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

by Robert Payne

  In the Transvaal the situation was even worse than in Natal. The Indians in Pretoria wanted to present Chamberlain with another petition, and asked Gandhi to write it. But how to reach Pretoria? All Indians crossing the frontier of Natal and the Transvaal had to be in possession of a permit. Gandhi was well-known, and it was unlikely that a permit would be granted. He approached his friend Superintendent Alexander, and with the superintendent’s help he was able, much to the surprise of the officials he encountered in the Transvaal, to obtain a permit. But when it came to presenting the petition of the Transvaal Indians to Chamberlain, Gandhi was excluded from the deputation. An Asiatic Department had been set up in Johannesburg, and the Indians were informed that there was no longer any need for the protection that might be afforded by the presence of Gandhi, who was persona non grata in government circles.

  This was a serious blow, but it was mitigated by the fact that Gandhi had made many friends with lawyers in the past and was not persona non grata among them. When he applied for admission as an attorney in the Supreme Court, no one opposed him; and he was duly enrolled. He opened an office in Rissik Street and set about acquiring a staff. His first stenographer was a Miss Dick from Scotland, who swept into his office, announced that she wanted a salary of £17.10.0 and was immediately accepted. Soon from being merely a stenographer she became his confidential assistant and was entrusted with large sums of money. Unfortunately she was engaged to be married, and Gandhi soon lost a woman whom he regarded as a sister or a daughter.

  Miss Dick was one of those young Scottish women with an earthy common sense. She was replaced by the much more formidable Miss Sonja Schlesin, seventeen years old, of Russian-Jewish origin, difficult and impetuous and violently opinionated. Short and masculine-looking, wearing severe costumes, dark skirt, shirt and necktie, Sonja Schlesin was one of those women destined to take command; and Gandhi became her willing victim. She asked for little money, saying: “I am not here to draw a salary from you. I am here because I like to work with you and I like your ideals.”

  Her ideal was to serve the oppressed and to surrender herself to a cause larger than herself. In this she was successful, and there was never any doubt about her competence. She was often foolhardy and sometimes silly. She would go on errands at night without an escort and she would sometimes tell Gandhi how to manage his affairs. Gokhale spoke of her purity and fearlessness, and Gandhi called her “the jewel of my house.”

  In addition to his Indian law clerks Gandhi also employed an Englishman, Louis Walter Ritch, a theosophist and a successful businessman, married, with a large family, who abruptly abandoned his business on Gandhi’s suggestion and became an articled clerk in Gandhi’s law office. Nearly everyone who worked for Gandhi became a brother, a sister, a son or a daughter, and Louis Ritch was no exception, for he became the favorite son. He was so delighted by law that he decided to dedicate his life to it. He stayed only two years with Gandhi, and then sailed for England to continue his legal studies.

  What Gandhi liked in Ritch was his practical sense, his efficiency, which was not in the least affected by his profound study of theosophical mysteries. He had been the manager of a commercial company, and was one of the leading members of the Johannesburg branch of the Theosophical Society. Gandhi never became a member of the society, but he sometimes spoke at their meetings. He enjoyed listening to extended readings of the works of Madame Blavatsky and joined in the discussions. In his autobiography he says he engaged in religious discussions with the theosophists every day. Law and theosophy were intimately combined, and nearly all his European friends in Johannesburg came from theosophical circles.

  His closest European friend was a tall, heavily-built, square-headed and rather ponderous architect called Hermann Kallenbach. He was rich, and he liked to wear expensive clothes, and there was a diamond stickpin in his brilliantly colored, neckpiece. With his small brown eyes, heavy mustache, and rather florid complexion, he looked like a successful innkeeper, but in later years when he gave himself up to a life of asceticism he resembled one of the noble attendants of Buddha as they appear in Indian sculpture: heavily brooding, with an air of great refinement. Bom in Poland, brought up in Germany, and taken to South Africa at an early age, he had already made a small fortune designing the houses of the wealthy, and his own house on a hill some distance from Johannesburg was a show place of elegance and beauty. He was unmarried, and had time and money to spare.

  Sonja Schlesin was his first gift to Gandhi, for he had recommended her as a trustworthy and efficient stenographer. In the course of time there would be many more gifts, and ten years later Kallenbach would offer himself as a gift, saying that he wanted nothing better than to go to India and serve him in some lowly capacity. For various reasons this plan miscarried and Kallenbach spent his last years as a successful architect in South Africa.

  Gandhi had an extraordinary faculty for making bondslaves of people met by chance at meetings of the Theosophical Society or in vegetarian restaurants. He met Albert West, who ran a printing shop, in a vegetarian restaurant. West, who was unmarried, came from peasant stock long established in Lincolnshire, and had only a smattering of education. He had begun life as a printer’s devil and was now part-owner of a not very successful printing shop. A kindly, reflective, determined man, always ready to serve in a good cause, he stood a little apart from the rest of Gandhi’s bondslaves. He was not deeply interested in matters of religion and had no desire to save his own soul; he was concerned with helping his fellow men.

  Early in February 1904 plague broke out in the Indian location in Johannesburg. There had been seventeen days of torrential rains, with many streets flooded, and the hospitals were crowded with people suffering from a strange, unidentifiable disease. The Europeans and the Kaffirs were affected, but the Indians, having less resistance, suffered most. The municipal authorities were unable to diagnose the disease, and no proper precautions were taken. When Gandhi learned that twenty-three Indians working in the mines had been stricken, he at once suspected pneumonic plague, sent a hurried note to the medical officer of health and rushed off to see the victims. With the help of a handful of Indian volunteers, he broke open an empty store, converted it into a temporary hospital, and collected the patients from the coolie lines in the Indian location. In this way the worst cases were separated from the rest. After a conference with the town clerk of Johannesburg, he was authorized to make any necessary expenditures. The Indian merchants offered their services. Beds and blankets were procured, and the victims were made as comfortable as possible.

  Pneumonic plague strikes quickly and kills within a few days. The face becomes strangely discolored, the sputum is full of little white specks, and there is the terrible sound of quick labored breathing. It is highly contagious, and there is no known cure. A man who visits a hospital of plague patients is in great danger, and so are the doctors and nurses.

  Gandhi was not concerned with danger. He threw himself into the work with delight, and could be seen bicycling all over Johannesburg on various errands of mercy. Since a larger building soon became necessary, he arranged that the old customs house on the outskirts of the city should be transformed into a temporary hospital, a nurse was brought in from the Johannesburg General Hospital, and proper medical facilities were set up. Meanwhile the plague killed off its victims, and over a hundred died within the first month. Of these, twenty-five were Europeans and fifty-five were Indians.

  Gandhi liked to take his morning and evening meals at a vegetarian restaurant, where he would usually have a word with Albert West, that “sober, god-fearing, humane Englishman.” Learning that Gandhi was working with the plague victims, and not having seen him in his usual place at the vegetarian restaurant, Albert West called at Gandhi’s apartment and offered his services. Gandhi was in no need of Europeans to nurse the Indian miners, but he did need a capable manager with some experience of printing to take charge of his weekly newspaper Indian Opinion, which was then being printed in four l
anguages, Gujarati, Hindi, Tamil and English. The newspaper had been started the previous June, and although Gandhi was not technically the owner or the editor-in-chief he was in fact the sole arbiter of its destinies and the chief editorial writer.

  People who met Gandhi were likely to find their lives violently altered overnight. Albert West was being asked to uproot himself from his printing shop and to take charge of the Indian Opinion press at Durban at a salary of £10 a month. He was also to receive a share of the profits, but these profits never materialized. The working capital of £2,000 was provided by Gandhi during the first year of the newspaper’s existence, and thereafter it usually cost him about £900 a year. Albert West asked for a few hours to ponder the change in his fortunes, but there could be no doubt about the outcome. The next day he left for Durban to take up his new duties, leaving to Gandhi the task of winding up his affairs.

  At the time of the plague, Gandhi had written a strong letter to the press accusing the municipality of negligence in not providing sufficient facilities for the Indian laborers. The letter caught the attention of Henry Polak, an English Jew born in Dover, who was an assistant editor of The Critic, a weekly dealing largely with Transvaal politics. He was a vegetarian, frequented the same restaurant as Gandhi, and one evening, seeing Gandhi at the restaurant, he sent over his card. Gandhi invited him to his table, and they spent the rest of the evening talking. In this way Gandhi acquired a new disciple.

  Henry Polak was then twenty-two, a stocky handsome man with a great capacity for indignation and a desire to do something about the chaotic state of the world. “He had a wonderful faculty of translating into practice anything that appealed to his intellect,” Gandhi wrote of him. He liked the simple things of life, but what he liked most of all was action on behalf of a good cause. The Critic did not give him sufficient scope for action, and he recognized in Gandhi one of those men who create trouble by defying established authority. The three Europeans closest to Gandhi in Johannesburg—Sonja Schlesin, Hermann Kallenbach and Henry Polak— were all Jews, though none of them attended the synagogue or showed the least interest in the Jewish faith.

  Gandhi’s meeting with Henry Polak took place in March 1904, and thereafter they saw a good deal of each other. Gandhi had not yet rented the large house he would acquire in the suburbs, and was living in a small room behind his chambers in Rissik Street. Henry Polak was a little surprised to find a large picture of Christ above Gandhi’s desk. In addition there were portraits of Justice Ranade, an early spokesman for Indian independence, Dadabhai Naoroji and Gokhale. Beside Gandhi’s chair there was a small bookcase, and Henry Polak, who possessed a large appetite for books and was always borrowing them from his friends, observed that there was a Bible, Sir Edwin Arnold’s The Song Celestial, a number of works by Tolstoy, and Max Müller’s India: What Can It Teach Us? Gandhi liked to quote from this book when discussing Indian problems with South African politicians, because it showed the superiority of ancient Indian civilization over the civilization of the West. Henry Polak borrowed the book.

  Their relations were soon very cordial and intimate, and there was scarcely anything they did not discuss. Gandhi had a habit of making a swift intake of breath when searching for a word or an expression. This distracted from his argument, and Polak gently prevailed upon him to try to correct the defect. Within a few days the sibilant sound completely disappeared. Their vegetarianism bound them closely together, and they were always discussing the principles of Adolf Just’s book Return to Nature, which advocated a diet of fruit and nuts, regular evacuation of the bowels, and mud packs. Gandhi suffered from constipation and took Eno’s fruit salts every morning when he woke up, but hoped to abandon the habit. He was addicted to onions, with the result that Polak humorously inaugurated the Amalgamated Society of Onion Eaters, with Gandhi as president, and himself as treasurer presiding over a non-existent treasury. As far as is known, they were the only members of the society.

  During one of their discussions Polak learned that Gandhi had helped to bankroll both of the vegetarian restaurants he frequented, with un-happy results. The owner of one of these restaurants was Miss Ada Bis-sicks, an enterprising theosophist, who had started in a small way and wanted to open a larger restaurant. She appealed to Gandhi for a loan of £1,000, and he advanced the money from a fund entrusted to him by one of his Indian clients. The newly opened vegetarian restaurant failed, the money was never repaid, and Gandhi had to make good the loss to his client. Gandhi described Miss Bissicks as a woman “who was fond of art, extravagant and ignorant of accounts.” When she died a year later there was a brief obituary in Indian Opinion where the best he could say of her was that “in many ways she had much sympathy with the Indians.”

  Indian Opinion had by this time become an expensive hobby, and when Albert West arrived in Durban to become the managing editor, he soon realized that it suffered from the same failing as Miss Bissicks. The accounts were improperly kept, there were unpaid debts and many arrears to be recovered. Everything about the newspaper was in a state of turmoil, and it was unlikely that it would ever make a profit.

  In October 1904 Gandhi decided to go to Durban and investigate the situation. Madanjit Vyavaharik, the editor, was returning to India to resume his career as a schoolmaster, and some important decisions had to be made. Henry Polak accompanied him to the railroad station and watched him settling down in a compartment reserved for colored persons. He had just finished reading John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, and he now handed the book to Gandhi, saying he might like to read it during the twenty-four-hour journey to Durban. It was late in the evening, but before going to sleep Gandhi began reading the book. He did not put it down until he had finished it.

  Unto This Last is a book of about eighty pages originally published in 1860 as a series of articles in the Cornhill Magazine. Ruskin’s chief contention was that theories of social economy always excluded the principal motive that rules a man’s life, his desire to maintain human relationships with his fellow men. Social relations cannot be determined on a basis of expediency; the relationship between the employer and the employee must be a human one deriving from “social affection,” otherwise it is meaningless. Not only money but also an invisible wealth must be paid to the laborer for his hire. “A man’s hand may be full of invisible gold, and the wave of it, or the grasp, shall do more than another’s with a shower of bullion.” Ruskin was demanding that the wealthy should regard themselves as the servants of the poor, abandoning luxury so that the poor might benefit and placing their wealth at the service of the community. The argument led by devious ways to the discovery that the state would eventually have to possess a far greater share of authority over its citizens if all its children were to be properly clothed, fed, housed and educated.

  Though very short, Unto This Last covers a great deal of territory, for it is intended as a preliminary sketch of the entire financial, moral and spiritual economy of a nation. Gandhi may have found some of it heavy reading, for Ruskin discourses on Dante, introduces art criticism at intervals and ponders whether the embalmed and jewel-encrusted body of St. Charles Borromeo in the transept of Milan Cathedral owns the jewels or is owned by them. It is unlikely that Gandhi showed much interest in jeweled saints. What pleased him most of all was Ruskin’s repeated assertion that real wealth was not to be found in banks. “There is no wealth but Life,” Ruskin wrote, printing the words in capitals to emphasize that there could be no debate on this subject: this was the final and irrefutable basis on which any economy must be founded.

  Gandhi took from the book what he wanted to take: the humanity and warmth, the insistence on the dignity of labor, the unreality of money, the sense of dissatisfaction with all existing economies. He wrote later that he understood the teachings of Unto This Last to be:

  1. That the good of the individual is contained in the good of all.

  2. That a lawyers work has the same value as the barber’s inasmuch as all have the same right of earning their liveli
hood from their work.

  3. That a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman is the life worth living.

  He felt that he had long been aware of the first, dimly recognized the second, and had never grasped the third. Although Ruskin never explicitly states that the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman enjoy “the life worth living,” the argument favors the simple laboring communities and Gandhi was not unduly wrenching a new meaning out of Ruskin’s text. Unto This Last is a call to action, and Gandhi was not the first to spring into action on reading it.

  In Durban, at the press of Indian Opinion, he discussed the book with Albert West, having already reached certain conclusions. The press, he felt, should be a kind of village industry. It should not be in Durban, but in the countryside. The workers at the press should grow their own food, fetch their own water, and draw the same wage. A few days later Gandhi paid a flying visit to the small village of Tongaat, thirty miles from Durban, where some relatives of his kept a store. They had a plot of land filled with fruit trees, and it annoyed him to see that his cousins were wasting their time in the store when they could more profitably be working the orchard. He was determined that his new community should have an orchard.

  Returning to Durban, he inserted an advertisement in a newspaper for a piece of land near Durban and near a railroad station. A reply came from a landowner at Phoenix, a sugar-cane center six miles from the sea and two and a half miles from a railroad station. With Albert West, Gandhi immediately went to look at the land. There was a small orchard with orange, mango, guava and mulberry trees; only two or three acres had been under plow; the rest, amounting to about eighty acres, was black soil, as fertile as any to be found in South Africa. There were some disadvantages; a large number of rocky outcrops, and there were many green snakes hanging from the branches of fruit trees near the perennial spring. Altogether there were five or six varieties of snakes, some of them deadly. But there were no tigers, wolves, or jackals, and only an occasional Zulu hut and one or two isolated farms belonging to Indian settlers lay nearby. The earth was full of wealth for any hardworking cultivator, there was no scarcity of rain, and everything he saw was pleasing. He bought the land outright for a thousand pounds and proceeded to put his plans in order.