Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  Of this word to Solomon no inkling was given to Gandhi, who on his first visit to England after leaving its shores fifteen years earlier lobbied with exemplary zeal. Along, when possible, with an often-ill Ali, Gandhi briefed public figures, including Campbell-Bannerman, the Prime Minister, Morley, the Secretary of State for India, and Curzon Wyllie, Morley’s political secretary.

  He addressed about a hundred Liberal MPs and also approached MPs of other kinds—imperialist, progressive and Irish. Two eminent London-based Parsis, Dadabhai Naoroji of the Indian National Congress and Sir Muncherjee Bhownugree, helped with some of the appointments.

  Gandhi and Churchill. It was on this visit that Gandhi and Winston Churchill, Under-Secretary for the Colonies and at this juncture belonging to the Liberal Party, had their first (and last) meeting. This end-1906 interview with a thirty-two-year-old Churchill was cordial enough; Gandhi, who was five years older, would say in 1935 that he retained ‘a good recollection of Mr Churchill in the colonial office’.1

  But from My African Journey, published in 1908, we know what Churchill, a correspondent and prisoner in South Africa during the Boer War, thought of Indian rights in Africa. He feared that ‘Asiatics’ might ‘teach the African natives evil ways’, saw the interests of whites and Indians as ‘irreconcilable’, and seemed to think that ‘the brutal question’ would be resolved only ‘in a brutal fashion’. Added Churchill: ‘The white artisan is invited to acquiesce in his own extinction… by a competitor whom, he believes, he could strike down with his hands.’

  The phrase is evocative of the beating Gandhi had received in Durban in 1897 (of which Churchill may have heard). In London Gandhi invoked before Churchill what he believed to be an imperial norm: equal rights for Indians. Churchill would concede in My African Journey that ‘the British Indian’ had some rights ‘as a human being’ and ‘as a British subject’.2

  The climax of Gandhi’s six weeks of lobbying in London was a large luncheon—‘about a hundred covers were laid’—where the South Africa British Indian Committee (SABIC), a standing committee for the protection of Indian interests in South Africa, was formed, with Lord Ampthill, a former governor and Viceroy in India, as its president and Louis Ritch as secretary.

  Often working through the night, and writing an incredible 5,000 or so letters during the six weeks, Gandhi was helped by Indian students in London and by two young whites he had known in South Africa, Louis Ritch, now studying for the bar in London, and Symonds, a gifted thirty-year-old who in Johannesburg had ‘often humorously assured [Gandhi] that he would withdraw his support’ if Gandhi was ‘ever found… in a majority’ (S 112-3).

  In London, Symonds, who would die not long afterwards, took down Gandhi’s dictation, typed letters, wrote addresses, affixed stamps and posted envelopes. Symonds ‘toiled for us day and night without payment’, Gandhi would write, and he would remember the ‘sad parting’ beside the steamer on 1 December (S 113).

  While in London Gandhi met British suffragettes fighting for women’s rights and also Shyamji Krishnavarma (1857-1930), a Gujarati barrister and linguist who had studied in Oxford. Condoning violent means for Indian independence, Krishnavarma had in 1905 set up India House in Highgate for putting up and training young Indians, and also started a monthly, the Indian Sociologist, which attacked Gandhi’s stand during the Zulu rebellion.

  Spending two nights in India House—an indication of his concern about its thinking—Gandhi proposed peaceful disobedience as an alternative to violence. Present at these discussions were young admirers of Krishnavarma, including a recent arrival from India, twenty-three-year-old Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a future ideologue of Hindu militancy.

  On the way back along the west coast of Africa, Gandhi received (in the Portuguese island of Madeira) a joyous cable from Ritch: Elgin had advised the King to withhold assent. Two days after Gandhi left England, Churchill had indicated as much in Parliament. During the leg from Madeira to Cape Town, Gandhi, Ali and other Indian travellers therefore ‘had quite a good time of it and built many castles in the air’ (S 112).

  They were undeceived on reaching Cape Town, where they learnt that Elgin had also assured the Transvaal of assent after the colony became responsible. On 1 January 1907 ‘responsibility’ or self-government was granted. The first measure passed by the new Transvaal was the budget; the second, rushed through on 22 March, was the Transvaal Asiatic Registration Act (TARA), or the Black Act, as the Indians called it, which soon received London’s consent.

  The appeal to Empire had totally failed. On 4 April Gandhi called on General Jan Christian Smuts, the Transvaal interior minister, and told him that the Indians could not accept TARA.

  Harilal. In April Harilal, now nineteen (and only eighteen years younger than his father), arrived in South Africa with his wife Gulab (or Chanchal or Chanchi). Living, along with his father, in Kallenbach’s place in Johannesburg, Harilal spent some time daily in Gandhi’s law office, where Polak too worked. The father taught the son for an hour a day and urged him to ‘maintain the habit of reading newspapers’ even if for a few minutes every day. If he came across a word he did not understand, he should turn ‘immediately’ to the dictionary or his father ‘or Mr Polak’.3

  Soon, Harilal moved to Phoenix, where his wife was, and helped there with the printing of Indian Opinion and tried to involve himself in the settlement’s other activities: carpentry, shoemaking, tailoring, cooking, grinding and farming. He also attended a school improvised by the inmates.

  ‘We will fight.’ Jolted by Britain’s ‘crooked policy’, and disappointed that London had not tied the Transvaal’s elevation to its treatment of Indians, Gandhi probed the willingness of the Act’s victims to fight. Contemplating risks to property and to their right of residence, quite a few had developed cold feet.

  Yet on the night of 31 July about 2,000 Transvaal Indians gathered on the grounds of a Pretoria mosque. To address them came a friend of Gandhi’s, William Hosken. A business magnate, Hosken had been sent by the duo that ruled the Transvaal, General Louis Botha, the Premier, and Smuts, both heroes on the Boer side that had lost the war.

  In his remarks (translated ‘word by word’ by Gandhi), Hosken conveyed the duo’s message: the Indians, who ‘knew very well how powerful’ the Transvaal government was, should not ‘dash [their] heads against a wall’.

  Having heard Hosken in pin-drop silence, the gathering clapped as he left, but the applause was meant for the fight that now seemed unavoidable. Gandhi said he took complete responsibility for advising Indians not to comply with TARA. Ahmad Muhammad Cachalia, a Meman trader with links to Surat, declared that he would face confiscation, deportation and even hanging rather than submit to the law.

  While mentioning hanging, Cachalia ran his fingers across his throat. Gandhi smiled in skepticism, a reaction he would be ‘ashamed of’, for Cachalia would soon prove his mettle, and Gandhi would later write that he knew of none to ‘surpass Mr. Cachalia in courage and steadfastness’ (S 123-4).

  A new body, the Passive Resistance Association (soon to be renamed the Satyagraha Association) was formed—Gandhi did not want the Transvaal British Indian Association or its funds to attract the government’s hostility. Hundreds of passive resisters peacefully picketed the offices where permits were to be issued and gave every Indian approaching the offices a pamphlet that explained the new Act and its consequences.

  An additional tactic was devised: hawkers and small traders hawked their goods without showing their vendors’ licences. Gandhi was able, too, to draw into the struggle the Transvaal’s small Chinese community, also affected by TARA.

  Indian Opinion sustained the resisters’ spirits but also gave the authorities advance notice of the resisters’ plans. Providing a rousing image, Gandhi wrote that each lamb-like Indian contained a lion inside, but he also offered a new definition of virility. Those reneging from a vow lost their manhood and hurt India’s honour, he said, while those keeping a vow achieved manhood and burnis
hed honour (Indian Opinion, 6 July 1907; 7: 35).

  And he swiftly denounced resisters who threatened violence against permit-seeking Indians; when the ones threatened obtained permits with police protection, the folly of violent talk became apparent to all resisters.

  Some prominent Indians procured permits late at night, in stealth, and far from any permit office, yet by 30 November 1907, the last date for registration, the Transvaal government was able to register only 511 out of the 13,000 Indians living in its territory. The rest had refused to comply.

  Arrests. General Smuts responded with a policy of selective and, on the whole, courteous arrests. A group including Gandhi, Leuing Quinn, who led the Chinese community, and Thambi Naidoo, a Tamil trader who could, as needed, lead meetings or do porter’s work, were asked to appear before a Johannesburg magistrate to explain why they should not be deported.

  When on 28 December 1907 they presented themselves, the judge asked them to leave the Transvaal by 10 January or return to the court to be sentenced.

  By now Gandhi was calling the struggle satyagraha. British suffragettes active at this time and British non-conformists opposing the Education Act in 1902 had spoken of their ‘passive resistance’. Claiming that his struggle was different on two counts—it eschewed hatred and violence, and was a weapon for the strong, not the weak—Gandhi wanted a new name to distinguish it (S 103-7).

  He had seen the itch for violence in some Indians in South Africa, in the group he had met in 1906 in India House in London, and in the news from India. On 6 December 1907 there had been a terrorist attempt on the British lieutenant-governor’s train near Midnapore in Bengal, and April 1908 would see assassinations by a bomb in Muzaffarpur in Bihar. In these methods Gandhi saw more travail for the oppressed, and he hoped that satyagraha would make them obsolete.

  Some South African whites were unable to withhold their admiration. First meeting him in December 1907, Joesph Doke, a Baptist minister in Johannesburg, eight years older than Gandhi, recorded his impressions of the unusual Indian: ‘a small, lithe, spare figure’, ‘a refined earnest face’, ‘a direct fearless glance’, and ‘the smile that lighted up the face… and simply took the heart by storm’.4

  In prison. On 10 January Gandhi, Quinn and Naidoo returned to the court. To be ‘standing as an accused in the very court where [he] had often appeared as counsel’ felt strange but Gandhi experienced not ‘the slightest hesitation in entering the prisoner’s box’.

  He was awarded two months in prison. After being sentenced he was led to a side-room and shown a bench to sit on. Then the door was shut on him.

  Anxious thoughts raced across Gandhi’s mind. His home and courts had vanished. He was a prisoner. Would he serve the full term? Two months would seem an age if other resisters did not join him. And so on, for some seconds, until Gandhi remembered that he had asked fellow Indians to recognize jails as His Majesty’s hotels and imprisonment as bliss.

  How vain I was! Where had all this knowledge vanished? This second train of thought acted upon me as a bracing tonic, and I began to laugh at my own folly (S 137-8).

  A policeman interrupted the smile and ushered Gandhi into a van which took him to the city jail, where he found it difficult to don the ‘very dirty’ clothes he was asked to change into. He was taken to a large cell where other Indians soon joined him. They told him his arrest had triggered a procession with black flags, and that some marchers had been flogged.

  Finding that he had a free run of the prison library, he relaxed and read. Among the texts he dipped into were Carlyle’s Lives of Robert Burns, Samuel Johnson, and Walter Scott, Bacon’s Essays, Plato’s Socratic dialogues, the Bible, the Gita, and an English translation of the Qur’an. He thought he should translate Carlyle and Ruskin into Gujarati.

  In a few days many more Indians were in the jail, most of them vendors sentenced for refusing to show their licences. No matter where arrested or tried, all were given hard labour—the government had conveyed guidelines to magistrates. Soon the jail had about 150 Indian prisoners. Gandhi instructed them to observe jail rules.

  On 28 January a friend of his, Albert Cartwright, editor of the Transvaal Leader and a supporter of the Indian position, turned up at the jail with the text of a proposed compromise that he claimed Smuts had approved. Detaining a multiplying number of Indians useful to the economy was not a comfortable option for the government; the Indians too could not indefinitely defy.

  Cartwright added what newly-arriving prisoners had also told Gandhi, that Indian leaders outside prison would accept any solution approved by him.

  The essence of the ‘settlement’ he brought was an understanding, not reduced to writing, that if Indians underwent voluntary registration over a three-month period, the government would repeal the Black Act. There was, in addition, a written draft, which was vague. Amending the language, Gandhi signed the draft, as did Quinn and Naidoo. Cartwright was doubtful that Smuts would approve of the change but said he would take the signed document to Smuts.

  In the afternoon of 30 January, the police superintendent of Johannesburg took Gandhi to Pretoria to meet Smuts, who said he accepted Gandhi’s alteration. Reminding Gandhi, in a long talk, that he too was a barrister from a London Inn of Court, and claiming that English-speaking whites wanted TARA more than the Boers, Smuts praised the commitment of the Indian resisters. According to Satyagraha, Smuts added:

  I have consulted General Botha also, and I assure you that I will repeal the Asiatic Act as soon as most of you have undergone voluntary registration. When the bill legalizing such registration is drafted, I will send you a copy for your criticism (S 144).

  When Smuts rose, Gandhi asked, ‘Where am I to go? And what about the other prisoners?’ Smuts laughed and answered that Gandhi was ‘free this very moment’ and that he was phoning to instruct the release of the others. As Gandhi ‘had not a single farthing in [his] pocket’, Smuts’s secretary gave him the train fare to Johannesburg, where, immediately on arrival, Gandhi explained the settlement to the chairman of the Passive Resistance Association, Yusuf Mian, and other community leaders (S 144-5).

  Around midnight Gandhi addressed about 1,000 Indians in Johannesburg who had quickly gathered on the grounds of a mosque. Terming the settlement a victory, he asked the Indians to be as wholehearted in registering voluntarily as they had been in opposing compulsion.

  Mir Alam. As soon as Gandhi sat down, Mir Alam, ‘fully six feet in height and of a large and powerful build’, stood up. A friend and client of Gandhi, Alam was one of the Transvaal’s fifty or so Pathans, many of whom worked for him, making coir or straw mattresses. Alam asked Gandhi if they had to give ten fingerprints. Those with difficulties of conscience would not need to, replied Gandhi, but all the others should give ten finger-prints.

  ‘What will you do yourself?’

  ‘I have decided to give ten finger-prints.’

  ‘It was you who told us that ten finger-prints were only required from criminals.’

  ‘Yes I did, and rightly. But… an indignity yesterday is today the hallmark of a gentleman. If you require me to salute you by force and I submit to you, I will have demeaned myself… But if of my own accord I salute you as a brother or fellow man, that will be counted in my favour before the Great White Throne.’

  ‘We hear you have sold the community to General Smuts for 15,000 pounds. I swear with Allah as my witness that I will kill the man who takes the lead in applying for registration.’

  ‘One may not swear to kill another in the name of the Most High. However that may be, it is my clear duty to take the lead in giving finger-prints… To die by the hand of a brother, rather than by disease… cannot be for me a matter for sorrow’.5

  When Yusuf Mian asked the audience what they thought, all, ‘with the exception of a couple of Pathans present’, endorsed the settlement. After two hours of sleep, Gandhi returned to the Johannesburg prison to meet his colleagues. An hour after he reached the jail, all the satyagrahis were releas
ed.

  Assault. Authorities in Johannesburg worked with the satyagrahis to produce a new registration form. Gandhi, Yusuf Mian and some others decided they would fill it on 10 February.

  That morning, when Gandhi went to his law office on Rissik Street, which was also the office of the Satyagraha Association, he found Mir Alam and his companions standing outside the premises. Noticing Mir Alam’s ‘angry eyes’, Gandhi thought ‘that something was going to happen’.

  After Yusuf Mian, Thambi Naidoo, and some others had joined Gandhi in his office, the party set out on foot for the registration office, a mile away on Von Brandis Square. Mir Alam and friends followed. When Gandhi and party reached the premises of Messrs Arnot and Gibson on Von Brandis Street, Mir Alam accosted Gandhi and asked, ‘Where are you going?’

  While replying, Gandhi was hit by a club from behind him. Sighing ‘He Ram (O God)’, he fainted. Later he learnt that Mir Alam and his companions had given him more blows and kicks, some of which were warded off by Yusuf Mian and Thambi Naidoo, who were also hit. Some Europeans on the street caught the assailants as they were running and handed them to the police. An unconscious Gandhi was taken to the private office of J.C. Gibson.

  Coming to, he saw Joseph Doke bending over him. Doke had found Gandhi ‘lying on the floor, looking half-dead… his face cut right open through the lip [and] an ugly swelling over the eye’.6 When Doke asked him how he felt, Gandhi replied that apart from some pain in the jaw and the ribs he felt all right. He added, ‘Where is Mir Alam?’

  ‘He has been arrested along with the rest.’

  ‘They should be released.’

  The police was ready to take Gandhi to a hospital but he accepted an invitation to Doke’s home on Smit Street, to which he was moved in a carriage. Learning that Gandhi had been injured and taken to Doke’s place, Montfort Chamney, the registrar of Asiatics, turned up there. Gandhi asked Chamney to bring the papers for his finger-prints. ‘I had said I would be the first to register and have a pledge to keep.’