Smuts’s toughness and retreat. By now Smuts had resolved on toughness. Sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment, Gandhi was sent all the way to Bloemfontein, deep in the interior of Orange Free State, where there were hardly any Indians, so that no Indian could see Gandhi or carry messages from him. Also arrested were Kallenbach, who was sent to Pretoria jail, and Polak, sent to the prison in Germiston.
For ‘a few happy days’ Gandhi, Polak and Kallenbach were together in Volksrust jail, where new prisoners came every day and brought news. Among these was Harbat Singh, aged about seventy-five. Though not a miner he had crossed from Natal into the Transvaal and was arrested on that count.
Old men like him had not been asked to go to prison, Gandhi said to Harbat Singh, who answered that he could not help it when ‘you, your wife and even your boys went to jail’. Saying that at his age Harbat Singh might not survive jail, Gandhi offered to arrange a release, but Singh’s ‘no’ was unshakeable. On 5 January 1914, Harbat Singh died in Durban prison (S 283).
Whipping & firing. For the marchers, many of whom had by now walked for about 110 miles, the government’s retort was to pack them into trains, send them back to Natal, and force them to work in the coal mines as prisoners. Barbed wires converted collieries into ‘outstations’ of jails in the Natal cities of Dundee and Newcastle, and the Indians were ordered to go down into the pits and dig the coal out. Gandhi would call this ‘slavery pure and simple’ (S 286).
But since the workers disobeyed, they were whipped, kicked and abused. This loss of temper and balance proved counter-productive, for the outrage caused in India and Britain, and also in South Africa, compelled the government to retreat.
The coal-miners were not the only workers to strike. There were stoppages across Natal in sugar plantations, the railways, hotels and restaurants. An arc of territory in coastal Natal was affected—from Tongaat down through Durban to Umzinto—and the interior cities of Pietermaritzburg and Ladysmith as well. At one point or another in November 1913, a great majority of Natal’s 60,000 Indian workers were out.
The government’s reply was to ask mounted military policemen to force workers back to work and to support employers and managers who flogged strikers. A striker in Durban was killed in police firing on 16 November; two strikers were gunned down in an estate in Esperenza on 25 November. Two days later, five workers, Pachiappen, Ragavan, Selvan, Guruvadu and Soubrayen Gounden, were killed in the barracks of an estate in Mount Edgecombe. A worker with a paralyzed arm, Soorzai, also known as Amhalaram, was brutally flogged the same day in a plantation near the Phoenix settlement; he died two weeks later. Another worker, Narjia, died in prison. Scores were seriously injured.28
Word of the repression was cabled by Reuters to India and Britain, where reactions were strong.
Settlement. From his sickbed in Poona, Gokhale asked for every detail and publicized it, and the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, was obliged to call an emergency session of his council. On 27 November, from Madras, Hardinge publicly criticized the government of South Africa, asked for a commission of inquiry on which Indian interests would be represented and appeared to defend the satyagraha.29
Conferring privately across the seas, the Empire’s high-tier officials in India, London and Pretoria concluded that the substance of Gandhi’s demands would have to be conceded through the device of a commission that would save Pretoria’s face. In early December Smuts announced that a three-man commission headed by Sir Richard Solomon, and including Ewald Esselen and Wylie, would inquire into the Indian strike.
On 18 December, following a request by the commission, Gandhi, Polak and Kallenbach were released; the release of West and of the Transvaal and Phoenix batches, including Kasturba and Ramdas, followed.
Gandhi had welcomed his confinement in Bloemfentein, with its ‘bearable discomforts’, as ‘a blessing’ and ‘a joy’ (S 284). For the first time in years, he had the time and solitude to read. The need to keep his eyes and ears alert from one second to the next had gone. The fact that he, an educated Indian, was now in the heart of the most jealously guarded white preserve, Orange Free State, even if only as a prisoner, added to the satisfaction.
The jail doctor became Gandhi’s friend, as did the jail chief himself, since Gandhi supported the chief’s opposition to the doctor’s pleas for favours to Gandhi. But the Bloemfontein ‘rest’ ended in about six weeks.
He had grasped that victory had come closer but was disturbed by the presence on the commission of Esselen and Wylie, ‘well-known and able citizens’ who had ‘often expressed their dislike for the Indians’ (S 292-3). On 21 December he wrote to Smuts asking for an additional member who had the Indians’ confidence.
The same day, Gandhi appeared dressed as an indentured Indian at a mass meeting in Durban, announced that to mourn the killed workers he would, for some time, eat only once a day, and asked others to do likewise. The meeting resolved not to give evidence before the commission unless a member acceptable to the Indians was added to it and kept alive the possibility of another strike.
Smuts rejected the idea of an additional member. However, two intermediaries were by now on their way to South Africa. One was Charles Freer Andrews, whose good friend, Rabindranath Tagore, was the 1913 Nobel laureate in literature.
When Gokhale learnt that Albert West, Indian Opinion’s acting editor, had been arrested (25 November)—even though West had followed Gandhi’s instruction that he, along with Ahmed Cachalia, Maganlal Gandhi and Sonja Schlesin, should do nothing that could invite arrest—he wired Andrews to ask if he would go at once to South Africa. Andrews agreed.
The other intermediary, also travelling from India, was Sir Benjamin Roberston, sent on a special steamer by Hardinge, the Viceroy. On 2 January 1914, Andrews, accompanied by his friend W.W. Pearson, arrived in Durban, two weeks before Robertson.
At his first meeting with Gandhi, Andrews, who was two years younger, bent down and, in traditional Indian fashion, touched Gandhi’s feet. ‘Pray do not do that,’ Gandhi said, ‘it is a humiliation to me’. Andrews said that Gandhi would have to accept such gestures when he returned to India.30
A strike at this juncture by European employees of the South African railways provided an ideal opportunity for a recommencement of the Indian struggle, but Gandhi declared that the Indians did not wish to embarrass the government. Any resumption would await the end of the railway strike.
This stand elicited a comment from a secretary to Smuts that the Indians’ help in ‘days of need’ and their refusal to take to violence reduced the government to ‘helplessness’, preventing it from ‘laying hands upon’ the Indians (S 295).
Gokhale, through telegrams, and Andrews, in conversation, urged Gandhi not to boycott the commission, but Gandhi and his colleagues felt they would let the workers down if the boycott was withdrawn. What broke the deadlock was an understanding that the formal boycott would not exclude private talks between Gandhi, Smuts, Robertson and Andrews.
In Gandhi’s opinion, Robertson was ‘not entirely free from the usual weakness of the English official’ (S 300). However, if Robertson was inclined to side with Smuts’s point of view, Andrews sympathized with Gandhi’s. Thus the parties were balanced, and a provisional settlement was arrived at.
On 21 January, Gandhi and Smuts exchanged letters spelling it out. All prisoners would be released and the Indians would stop the satyagraha pending the outcome of the commission and the introduction of legislation to provide relief. In his conversations with Gandhi, Smuts said that the commission was likely to endorse the main Indian demands.
Mass meetings of Indians in several cities supported the settlement. On 21 February Andrews sailed for England; on 7 March the Solomon Commission submitted its report; and in May and June the two Houses of the South African Parliament passed the Indians’ Relief Act, or Act 22 of 1914.
The three-pound tax was abolished, Indian marriages were restored to the pre-Searle position, and the rights of all bona fide former residents w
ere assured. Though not included in the Act, the right of ‘specially exempted’ educated Indians to enter South Africa was conceded in correspondence between Smuts and Gandhi, in which Smuts also agreed that all existing laws would be ‘administered in a just manner and with due regard to vested rights’ (S 304).
This last point was of special concern to Indian merchants, who continued to be denied opportunities to do business or own land or reside in many parts of South Africa, and feared erosion of such rights as they had. Also not conceded by the Act was the right of South Africa’s Indians to settle in a province of their choice. This was a demand that Gandhi had raised but not pressed during the march.
In his last letter to Smuts, Gandhi stated that ‘some day or other these matters will require further and sympathetic consideration by the Government’ and that ‘complete satisfaction cannot be expected until full civic rights have been conceded to the resident Indian population’ (S 304). Though much remained unachieved, Gandhi could say in the letter that
The passing of the Indians’ Relief Bill and this correspondence finally closed the Satyagraha struggle which commenced in September 1906 and which to the Indian community cost much physical suffering and pecuniary loss… (S 304)
‘General’ Gandhi. We have to acknowledge the acumen of satyagraha’s general. He knew his often hostile terrain and worked out his logistics; he understood his forces and his adversary’s; and he cultivated people who could influence the adversary. Through Gokhale, and through reporters he had befriended, he worked successfully on Hardinge, who played a critical endgame role; and Gandhi’s strategy, developed over the years, of enlisting allies from among the whites of South Africa delivered results.
Smuts said on 11 March to the South African Parliament that Gandhi was able to function as he did in South Africa ‘because he never advocated methods of violence to overthrow the state’.31
For his own army, Gandhi had built a talented and trustworthy staff and an effective chain of command. Planning his moves with deliberation, he also knew when to accelerate, stop or negotiate.
His ability to anticipate the course of the battle was remarkable, as was his grasp of how the indentured would respond. Some Indian merchants, we saw, were critical of the Act and of Gandhi’s failure to obtain redress for them. Considering that Gandhi had come to South Africa under their auspices and received their support for several years, the merchants’ disappointment with him was natural. It was paralleled by the adoration of the indentured.
The irony was symbolized by the change between 1893 and 1914 in how Gandhi travelled and what he wore. When he first arrived in South Africa, he fought hard to travel first and wore the smart European shirts and suits befitting a barrister. In 1914 he was travelling third class and wearing the clothes of the indentured.
His army did not win a complete victory, but it was a victory nonetheless, and even in 2006 it is hard to disagree with Gandhi’s own assessment offered in the mid-1920s:
Had it not been for this great struggle and for the untold suffering which many Indians invited upon their devoted heads, the Indians today would have been hounded out of South Africa. Nay, the victory achieved by Indians in South Africa more or less served as a shield for Indian emigrants in other parts of the British Empire… (S 307)
A lapse in Phoenix and a fast. In July 1913, when Gandhi was in Johannesburg, he heard that two individuals in Phoenix were guilty of ‘a moral fall’. Manilal, now twenty-one, was one of them; a married Indian woman was the other. Confronted by letters from his father, Manilal at first denied any wrongdoing, which may have been encouraged by the woman. But when Manilal received a letter signed ‘Blessings from a father in agony’, he broke down. In a letter that he asked Kallenbach to pass on to Gandhi, the son made a confession and asked for forgiveness.
Sending a telegram, ‘I forgive you; ask God to forgive’, Gandhi went to Phoenix where he announced that he would fast in atonement for a week and thereafter, for twenty weeks, eat only one meal a day. If the transgression was repeated, he would fast for three additional weeks.
Though Gandhi found it hard to go entirely without food, the decision to fast transformed his appearance. One who had looked ‘so sad and troubled… as though the light had been quenched within him’, as Millie Polak would recall, was suddenly completely at peace.32 Manilal joined his father in this private fast of reparation, which was a precursor to Gandhi’s ‘public’ fast in mourning for the killed workers.
Deaths of Laxmidas and Karsandas, & Kasturba’s illness. Gandhi’s rejection of family responsibilities as his first priority had not gone down well with Laxmidas, who ‘year after year’ sent ‘curses by registered post’ to the younger brother, as Gandhi would later recall.33 But evidently the older brother thawed, acknowledged that what Gandhi was doing was necessary, and wrote that his dearest wish was to join him in South Africa.
This was not to be, for Laxmidas died on 9 March 1914 in Porbandar. Karsandas, the middle brother, had died the previous June in Rajkot. On 11 March, a shaken Gandhi wrote to Chhaganlal about handling family matters if he, Gandhi, were also to die.34
The news of Laxmidas’s death came when, her health damaged in jail, Kasturba lay critically ill. On 2 March Gandhi wrote to Harilal in India that she was ‘hanging between life and death’ (14: 97), and on 13 March he wrote to Andrews, with whom he had established a close relationship, ‘Mrs Gandhi was near death’s door last week. I have therefore done hardly anything else during the last ten days’ (14: 118). The condition seemed not to improve, and on 1 April, writing to Gokhale, Gandhi expressed doubts about Kasturba’s survival.35
He was proved wrong, and Kasturba would accompany Gandhi on his July 1914 departure from Cape Town for England en route to India. Their sons and the rest of the Phoenix party would be shepherded directly to India by Maganlal in August. Following Andrews’ suggestion, Gandhi had directed the Phoenix group to go first to a centre in the Himalayan foothills started by Mahatma Munshi Ram, later known as Swami Shraddhanand, and then east, near Calcutta, to Santiniketan, the educational centre created by Tagore. Close to both Munshi Ram and Tagore, Andrews had undertaken to arrange hospitality.
In different South African towns (Pretoria, Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and the Natal cities of Durban and Verulam), the struggle’s martyrs were honoured and the Gandhis farewelled. Addresses in Durban and Verulam referred to Gandhi as a ‘Mahatma’. He was seen as a great soul because he had taken up the poor’s cause. The whites too said good things about Gandhi, who predicted a future for the Empire if it respected justice.
Before leaving, Gandhi presented Smuts with a pair of sandals out of a dozen or so pairs he had made on Tolstoy Farm. Later Smuts would say that he did not feel qualified to wear Gandhi’s shoes, but in 1914 he was glad that Gandhi had left. To a friend he wrote, ‘The saint has left our shores, I sincerely hope for ever.’36
If thus perceived as saintly (and difficult), we have seen that Gandhi was also a politician with brilliant instincts. Prayer was no doubt a daily part of his life, and we saw that in the latest campaign he once more acknowledged providential interventions, yet he relied primarily on his own untiring effort, which was as sound and shrewd as he could make it.
The Gandhi who inspired and led the great march was not exactly a shirt hanging on the line content to be blown about by the winds of God—he strove to create favourable currents. But he also astutely employed breezes that owed nothing to him.
It seemed beyond his capacity to take on also the cause of the Africans amidst whom he and the Indians of South Africa lived. Yet Gandhi’s platforms in the opening decades of the twentieth century, including his nationalism, were stepping-stones to a common humanity, and also to a future politics of an African-Indian alliance in South Africa.
Even at the time, many Africans offered a silent blessing and a silent applause to the Indian satyagrahis. This came across in 1914 when Andrews’s friend, Rev. W.W. Pearson, interviewed the Zulu leader, John
Dube, who was running the Ohlange Institute near the Phoenix settlement.
Recalling to Pearson a scene near Phoenix station that he had personally witnessed during the Indians’ strike the previous November, Dube said he was ‘amazed’ by the nonviolence and forbearance with which the Indians faced police brutalities, and by their love for Gandhi Raja.
Dube went on to say that Gandhi had tapped a vein in the Indian character that he was not sure existed in the Africans. In a comparable situation, Dube added, the Africans would hit back recklessly. ‘If any brother of mine kills a white man after being excited, it would precipitate a great disaster upon us.’ It was best not to risk it.37
Interviewed in 1976, Selby Msimang, an ANC founder-member, thought that the African leadership of Gandhi’s time ‘would have found Indian politics too radical to countenance an alliance’.38 Though neither Gandhi nor any other Indian or African leader in South Africa in his time attempted a political alliance between Indians and Africans, the Indian struggle was paving the way for an African struggle. Recognizing this, Smuts himself had declared in 1908 that Indian defiance in the Transvaal could lead one day to ‘Kaffir’ or African defiance.39
To India via England. It was under Gokhale’s guidance that Gandhi would start his public life in India. Eager to present satyagraha to India, Gandhi had accepted Gokhale’s advice to say nothing, while observing everything, for a year. Since, for health reasons, Gokhale was in Europe and not in India, it was for England that Gandhi and Kasturba sailed on the Kilfauns Castle on 18 July from Cape Town.
Kallenbach, whom Gandhi proposed to take to India, was with them, carrying two pairs of binoculars. When he said that the items were an infatuation, Gandhi offered to throw them into the sea. Kallenbach agreed, Gandhi implemented his word, and the Atlantic was enriched.
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 25
