by Robert Payne
Gandhi was reaping the whirlwind. He had summoned them to resist, and now he was summoning them to submit. Why? Gandhi gave no coherent explanation. He offered to assist the Pathan in obtaining a certificate of registration without submitting to fingerprinting, and said that he himself would cheerfully submit to it. He had been threatened with death, but this was a small matter, to be expected by everyone who enters public service. Then he said:
Death is the appointed end of all life. To die by the hand of a brother rather than by disease or in some other way cannot be for me a matter of sorrow. And if even in such a case I am free from the thoughts of anger or hatred against my assailant, I know that that will redound to my eternal welfare, and even the assailant will later on realize my perfect innocence.
He said these words because death was very close to him on that dark evening. Forty years later, on the eve of his assassination, he would say very similar words.
The Indians sitting in the grounds of the mosque were deeply disturbed. One after another they protested angrily against the agreement. He had built up an army of pickets, encouraged them to harass everyone who attempted to register, promised them liberation from a detested law, and now after a single confrontation with General Smuts he was urging them to register voluntarily. It was not to be wondered at that many Indians believed he had compromised with the government.
During the following days he addressed many meetings of Indians, explaining that the time had come to act in good faith with the government, which must be given the benefit of all doubts. “A Satyagrahi is never afraid of trusting his opponents,” he declared. At the very least there had been created an atmosphere in which they could work with the government in mutual respect. If there were any faults in the agreement, then he alone was responsible; and if violence was to be used against anyone, then let it be first used against him.
He knew on February 10, when the doors of the registration office opened, that he was in danger. Perhaps a fifth of the Indians in Johannesburg regarded him as a traitor to the cause. At a quarter to ten, while walking in the company of Yusuf Mian, Thambi Naidoo, and a few other friends in the direction of the registration office on Van Brandis Street, he was accosted by a powerfully built Pathan called Mir Alam, more than six feet tall, a mattress-maker by trade, and well known in Gandhi’s office, for he had often visited it in connection with his business. They had met a few minutes earlier and exchanged the usual greetings; Gandhi thought he had detected an unfriendly, even an angry, look in his eyes, and told himself to be on guard. It seemed to him that there was something ominous in the Pathan’s behavior, but he could not say precisely why he was afraid.
He was within sight of the registration office when the Pathan accosted him, saying: “Where are you going?”
“I am going,” Gandhi said calmly, “to take out a registration certificate, and I shall be giving my ten finger-prints. If you will come with me, I’ll arrange that you receive a certificate with only two thumb-prints, and then I will take one with all my finger-prints.”
At that moment Mir Alam struck him from behind with a heavy cudgel, the blow just missing his neck and cutting across his face. He dropped to the ground, murmuring: “Hat Ram!” (O God!), those words which every Vaishnava Hindu hopes to have on his lips at the moment of death. In falling, he struck his head against a jagged stone; his cheek, his upper lip and forehead were badly lacerated, and worse still, his eye struck another stone. There were three or four men with Mir Alam, and they continued to beat and kick him as he lay on the ground, and Yusuf Mian and Thambi Naidoo were beaten and kicked when they came to the rescue. There were screams and shouts, the police ran up, the assailants attempted to flee, and soon there was a small crowd gathered around Gandhi. He did not know what was happening, for he lay unconscious in a pool of blood.
The Defiant Prisoner
THE REVEREND JOSEPH DOKE, the forty-five-year-old pastor of the Grahamstown Baptist Church in Johannesburg, was one of those gentle and sweet-tempered men who are totally devoted to their faith and constantly praying that they will be given the strength to do God’s will. On that morning he found himself walking in the center of the city with the obscure notion that God would make some special demand on him, but he could not guess what it was. He passed the registration office on Van Brandis Street, but saw nothing unusual. He went on into Rissik Street and encountered Henry Polak standing outside Gandhi’s office and engaged him in conversation. A moment later a young Indian came running up. He shouted: “Coolie he hit Mr. Gandhi! Come quick!” Then the young Indian went running back toward Van Brandis Street, with Henry Polak and the Reverend Doke running hot on his heels.
When they reached the street they saw hundreds of Indians crowding outside a shopfront. They pushed their way through the crowd and found Gandhi lying in the shopkeeper’s private office, looking half-dead, while a doctor was cleaning the wounds on his face. Thambi Naidoo had received a severe scalp wound, and there was blood all over his collar and coat. Yusuf Mian had a gash across his head. Policemen were asking for details of the assault, and Thambi Naidoo was explaining what had happened. Gandhi had recovered consciousness, but he had still not recovered all his faculties. He was nearly unrecognizable: his upper lip was split open; there was an ugly swelling over one eye, and a jagged wound in the forehead. He had been kicked repeatedly in the ribs, and breathed with difficulty. Someone was saying: “Take him to the hospital.” Reverend Doke, searching for God’s purpose, heard himself saying: “If he would like to come home with me, we shall be glad to have him.” The doctor asked where the home was, and then turned to Gandhi to ask him where he wanted to go. There was no reply. Reverend Doke bent down and said: “Mr. Gandhi, you must decide. Shall it be the hospital, or would you like to come home with me?”
“Yes, please take me to your place,” Gandhi said, and soon he was being driven to a house in Smit Street and carried up to a small upper room, the bedroom of Reverend Doke’s fifteen-year-old son.
Montfort Chamney, the registrar of Asiatics, accompanied Gandhi in the carriage, and as soon as they reached the house Gandhi raised the question of his own registration. He had wanted to be the first, and what chiefly annoyed him was that this privilege had been taken from him.
“What is the hurry?” Mr. Chamney asked. “The doctor will be here soon. Please rest yourself, and all will be well. I will issue certificates to the others and keep your name at the head of the list.”
Gandhi was not satisfied with this arrangement and insisted that the papers be brought to him. Then he asked for a telegraph form and wrote out a telegram to the attorney general, asking that no charges be brought against Mir Alam. The doctor came and stitched up the wounds in his cheek and upper lip. Three teeth had been loosened, and he was in severe pain. The doctor enjoined silence. He sat in the bed, swathed in bandages, forbidden to speak, waiting for Mr. Chamney to return with the papers, and when at last the registrar returned, Gandhi was fingerprinted, although the effort caused him great pain.
His wounds healed so slowly that he grew impatient and wrote out on a slate that he intended to become his own doctor. Would Reverend Doke kindly provide him with some clean mud? Why? He wanted a mud plaster on his face. Any clean uncontaminated earth would do, and accordingly the young Doke was sent out with a spade and bucket to find some suitable earth, and Mrs. Doke applied the mud plaster. When the doctor arrived, he threatened to abandon all medical assistance. Two days after applying the mud plaster, Mrs. Dokes was surprised to see him sitting in an armchair on the veranda, apparently well on the road to recovery.
Gandhi had not been a close friend of Reverend Doke. They had met three or four times in the past, always casually, and there were usually some polite questions about the progress of the movement. What surprised and delighted him was the perfect devotion he received. During the night Reverend Doke would peer into the room at intervals to see that all was well. Mrs. Doke was in charge of bandaging him and washing the bandages. The children moved about the house
on tiptoes. In the morning there would be streams of visitors, and they would be led one by one, very courteously, to the upstairs bedroom. As many as fifty Indians would come in a single morning, and no one complained, except the European parishioners of the Baptist Church, who wondered aloud why Reverend Doke should trouble about “an Indian rebel,” and demanded that he rid himself of Gandhi, otherwise they would refuse to pay his salary. The pastor simply went on doing his duty, not in the least afraid of his parishioners. “My cherisher is God,” he said, “and none may interfere with my religious liberty.”
Gandhi was deeply impressed by him. Never before had he met a Christian who was so humble, so dedicated, and so kindly.
When he recovered he went to stay with Henry Polak, and early in March he took the train to Durban in order to explain the situation in the Transvaal to the Indians of Natal. He did not succeed in convincing everyone that he had acted rightly. At the end of a public meeting in Durban a Pathan came rushing up to the platform with a big stick. The lights went out, someone fired a blank shot from a revolver, friends on the darkened platform formed a circle around Gandhi to protect him, and Parsi Rustomji hurried off to the police station to seek the protection of Superintendent Alexander, who had once before saved Gandhi’s life. On the following day Parsi Rustomji attempted to mediate between Gandhi and the Pathans. The Pathans complained that Gandhi was a traitor to the cause. Gandhi could do nothing to convince them otherwise, and left the same day for Phoenix in a spirit of dejection. The Pathans had denounced him so vehemently that it was thought wise to provide him with a bodyguard.
The Pathans insisted that the government was not to be trusted, for it was bound by no laws except those which it invented. Gandhi argued that he trusted General Smuts because the general had proved to be a man of integrity and courage. Meanwhile the government was determined to prevent a mass influx by Indians and to protect the livelihood of the Europeans against competition from the Indians; and General Smuts was dependent upon the will of the majority. He made promises or half-promises, but could not always keep them. As the summer wore on, it became clear that the government was determined to impose even more restrictive measures and that the Indians were powerless to prevent them. Indian tempers were flaring up. The Pathans sent some hooligans to attack Yusuf Mian, who was beaten unconscious, and Gandhi’s life was again threatened.
To deal with the situation Gandhi developed two techniques. Educated Indians were sent into the streets to court arrest as unlicensed hawkers, and the registration cards voluntarily taken out were solemnly burned. In both cases the intention was to show that the Indians were prepared to fill the jails and to defy the government. It was hoped that the government w6uld seek a compromise. Harilal Gandhi and Thambi Naidoo were among the first to be arrested as unlicensed hawkers.
Harilal Gandhi was now twenty years old, and for some time he had been staying in Phoenix. He had grown into a tall, thin, rather serious youth, well-liked by his friends, totally unlike his father in appearance and manner. He was intelligent, and one of his closest friends wrote later that he had a special sympathy for all suffering things, a trait he had inherited from his grandmother. His education had been neglected except for a brief period when he lived in India as the ward of a leading lawyer in Kathiawar called Haridas Vakatchand Vora, a kindly man who had pleaded against Gandhi’s excommunication after his return from England in 1891. Harilal became a member of the Vora family and was treated as a son by the elderly lawyer, who nursed him when he fell ill in the spring of 1903. Soon Harilal was falling in love with Gulab, the lawyer’s pretty daughter. In the summer of 1906 Gandhi heard rumors that they were already married, and wrote in cold fury to his brother Laxmidas: “It is well if Harilal is married; it is also well if he is not. For the present at any rate I have ceased to think of him as a son.”
The rumor that Harilal had married was premature, and nothing more was heard from him until the summer of the following year, when he announced his marriage. Gandhi refused his blessing. His relations with his eldest son were especially complicated, because he remembered vividly the night when his son was conceived in lust. In Harilal he saw the evidence of his guilt, his wanton misuse of Kasturbai’s body. By his own account he had wasted his physical and spiritual energy on the marriage bed. Since Harilal had been conceived in this way, it was inevitable that he should bear the characteristics of lust and indiscipline, and it was therefore necessary that even after his marriage he should be held on a tight rein. Now, more than ever, Gandhi was determined to dominate his son.
He wrote an angry letter urging Harilal to come to South Africa alone. Harilal refused, but offered to come with his wife. Gandhi’s intention was that Harilal should expiate his sin by offering his life in service to the people. If he had known what was in store for him, Harilal would have been well-advised to remain in Rajkot.
From the beginning Gandhi had his own way. Gulab was deeply in love with Harilal and she had all the qualities necessary to help a moody and sensitive youth, but she was no match for her father-in-law. Gandhi took charge of her diet, told her what to wear, kept her apart from her husband as much as possible, and was clearly distressed when she gave birth to a daughter. Harilal was thrown into the struggle against the government. He spent nearly a year in prison, always worrying about his wife. Sometimes the prison terms were short. In July 1908, for example, he was given a sentence of seven days with hard labor for publicly hawking fruit without a license. He was represented in court by his father, who offered no defense, merely asking the magistrate to hand down a severe sentence, and if a light sentence was imposed, he promised that his son would immediately repeat the offense. Harilal received a light sentence, and as soon as he came out of prison he immediately repeated the offense at his father’s orders and was sentenced to be deported from the Transvaal.
In Gandhi’s eyes Harilal was now behaving with a proper sense of his revolutionary destiny. His task was to court arrest, to be an agitator in the service of the British Indians in South Africa, and never to permit his private life to interfere with his work. There were many, including Harilal’s young wife, who objected strenuously to Gandhi’s use of his son. There was something curiously cold-blooded about a father standing up in court and asking the magistrate to give his son the maximum sentence. To these objectors Gandhi replied in a letter which he published in Indian Opinion:
SIR,
I have received inquiries from many quarters as to why I sent Harilal, my son, to gaol. I give some reasons below:
1. I have advised every Indian to take up hawking. I am afraid I cannot join myself since I am enrolled as an attorney. I therefore thought it right to advise my son to make his rounds as a hawker. I hesitate to ask others to do things which I cannot do myself. I think whatever my son does at my instance can be taken to have been done by me.
2. It will be part of Harilal’s education to go to gaol for the sake of the country.
3. I have always been telling people that Satyagraha is easy for those who can understand it well. When I go to defend those who have been arrested, I do not, strictly speaking, defend them but only send them to gaol. If we have acquired real courage, there should be no need for me to present myself in Court. I thought it only proper that I should make this experiment in the first instance with my son. . . .
I want every Indian to do what Harilal has done. Harilal is only a child. He may have merely deferred to his father’s wishes in acting in this manner. It is essential that every Indian should act on his own as Harilal did at my instance and I wish everyone would do so.
It was a strange letter, for Gandhi seems to have realized dimly that by using his son as though he were no more than a piece on a chessboard, he was playing with fire. The arguments are marshaled like a lawyer’s brief, but they are never completely convincing. When Gandhi said that “Harilal is only a child,” he was speaking of a man who was twenty years old, with a wife and child he adored, and there was another child on the way. On his
own admission Gandhi was exerting the full strength of his own will-power on his son.
Harilal did not go to prison joyfully; he went to prison because he believed it was his duty and because his father insisted upon it. His will had been broken. He went in and out of prison, usually for short terms, but after his arrest in Johannesburg on December 30, 1908, there was no doubt that the government intended to make an example of him. While still under arrest, before he was brought up for trial, he wrote to his father complaining about the separation from his wife. “I am taking a stone in exchange for a pie,” he said, and Gandhi gave him cold comfort. “I have not been able to follow what you say about taking a stone in exchange for a pie,” he replied, and he offered no hope that there would be only a brief separation. “I see that you will have to undergo imprisonment for a long time.”
To Harilal’s wife he offered even less comfort. There would be a long separation, which would probably last until the struggle on behalf of the British Indians was won. Harilal would have to remain in Johannesburg, either in prison or working on behalf of the Satyagraha movement, until there was no longer any need of his services. Gulab must accustom herself to living alone. He wrote to her sternly:
Be sure that if you give up the idea of staying with Harilal for the present, it will be good for both of you. Harilal will grow by staying apart and will perform his other duties. Love for you does not consist only in staying with you. At times one has to live apart just for the sake of love. This is true in your case. From every side, I see that your separation is for your benefit But it can be a source of happiness only if you do not become restless owing to separation.
Gandhi had not wanted the marriage to take place, and now he was ensuring that there should be no marriage. To his son he wrote on the virtues of service to mankind, to his daughter-in-law he wrote on the virtues of continence and fidelity. It is possible that he sincerely believed that he was acting in the best interest of Harilal by sending him to jail, but it is not difficult to discern the unconscious motives. Harilal had been rebellious in the past; now he must be punished. He had disobeyed his father’s instructions about marriage, and now he must be separated from his wife. In this simple way Gandhi succeeded in exerting his parental authority.
