Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  ‘What brings you here?’ Moor asked a standing Gandhi, who replied that his presence and advice had been asked for. ‘The permit you hold was given you by mistake,’ Gandhi was told. ‘You shall not wait on Mr Chamberlain. You may go. Goodbye.’

  The rudeness seemed too much for Tyeb, who said that no Indians would go to Chamberlain. Gandhi too ‘smarted under the insult’ but asked Tyeb and the others to pocket it. George Godfrey, an Indian barrister, went in Gandhi’s place, but the deputation heard nothing encouraging from Chamberlain.

  Following his exclusion from the meeting with Chamberlain, Gandhi chose not to return to India. Later he would write that he rejected ‘the vain fancy of serving on a larger field in India’ in favour of dealing with ‘the great danger which stared the South African Indians in the face’ (S78), but we can assume that the personal rebuff made him keener to address the danger.

  Once more a crisis had changed his, and his family’s, life. Gandhi told Tyeb and the others that not only would he stay on in South Africa, he would live in the Transvaal, practising in Pretoria or Johannesburg, deal with the Asiatic Department, and strive to prevent the hounding out of the Indians.

  Johannesburg, 1903-4. Delighted, the Transvaal Indians backed Gandhi in starting the Transvaal British Indian Association (TBIA or BIA), a counterpart of the Natal Indian Congress, and adopted him as their leader. And to everyone’s surprise the Law Society did not oppose Gandhi’s application to be enrolled in the Transvaal Supreme Court.

  Unexpectedly again, Gandhi found rooms in mid-1903 at Rissik Street in Johannesburg’s legal district, with the help of a European friend called Louis Walter Ritch, a manager in a commercial firm. ‘A modest room behind his chambers’ was where he lived.2 He did not send right away for Kastur and the boys; he would wait and see.

  Gandhi’s practice in Johannesburg bloomed. Before long he had four Indian clerks and a secretary, a Miss Dick (we do not know her first name), who had come fresh from Scotland. Gandhi soon felt he could place complete confidence in Miss Dick, who managed his funds and account books. Trusting Gandhi fully on her part, she sought his advice in the choice of her husband, and eventually it was Gandhi who gave her away to become Mrs Macdonald. Gandhi’s burden was lightened further when Ritch left his firm and got himself articled under Gandhi.

  In Johannesburg Gandhi resumed his contacts with the theosophists (many of them vegetarians frequenting a restaurant, run by a German, that Gandhi often went to), not to join as a member of their society but to read religious, mostly Hindu, books with them, including Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, which espoused vows of nonviolence, truth, non-stealing and chastity.

  His two years in India had taught Gandhi that he had to steep himself in Hinduism if he wished to impact India—if, for instance, he intended to challenge untouchability and animal-sacrifice. Accordingly, in Johannesburg, he studied the Bhagavad Gita, in English and also, with the aid of an English translation, in Sanskrit.

  It hit him with unexpected force. Gripped by the Gita’s notion of aparigraha or non-possession, Gandhi accepted that he could not follow God without giving up all he had. How, in practice, was this to be done? To Gandhi the answer lay in what he remembered, from his London days, of Snell’s law book. If an owner of great possessions regarded not an iota of them as his own, but saw himself as a trustee, he had in effect given up his possessions. Once again Gandhi was being moulded by a combination of East and West, not by one or the other.

  We may mark that it is in Johannesburg, the city of gold, where, as he would say, citizens did not walk but ran, where ‘no one has the leisure to look at anyone else’, that Gandhi is impelled to reject the god of money (S 4).

  He sought also—in line with Hindu tradition—to memorize the Gita’s Sanskrit verses. Pasting verses on his bathroom wall, he recited them while he bathed. In three years he would memorize thirteen of the Gita’s eighteen chapters.

  Continuing to experiment with food, he found that skipping breakfast removed headaches he was experiencing, and also that applying to the abdomen ‘a bandage of clean earth moistened with cold water and spread like a poultice on fine linen’ did wonders for his constipation (A 238).

  One experiment linked to vegetarianism proved a disaster. Ada Bissicks, an ‘enterprising lady’ with a large circle of friends, came to him with a plan for turning a small vegetarian restaurant she was running into something ‘on a grand scale’ to promote vegetarianism, and asked for help.

  She knew that some of Gandhi’s clients kept large sums with him. With the approval of Badri, a client who had risen from indentured ranks, Gandhi lent 1,000 pounds of Badri’s money to the lady. But her project failed, and Gandhi had to reimburse Badri’s account from his savings (A 235-6).

  Politically, Gandhi’s principal target was the Asiatic Department. Hearing that bribes were being demanded from Indians and Chinese seeking entry into the Transvaal, Gandhi began to collect evidence. This was risky not only for him (his movements were watched) but also for the Indians and Chinese willing to help him. In the end he gathered what he thought was unchallengeable evidence against two officers.

  Confronted with the evidence and with witnesses brought by Gandhi, Johannesburg’s police commissioner said he would detain and prosecute the two officers. He added, however, that a white jury was unlikely to convict whites accused by non-whites. When one of the accused absconded, the police chief obtained an extradition warrant and had the man brought to Johannesburg.

  As expected, the all-white jury disregarded compelling evidence and acquitted the two. But the accused were cashiered by the Asiatic Department, which became ‘comparatively clean’, enabling the Asian community to save large sums in unpaid bribes. Gandhi’s prestige rose, and it went up further when, on receiving a request, he agreed not to thwart the dismissed officers’ applications for jobs with the Johannesburg municipality.

  A description of the 1903 Gandhi has been left by a British writer, Arthur Hawks, who was in South Africa from April to June that year and met Gandhi in Johannesburg. Hawks thought the thirty-three-year-old Gandhi to be ‘about forty’ and described him as wearing ‘a small black moustache on a face not especially dark in colour, but very bright in understanding’.

  Hawks noticed Gandhi’s ‘soft voice, mellifluous diction, charm of manner’ and ‘exquisite English’ and that he was ‘without semblance of rancour’. Hawks also recorded that Gandhi’s speech contained a ‘faint’ and ‘intermittent’ sibilance that at times turned an ‘s’ sound into ‘sh’.3

  Ghetto and plague. A ‘coolie location’ or ghetto in Johannesburg called Brickfields claimed Gandhi’s attention almost from the time he arrived in the city. A number of ex-indentured Indians lived there on small plots leased for ninety-nine years. The municipality’s neglect combined with the ignorance of the overcrowded residents made the location totally unsanitary, and the municipality was able to get a law passed for destroying it. The residents were allowed the right to appeal against the municipality’s offer of compensation.

  For their appeals they engaged Gandhi. Out of about seventy cases, he lost only one. While the residents were happy with their success, and grateful to Gandhibhai, as they called him, their location, where they had to live until new quarters could be identified, was getting more squalid by the day—having decided on destroying Brickfields, the municipality had no desire to look after it.

  Madanjit Vyahavarik, a Gujarati-speaking friend of Gandhi who had been a schoolteacher in Bombay, was at the location on 18 March 1904 when he learnt that twenty-three Indians there were down with pneumonic or ‘Black’ plague, contracted at a gold mine where the plague had broken out.

  ‘A remarkably fearless man’, as Gandhi calls him, Madanjit broke open the lock of a vacant house and put all the patients there. He also sent Gandhi a note in pencil: ‘There is an outbreak of the plague. You must come immediately.’

  Gandhi cycled to Brickfields, where he was joined by Dr William Godfrey, an Indian doctor, and also
, at Gandhi’s instance, by four young Indians working in his office, all bachelors. An offer to assist from Ritch, who supported a large family, was turned down by Gandhi.

  Godfrey, Madanjit, Gandhi and the four youths spent ‘a terrible night of vigil and nursing’, giving the patients such medicine as Dr Godfrey prescribed, keeping them and their beds clean, and trying to cheer them up. All the patients were pulled through that night.

  The town clerk, to whom Gandhi had written a note saying they had taken possession of the vacant dwelling, now placed an unused warehouse at Gandhi’s disposal. Gandhi and a team mobilized by him cleaned the warehouse, collected some beds from charitable Indians and improvised a hospital. The municipality sent a European nurse, quantities of brandy for patients and helpers, and some equipment.

  Despite urgings from the nurse, Gandhi and the other helpers did not consume the brandy, Gandhi for one being unsure of its usefulness even for the patients. With Dr Godfrey’s permission, Gandhi put three patients under his earth treatment, applying wet earth bandages to their heads and chests. In the end, two of these three were the only ones to survive. Even ‘the good nurse’, as Gandhi calls her, who ‘would fain have attended to the patients’ but was ‘rarely allowed… to touch them’, succumbed.

  ‘It is impossible to say,’ Gandhi would write in the Autobiography, ‘how the two patients were saved and how we remained immune’ (A 257-61).

  The Natal Mercury acknowledged Gandhi’s ‘yeoman service’ (22 March 1904). In a letter to the press about the plague, Gandhi held the municipality responsible for neglecting the location after taking it over, but he cooperated fully in efforts to prevent the plague from spreading. Advised by him, the location’s residents abided by an order preventing passage into or out of it. They also agreed to move out with all their belongings and to have the location gutted.

  Many residents had hoarded coins under the Brickfields ground. These had to be unearthed. Gandhi, who spent much of his time with the residents, became their temporary banker and persuaded the manager of his bank to accept, in coins of copper and silver, a total of about 60,000 pounds from the location, after the coins were disinfected.

  After a tent city was raised by the authorities at Klipspruit Farm, about thirteen miles from the city, the ghetto’s residents were removed there by special train. The next day the location was put to the flames.

  Addressing fellow-Indians, Gandhi asked for ‘sanitation and hygiene’ to be made ‘part of our being’. Overcrowding had to be ‘stamped out’ and ‘we should freely let in sunshine and air’.4

  INDIAN OPINION

  That South Africa should have an Indian-owned printing press and journal had been the community’s longing since the 1890s. In 1899, Gandhi had loaned money to help Madanjit Vyavaharik start the International Printing Press in Durban.

  Early in 1903 Madanjit approached Gandhi with the idea of using the press for a weekly called Indian Opinion to be published in four languages, English, Gujarati, Tamil and Hindi. (South Africa’s first non-European journal, started in 1884 in the eastern province by an African teacher, John Tengo Jabavu, was called Native Opinion.)

  Gandhi signalled his readiness to support Indian Opinion with his pen and if need be his money. Mansukhlal Nazar, associated with Gandhi in Durban from the 1890s, agreed to serve as unpaid editor, and Gandhi promised to send at least one article each week. The first issue came out on 4 June 1903.

  Translating every item into three other languages and composing type in four languages was a challenge for the modest staff and the small press, but the journal soon satisfied a need, informing Indians of events across South Africa and in India, and enabling interested Europeans to know the Indian mind.

  In the opening issue Gandhi said that the journal would highlight the ‘undeserved and unjust’ disabilities under which South Africa’s Indians laboured and would also ‘unhesitatingly point out’ Indian faults.5 Commenting on the first issue, The Times of Natal wrote that the Indian case had been ‘very temperately and fairly’ presented.

  Gandhi would later claim that he realized ‘in the very first month’ of Indian Opinion that while control on a newspaper from without was ‘more poisonous than want of control’, an ‘uncontrolled pen’ could also destroy. He would say that the journal trained him in self-restraint, compelled the critic too ‘to put a curb on his own pen’, and enabled the Indian community to ‘think audibly’ through letters and comments (A253).

  At the end of its first year, after Gandhi had spent around Rs 30,000 on the journal, he asserted that Indian Opinion had endeavoured ‘never to depart from the strictest facts in dealing with the difficult questions that have arisen’ and to write nothing ‘with a view to hurt’. But its writers ‘believed in the righteousness of the cause’ they espoused and would ‘always place before readers’ facts ‘in their nakedness’.6

  It was for collecting subscriptions for Indian Opinion that Madanjit was in Brickfields when the plague occurred. In March or April 1904 (around the time of the plague) Madanjit told Gandhi that he planned to return to India. He was not in a position to repay Gandhi’s loans, Madanjit added, but Gandhi could take over the press and the journal if he wished, and enjoy its income. Gandhi ‘accepted the offer and finalized the deal then and there’.7

  Chhaganlal and Maganlal. Encouraged by Gandhi, his ‘nephew’ Chhaganlal Gandhi, twenty-four, had by this time arrived in Durban from Bombay and found employment at the International Printing Press. Chhaganlal’s younger brother Maganlal, who had travelled with Gandhi to South Africa at the end of 1902 but could not get to the Transvaal, had done well at business in the countryside near the Natal towns of Tongaat and Stanger, in partnership with another clansman who had gone to South Africa in 1897, Abhaychand, grandson of Gandhi’s uncle Tulsidas.

  Frightened at first by strongly-built Zulus who invaded his village store, Maganlal, who was twenty-two in 1904, soon learnt the Zulu language and befriended his African customers.

  Gandhi viewed these brothers (whose father Khushalchand had always been close to him) as a special charge and sought to train them from Johannesburg. On their part the young men, whose wives would soon join them in South Africa, responded warmly to him. After Maganlal and Abhaychand met Gandhi in Durban, an impressed Maganlal wrote to the older brother, who was in India at the time:

  31 October 1903. Looking at his radiant face, we were overjoyed… Uncle is ranked here as an extraordinarily powerful figure and is held in high esteem even by veteran statesmen… He has to employ seven Indian and two European clerks in his office, besides a lady typist.8

  PHOENIX

  Gandhi’s response to the plague in Brickfields impacted the Indian Opinion project in ways that surprised Madanjit, Nazar and everyone else involved with it, Gandhi included.

  West & Polak. Two white men played a role in this impact. One was Albert West, a partner in a small printing firm in Johannesburg, described by Gandhi as a ‘pure, sober, God-fearing and humane Englishman’. Most evenings West was Gandhi’s dinner companion at a vegetarian restaurant run by a German called Adolf Ziegler (during this phase Gandhi seemed to eat both lunch and dinner out). Often, after dinner, the two took a walk together.

  Having missed Gandhi at the restaurant during the plague days and read his letter to the press, an anxious West knocked on the door of Gandhi’s apartment. Relieved when Gandhi appeared, West offered to assist the plague victims as a nurse. ‘You are not needed here,’ replied Gandhi, ‘but will you consider going to Durban to look after the Indian Opinion press?’ West agreed and left the next day to take care of the press in Durban for ten pounds a month plus a fifty-per-cent share in any profits, Gandhi having conveyed to West Madanjit’s view that profits were likely.

  Not long after this, Henry Polak, ‘a young man sitting a little way off’ Gandhi’s table at The Alexandra, the restaurant run by Ada Bissicks, sent his card to Gandhi, who invited Polak, sub-editor of The Critic, to his table. Polak said he had been impressed by G
andhi’s letter to the press. The conversation that followed revealed a similarity of views and started a friendship.

  When West wrote from Durban that the finances of the press and journal were in a sorry state, and that there seemed no possibility of any profits, adding however that he would ‘remain on’, Gandhi had no choice but to go to Durban to get at the facts. Polak saw him off at Johannesburg station (Sept. 1904) and lent him a book for the twenty-four-hour journey to Durban, saying that Gandhi was sure to like it.

  The book was John Ruskin’s Unto This Last. Gandhi could not put it down; it more than captured him. Before his train had reached Durban he was resolved to reduce to practice the book’s principles. As he saw them, these were, one, the good of the individual was contained in the good of all; two, a lawyer’s work had the same value as a barber’s; and three, a life of labour, of the tiller of the soil or the handicraftsman, was the life worth living.

  In embracing the social equality and simple life presented by Unto This Last, Gandhi may also have been influenced by his recent interactions with the residents of the location that was no more. Acting instantly, Gandhi proposed to West that Indian Opinion should be removed to a farm on which everyone should labour, drawing the same living wage (three pounds a month) and also help with the printing. Living outside the city, they would live the right life and also reduce Indian Opinion’s losses.

  The remarkably flexible West, clearly also a believer in Gandhi, agreed. So did Chhaganlal and Maganlal, though making money had been their goal in coming to South Africa. The brothers agreed to move to any farm that could be found, as did a few others, but Madanjit (who would leave for India on 16 October 1904) thought the proposal foolish in the extreme, and Nazar made it clear that his editing would be conducted from Durban.

  An advertisement for ‘a piece of land near a railway station in the vicinity of Durban’ fetching an offer, Gandhi and West inspected a twenty-acre estate situated fourteen miles from Durban and two-and-a-half miles from Phoenix station. The land was wild and infested with snakes, but it also had a spring and some orange and mango trees. The estate was bought, along with an adjoining eighty-acre piece, for 1,000 pounds in all. It was not far from a centre started by a Zulu leader, John L. Dube, later a founder of the African National Congress.