The best view of the city, as a whole, was afforded from the ridge of the Malabar Hill at the southern end of one of the promontories of Bombay island. From here, the full range of the town revealed itself, from its spacious new gardens and parks to the crowded old city, the grand administrative edifices of empire and, a little further out, the cotton mills that had made the fortunes of Bombay’s Parsi elite. ‘Standing by night upon the ridge’, described the Imperial Gazetteer in 1908, ‘one looks down upon the palm groves of Chaupati, and across the sweep of the Back Bay to the Rajabai tower [of the neo-Gothic University of Bombay, designed by Gilbert Scott, the architect of St Pancras station in London], the Secretariat, and the Light-house at Colaba, the whole curve of land being jewelled with an unbroken chain of lights which have earned the appropriate title of “The Queen’s Necklace”’.27 Below, across the bay, lay the old city of Bombay. To the left, was ‘the industrial area, with its high chimney stacks and mill roofs’, the origin of many fortunes for the owners of the mills, and increasingly hit by strikes of workers protesting against the conditions under which these fortunes were made.28 In 1913, the chairman of the Bombay Mill Owners’ Association, Jehangir Bomanji Petit, foresaw India being affected by the same tendencies as Europe. ‘Labour in this city’, he noted, ‘has now commenced to realise the force of numbers and the power of combination’.29
Hans von Koenigsmarck traced Britain’s impress in the structures of Bombay. ‘You can tell at the outset that this metropolis is the daughter of old England’, he wrote with Germanic confidence.30 The Union Jack flew atop the Governor’s residence, certainly. Of the 2,398 cars listed in Thacker’s Bombay Directory of 1913, the prized registration number 01 fell to British Captain G. H. Hewett, just ahead of the Maharaja of Gwalior, who had to make do with registrations 02, 03 and 04.31 British architects, meanwhile, were responsible for many of the city’s main public buildings. But in most respects the city’s British aspect was lightly worn. The city’s two leading architects, Scots John Begg and George Wittet, adopted the consciously un-British Indo-Saracenic style for two of the grandest buildings built in Bombay in recent years: the General Post Office building and the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India.32
Undoubtedly the most British spot in Bombay was the Royal Bombay Yacht Club, on the Apollo Bunder (a seafront promenade). On a Friday afternoon, the place filled with expatriate Anglo-Indians, awaiting the arrival of the mailboat from Britain while listening to a smartly dressed British military band playing in the club gardens. Indians were excluded. ‘One could hardly find a more enjoyable way of passing an hour or two’, confided Rachel Humphreys, fresh from her adventures in Algiers, ‘than at the Yacht Club, which is essentially English, not a trace of a gentleman of colour allowed’.33 John Alfred Spender, editor of the Westminster Gazette, wrote: ‘Tone it all down and in the dim light the view [from the Bombay Yacht Club] might be that from Plymouth Hoe [on the English south coast]’. Spender, visiting India for the Delhi Durbar of 1911, went on, ‘the twilight passes quickly, festoons of electric light make a dazzle on a hundred tea-tables, and an excellent military band strikes up a selection from “Samson and Delilah”’.34 ‘While you are here’, he continued, ‘you forget the great, seething, miasmic city behind you’. Rather, he wrote:
[you] wonder at the cheerfulness, smartness, good looks and good manners of the Bombay English and their womenkind. Civilians or soldiers, they are clearly a strong, self-reliant, well-favoured race, with an indefinable air of being in authority.35
The authority, however, was not, at least as Spender saw it, flaunted:
You hear no big talk; it is, indeed, the most difficult thing in the world to induce any of them [the British military and civilian administrators] to talk at all about themselves or their duties. They seem to take for granted that they should be there and doing what they are doing. The first dominant impression you bear away is that they have a great interest in governing and none at all in possessing. Hence, in spite of the alien rule, Bombay strikes you as eminently belonging to itself, as being in fact a real Indian town and as remote as possible from a British colony.36
And Bombay was indeed in many respects far more Indian than it was British, the very opposite of Algiers, which was more French than Algerian. If leading Indians were excluded from British clubs, no matter – they had their own. In 1886, the Parsis established their own gymkhana, or ‘sports club’. A plot of land for a Muslim gymkhana was secured in 1892, and a Hindu gymkhana two years later. In 1912, for the first time, there was a quadrangular cricket tournament between the four communities: European, Parsi, Muslim and Hindu. Perhaps the leading citizens of Bombay would not meet in each others’ homes, or in each others’ club-rooms, but they could at least meet on the cricket pitch.
When not competing at cricket, the different communities of Bombay engaged in competitive philanthropy. The winner of this contest was undoubtedly Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, a leading Parsi, and the first Indian in Bombay to be granted a baronetcy (a hereditary knighthood). Jeejeebhoy and his successors were well represented in the names of hospitals and fire temples across the city – not to mention Bombay’s art school, where Lockwood Kipling, the father of arch-Anglo-Indian Rudyard Kipling, taught architecture. By 1913, seven other Bombay baronetcies had been created in recognition of the local great and good: two more in the Parsi community, three amongst the Sassoon family of Baghdadi Jews, and one each from the Muslim and Hindu communities.37 It was these leading lights of the Parsi, Muslim, Hindu and Jewish communities who influenced the Bombay City Improvement Trust, the body charged with reshaping the city itself. Occasionally, influential leaders of the Indian community in Bombay would weigh into wider discussions – for example the conditions of Indians in other parts of the British Empire or, for Indian Muslims, the attitude taken by Britain on the wars in the Balkans – convening meetings in the city, or firing off letters to relevant government officials. For these Bombay men and women their city stood not on the fringes of British India, but at the centre of a wider Indian world.
In 1913, the attention of Bombay Indians turned not only to matters in Madras, Mysore or Calcutta. It turned also across the Indian Ocean to the Indian diaspora in Durban, in the province of Natal, in the newly formed Union of South Africa.
The previous year Congress leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale had spent nearly a month in South Africa, following a punishing schedule that took him from Cape Town to the Kimberley diamond mines, and to Johannesburg, Pretoria and Natal, meeting with everyone from the Transvaal Chinese Association to the South African premier, Louis Botha, and his government. Entering Durban, a seaside city like Bombay and home to the majority of South Africa’s Indian community, Gokhale was met at the station by the Jewish mayor of the city, F. C. Hollander. The Indian anthem ‘Vande Mataram’ was sung by local Indian girls as the train pulled in to a platform decorated with British flags. ‘Outside’, noted an account of the visit, ‘a team of four cream horses decorated with pink carnations and rosettes of green, yellow and red ribbon awaited … Thousands of Indians thronged the streets, and constant cheering was kept up along the route’.38 Always by Gokhale’s side, sometimes making speeches in reply to his, sometimes welcoming him, sometimes reminding the audience of Gokhale’s wider fame – even suggesting that had he been born British he would be Prime Minister, and had he been born American he would be President – was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, an English-trained lawyer who had earned a reputation in South Africa for his integrity, and for his ability to make himself an unfailingly polite nuisance to the authorities.
Shuttling between the Tolstoy farm – named after Gandhi’s erstwhile correspondent, the Russian author of War and Peace – and Phoenix in Natal, using his knowledge of the law first to defend Indians in court and then, later, to agitate for their rights, Gandhi had become a well-known figure locally, more often than not dressed smartly in the pinstripe suit of an English county solicitor. The visit of Gokhale was a coup for Gandhi personally, evi
dence of the recognition his work was receiving in India, and of the importance attached to the wider question of the status of Indians in their empire. It was also a moment of revelation for Gandhi himself: accompanying Gokhale to Dar es Salaam to see him on to his boat back home at the end of 1912, Gandhi dressed in Indian clothes for the first time in his adult life.39
The Durban in which Gokhale arrived in 1912 was a dusty and beautiful British outpost, a port competing for South African business with Lourenço Marques in the neighbouring Portuguese colony of Mozambique, and a coastal resort where people came from inland areas to warm their feet in the Indian Ocean. ‘Best wishes from Durban’ read a postcard of the time, showing white locals playing in the sea in front of the serried ranks of painted bathing huts. Surrounding the city to the north and west were the Drakensberg mountains, rising high above the coastal plain. The climate was gentle, the sun shone almost every day. To many, South Africa felt blessed with the certainty of future wealth and power. Already one of the world’s largest producers of gold and with a virtual monopoly of the production of diamonds, did not the country have the basis in natural resources for a people as prosperous as the Australians, destined to be as great as the Canadians? On the beach at Durban, white South Africans could be permitted to forget, if only for a moment, the demographic and political realities of their country: fragile, divided and deeply unequal.
The Union of South Africa dated back only to 1910, forged quite opportunistically out of four British colonies, all with different populations and different political traditions, ranging from the relatively liberal and English-speaking Cape Colony to the Boer supremacist Orange Free State, where Dutch-speaking Afrikaners had the whip hand, and where memories of the Anglo-Boer War were still raw, part of the foundation story of the Afrikaner people. The constitution of the Union of South Africa – agreed upon by the British Parliament in the hope that its racial connotations would, over time, be alleviated – allowed only ‘British subject[s] of European descent’ to sit in the House of Assembly and the unelected Senate.40 In the Cape province, the franchise remained theoretically colour-blind, though in practice franchise qualifications based on education and wealth excluded the vast majority of non-European residents. The racially exclusive franchise that predominated in most other parts of South Africa was maintained for national elections. This was the price of Afrikaner adhesion to the new national state. In 1910 Prime Minister Louis Botha, a Boer, formed what he hoped would be a truly national government able to bridge the divide between Afrikaners and British. This would not be easy, however. By the beginning of 1913, Barry Hertzog, a Boer nationalist who disliked the ideas of Cape racial liberalism as much as he disliked the subservience of the Union of South Africa to the British Crown, had split from Botha’s government, threatening to bring it crashing down. History, race and land provided the combustible ingredients of South African politics. How long the Union would last in its current form was anyone’s guess.
Natal, formerly a British colony and now one of the smaller South African provinces, with Durban as its largest city, was something of an outlier. The governing whites here were less numerous than Indian immigrants and in a much smaller minority compared to native Africans than elsewhere in South Africa. In Natal, whites were outnumbered ten to one, compared to two to one in the Free State, and three to one in Transvaal and the Cape.41 Partly to make up for this weakness in numbers, white Natalians in Durban developed a strongly British identity, clearly marking themselves out from the native Zulu population, the Afrikaners and, increasingly, the Indian population of Durban. A third of the white population of the city had been born in Britain. They had created a city of English gardens and statues of Queen Victoria. In 1899 Lord Milner, the leading British colonial administrator in southern Africa, described Natal as ‘a secure outpost of England, loyal in the fashion of Ulster’.42 In 1910, the sub-tropical African city of Durban repaid the compliment, completing its new town hall as an almost exact replica of that which stood proudly in Belfast, 6,000 miles away under the slate-grey skies of Northern Ireland. In 1913, the city’s British pride was redoubled by the visit of battlecruiser HMS New Zealand, a reminder that even the smallest of the British dominions could contribute something to the defence and unity of the empire.
Whatever the image of Durban white Natalians wished to present to the world – and to themselves – the economic fortunes of the city and the countryside alike were not simply the product of hardy white settlers battling against the elements. Far from it. From the 1860s up until 1911, when it was stopped, indentured Indian labour – or ‘coolie’ labour, as whites called it – had flowed into the colony of Natal, to work on coastal sugar plantations, and later on the coalfields of northern Natal and the railways. It was these workers who had provided much of the muscle for development in Natal, as nowhere else in South Africa. The initial period of indenture for such labourers was not more than a few years, but many Indians gave up their free passage back to India once that time was up, and stayed on in South Africa to work as domestic servants, in industry, or growing fruit and vegetables. A few drifted to the mines of the Transvaal. The bulk stayed in Natal. Some, not able to make ends meet on the open market, found themselves back on a new indentured contract on the sugar plantations or at the mines, forbidden from travelling more than two miles from their place of work without written permission.43
From the 1870s on the population of indentured Indian labour was supplemented by ‘free’ immigrants from Gujurat, on the west coast of India, who thus extended their trading networks from Mauritius over to southern Africa. Setting up shop in downtown Durban, Gujurati merchants imported rice and ghee for their local Indian clientele as well as engaging in wider trade with India and Britain. In 1908, they had set up an Indian Chamber of Commerce in Durban, viewed by the city’s white traders as dangerous competition.44 What had been an Indian ‘solution’ to the question of developing the resources of Natal was now viewed, by whites, as an Indian ‘problem’, bringing into doubt their economic predominance and perhaps, over time, their cultural and political predominance too.
Armed with the tools of colonial self-rule since the 1890s – making it harder for London to dictate policy in local affairs – white Natalians had set about encouraging non-indentured Indians to re-emigrate. They made life difficult for Indian traders by allowing local officials to decide arbitrarily on whether trading licenses should be granted, eliminated future Natalian Indians from the franchise, and imposed a £3 annual tax on Indians not returning to India at the end of their indenture.45 The British government was petitioned to protect the rights of Natal Indians compromised by these changes, and to uphold the principle of basic equality of Crown subjects, irrespective of race or religion, the principle upon which Indians had come to southern Africa in the first place and the principle upon which they had been able to stay. The Indian government, under pressure from outraged Indian opinion at home, attempted to bring pressure to bear by threatening to cut off the flow of indentured labour to Natal altogether. The government of Natal pursued its own policies nonetheless. Natal’s violent suppression of Zulu disturbances in 1906 – 3,000 Zulu deaths, compared to twenty-four white deaths, of which eighteen were soldiers – had led Winston Churchill to label the colony the ‘hooligan of the British Empire’.46 Treatment of the Indian population, though nowhere near as severe, drew similar brickbats, requiring the government of Natal to trim its policies towards its Indian population and to alter the wording of its laws to placate London’s sensitivities, though without fundamentally changing their aims or consequences. Aware of their historic rights as subjects of the British crown, with a local elite articulate in their own defence and allies in India to make their case, Natalian Indians became a cause célèbre of empire – showing up the richness of its tapestry and, in South Africa, the gap between imperial principle and local practice.
At the time of Gokhale’s visit, the position of Indians in South Africa appeared under ever-greater assault
; they were discriminated against by carefully crafted provincial and national laws, and by the established practices of petty officials who felt themselves vested with the responsibility of protecting ‘white’ Natal. In Durban, particular Indian anger was reserved for the immigration officials operating according to their own interpretation of the rules – ‘Little Tin Tsars’, as one South African politician put it – with the apparent aim of generalised harassment.47 Gokhale’s visit had raised hopes that the situation would improve. It had not. ‘Mr Colborne-Smith’s [the Chief Immigration Officer] humour is of a grim and sardonic type’, observed Indian Opinion, the voice of South Africa’s Indian community, ‘he appears to imagine that General Botha’s promise to the Hon. Mr Gokhale that, in future, the administration of the Immigration Laws of South Africa would be rendered more humane, as an excellent joke, meaning exactly the converse of what it said’.48
In February 1913, a letter to the Natal Mercury drew readers’ attention to the recent case of twelve-year-old Ahmed Kotwal. Ahmed was initially refused permission to land in Durban, despite holding a Natal domicile certificate, on the basis that his father, an Indian merchant at the time touring Europe and the United States, was not in Natal. Dispatched rapidly back to India on the ship on which he had arrived, the Markgraf, he did not have time to seek a court injunction. ‘Would not the people of Natal rise in revolt’, asked Mr Polak, ‘were men, women, and children of European origin treated with the same scandalous harshness and inhumanity as are these unrepresented and disenfranchised Indians?’49 The editors of the newspaper took up the matter on their editorial pages, asking how the matter would be viewed in Delhi or Bombay:
Had the hardships alleged been inflicted on the subjects of a foreign Power an awkward diplomatic question would have arisen. What are the people of India to think when their loyalty is rewarded with treatment which our officials would not lightly dream of meting out to persons enjoying the protection of an alien flag?50
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