Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  Storms. Four days short of the Natal coast, a violent gale hit the boats. Though the Courland’s captain said that ‘a well-built ship could stand almost any weather’, the passengers became ‘inconsolable’. The ships rocked and rolled, and ‘every minute were heard sounds and crashes which foreboded breaches and leaks’. In different languages and ways, all prayed, including the captain, to ‘the one and only God’. ‘His will be done’ was the only cry on every lip.

  Always a good sailor, Gandhi took hourly reports from the captain to the Courland’s passengers and sought to calm them. (The Autobiography makes no mention of the reactions to the tempest of Kastur and the boys, who are subsumed among ‘the passengers’.) After twenty-four hours the storm cleared, but just ahead was a gale of another sort, and Gandhi’s bonding with the passengers was put to good use.

  A number of Durban’s whites were planning to prevent the Indians from landing. Angered by the summary they had received, via London, of Gandhi’s Green Pamphlet, they felt defamed by him in India—and alarmed by a rumour that Gandhi was bringing 800 Indians to settle in Natal. Harry Escombe, the attorney-general who lived next to Gandhi’s house, had joined in exciting them.

  At one public meeting after another, the whites were warned of a Gandhi-led ‘invasion’ of Natal by ‘free’ or non-indentured Indians. There was, as yet, no Natal law to deny entry to people like the passengers on the Courland and the Naderi, which reached Port Durban on 18 or 19 December. But the plague that had occurred in Bombay came in handy to a Committee of Europeans formed to prevent the Indians from landing. The ships were placed in quarantine, and messages were sent to the passengers trapped in them that if they valued their lives they should return to India.

  The ‘quarantine’ lasted twenty-three long days during which the Committee’s warnings were repeated. Dada Abdullah & Co. was also warned, and offered inducements for sending the ships back, but the firm stood by the passengers it had brought, as did the captains of the ships. And Gandhi rallied the passengers, very few of whom he had known before departure in Bombay and all of whom declared their readiness to wait, and arranged games for their entertainment while they waited.

  Following a speech by him on Christmas day, Gandhi was asked by Milne, the Courland’s captain, how he would respond if Durban’s whites assaulted him. Gandhi’s reply was that he prayed that he would be given courage and good sense.

  The ‘quarantine’ could not be extended indefinitely, and on 13 January 1897 the Indians were finally allowed to land. Before leaving the ship, Gandhi was interviewed by a reporter from the Natal Advertiser about the Green Pamphlet, his speeches in India and his future plans. Also, Escombe sent word through Milne that since the whites were ‘highly enraged’ against Gandhi, he and his family should land at dusk, when Mr Tatum, the port superintendent, would escort them to their home.

  Gandhi seemed willing to do this but readily changed his mind when F. A. Laughton, lawyer for Dada Abdullah & Co. and a friend of many of Durban’s Indians, came on board and told Gandhi that he should not enter the city ‘like a thief in the night’. Laughton and Gandhi had Kastur and the boys driven to the home, two miles from the dock, of Parsi Rustomji (where Gandhi and his family would stay for a few days before moving to Beach Grove Villa), and the two of them walked.

  But Gandhi was quickly recognized by some white youths who shouted, ‘Gandhi! Gandhi!’ and ‘Thrash him! Thrash him!’ When several others joined the shouting, a worried Laughton hailed a rickshaw and asked Gandhi to get inside. Gandhi had never sat in a rickshaw before—the idea of being pulled by another human had seemed ‘thoroughly disgusting’ to him. But now, after Laughton’s urging, he was willing. However, the shouters, whose ranks were swelling, frightened the African rickshaw-puller, who said ‘Kha!’ (‘No’) and disappeared.

  The crowd was ‘enormous’ by the time Gandhi and Laughton reached West Street, where a man ‘of powerful build’ dragged Laughton away while others pulled down Gandhi’s turban, pelted him with stones and eggs, and slapped and kicked him. About to faint, he staggered to a fence and held on to it.

  After recovering his breath and balance, he started to walk again when Mrs Alexander, the wife of Durban’s police superintendent, who knew Gandhi and was walking in the opposite direction, saw him. Spreading her umbrella over Gandhi, she kept step with him. Though Gandhi received some more blows, the presence at his side of a well-known white woman saved his bones, and he made it to Rustomji’s home. Decades later he would write:

  God has always come to my rescue… My courage was put to the severest test on 13th January 1897 when… I went ashore and faced the howling crowd determined on lynching me. I was surrounded by thousands of them… but my courage did not fail me. I really cannot say how the courage came to me. But it did. God is great (Harijan, 1 Sept. 1940; 79: 129).

  Gandhi’s later surprise at his courage is of interest, but so is a comment that Laughton made in 1897: ‘Intimidation is out of the question because, if he knew the Town Hall were going to be thrown at him, I believe from what I saw that he would not quail.’15

  But 13 January 1897 held another test for him. A large crowd surrounded the Sorabji house (where the Courland’s medical officer, Dr Dadiburjor, a Parsi like Sorabji, was treating Gandhi’s wounds) and shouted, ‘We want Gandhi!’ Alexander, the police chief, arrived on the scene and found it ugly indeed. His advice was that Gandhi should leave the house in the disguise of a south Indian constable. That was the only way to save his family and that of Rustomji, and Rustomji’s property. ‘I am afraid the crowd will raze Rustomji’s house to the ground.’

  The advice was at once implemented. Changing quickly into a constable’s uniform provided by one of Alexander’s men, Gandhi also wore a protective ‘hat’ that consisted of a metal plate wrapped inside a headscarf, and slipped out of the rear entrance of the Rustomji compound. He was quietly taken to the police station. Alexander, meanwhile, had been leading the crowd in singing, ‘Hang Old Gandhi/On the Sour Apple Tree.’ On being informed that Gandhi had reached the police station, Alexander announced to the crowd that their quarry had escaped, a claim confirmed by a delegation that inspected the house. Outwitted, the crowd dispersed.

  Within a few days the climate improved, for two reasons. The Natal Advertiser published its interview with Gandhi in which he had managed ‘to refute every one of the charges levelled against’ him (A 171). Even more importantly, a Gandhi blessed with good sense in addition to courage chose not to prosecute his assailants.

  From London the secretary of state for the colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, had indeed cabled the government of Natal asking for prosecution, but Gandhi told Harry Escombe that he did not want it. When Escombe indicated that he would like to have this word in writing, Gandhi at once ‘obtained some blank paper from him, wrote out the desired note, and handed it over to him’ (S 52-61; A 164-70).

  As Escombe admitted to Gandhi, the government of Natal had been saved the ‘most awkward’ task of proceeding against its supporters, but the Indian community too benefited. Declaring that Gandhi was innocent, Natal’s newspapers condemned the mob. Later Gandhi could write:

  In three or four days I went to my house, and it was not long before I settled down again. The incident added also to my professional practice (A 171).

  Family life. But for Kastur and the boys it had been a turbulent start to life in Durban, and they were not destined to find calm. The boys’ schooling was a dilemma. Gandhi’s contacts would have secured them places in the best European schools, but other Indian children were not admitted there, and Gandhi rejected a ‘favour and exception’ for his family. He also decided against the schools for Indian children run by missionaries, which were of indifferent quality, taught no Gujarati, and seemed likely to indoctrinate pupils in Christianity.

  The boys were therefore schooled at home, a decision strengthened by Gandhi’s belief, no doubt born of his years away from his sons, that ‘young children should not be separated from their p
arents’ (A 174). However, Gandhi’s public life restricted his teaching at home, even if it was enthusiastic and creative whenever it occurred.

  Though he also engaged an English governess at seven pounds a month, the schooling of Harilal and Manilal and their cousin Gokul was overall a dismal affair. Harilal and Gokul showed a flair for soccer, and no doubt all three saw life at Beach Grove Villa as an exciting change from Rajkot, but their education was not Gandhi’s primary goal, and it suffered.

  Harilal, however, would later view this early slice of his life, when his father seemed to ride what the Autobiography calls a path of ‘ease and comfort’, as its best period (A 174-6). Though Gandhi was beginning to simplify his lifestyle (among other things he was washing, starching and ironing his numerous shirts and collars and had taught Kastur these skills), what nine-year-old Harilal found, for the first time, was the company, in a large comfortable home, of a father who was engaging, rich and influential.

  In 1898 he and Manilal were joined by a new brother, Ramdas, and in 1900 there was a fourth boy, Devadas. Kastur and Gandhi ‘had decided to have the best medical aid at the time of her delivery’, but it was just as well that Gandhi had also studied childbirth. When Devadas was due, ‘the travail came on suddenly’ and neither the doctor nor the midwife was immediately available. Gandhi saw through the baby’s safe delivery and apparently ‘was not nervous’ during the exercise (A 177-8).

  Gandhi had profited from a Gujarati book and also from the time he was spending at a dispensary funded by Parsi Rustomji and supervised by Dr Booth, the head of St Aidan’s Mission. (The Autobiography hints that Gandhi helped set up the dispensary.16) For an hour or more each day, Gandhi ascertained patients’ complaints, laid the facts before a doctor, and compounded medicines. The work brought ‘some peace’ to one ‘ill at ease’ with his prosperity and also a closer contact with the indentured, most of whom came from India’s Hindi, Tamil and Telugu regions (A 177-8).

  Gandhi’s joy at the arrival of Ramdas and Devadas was joined by some awkwardness, for it proved his inability to practise brahmacharya to the full. He had wished to do so following the talk with Rajchandra in Gujarat, and he and Kastur were sleeping in separate beds, but there were nights when he failed to resist the physical pull.

  The dispensary and Gandhi’s work there had been triggered by the arrival in Beach Grove Villa of an indentured labourer suffering from leprosy. Unable ‘to dismiss him with a meal’, Gandhi offered him shelter, dressed his wounds and looked after him. But this could not go on forever, and after some days Gandhi sent the man to a government hospital for indentured labourers (A 177).

  The leper was hardly the only outsider in Beach Grove Villa, which as before also accommodated Gandhi’s clerks, one of whom was indirectly responsible for a bitter exchange between Gandhi and Kasturba recounted in the Autobiography and elsewhere. This clerk, a Christian born of ‘untouchable’ parents, was a newcomer who had not yet started cleaning the chamber-pot kept in his room, and in his reformist zeal Gandhi decided that it was up to him or Kastur to take it down, empty and clean it, and bring it back to the clerk’s bedroom.

  Kastur had acceded to cleaning the chamber-pots of some other lodgers, but carrying an ‘untouchable’s’ urine, or letting her husband carry it, was too much. ‘Her eyes red with anger, and pearl drops streaming down her cheeks,’ she chided her husband as, pot in hand, she descended the outer stairway.

  He answered by shouting, ‘I will not stand this nonsense in my house.’ ‘Keep your house to yourself and let me go,’ said the spirited wife. Her husband ‘caught her by the hand, dragged the helpless woman to the gate, which was just opposite the ladder, and proceeded to open it with the intention of pushing her out.’

  The tears ran down Kastur’s cheeks in torrents, and she cried: ‘Have you no sense of shame?.. Where am I to go? I have no parents or relatives here to harbour me. Being your wife, you think I must put up with your cuffs and kicks? For heaven’s sake behave yourself and shut the gate.’

  Returning to his senses, Gandhi shut the gate, but Kastur had seen, not for the first time, her husband’s domineering face. At such moments, mercifully short-lived, he was master, teacher, husband, and she servant, pupil, wife, indeed a piece of property he owned and could dispose of as he pleased. Moreover, his success (as lawyer, leader, reformer) had swollen his pride, and Kastur’s resistance to his moral certitude had turned the reformer spirit into a knife.

  We owe our glimpse of this unpleasant face entirely to Gandhi’s own candid recollections. Yet these recollections, along with his acknowledgment of a domineering and pitiless side to his nature, and the contrite envisioning of Kastur as ‘a helpmate, a comrade and a partner in the husband’s joys and sorrows’, rather than one ‘born to do her husband’s behest’, came many years after the incident, which occurred in 1897 or 1898. (He gives both dates in different accounts.) At the time, while no doubt ‘really ashamed’ (as he puts it in the Autobiography) at his behaviour, Gandhi did not seem to comprehend the forces inside him that made him act or react the way he did (A 243-5).

  Here we may mention a French tale that Gandhi heard in South Africa and never forgot. It was translated for him (we do not know exactly when) by ‘an Anglo-French philosopher’, as Gandhi would later describe him, ‘an unselfish man who always sided with the minorities’, whose ‘mother was a Frenchwoman and his father an Englishman’. The story was about a scientist who journeyed to India before Mughal times ‘in search of truth’. He saw many so-called high-caste people, men and women, but was not satisfied. Finally the scientist went to the humble cottage of an untouchable in a humble village and ‘found the truth that he was in search of’.17

  We can see why the story made such an impression on Gandhi, who disliked untouchability but belonged to a high caste, an Indian seen as an untouchable by some South African whites, and one who sensed that he might some day have truths to share.

  On the public front there were gains and losses. Thanks to the NIC’s lobbying, London ruled that Natal could not discriminate against Indians on the ground of race. But Natal nullified London’s ruling through ‘non-racial’ laws aimed at Indians that imposed stringent conditions on traders and made immigration virtually impossible for those not proficient in English, unless they were indentured labourers, who were still wanted. Despite an appeal by the NIC, the colonial secretary in England refused to block the new laws.

  Useful work was nonetheless done in England by Mansukhlal Nazar, another of Gandhi’s Beach Grove Villa lodgers, a public-spirited Gujarati fluent in English who had moved in 1896 from Surat to Natal. In 1897, when the premiers of self-governing colonies and dominions assembled in England for Victoria’s diamond jubilee, Gandhi sent Nazar to London, to be guided there by three men whom Gandhi had cultivated through correspondence: Dadabhai Naoroji, Sir William Hunter, the ‘India’ editor of The Times, and Sir Muncherjee Bhownugree, a Parsi Member of Parliament whose politics were milder than Naoroji’s. With their help Nazar was able to brief several influential Britons on the situation of Indians in South Africa.

  Continuing an old friendship, Pranjivan Mehta showed up briefly in Durban in 1899, but opposition, too, surfaced, especially when Gandhi persisted in asking Natal’s Indians ‘to keep their surroundings clean’. Running into ‘polite indifference’ and even ‘insults’, Gandhi concluded that ‘it is the reformer who is anxious for reform, not society’, and that society may offer ‘opposition, abhorrence, and even mortal persecution’ to a reformer (A 190).

  The Boer War and Sergeant-Major Gandhi. The Boer War starting in 1899 also divided the Indian community. The gold of the Transvaal was a factor in this war between the British and the Afrikaners or Boers, and though Indians were shabbily treated in the Transvaal and had been forced out of the other Boer republic, Orange Free State, Gandhi admired the Afrikaners’ independent spirit. In this historic battle between the Boers and the British, where, on both sides, ‘lawyers gave up their practice, farmers their fa
rms, traders their trade, and servants their service’ (to use Gandhi’s sentence), his ‘personal sympathies were all with the Boers’.

  Yet he raised an ambulance corps of 1,100 Indians for the British side, reasoning that failure to support the British would invite fresh hostility and probably expulsion. On the other hand, supporting the British would strengthen their right to live in South Africa, gain the whites’ respect, and perhaps improve their lot—the poor treatment of Indians in Boer lands was in fact a ground the British cited for the war.

  But should victims help oppressors? And what if the other side won? Gandhi answered that soldiers facing a battle never asked the second question, but we must assume also that his finger on the pulse of events, and his awareness of Britain’s ships and the Empire’s resources, indicated to Gandhi a British victory.

  Allegations that Indians were cowardly and stayed at home to make money were common in Natal, and Gandhi’s offer of an ambulance corps (for which his work in the dispensary had to some extent prepared him) was not immediately accepted by the authorities. But men like Laughton and Escombe, and the Bishop of Natal, on whom Gandhi called, championed the offer, as did Dr Booth, who also trained the Indian volunteers in ambulance work.

  In the end, about 300 ‘free’ Indians and 800 indentured Indians were permitted to serve in the Boer War as an ambulance corps. Thirty-seven Indians were listed as ‘leaders’. Gandhi saw to it that different sections of the Indian community—Hindus, Muslims and Christians, the well-off and the poor, south Indians and north Indians—were represented in the corps and among the leaders. In fact Gandhi seemed to sense in the ambulance corps a chance to develop Indian solidarity. He was there himself, of course, with the rank of a sergeant-major, as was Dr Booth.