Though unable to switch to a ‘normal’ family life, Gandhi had offered Harilal the sort of warmth that many Indian fathers of his generation extended to their sons. He would thus say (1910), ‘I have great hopes from you.’6 At other times, again like a typical father, he felt frustrated and angered by the son. ‘I feel angry and feel like crying,’ he wrote to his son when he learnt that Harilal was drifting after returning to India.7 More than once the father simply said, ‘Let’s just be friends.’ In a letter to Gulab in February 1912 Gandhi wrote, ‘Live, both of you, as you wish and do what you like. I can have but one wish; that you should be happy and remain so’ (12: 163).
Yet the father could not refrain from advising. (Here, too, he was typical of more than one generation of Indian fathers.) The son was ‘independent’, Gandhi told Harilal, and ‘could do what he wanted’, but what the father wanted was always spelt out. When Harilal wrote from Ahmedabad that he intended to take French as a subject for matriculation, Gandhi proposed Sanskrit instead. The son resisted what he saw as pressure. However, despite three attempts in Ahmedabad over a three-year period, Harilal failed to matriculate. Cards and gambling elbowed out studies.
The sharpness with which Harilal reacted to not being sent to England produced second thoughts in the father, who wrote in 1910, ‘If you desire to go, I will send you,’ and again, in 1912, ‘I am ready to send you to England.’8 But a condition was attached: after studying in London, Harilal should return to South Africa and serve the satyagrahis. (A similar promise had been taken from Chhaganlal.) Disliking the condition and the delay in the offer, Harilal declined it.
Unable to endure the English winter, Chhaganlal returned to India before completing his law course, and Mehta offered another scholarship for England, which Gandhi awarded to the faithful Adajania, thereby rekindling the grievance of Harilal (and Manilal).
However, Harilal’s break with his father was not yet complete. When, in 1912, Gokhale returned to India after a triumphal visit to South Africa that his father had organized, Harilal spoke at a reception for Gokhale in Bombay; and in 1913 there was talk of Harilal wishing to rejoin the satyagraha in South Africa. But it was not to be.
Charisma. Harilal’s resentment of Maganlal and Chhaganlal was to some extent shared by Manilal and Kasturba, but Gandhi asked his nephews not to be swayed by it. The grudge, he explained, was in fact against him, and would not disappear if Maganlal and Chhaganlal were to leave, as they had offered to. Later (in 1918) Gandhi would speak of having found three colleagues in South Africa who were the sort of persons he was ‘searching for’: Maganlal, Henry Polak and Sonja Schlesin.9
Seventeen when, replacing Miss Dick, she joined as Gandhi’s secretary, Sonja Schlesin, ‘a short stocky figure’ who wore ‘severely cut costumes’,10 had been introduced to Gandhi by Kallenbach, who said: ‘This girl has been entrusted to me by her mother. She is clever and honest but she is very mischievous and impetuous. Perhaps she is even insolent. You keep her if you can manage her’ (S 164-6).
Despite her age and temperament, Sonja Schlesin grew to become a colleague trusted by Gandhi with funds and major tasks. She had executive skills, excellent English, frankness and a readiness to serve at a low salary that she did not allow Gandhi to increase. If she took more than her need, she said, she would betray ‘the principle which has attracted me to you’. Indians of all kinds turned to Schlesin for help or advice, and Gandhi acknowledged her as ‘the watchman and warder’ of his office and movement (S 165-6).
In her dealings with Gandhi Sonja practised a freedom that Gandhi evidently liked. Wanting her to be articled (like Polak) to him and become a lawyer, he applied to the Law Society on her behalf. On the ground that she was a woman, the application was rejected.
There was competition for Gandhi’s attention between Kallenbach and Henry Polak but the two played different roles, with Polak, who was eleven years younger than Kallenbach, serving as Gandhi’s political representative and interpreter, and Kallenbach as financier and helper. A loyal and talented aide, Polak was also a frank critic disconcerted by the sudden changes (in strategy, tactics, location) that Gandhi was apt to make. ‘You have a most delightful habit,’ Polak wrote in August 1911, ‘of directing at my devoted head bolts from the blue, and then imagining that things will proceed just as before’.11
Recognizing in Polak ‘a will to change the world’12 and considerable journalistic skills, Gandhi also formed a direct relationship with Millie Polak, who saw that at times Gandhi showed womanlike reactions. Noticing, to her surprise, that a Gandhi who idealized celibacy was warm towards a newborn child in Phoenix and its mother, Millie Polak thought that Gandhi differentiated, ‘even as a woman does’, between ‘abstract principles and human needs and affections’.13
Millie felt for many years the power of Gandhi’s personality, as did her sisters, and also the sisters of Henry, whom Gandhi met in England in 1906 and 1909. Writing to Henry of the enthusiasm for his projects revealed by Maud, one of Henry’s sisters, Gandhi wondered whether the enthusiasm resulted from the glamour of his personality. ‘If so,’ Gandhi added, ‘I should be shot on sight, as a power more for harm than good.’14
If suspicious of his charisma, Gandhi was increasingly aware of it and of his growing fame. Doke’s 1909 book on him had been followed in 1911 by three essays on Gandhi in the British journal Open Road, written by a Tolstoyan, Isabella Mayo, and in 1912 by a short book that Pranjivan Mehta wrote. Published in Madras, it was called M.K. Gandhi and the South African Indian Problem.
We may mark, too, that for all the depth of his South African involvement, India was in Gandhi’s sights. In a letter to Pranjivan Mehta in September 1911, he said:
I shall be [in India] when the time comes. What more shall I say? All my preparations are meant to equip myself for work there (12:61).
Truce. Though ‘stray satyagrahis now and then went to jail’—most of them Tamil-speaking Indians from Johannesburg but also the valiant Sorabji Adajania, who courted another arrest in June 1910—a visitor observing the even tenor of life on the fruit-blessed Tolstoy Farm was unlikely to suspect that its residents were fighters (S 236-7). Gandhi hoped that patience and peacefulness would prove of help when ‘war’ came.
The emergence (in June 1910) of the Union of South Africa, with Botha as its Prime Minister, saw Smuts becoming the interior minister for the country as a whole. The Indians of all four territories, the Transvaal, the Cape, Natal and Orange Free State (OFS), were part of his charge, and he accepted Gandhi as their spokesman.
In 1911 the Government of India prohibited the export of indentured labour to South Africa, a ban supported by Gandhi and sought also by Gokhale, who was a member of the Viceroy’s advisory council. Apart from the indignity the indentured suffered, Gandhi wanted India to save face by stopping the export of the indentured before the new Union Parliament banned their import.15
Smuts knew that for the Transvaal Indians Gandhi had three demands: repeal of the Black Act; restoration of ‘legal’ equality by permitting the entry into the Transvaal of six or so educated Indians (which would remove the colour bar); and protection of the rights of all bona fide former residents, including arrested or deported satyagrahis.
Though Smuts also knew that committed satyagrahis were now small in number, he was willing to concede Gandhi’s demands if he could obtain the Indian community’s acceptance of a new countrywide immigration law to replace the immigration laws of the four former colonies.
In May 1911 he and Gandhi signed a ‘provisional settlement’, which was published, in which Smuts said he would fulfil the satyagrahis’ demands at the next session of the Union Parliament, and Gandhi pledged a suspension of satyagraha. An overflow meeting of Johannesburg’s Indians had endorsed the settlement on 27 April, after four hours of discussion.16
But Smuts ran into white opposition, especially from representatives of the OFS, which had the most restrictive anti-Asian legislation in South Africa and from where, twenty years earl
ier, all but a handful of Indians had been expelled.
Its representatives refused to accept even a notional right of Indians to immigrate; Gandhi on his part could not assent to an OFS colour bar written into a South African immigration law. Smuts asked for more time, saying, among other things, that he wanted peace in South Africa during the coronation of George V, and Gandhi agreed.
In fact he welcomed the postponement. While a solution of the Transvaal grievances would finally enable Gandhi to return to India, he still needed to address another major issue. Primarily affecting Indians in Natal, this was the annual tax of three pounds that every ex-indentured Indian had to pay. Gandhi knew that he could not return to India in dignity without tackling this harsh tax.
On 28 October 1911 Indian Opinion said that the three-pound tax ranked with the Transvaal question as ‘the most pressing’ of the Indians’ problems in South Africa as a whole; and a month later (25 Nov. 1911) the journal urged the Natal Indian Congress to work for the repeal of the tax ‘at any cost’.
GOKHALE’S VISIT
The truce with Smuts was still in place in the summer of 1912 when Gokhale informed Gandhi that he was ready to visit South Africa.
For some time Gokhale and Gandhi had each been bidding to attract the other. The ailing Gokhale saw Gandhi as his political successor, wanted him in India, and had sought Gandhi’s selection as president for the end-1910 session of the Indian National Congress. He was willing to accept the chair, Gandhi said, provided he could return to South Africa immediately after the session. Whether because of this condition or for other reasons, the plan did not materialize.
Gandhi’s counter-proposal was that Gokhale should free Gandhi to return to India by visiting South Africa himself and helping its Indians. At the end of 1911, Gokhale said he would visit South Africa the following year, and in July 1912 he confirmed this from London, where he was, adding that the secretary of state for India supported the proposed visit.
As he would later recall, Gandhi was ‘simply overjoyed’ (S 237). Gokhale would speak to South Africa’s ministers on behalf of the Indian government and indirectly on behalf of the Empire; it would not be easy for the ministers to reject his pleas. And through Gokhale the Indian community could raise points not yet brought to the fore, such as the three-pound tax.
Gokhale’s charm, and Gandhi’s management. Although Tolstoy Farm practised rigorous simplicity, Gandhi organized (in October and November 1912) a reception for Gokhale ‘which even princes might envy’ (S 237). Railway stations were decorated: at Johannesburg station Kallenbach designed what Gandhi approvingly called ‘an ornamental arch of welcome’, and ‘rich carpets’ (to use Gandhi’s phrase again) were spread on the railway platform.
A simple-lifer who saw the chase for the yellow metal as a sickness, Gandhi ensured nonetheless that the welcome address presented at the station to Gokhale was, in Gandhi’s own words, ‘engraved on a solid heart-shaped plate of gold from the Rand mounted on Rhodesian teak’. On the plate was a map of India flanked by two gold tablets, ‘one bearing an illustration of the Taj Mahal and the other a characteristic Indian scene’ (S 240). Gandhi also saw to it that Ellis, the Johannesburg mayor, was present at the station.
He sought grandeur and white participation in the welcome for Gokhale because India’s prestige was involved, and also because he knew that the scale of the reception and white involvement in it would strengthen Gokhale’s hand in talks with the ministers.
In Cape Town (the port of Gokhale’s arrival), Gandhi persuaded Senator W.P. Schreiner, head of the illustrious Schreiner family, to chair ‘a great meeting’ attended by ‘a large number of Indians and Europeans’. Planned by Gandhi, Gokhale’s itinerary took him from Cape Town to the Transvaal towns of Klerksdrop, Potchefstsroom and Krugersdorp, with mayors presiding at town hall receptions in each place and the Indian community arranging separate meetings.
Then it was Johannesburg, where Gokhale addressed about 150 Europeans and 250 Indians at a banquet. The Indians paid a guinea each for the vegetarian dinner of fifteen courses, the Europeans nothing. No wines were served.
In Johannesburg, Gokhale (who was not in strong health) stayed in Kallenbach’s suburban home-on-a-hill, enjoying the view outside and the art inside, received visitors in a three-room office hired in the heart of the city, and held a private meeting with leading Europeans.
In Natal there were trips to Durban, Pietermaritzburg and Kimberley’s diamond mines. Indians in these places spoke of the burden of the three-pound tax, and Gokhale and Gandhi promised to work for its repeal. ‘The clearness, firmness and urbanity of Gokhale’s utterances’ satisfied Gandhi, who thought that every idea expressed, and adjective used, had been just right (S 242-3).
The climax of the visit—‘a most important affair’, as Gandhi would term it—was a two-hour interview in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, with Premier Botha, General Smuts and Fischer, an OFS politician who would succeed Smuts as interior minister (S 242-3).17 Having so often fought the ministers, it was best, the two agreed, if Gandhi did not join this meeting. Gokhale would go alone.
Gokhale and Gandhi spent a whole night preparing for this meeting, even as they had collaborated on all the talks that Gokhale had given. After studying a long memo that Gandhi had prepared on the Indians’ grievances, including the three-pound tax, and ‘post[ing] himself fully on every point’, Gokhale ‘went over the whole ground again in order to make sure that he had rightly understood everything’. If anything cropped up during the interview that was outside the brief provided by Gandhi, Gokhale was to say that he did not know and could not comment.
Returning from the interview, Gokhale said to Gandhi: ‘You must return to India in a year. Everything has been settled. The Black Act will be repealed. The racial bar will be removed from the immigration law. The three-pound tax will be abolished.’ Not convinced, Gandhi said he expected a lengthy fight and imprisonment rather than an early return to India.
Yet Gokhale was not imagining things. Two days after his talks with the ministers, the governor-general, Herbert John Gladstone, informed the Colonial Office in London that ‘as regards the three pounds tax, the PM told me that he thought it would be possible to meet Mr Gokhale’s views, though there might be strong opposition in Natal.’18
Gandhi and Kallenbach accompanied the India-bound Gokhale until Delagoa Bay in the Portuguese colony on the east coast, and thence on a steamer until Zanzibar. At Gandhi’s instance, Gokhale ‘minutely analyz[ed] for [him] the characters of the principal persons’ he had met in South Africa. Discussing Gandhi’s associates, Gokhale gave ‘pride of place’ to Sonja Schlesin for her energy, ability and service without expectation of reward (S 164).
Interestingly enough, Gokhale also ‘analyzed [for Gandhi] the characters of all the leaders in India’. Twelve years later, after he had interacted with many of the leaders they discussed in 1912, Gandhi would write that Gokhale’s ‘analysis was so accurate’ (S 245). Gandhi’s account of these 1912 conversations makes it quite clear that Gokhale’s visit was only secondarily for supporting the Indians’ battle in South Africa. Its primary, if also connected, goal was to get Gandhi back to India.
It did not take long for Smuts to declare from his seat in Parliament that as the Europeans in Natal objected to the repeal of the three-pound tax, the Union government could not arrange it. A ‘deeply pained’ Gokhale was assured by Gandhi that ‘we would wring a repeal out of unwilling hands’ (S 250).
The way was now clear for Gandhi to include ‘the despicable impost’ as a cause of ‘war’ (S 249). In backing out, the government had let India’s eminent leader Gokhale down, an offence that Gandhi would not fail to underline. In March 1913 he was given another gift.
This was a verdict by Justice Malcolm Searle of the Cape Supreme Court that only marriages performed under Christian rites or registered by the registrar of marriages could be recognized in South Africa. By a stroke of the pen, the judgment nullified Hindu, Muslim and Zoroa
strian marriages, outraging large numbers of women and men.
As Gandhi would later put it, ‘God was preparing the ingredients for the Indians’ victory’ (S 251). While he and the other satyagrahis had been patiently waiting, ‘there happened, or God brought to pass, events which no one had expected’ (S 237).
When there was no positive response to a letter from Gandhi asking for legislation to validate Indian marriages, ‘stubborn’ satyagraha, in Gandhi’s phrase, was decided upon by the Satyagraha Association of the Transvaal, irrespective of the number of willing fighters, and endorsed by the BIA, headed by Ahmed Cachalia (S 252.19)
On 3 May Gandhi felt confident enough to claim in Indian Opinion that the likely satyagraha to come would be ‘the purest, the last and the most brilliant of all’. The passage in July of a Union-wide Immigration Bill made confrontation inescapable. Though the Bill rendered the Transvaal’s Black Act dead, it did not correct the Searle judgment or deal with the three-pound tax, or give even a theoretical right of entry to educated Indians.
WOMEN TO THE FORE
Informed by Gandhi of the implications of Searle’s judgment, several Tamil women of the Transvaal said they were willing to go to prison, and publicly announced their intention to seek arrest unless the judgment was overturned.20 So did Gujarati women in Phoenix, including Kasturba. Gandhi had been cautious about inviting his wife to resist, but she overheard his conversations with other women in Phoenix and demanded to join the battle.
Gandhi frankly asked Kasturba whether she would remain firm. If she trembled in the courtroom or, terrified by jail hardships, apologized to the government, Gandhi would not find fault with her, yet ‘how would it stand with me? How could I then harbour you or look the world in the face?’ (S 255)
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 23
