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

by Robert Payne

  There were no buildings on the farm, and so the first matter of business was to procure building material. Parsi Rustomji, the ever-willing philanthropist, sent some corrugated iron sheets from a disassembled warehouse, and a shed went up. Some veterans from the ambulance unit in the Boer War helped Gandhi to build it, and soon there was a handsome structure seventy-five feet long and fifty feet wide to house the printing press. The workers lived under canvas, and complained that there were far too many snakes. Gandhi was not inclined to take snakes seriously. Snakes in his view were kindly creatures, and if you cleared the wild grass and took proper precautions you were unlikely to be bitten.

  Once the shed was up, houses could be built, the land cultivated, a school opened, the roads mapped out, the irrigation ditches dug. Durban was fourteen miles away, and there was no difficulty in bringing up supplies. Milk came from Durban, though an Indian farmer who lived a few miles away could usually be relied upon to provide a few pints of milk when supplies ran out. By train came the oil-engine and the oil to run the printing press, and all the cases of type, English, Hindi, Gujarati and Tamil. Altogether there were twelve compositors, all sitting at their stools in the well-ventilated and well-lit press. There might be turmoil everywhere else, but Gandhi was determined that the press should function in an orderly fashion. There were a few Zulu servants, two or three Tamils, two or three Hindi-speaking Indians, and about half a dozen Gujaratis, many of them distant relations of Gandhi. They all worked at the press under the guidance of Albert West. Gandhi remained in Johannesburg, but from time to time he would descend upon Phoenix like a baronial lord descending upon his country estate.

  No one had any illusions about who owned the press and the farm. The authoritarian principle was accepted without debate, and Gandhi ruled over the Phoenix settlement like a benevolent despot. The settlers were divided into two classes—the “schemers” and the paid workers. The “schemers” were those who had a personal stake in the enterprise, and they were granted an acre or more of the estate together with a small house which they would pay for when they could, and in addition they drew £3 from Indian Opinion, with the right to divide the profits. The rest were simply paid for their labor.

  Soon Harilal, Gandhi’s eldest son, now a boy of sixteen, came from India and began to live at Phoenix. His cousin, Gokuldas, the only son of Gandhi’s widowed sister, also came to live there. Gokuldas was one of those bright and eager young men who seemed destined for a career of service, and his death four years later a few days after his marriage plunged Gandhi into a violent grief. That someone so young and so promising should be snatched away left him with a strange desire to die and to be born again in a purer form. For many weeks he ached with the misery of Gokuldas’s death, and many years later he would find himself talking about it.

  Meanwhile the owner of Phoenix Farm still spent most of his time in Johannesburg as a practicing lawyer. He was a rich man, earning between £4,000 and £5,000 a year, with a large eight-room house in the suburbs. There was a large garden behind the house with a strip of lawn in front. As usual, he had some of his law clerks living with him. Early in 1905 his wife and three younger sons came to join him. Manilal was ten, Ramdas was eight, Devadas was five. All except Kasturbai wore European clothes. Gandhi wore a lounge suit with a faint blue stripe, a stiff collar and tie, a black turban, and he was partial to the latest fashion in shoes and socks.

  From time to time he would attempt to introduce elements of simplicity into a vastly complicated life. So it came about that every morning the members of the household would be summoned to grind the wheat which the servants would later make into bread. Calisthenics were introduced, and for a while everyone was compelled to take up skipping as a form of exercise. His days were carefully organized. At seven thirty in the morning he would lead his bicycle down the driveway and cycle to his office in the center of town, a journey of about six miles. After reading his morning mail, he would dictate letters to Sonja Schlesin until ten thirty, when he would walk across the street to the lawcourts. At one o’clock he would be found in his favorite seat at a vegetarian restaurant, accompanied by his law clerks. They would have a leisurely lunch, and he would leave the office after five o’clock, and was home by seven. There would be a vegetarian dinner, with lentils, nut butter and home-baked bread followed by a dessert of raw fruit or milk pudding topped off with cereal coffee or lemonade. Afterward there would be the recitation of the Bhagavad Gita with Henry Polak, the perennial house guest, reading the appropriate passages in Sir Edwin Arnold’s The Song Celestial. These evening prayer meetings were also conducted at Phoenix Farm.

  Gandhi’s life swung between the two poles of the law office and the communal farm. Polak, too, found himself caught up between the desire to become a lawyer and the desire to manage the farm, and after a brief spell at Phoenix he returned to Johannesburg and became articled to Gandhi. Financially the law was more rewarding. ‘Gandhi, troubled by his newfound wealth, would sometimes dream of abandoning his law practice to spend the remaining years of his life at Phoenix, earning his livelihood by manual work, tending the sick, shepherding his flock and editing Indian Opinion: He enjoyed managing the lives of others. Henry Polak and Albert West were commanded to find wives and to settle down in comfortable domesticity. Gandhi had not yet embraced the idea of brahmacharya, or perfect chastity. He wanted his friends to marry and to have children, and he was happy in his own family life. So Albert West went off to England in the hope of finding a wife and returned with both a wife and a mother-in-law, the widow of a shoemaker. Henry Polak had long been engaged to a young woman in England and he now summoned her to South Africa. Millie Graham arrived at the railroad station in Johannes-burg at six o’clock in the morning of December 30,1905, and before noon she was married and by the afternoon she was established in Gandhi’s suburban house as governess to his children. She taught them simple English, reading, writing, arithmetic, and composition, and sometimes wondered how they had picked up the little education they possessed. There were now nine people living in the large house in the suburbs.

  Rich, influential, with thirty or forty people doing his bidding at Phoenix, in his law office and in his house, Gandhi was living the settled life of a patriarch. Outwardly he gave the impression of a man who has found himself and has no intention of changing. Inwardly he was seething with discontent. He had been writing petitions to the government on behalf of the Indians in an endless stream; the government paid no attention to them. He had been writing editorials in Indian Opinion every week, and their effect was negligible. He was making speeches which were always well attended, but no one acted on the speeches. He wanted action, but there was no action. He wanted the laws changed, but the legislators were determined not to change them or to make them even more unpalatable. He wanted the Indians to acquire more sanitary habits, but they remained obstinately unsanitary. Above all he wanted to demonstrate to the government that the Indians were law-abiding and patriotic servants of the Crown, deserving to be integrated into the South African community, and he was continually being reminded that their virtues made it necessary for the government to impose restrictive laws on them. The lawyer was successful; the public figure had been proved a failure. He had achieved a certain notoriety without benefiting the Indians. Sometimes, in spite of wealth and position, he hungered for poverty and obscurity.

  One day he read in the newspapers that the Zulus had come out in open rebellion in Natal. The news made little impression on him. For many weeks he continued his work at the law courts. Suddenly, at the beginning of summer, he decided to leave Johannesburg and settle in Natal, where he hoped to rally the Indians against the Zulus. He gave his landlord a month’s notice and then left the large suburban house, never to return to it. He retained his law office in Johannesburg, for he had a large practice and nothing would be gained by putting an end to it. He had a trained staff, who could carry on the business in his absence. He took his family to Phoenix and then hurried off to Durban to
offer his services to the government and to raise money for the war effort from the rich Indian merchants. He had acted in exactly the same way during the Boer War, and now the pattern was being repeated.

  It was a small brush-fire war against an unarmed people. There were raids into Zulu territory, the kraals were set on fire, and within a period of four or five months some 3,500 Zulus were killed. During the course of the war Gandhi became a sergeant major and made a decision which profoundly altered the course of his life.

  Sergeant Major Gandhi

  THE ZULUS of northeastern Natal were a proud and handsome people who had fought many battles against the Boers and the British. They were muscular and long-limbed, taller than most of the natives of South Africa, with finely carved features. They were farmers, raisers of cattle, smelters of iron, and they possessed an extensive poetry and folklore. Under their chieftains Chaaka and Cetewayo they had forged a united nation. Armed only with assegais and knobkerries, they had fought against howitzers and machine guns. Defeated by an army under Lord Chelmsford in the battle of Ulundi in the summer of 1879, they submitted to British rule. In 1897 British government gave the administration of Zululand to the government of Natal.

  The Zulus are a warlike people and they did not take easily to defeat. They lived quietly in their kraals, waiting for a new leader to arise and lead them against the hated conquerors. Zulu boys took service in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Durban; others worked in the mines. They had their own secret societies, vowed to exterminate the conquerors, but they were hopelessly outnumbered. In the early months of 1906 the long-simmering revolt broke out.

  From his law office in Johannesburg Gandhi viewed the Zulu rebellion with detachment. He knew very little about them. During a visit to Phoenix, he discovered that the engines delivering power to the printing press had failed. He therefore decided to employ donkeys to turn the handles of the presses, but the donkeys proved to be unreliable. He therefore sent a messenger to the Zulu kraal a few miles away, asking for the services of four strong Zulu girls on printing day. This was his only contact with the Zulus, who lived in a world apart and spoke a language unintelligible to him.

  When the Zulu rebellion broke out, he was in a quandary. “I bore no grudge against the Zulus, they had harmed no Indian,” he wrote. “I had doubts about the ‘rebellion’ itself. But I then believed that the British Empire existed for the welfare of the world. A genuine sense of loyalty prevented me from even wishing ill to the Empire. The rightness or otherwise of the ‘rebellion’ was therefore not likely to affect my decision.” Gandhi decided to throw the full force of Indian public opinion on the side of the Natal government.

  In his articles in Indian Opinion Gandhi called upon the Indians to fight on the side of the British. He pointed out that the Europeans had always distrusted the fighting prowess of the Indians in Natal; at the first sign of danger they would desert their posts and make their way back to India. “We cannot meet this charge with a written rejoinder,” he wrote. “There is but one way of disproving it—the way of action.” He asked the Indians to join the Volunteer Corps. They should not be afraid of war. Wars are relatively harmless. There was nothing to fear, and everyone at the front was perfectly happy.

  Gandhi’s ideas about war were to change radically, but he never lost his respect for the warrior. Although a pacifist by religion, he delighted in combat and especially admired the monastic discipline of the front-line soldier. Here is Gandhi appealing to the Indians to wage war against the Zulus in the summer of 1906:

  Those who can take care of themselves and lead regular lives at the front can live in health and happiness. The training such men receive cannot be had elsewhere, that is, if they do not go to the front only to prove their valour or quench their thirst for blood. A man going to the battle front has to train himself to endure severe hardship. He is obliged to cultivate the habit of living in comradeship with large numbers of men. He easily learns to make do with simple food. He is required to keep regular hours. He forms the habit of obeying his superiors orders promptly and without argument. He also learns to discipline the movement of his limbs. And he has also to learn how to live in limited space according to the maxims of health. Instances are known of unruly and wayward men who went to the front and returned reformed and able fully to control both their mind and their body.

  For the Indian community, going to the battlefield should be an easy matter; for, whether Muslims or Hindus, we are men with profound faith in God. We have a greater sense of duty, and it should therefore be easier for us to volunteer. We are not overcome by fear when hundreds of thousands of men die of famine or plague in our country. What is more, when we are told of our duty, we continue to be indifferent, keep our houses dirty, lie hugging our hoarded wealth. Thus we lead a wretched life acquiescing in a long tormented process ending in death.

  Why, then, should we fear the death that may perhaps overtake us on the battlefield? We have to learn much from what the whites are doing in Natal. There is hardly any family from which someone has not gone to fight the Kaffir rebels. Following their example, we should steel our hearts and take courage. Now is the time when the leading whites want us to take this step; if we let go this opportunity, we shall repent later. We therefore urge all Indian leaders to do their duty to the best of their ability.

  A man who assumes the responsibility of sending others to war while not himself prepared to fight is in an invidious position, which he can only defend by appealing to expediency. Gandhi desperately wanted to convince the authorities that the Indians in South Africa were patriotic citizens deserving of sympathetic treatment from the government. They could prove their patriotism by killing Zulus.

  But there was part of Gandhi’s argument that was not concerned with expediency; it derived from a nihilistic rage against the Indians, their lethargy, their indifference to duty, their squalid houses, their hoarded wealth, and their acquiescence to poverty and sickness. He contrasts their disorderly and undisciplined lives with the orderly, disciplined lives of the front-line soldiers, and he was evidently thinking of the English troops he saw during the Boer War. Since the lives of the Indians were brutish and short, why should they fear bullets and bayonets? He added that during the Crimean War “fewer men died from bayonet or bullet wounds than from sheer carelessness or perverse living.” In the attack on Ladysmith more men died of fever than from bullets.

  In this strange and unpleasant argument, which ran counter to his religious beliefs, Gandhi was clearly on the defensive, seeking to justify himself by a perverse logic. He was a lawyer, and these were lawyer’s arguments. It is simply not true that the front-line soldier lives “in health and happiness,” and it was equally untrue that “fewer men died from bayonet or bullet wounds than from sheer carelessness or perverse living” in the Crimean War. He was a deeply troubled man, and these arguments were designed to protect his own wounds from being touched. He was far more vulnerable than he knew. Something was happening deep inside him which frightened him, and he would go to extraordinary lengths to stifle the accusing voices that rose from the deep recesses of his being.

  Gandhi’s actions during the Boer War were considerably less demonstrative than during the Zulu rebellion. During the Boer War he called upon the Indians to volunteer, but he did so quietly and rather helplessly, knowing that they would not be accepted except as stretcher-bearers. In the days of the Zulu rebellion he called for recruits, and seems to have regarded service as stretcher-bearers as a last resort. He was unable to convince the government that the Indians would make good recruits, and he contented himself with raising a very small ambulance corps consisting of twenty men, about a third of them being Tamils, a third Muslims, and the rest Gujaratis and men from North India. They solemnly swore an oath of allegiance to King Edward VII, his heirs and successors, and agreed to terms of service which included rations, uniform, equipment and one shilling and sixpence a day. The equipment consisted largely of stretchers made in Japan.

  Gandh
i was given the rank of Sergeant Major. There were three sergeants, one corporal, and fifteen privates under him. They were photographed in their field uniforms, looking strangely ill at ease. The uniforms were too large for them, and they were made uncomfortable by their heavy boots and puttees.

  On June 22, 1906, they were sent by train to Stanger, to join a column under Colonel Arnott. There was no sign of any Zulus, and the ambulance corps was kept busy tending the troopers who suffered from malaria or who had been in accidents. There were no tents, and they slept that night on the ground, wrapped in their overcoats. It was a cold night, but Gandhi could congratulate himself that he was able to feed his men well before they went to sleep. Substantial rations of bread, sugar, tea, coffee, butter, salt, jam, cheese, pepper, mealies, rice and lentils were provided from the camp canteen. In the notes written for Indian Opinion, which were published as coming from “Our special correspondent at the Front,” Gandhi gave the exact amount of bread, sugar, tea, etc., received by his men. Each received a pound of bread or biscuits, five ounces of sugar, a quarter ounce of tea. He had time to write such things, for there was no visible front and very little for his men to do.

  On the following day they began to march in full kit to Mapumulo. It was another uneventful journey, interrupted by a raid on an orchard and later by the happy discovery that they were permitted to carry the stretchers and the medicine chests in the wagons. At Mapumulo, after an uphill journey of two days, they met their first Zulus. They were not warriors armed with assegais, but poor peasants and farmers rounded up by the troops and thrown into a stockade; they bore the marks of severe beatings. They had not been beaten for any crimes they had committed, but as a warning not to take part in any future rebellions. They lay in the stockade in filth and misery, lying in their own blood, and since no English doctor would tend their wounds, this task was given to the Indians. An improvised hospital was set up and soon Gandhi and the rest were swabbing the wounds of the Zulus with disinfectant and then bandaging them, while the British troops who had administered the beatings jeered from behind the railings of the stockade. The general announced that all the Zulus were suspects: no mercy was shown to them.