When, at the end of 1909, Henry Polak too returned to South Africa (from India), Gandhi, along with associates, was at Port Durban to welcome him. As his ship neared the pier, Polak waved from the deck. Standing on the pier along with his son Prabhudas, Chhaganlal was waving back when a port employee brusquely asked him to move aside.
Chhaganlal moved back a step and continued to address Polak. ‘Get out!’ the white employee shouted. ‘Didn’t you hear me? Get out!’ He was about to shove Chhaganlal away when Gandhi’s voice, twice as loud, was heard. ‘HE SHAN’T MOVE AN INCH,’ said the voice, whereupon the employee was escorted out by his colleagues.50
In India Polak had spoken to several audiences about happenings in the Transvaal, but a tribute that Gokhale paid to Gandhi at the end-December session of the Congress in Lahore was based not only on accounts that Polak might have supplied but also on Gokhale’s direct experience in 1902-3:
It is one of the privileges of my life that I know Mr Gandhi personally, and I can tell you that a purer, nobler, a braver and a more exalted spirit has never moved on this earth… [He] is a man among men, a hero among heroes, a patriot among patriots, and we may well say that in him Indian humanity at the present time has really reached its high watermark.51
It was probably at this time (end-1909) that an incident mentioned by Gandhi in Satyagraha occurred. At a meeting in Lahore in support of the satyagrahis of South Africa, Gokhale saw (and obviously reported at some point to Gandhi) that Charles Freer Andrews (1871-1940), an Anglican priest sympathetic to Indian hopes, ‘gave in their interest all the money in his possession’ (S 291).
Chapter 6
A Great March
South Africa, 1909-15
The trip to London had removed the last hopes of imperial intervention, and South Africa’s Indians seemed to have lost their ardour for satyagraha. But Gandhi expected its revival and would wait for it.
Meanwhile he faced a huge task: taking care of the families of jailed or deported satyagrahis, and of satyagrahis who had lost their jobs. Early in 1910, Gandhi’s burdens were lightened somewhat by a gift of Rs 25,000 from the industrialist Ratan Tata in Bombay and other contributions from India, including what C.F. Andrews had given.
But what really rescued him was Kallenbach’s offer of 1,100 acres he had acquired in Lawley, a mile from Lawley station and twenty-one miles from Johannesburg. Here Indian satyagrahis of all religious and social backgrounds, and their families, could live together and support one another.
He and Gandhi named the site Tolstoy Farm shortly before the Russian died in November 1910. Gandhi’s obituary in Indian Opinion, bearing the heading, ‘The Late Lamented Tolstoy the Great’, said (26 Nov. 1910):
Tolstoy is known to the entire world; but not as a soldier, though once he was reputed to be an expert soldier; not as a great writer, though indeed he enjoys a great reputation as a writer; nor as a nobleman, though he owned immense wealth. It was as a good man that the world knew him… It is no small encouragement to us that we have the blessings of a great man like Tolstoy in our task (11: 176-7).
However, a year earlier Gandhi had also said, ‘No one should assume that I accept all the ideas of Tolstoy’ (Indian Opinion, 25 Dec. 1909; 10:242). Seeking a better world from an Indian platform, he did not agree with Tolstoy’s sweeping denunciation of nationalism; and he agreed with only some of the Russian’s criticisms of Hinduism.
Yet the two were completely at one in their understanding of how India was lost to the British and in asking for a nonviolent rejection of British rule.
Kallenbach. To name the new farm after Tolstoy was natural for him and for Kallenbach too, who had informed Tolstoy (via Gandhi) that he recognized himself in one of Tolstoy’s novels, A Confession, a comment that ‘greatly interested’ the Russian.
Another novel, David Copperfield, featured in conversations between Gandhi and Kallenbach. Reading Dickens’s story ‘with avidity’ after Kallenbach had recommended it to him, Gandhi asked Kallenbach to reflect on the character of the boy David’s hero, Steerforth, who seduces and ruins the village beauty, Emily.
Martin Green connects this to Gandhi’s recollection of his boyhood admiration of Mehtab, in some ways a Steerforth-like figure, and points out that while David failed to improve Steerforth, and Mohan seemed to fail likewise with Mehtab, Gandhi succeeded with another dazzling figure, Kallenbach.
In his friendship with Kallenbach, preserved in a remarkable correspondence, Gandhi set aside his caution against intimate or exclusive relationships. Offering Kallenbach a relationship that was warm, intimate, frank and mentoring, he received an exceptional friendship in return.
In June 1909 Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach that he did not understand the latter’s ‘extraordinary love’ for him. On 30 August 1909, referring to Kallenbach’s unfinished studies, Gandhi wrote: ‘You remind me of friendships of bygone years of which one reads in histories and novels… But is that almost superhuman love to exhaust itself in delicate attentions to me and mine, or will it not compel you to the study you know you need so badly to complete?’
Writing again in September 1909, Gandhi informs Kallenbach that his is the only photograph on the mantlepiece in the hotel room that Gandhi has taken in London, and that he is unable to dismiss Kallenbach from his thoughts. Two years later, when Kallenbach went to England, he drew up ‘Articles of Agreement’ with Gandhi in which he promised that he would neither marry nor look lustfully upon a woman. The return, the two agreed, would be ‘more love and yet more love’ between them—‘such love as, they hope, the world has not yet seen’.
Gandhi would write that he found partings from Kallenbach difficult yet inevitable, that Kallebach should ‘remember the meditation of the Yom Kippur’ and ‘constantly check [him]self’. Also, Kallenbach should watch Gandhi ‘not with a friendly eye but with a highly critical and fault-finding eye’. It was foolish, Gandhi urged, to turn him into an idol. Gandhi would often not satisfy, and the result would be a hurt ‘as if a dagger had gone through you’. ‘Let the idol be broken. The residue will be a purer thing.’
Why a Kathiawari Bania and a German Jew should find each other in Johannesburg, and receive from the other what each needed, is one of the marvels of our story.
Tolstoy Farm. Trees on Tolstoy Farm provided an abundance of oranges, apricots and plums. There was a small house where five or six could live, and a spring about 500 yards from the house. Gandhi envisioned ‘a sort of cooperative commonwealth’ rising on the property, families of satyagrahis ‘belonging to various (Indian) provinces and professing divers faiths’ and training ‘to live a new and simple life in harmony with one another’ (S 214).
Kallenbach decided to live and teach on the farm he had made available. He who (in Gandhi’s words) ‘had been brought up in the lap of luxury and had never known what privation was’, who ‘had had his fill of all the pleasures of life’ and ‘secure[d] for his comfort everything that money could buy’, was now happy ‘to live, move and have his being on Tolstoy Farm’ (S 223).
With ‘mastery and exactitude’ (Gandhi’s words again), Kallenbach oversaw the construction of a residence for men, another for women, a house for himself, a schoolhouse, and a workshop for carpentry and shoemaking. Aided by a European mason and Gujarati carpenters, the satyagrahis and their families managed the construction. For about two months, until the buildings were raised, everybody lived in tents.
Joseph Royappen, ‘a barrister free from barrister’s pride’, and Pragji Khandubhai Desai, who had not known discomfort hitherto, brought loads from the station and moved water from the spring. Gandhi felt that ‘the weak became strong on Tolstoy Farm and labour proved to be a tonic for all’ (S 217).
‘Having founded a sort of village we needed all manner of things large and small from benches to boxes, and we made them all ourselves,’ Gandhi would recall (S 219-20). Including children, the community was seventy-five-strong. Its Muslims and Christians readily agreed, when Gandhi approached them, to an e
ntirely vegetarian kitchen, even though Gandhi was prepared to allow meat (including beef) on the Farm. But meat would have called for two separate kitchens and disrupted the Farm’s budget.
To Maganlal, who was looking after Phoenix, where Kasturba and her sons continued to live, Gandhi wrote in August 1911:
My way of life has completely changed here. The whole day is spent in digging the land and other manual labour instead of in writing and explaining things to people. I prefer this work… I regard the Kaffirs, with whom I constantly work these days, as superior to us. What they do in their ignorance we have to do knowingly. In outward appearance we should look just like the Kaffirs (11: 107).
This perhaps was the last time that he employed the pejorative word. While his using it and his assumption of African ‘ignorance’ reveal limitations in the South African Gandhi, this picture of Gandhi digging the Transvaal earth alongside Africans and believing in a superiority conferred by bread-labour is worth registering.
Kallenbach acquired the art of making sandals at the Trappist monastery at Marianhill and taught it to Gandhi, who then passed it on to several others. The men on the Farm all wore ‘labourers’ dress but in the European style’: workingmen’s trousers and shirts imitated from prisoners’ uniforms and tailored by the Farm ladies (S 224). The aim was to make the Farm ‘a busy hive of industry’ and ‘the families self-supporting’ and thus be ready to do ‘battle with the Transvaal government’ (S 219).
Farm-baked bread and ‘coffee’ made from wheat was the breakfast at six in the morning; rice, dal and vegetables constituted lunch at eleven; the evening meal at 5.30 p.m. was either wheat-pap and milk or bread and ‘coffee’. The food was eaten from prison-style bowls with the help of Farm-made wooden spoons. Multi-faith prayers, including prayer songs in Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati and Hindi, were held after the evening meal.
Enforcing the principle that ‘the man who does not cover his waste deserves a heavy penalty even if he lives in a forest’, Gandhi would claim that ‘one could not find refuse or dirt anywhere on the Farm’. All waste water was used around trees, vegetable refuse and leavings of food employed as manure, and night-soil buried in pits. There were no flies (S 218-20).
Visits by train to Johannesburg on behalf of ‘our little commonwealth’ could only be done in the third class, and non-business trips only on foot. Nothing could be spent on food or drink in the big city, but walkers could carry ‘home-baked bread from which the bran was not removed’ as well as groundnut butter and marmalade made on the Farm.
On occasion people on the Farm, including Gandhi and Kallenbach, walked the twenty-one miles to Johannesburg and that distance back the same day, starting the journey at 2.30 a.m. and reaching the city in six or seven hours. (Four hours and eighteen minutes was the best time recorded.) Gandhi would later claim that ‘the youngsters thoroughly enjoyed the work on the Farm and the errands to the city’ (S 218), and also that ‘one day I walked fifty-five miles’ (S 235).
However, schooling for the Farm’s youngsters was again deficient. By the time (in the afternoon) that ‘school’ began, the teachers—Kallenbach, Gandhi and a couple of others—as well as pupils were apt to be ‘thoroughly exhausted by our morning labour’ and compelled to doze (S220). Moreover, on some days a teacher had to be in Johannesburg. The need to instruct in three languages (Gujarati, Tamil and Telugu) and to teach four religions (Hinduism, Islam, Zoroastrianism and Christianity) constituted additional challenges (S 220).
Yet there were gains. During Ramadan Hindu youngsters fasted alongside their Muslim farm-mates. Saved ‘from the infection of intolerance’, the children ‘learnt to view one another’s religions and customs with a large-hearted charity’ and ‘imbibed the lessons of mutual service, courtesy and industry’ (S 221).
Boys and girls met freely. Gandhi ‘fully explained the duty of self-restraint’ but permitted children of both sexes to bathe at the spring at the same time, in his presence. In another bold experiment, all the youngsters slept together around Gandhi in an open verandah, with little more than three feet separating any two beds. The parents allowed this, and Gandhi felt that ‘God safeguarded the honour of these boys and girls’ (S 223).
One day, however, a young man ‘made fun of two girls’. Gandhi ‘trembled’ at the news and admonished the culprit and his mates but also sought ‘some sign’ on the girls ‘as a warning to every young man’ and ‘as a lesson to every girl that no one dare assail their purity’. After cogitating through a sleepless night, Gandhi concluded that the girls should have their ‘fine long hair’ cut off.
In the morning he persuaded the two girls as well as the Farm’s older women to agree. He would write twelve years later that the girls’ hair was cut off by ‘the very hand that is narrating this incident’ (S 224).
Both girls, Gandhi would write, were ‘noble’. Yet though Gandhi claimed he was warning the boys and shielding the girls, it certainly looked as if the girls were being punished—we do not know if any punishment beyond chastisement was given to the boys. The incident stayed, and (going by the future remark about ‘this very hand’) perhaps preyed, on Gandhi’s mind.
Confidence. Snakes were a continuing problem on the Farm, but before long the versatile Kallenbach read up on them, taught the community that only a few snakes were poisonous, and tamed a cobra. However, when a snake was found in Kallenbach’s bedroom, Gandhi ordered its killing.
Gandhi’s faith in satyagraha and the simple life, and its corollary of nature cure, had reached a new height, and ‘Doctor’ Gandhi’s reputation grew after he cured an ex-indentured north Indian of asthma (by getting him to diet, quit tobacco and take sun baths) and the two-year-old son of the Lawley stationmaster of suspected typhoid (by regulating the child’s diet and applying a cold mud poultice to the abdomen). Later, he would claim: ‘I made many such experiments on the Farm and do not remember to have failed in even a single case’ (S 234).
The Lawley stationmaster became an ally and once even detained a train in order to allow two of the satyagrahis to catch it. At least in Lawley, the satyagrahis had become part of South Africa’s life and landscape.
As Green puts it, at Tolstoy Farm Gandhi enjoyed the Robinson Crusoe pleasures, and simplicity exalted his spirit. ‘My faith and courage were at their highest on Tolstoy Farm,’ Gandhi would recall in the mid-1920s (S 222). Also, he seemed completely free from any regret regarding his 1906 chastity vow.
HARILAL LEAVES
In courting prison, Gandhi’s eldest son was a star. During the two-and-a-half years between 28 July 1908, when (at twenty) he was jailed as a satyagrahi for the first time, and 9 January 1911, when he emerged from his sixth and last imprisonment, Harilal was free in all for only ten months. In 1910, eighteen-year-old Manilal also won a series of brief prison terms plus a three-month sentence for hawking without a licence.
Gandhi lauded Harilal for his satyagraha and referred to it with pride in a letter to Tolstoy. Yet the father-son relationship was rupturing. In the middle of 1910 Harilal sent his wife and two-year-old daughter Rami to India; a year later, shortly after the birth in India of Kanti, Rami’s brother, Harilal departed, without telling his father.
He and Gandhi were in Johannesburg at the time, and Kasturba in Phoenix. A letter he left behind reproached Gandhi for being a deficient father and announced that Harilal was breaking all family ties; yet the twenty-three-year-old son had taken a photo of the father with him. Gandhi searched all of Johannesburg for his boy and learnt (from Joseph Royappen1) that he had slipped away, en route to India, to Delagoa Bay in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique.
Kallenbach rushed to Delagoa Bay, found Harilal, and brought him back to Johannesburg. Father and son talked from sundown to sunrise. During the long night Harilal charged that the father never praised his sons, favoured Maganlal and Chhaganlal, was hard-hearted towards his boys and their mother, and unconcerned about the sons’ future. Harilal said he would go to India and make his own life.
The t
ension had been brought to a head by Harilal’s harsh jail terms. ‘Six months was a barbarous punishment’2 in South Africa at this time, and Harilal received it twice. But the father-son clash would have occurred even without the jail-going.
Gandhi was absorbed in fashioning a new India, Harilal in finding a career. To Gandhi Harilal was one ward among many, and a difficult one at that. Harilal saw himself as his father’s eldest son, entitled to a special relationship. Gandhi wanted his family to lose themselves in a new community of all races and classes; Harilal longed to find himself, and he disliked the community’s rules.
To ten-year-old Devadas the eldest brother was a ‘handsome’ prison-going hero who ‘parted his hair in the middle with beautiful curls on the forehead’ and carried ‘on his shoulder a huge leather bag’ while ‘engaged in deep conversation with Bapu as they walked together’.3
But the deep conversations were about differences. A major element in the son’s resentment was Gandhi’s decision in 1910 to send Chhaganlal rather than Harilal to study law in England with a scholarship provided by Pranjivan Mehta. It was for one of Gandhi’s sons (for Manilal, it seems) that Mehta had first offered help,4 but on Gandhi’s request Mehta agreed that the scholarship could go to the most deserving person. (Gandhi was conceding that Indians in South Africa needed London-trained lawyers, no matter what he had said about lawyers in Hind Swaraj.)
After the overnight discussion, Gandhi announced (on the morning of 17 May 1911) that Harilal was leaving. Several saw him off at Johannesburg station, including Gandhi, who, as Pragji Desai would report, kissed his son, gave him a gentle slap on the cheek, and said in a tremulous voice, ‘If you feel that your father has done any wrong to you, forgive him.’5 And when Gandhi heard that on his way back to India Harilal had spoken in Zanzibar of the necessity of satyagraha, he sent his son a note of appreciation. He hoped that a shared political struggle might restore the broken bond.
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 22
