durban to Pretoria probably engendered violent thoughts in Gandhi’s mind, even though he was unwilling, after arriving in South Africa, to proceed against those assaulting him. There was a clash in his mind between violence and forgiveness, and Tolstoy resolved it against violence.

  Another encounter of a Christian kind he had in the mid-1890s was in a Trappist monastery at Mariann Hill in Natal. Gandhi was struck by the skills taught there to Africans, by the practice of silence in the monastery, and by the ascetic life of the monks and nuns, who did not eat meat, which is how he had first heard of them.

  Abdullah Sheth, meanwhile, was speaking of the beauty of Islam and suggesting its study to Gandhi, who read Sale’s translation of the Qur’an and obtained other Islamic books. Unconvinced that he should embrace Christianity or Islam, and not certain either that Hinduism with its untouchability and ‘a multitude of sects and castes’ (A 119) was a perfect religion, Gandhi remembered the Jain thought that doubt should accompany every certainty.

  To his friend Rajchandra, a Jain who was also a scholar of Hinduism, Gandhi sent twenty-six questions about God, Christ, Rama, Krishna, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva and more. In October 1894, Rajchandra sent careful answers and books on Hinduism and recommended patience. Gandhi was ‘somewhat pacified’ (A 120).

  Though disappointing Baker, Coates and other Christian friends, Gandhi acknowledged a permanent debt to them ‘for the religious quest that they awakened in me’ (A 120). His relations with them remained warm, and until the 1940s Baker, for one, continued to write to, and no doubt pray for, Gandhi.

  At their first meeting Baker had told Gandhi that the case for which he had come would not pick up momentum for a while. Gandhi’s task was to understand all its points of fact and law, all its intricacies of accounting and promissory notes, and explain what he grasped to Baker, who in turn would brief the most eminent counsel available.

  Studying the case requiring only a part of his time, Gandhi decided, in his very first week in Pretoria, to study also ‘the condition of Indians there’—the political life was pulling him. The man who could help him reach Pretoria’s Indians, perhaps the city’s most influential Indian, was Abdullah’s adversary and relative, Tyeb Sheth. Gandhi made his acquaintance within days of arrival in Pretoria.

  This, too, was a sign of self-confidence. Someone comfortably approaching a powerful opponent of his employer had to have a good deal of faith in his relationship with the employer, or in himself, and in what he was doing. Gandhi told Tyeb of ‘his intention to get in touch with every Indian in Pretoria’.

  This again is worth noting. Gandhi does not seek Tyeb’s approval, he merely informs Tyeb of his intention. We must conclude that within days of arrival in South Africa, Indians there saw young Gandhi as a leader. (Such an image no doubt contributed to the persistence with which Gandhi’s Christian friends tried to win him.)

  With Tyeb’s help, Gandhi called a meeting of Pretoria’s Indians, held in the house of another Meman Muslim merchant, Joosab Sheth. It was a largely Muslim gathering with ‘a sprinkling of Hindus’. Most were traders. To them Gandhi made what he would call ‘the first public speech of my life’.

  Contesting the view that truthfulness was not possible in business, he asked the traders to realize that their conduct in Pretoria determined how ‘millions of their fellow-countrymen’ were being judged. ‘Insanitary habits’ that incurred unpopularity were referred to. He wanted his audience to remember what united them—their Indian origin—not their differences of religion, sect, and language. Asking them, finally, to form an association to ventilate their hardships, he ‘offered to place at its disposal as much of my time and service as was possible’ (A 109-10).

  Already, then, in the first half of June 1893, Gandhi too saw himself as a leader. In the Autobiography he says that he
‘made a considerable impression on the meeting’. An ensuing discussion produced a consensus on two points: they would meet regularly, and Gandhi would teach some of them English.

  Several more meetings were held, but only three men present agreed to be taught English by Gandhi: a Muslim barber, a Muslim clerk and a Hindu who kept a petty shop. For about eight months, Gandhi went to their places to teach them, often waiting while they were busy. Two of the three learnt enough English to keep accounts and write ordinary business letters, while the barber was satisfied with a few sentences to use with his customers.

  Not very surprisingly, ‘an English hair-cutter in Pretoria… contemptuously refused’ to cut Gandhi’s hair. Though he ‘certainly felt hurt’, Gandhi purchased a pair of clippers and cut his hair himself, with the help of a mirror (A 187). The results were not flattering, and amused friends asked whether rats had chewed his hair. Gandhi replied that the white barber would not condescend to touch his black hair.

  In the Autobiography he would claim that the conviction that such humiliations were ‘the reward’ for untouchability in India ‘saved me from becoming angry’ (A 187). Following long talks with Gandhi, Doke would write in 1908 that in Pretoria the young man proud of his birth and education had ‘learned self-restraint’ and ‘to bear the insults which attached to his race and colour until… he almost gloried in them’.11

  After some months of interactions, ‘there was… in Pretoria no Indian I did not know, or whose condition I was not acquainted with’ (A 110). Some of the Indians were wealthy—traders who sold goods and provisions in a Transvaal hungry for supplies. For them Gandhi won a tangible if small advance. A letter from him to the Transvaal’s railway authorities brought the response that stationmasters could issue first- and second-class tickets to ‘properly dressed’ Indians.

  But from Tyeb, and from Jacobus de Wet, the British Agent in Pretoria, whom Gandhi met several times, he also learnt the bitter story of the hounding out of Indians from the other Boer republic, Orange Free State.

  We must assume that interacting with the Indians of Pretoria reminded Gandhi of India and its politics, and of the nine-year-old Indian National Congress. South Africa was an absorbing stage in his life but not his permanent home.

  In Pretoria in 1893-94 Gandhi honed his religious, political and legal understandings and, until the case summoned almost all his time, also read close to a hundred volumes that included writings by Tolstoy, religious books that Coates, Baker, Abdullah and others supplied or suggested, and books sent by Rajchandra.

  Fulfilling a promise made in London to Pincott, he also read the volumes by Kaye and Malleson detailing the horrific course of India’s 1857 rebellion.

  In Pretoria he was also able to complete a writing interrupted by the Ollivant episode—the Guide to London. Written in a relaxed style but not destined to be published in his lifetime, the short Guide claimed, in 1893, to ‘attempt that which has not yet been attempted’, a portrayal of the life and needs of an Indian in London. Space is given in the Guide to food, its purchase and cooking, to how one can live in London on a pound a week, and to clothes an Indian should wear in England. Any Indian who can, he says, should go to England, where he would be ‘alone, no wife to tease and flatter him, no parents to indulge, no children to look after, no company to disturb’. He would be ‘the master of his time’, which is what Gandhi was in Pretoria while writing the Guide (1: 71).

  Continuing to experiment with food, Gandhi lived for some weeks only on uncooked cereals, vegetables, fruits and nuts, managing thereby to damage his health and his teeth. Dutifully he reported the experiment’s failure to The Vegetarian in London.

  Coming across plainly in Satyagraha and in later references, his fondness for the landscape, climate and fruits of South Africa was probably engendered during this Pretoria period, when he had the leisure to walk on the terrain and absorb its charms.

  The case. Yet the case against Tyeb was his primary commitment in Pretoria. He read the law on the points at dispute, and all the cases with a possible bearing on it, and examined every fact that Abdullah, who ‘reposed absolute confidence’ in Gandhi, had presented.

  Gandhi’s conclusion was that the facts made Abdullah’s case strong indeed, and also that Abdullah as well as Tyeb would be ruined if they fought in the courts to the bitter and distant end. The parties, too, realized this, but much money, time and feeling had been expended on the dispute, and Gandhi had to ‘strain every nerve’ before the two sides agreed to arbitration. The case was argued before an arbitrator, and Abdullah was awarded 37,000 pounds plus costs.

  Tyeb ‘meant to pay not a pie less than the amount’ but it was impossible for him to ‘pay down the whole sum’. Since Memans like Tyeb seemed to prefer death to bankruptcy, the only solution was for Abdullah to accept payment in moderate instalments. Abdullah fiercely resisted this, but in the end Gandhi persuaded him, and Abdullah allowed Tyeb’s instalments ‘to be spread over a very long period’.

  ‘Both were happy over the result, and both rose in the public estimation.’ Gandhi’s satisfaction was ‘boundless’ and he felt convinced that ‘the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder’ (A117).

  Change in plans. His job in South Africa had been completed. To bid farewell to Gandhi, Abdullah invited prominent Indians to spend a day with him in Sydenham on the Natal coast. There Gandhi’s attention was caught by a small item in a newspaper. Headed ‘Indian Franchise’, it mentioned a Bill before the Natal legislature to bar Indians from the right to vote.

  Asked about it by Gandhi, Abdullah explained that Natal’s attorney-general, Harry Escombe, who was also a legal adviser to Abdullah’s firm, had helped several Indians to register as voters when Escombe was fighting an election against a popular wharf engineer, and the Indians had voted for Escombe. Now, obviously, the franchise was being resented.

  Gandhi commented that the Bill would worsen the position of Natal’s Indians—it was ‘the first nail into our coffin’. When Abdullah asked for Gandhi’s advice on what should be done, one of his guests butted in and said that Gandhi should postpone his departure by a month. Others took up the cry and said that Abdullah should detain Gandhi.

  Gandhi himself was clearly open to the idea. The question of South Africa’s Indians had captured his imagination, and no business awaited him in India. Moreover, he swiftly saw a chance to organize Natal’s Indians.

  ‘You should all detain Gandhi,’ Abdullah told his guests, adding that a barrister had his fees. He would not take any fees for public work, Gandhi clarified, but were they willing, he asked, to pay for a campaign—for telegrams, printing, some law books (‘I am ignorant of your laws’), and any travelling? Were they willing to give their time?

  ‘Allah is great and merciful,’ several shouted. (Most of those gathered in Sydenham were Muslims.) ‘Money will come in, and men there are, as many as you may need. You please consent to stay, and all will be well.’

  Gandhi agreed, ‘worked out in [his] mind the outline of a campaign’, and turned the party into a working committee. Recalling the occasion later, he would see in it the hand of God, which ‘laid the foundations of my life in South Africa’. Once more an invitation had found Gandhi ready (A 121-22).

  From Durban he organized a brilliant campaign. The targets were multiple: the Natal Assembly, which had all but passed the Bill; the Europeans of Natal; leaders of the Empire in London; and public opinion in India. His means were petitions to the Assembly and a monster petition to Lord Ripon, secretary of state for the colonies in London—with copies to the press in Natal, England and India.

  At the opening meeting, held in Abdullah’s house, telegrams were sent to the speaker of the Assembly, the Premier of Natal, and Harry Escombe, and a petition to the Assembly was drafted. An old Indian with a neat hand, Arthur, sat up much of the night writing the master copy. Others made five copies by hand.

  That the Bill would be passed was a foregone conclusion, and it was. But the cam
paign ‘infused new life into the community’. In fact it helped redefine the community, for Gandhi secured the participation of all sections, traders and clerks, Muslims, Hindus, Parsis and Christians, the small and the great. Several volunteers were young Natal-born Christian Indians. Indian merchants had tended to disdain this Christianized section of the Indian community, but to Gandhi they did not ‘cease to be Indians because they had become Christians’.

  In the petition to Ripon, Gandhi argued that as Indians enjoyed ‘a kind of franchise in India’, they were entitled to the franchise in Natal, and also that Indians with the property and educational qualifications required by the Natal franchise amounted in any case to a small number. Taking off in carriages from Abdullah’s house, volunteers scurried across the colony and obtained about 10,000 signatures in a fortnight. No one asked to be reimbursed for expenses.

  Newspapers in Natal commented favourably on the Indian petition, an editorial in The Times of India strongly backed the Natal Indians’ demands, and in London The Times voiced support. Another consequence was that Indians in Durban surrounded Gandhi on all sides and asked him to ‘remain there permanently’.

  Gandhi was ready with his answer. He was prepared to stay on but not at the community’s expense. He would live in an independent house in a good locality and in a style that brought credit to the community. This would cost not less than 300 pounds a year. Were members of the community willing to guarantee him legal work to that extent?

  They would easily raise that sum for his public work, he was told, ‘apart from the fees you must charge for private legal work’. Gandhi did not agree. His public work would mainly be ‘to make you work’, for which he could not charge them. But it could be done out of a barrister’s income.

  He clearly wanted his independence, and said so to Durban’s Indian merchants: ‘I should occasionally have to say hard things to you.’ His terms were accepted, and about twenty of the merchants gave him retainers for a year, despite a warning by him that a brown barrister might not sit well with Natal’s judges (A 124-6). The twenty-four-year-old Gandhi of early 1894 places his cards on the table, but he also knows how to play them.