The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (The Robert Payne Library)

by Robert Payne

  Once in Bombay, when they were discussing religion, Shrimad Rajchandra had delivered himself of an opinion which deeply influenced Gandhi. He had said that it was not enough to be a paragon of virtue; it was necessary to bring all men to virtue. If, for example, he found his son drinking wine, then he would snatch the cup from his son’s hands, and destroy the wine bottle, and if he learned that there were more bottles in a secret chest, then he would destroy the chest and everything in it. “The son will certainly be hurt, and he will look upon me as a heartless father,” he said. “But a father who understands the meaning of compassion is not afraid of hurting his son or being cursed by him.” It was a puritanical philosophy, but Gandhi found a compelling beauty in it and behaved toward his own sons in exactly this way, with consequences which sometimes disturbed and alarmed him.

  The lesson, learned at the feet of Shrimad Rajchandra, had not yet been put into practice in South Africa. Gandhi now decided that the time had come to vindicate morality. The Muslim merchants in Pretoria were thoroughly untruthful in their business, and he therefore called a meeting and addressed them on the subject of truth, contending that there was no validity in their claim that it was impossible to speak the truth and still remain solvent. On the contrary, they had a bounden duty to speak the truth on all occasions and especially when they were in a foreign country. He went on to proclaim that the Indians’ unsanitary habits were offensive, that too few of them knew English, the lingua franca of South Africa, and that they should form a committee to make representations to the authorities about the hardships suffered by the Indian settlers. The Muslim merchants listened, argued, decided to meet again at infrequent intervals, and commended him for his speech.

  Gandhi regarded this as his first public speech, for the short and halting speeches he had delivered to the members of the Vegetarian Society in London were private addresses to his friends. This time he was addressing people he did not know, belonging to another religion, sharing neither his moral convictions nor his proselytizing zeal. A clerk, a barber and a shopkeeper asked him to teach them English, but this was not the most important result of the speech. Suddenly he became well known as a lay pastor and moralist, no longer the captive of the Christians but actively engaged in proselytizing on behalf of morality among Muslims. The Muslims opened their doors to him, and everyone was speaking about him. There were few Hindus in Pretoria. He was a solitary Hindu leading the Muslims to the truth.

  With that speech the familiar Gandhi, always insisting on the truth, begins to emerge. Almost recklessly, he entered the lions’ den and emerged unscathed. If he was not genuinely liked, he was at least listened to with respect. He had found his public duty.

  Meanwhile the lawsuit continued to demand his attention, but had not yet come up for trial. Documents were being studied and positions were being taken, while the lawyers profited from the interminable delays. Gandhi had studied the facts, the documents and the lawbooks, and finally came to a conclusion that the litigation would probably ruin both the plaintiff and the defendants. There was nothing to be gained by continuing the lawsuit, and the proper solution was to go to arbitration. He urged Dada Abdulla and Tyeb Khan Mohammed, the opponent in the case, to accept the decision of an arbitrator. They agreed, and a few days later the decision was handed down. Tyeb Khan Mohammed had to pay £37,000 and all the court costs. It was a triumph for Dada Abdulla, a disaster for Tyeb Khan Mohammed, who would inevitably be forced into bankruptcy.

  Gandhi knew the code of honor among these Muslim merchants. Bankruptcy was death. A merchant prince regarded bankruptcy as a reflection on his honor and he would kill himself rather than submit to it. But there was a way out, and Gandhi arranged that Tyeb Khan Mohammed should pay his debts by installments over a long period. In this way honor was vindicated.

  As a result of these decisions Gandhi was now free to return to India. Dada Abdulla gave him a farewell party in Durban, attended by all the Muslim merchants. At the party someone put a copy of the Natal Mercury in his hands, and he found himself glancing at a paragraph captioned “Indian Franchise,” announcing that a bill was being presented before the Legislative Assembly to disenfranchise all the Indians in the Crown Colony. Gandhi knew nothing about the bill. He asked Dada Abdulla what he knew about it.

  “What can we understand about these matters?” Dada Abdulla replied. “We can only understand things that affect our trade.”

  Dada Abdulla’s only interest in the newspapers was in the market prices. He felt that if the colonists decided to disenfranchise the Indians there was nothing he could do.

  “It is the first nail in our coffin,” Gandhi said. “It strikes at the root of our self-respect.”

  There was a long discussion. Dada Abdulla felt hopeless, but was prepared to listen to advice. Gandhi was explaining that they should at once organize a fighting committee and make representations to the government. It was intolerable that the Indians in Natal should be deprived of their right to vote. Someone suggested that Gandhi should stay in Durban and organize the committee, and Dada Abdulla should see that he remained in South Africa. But he was a shrewd man, and said: “Let us all persuade him to stay on. You should remember that he is a barrister. What about his fees?”

  Gandhi was a little annoyed that the question of his fees should be raised so early. The fighting committee would need to have money for telegrams, printing and traveling, but most of the work would be done by unsalaried enthusiasts for the cause. As for Gandhi, it was enough if some of the leading merchants would give him an annual retainer, for he would willingly offer his services to the committee. Meanwhile it was necessary to send off urgent telegrams to the government urging postponement of further discussion on the bill until the Indians had been heard, and then to draw up a petition to the Natal Assembly. This was only the beginning. He foresaw a long and exhausting struggle with many reverses and few triumphs except the final triumph which would come about, he believed, because it was intolerable that the Indians should be treated like coolies.

  The meeting at Dada Abdulla’s house took place toward the end of May 1894, and throughout June Gandhi was organizing the counterattack, presenting petitions, making speeches, demanding interviews with government officials. He had useful allies. Harry Escombe, the attorney general, later to become Prime Minister of Natal, was a close friend, and in fact it was Escombe who suggested that Gandhi should come to live next door to him at Beach Grove Villas in an exclusively European quarter near the sea. Dada Abdulla regarded the new residence of Gandhi with approval, paid the rent, and filled it with furniture, regarding rent and furniture as a gift in lieu of the money present which would have been given to him for successfully concluding the lawsuit. Gandhi was in communication with Dadabhai Naoroji, the former mathematics teacher from Bombay and merchant in London who had abandoned mathematics and trade for politics and was then sitting in the House of Commons as Member of Parliament for the constituency of Central Finsbury. Dadabhai Naoroji was one of those wise, temperate, calm men who were chiefly responsible for laying the foundations of Indian freedom. When he was asked whether he would accept the premiership of free India if by some miracle India achieved freedom in his lifetime, he answered: “No, I’ll go back to teaching mathematics.” One of his regrets was that he never had time to complete the book he was writing on the differential calculus.

  With Harry Escombe as an ally in Durban, Dadabhai Naoroji as an ally in London, and with the resources of Dada Abdulla at his disposal, Gandhi was in a powerful position. If he wrote a memorandum or a petition to a high official, it was not likely to be thrown in the wastepaper basket. On the contrary, it would be studied carefully and minutely examined to see whether there were any loopholes in the argument; and Gandhi went to great pains to ensure that there were none. His first petition to the Natal Assembly, dated June 28,1894, was a masterly argument in defense of the Indian’s right to vote, with quotations from Sir Henry Sumner Maine’s Village Communities in the East and West, and the writi
ngs of Sir George Birdwood, Sir Thomas Munro and Professor Max Müller. The argument was advanced in twenty-four numbered clauses, gently and insistently, with no raising of the voice. It was followed by many others, and they were always written in the same calm expository tones. He was a lawyer, not an agitator. A petition addressed to the Marquis of Ripon was accompanied by the signatures of ten thousand Indians, all collected within two weeks. Gandhi’s house at Beach Grove Villas and his office in Durban, a stone’s throw away from the offices of Dada Abdulla, became the headquarters of the movement and were crowded with willing helpers who gathered signatures, addressed envelopes, worked the cyclostyle machine or wrote letters on the typewriter. He gave the impression of being the quiet center of the hurricane, for he was slow and cautious in speech and seemed to be unhurried even when he was charging the enemy.

  Soon he realized that it was necessary to provide the Indians with an organization. Dadabhai Naoroji had presided over the Indian National Congress the previous year; it occurred to Gandhi that a Natal Indian Congress would be an effective organization to promote the cause of the Indians who were about to be disenfranchised On August 22 the Natal Indian Congress was solemnly inaugurated with Gandhi as honorary secretary, and about two hundred Indians joined during the first month, paying five shillings a month, while the rich were expected to pay more. Gandhi was also treasurer, director, manager, and chief executive officer. He did not enjoy being the treasurer, and complained that his clerk had to spend all his time writing dunning letters. Gandhi solved the problem by calling a meeting of the Congress and proposing that subscriptions should be paid annually. There was no opposition, and £3 was thereupon collected from all the members who were present. The Congress was clearly designed to serve the middle-class Indians, for the ordinary indentured laborer could not afford so large a fee.

  Every Congress proliferates, and the Natal Indian Congress was no exception, for Gandhi immediately decided that it should have an educational arm. This was the Colonial-born Indian Educational Association, consisting mostly of educated youths who paid a nominal subscription. “The Association served to ventilate their needs and grievances, to stimulate thought amongst them, to bring them into touch with Indian merchants and also to afford them scope for service to the community.” It was in fact largely a debating society and a reservoir of youths who could be useful to the Congress.

  About this time Gandhi decided that there were advantages in becoming an advocate in the Supreme Court of Natal, and made a formal application. He was opposed by the local Law Society, which objected to the presence of an Indian lawyer in the Supreme Court. They were not impressed with the testimonies of good character received from European merchants, since it was obvious that he had not been in Durban long enough to become well-known to them; but when the matter came up before the Chief Justice, his application was approved. “The law,” the Chief Justice said, “makes no distinction between white and colored people.” Gandhi took the oath, and was then gently reminded that according to the practice in the Supreme Court, he must remove his turban. This he did with good grace, for nothing could be gained by opposing a Chief Justice. “The turban that I had insisted on wearing in the District Magistrate’s Court I took off in obedience to the order of the Supreme Court,” he wrote thirty years later, adding that he saw no advantage in disputing the right of the Chief Justice to prescribe whatever headgear he pleased in his own court. Gandhi was becoming more temperate. He had come to realize that the stakes were very much higher than he had originally believed. What was at issue was the continued existence of the Indians in South Africa.

  For it was not only a question of removing them from the voters’ lists, so that they were deprived of any political power. The Natal government was quite seriously proposing to impose an annual tax of £25 on every Indian indentured laborer, well knowing that this sum was considerably more than his total annual income. He would be taxed out of existence, and his only recourse would be to return to India. The Congress was fighting for the very lives of the Indians, who had originally come to Natal as coolie laborers in the sugar-cane plantations and now presented a threat to white supremacy by their skill in business. The government foresaw a time when the Indians would outnumber the whites; it was determined to prevent this in every way possible. Gandhi had come on the scene only just in time.

  By agitation, by organizing the Indian community, by appealing above the head of the Natal government to the Viceroy and the Secretary of State for the Colonies, and by his own voluminous writings, Gandhi was able to stave off the excesses of the white supremacists. The tax of £25 was reduced to £3. The case against the exclusion of Indians from the voters’ lists was fought vigorously, but without success, though it was finally agreed that Indians already on the lists could not be excluded. In petition after petition Gandhi defended the Indians, and sometimes it was necessary to make admissions dangerous to his cause. The indentured Indians were untruthful, immoral, dirty, slovenly. They told lies without any reason, without any prospect of bettering themselves materially, scarcely knowing what they were doing. The traders, too, told lies, but perhaps not more than the European traders. Nor was there the least doubt that the Indians were thoroughly disliked by the Europeans. In an open letter to the Legislative Assembly Gandhi wrote:

  I think it will be readily granted that the Indian is bitterly hated in the Colony. The man in the street hates him, curses him, spits upon him, and often pushes him off the footpath. . . . The tramcars are not for the Indians. The railway officials may treat the Indians as beasts. No matter how clean, his very sight is such an offense to every White man in the Colony that he would object to sit, even for a short time, in the same compartment with the Indian. The hotels shut their doors against them. I know instances of respectable Indians having been denied a night’s lodging in a hotel. Even the public baths are not for the Indians, no matter who they are.

  The Indians had reached a state of frustration which was dangerously demoralizing. The task was therefore to revive their human dignity, to remind them and the Europeans that they came from a great and enduring civilization, and were not without protectors. In order to accomplish this, Gandhi fought a relentless, long-drawn battle, employing all the weapons of the law and all his psychological insight. For twenty years he would fight on behalf of the Indians in South Africa, and in the end he would achieve a token victory, while his cause went down to defeat.

  The First Clashes

  IN THOSE YEARS Gandhi appeared to possess inexhaustible energy. He was not only a lawyer with his own practice, executive director of the Natal Indian Congress and of the Colonial-born Indian Educational Association, but he was also the agent in South Africa of the Esoteric Christian Union and the London Vegetarian Society. The Esoteric Christian Union had been founded to propagate the works of Edward Maitland and Anna Kingsford, and Gandhi’s office was full of their books neatly packed in crates. The Perfect Way, Clothed with the Sun, and The New Gospel of Interpretation were being advertised regularly in The Natal Mercury. Vegetarian tracts were being distributed free. He was lawyer, bookseller, propagandist for the Indians, and there must have been times when he wondered how one man could possibly do all these things.

  Gradually he was able to accumulate a large staff. There were about twelve people directly in his employ. Among them was his confidential clerk Vincent Lawrence, a Christian from South India, quiet and unassuming, who lived with Gandhi in the large house at Beach Grove Villas. In charge of the affairs of the Natal Indian Congress was Joseph Royap-pan, an Indian Christian born in the Colony, who was later sent by Gandhi to England to study law. A tall, well-built man with a powerful singing voice, he was probably closer to Gandhi than anyone else. Later he would become one of the most gifted leaders of the Satyagraha movement. Another member of the household was Sheikh Mehtab, the schoolboy friend who had once taken him to a brothel and attempted to turn his attention to the joys of meat-eating. Exactly why Gandhi invited him to South Africa is not
clear. Apparently he hoped to convert him into a devout, law-abiding and useful citizen, but in this he failed. In his autobiography Gandhi tells a strange story about an anonymous companion who lived in his house and plotted so vigorously against one of the law clerks who was also staying in the house that it became necessary to dismiss the clerk. The anonymous companion was Sheikh Mehtab, who was employed as a handyman. The clerk, who was innocent, never forgave Gandhi for his abrupt dismissal.

  One day, when Gandhi was working in his office in Durban, his cook came running in to say that something very wrong was happening in the house. Gandhi did not particularly like the new cook, and he especially disliked the fact that he had come at noon, when there was still work to be done, long before his usual time for returning to his seaside home. But the man was persistent, even though he refused to reveal what was wrong, and finally Gandhi decided to follow him. Since quite obviously something very grave had happened, and help might be needed, he took Vincent Lawrence with him.

  When they reached the house, they ran upstairs and the cook pointed to Sheikh Mehtab’s room with the words: “Open the door and see for yourself!”