Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  Gandhi had been well received in the Presidency capitals of Bombay and Madras. Calcutta was the capital of the Bengal Presidency, the capital of Britain’s Indian Empire, and in 1896 the most active centre of Indian nationalism. The call for greater representation was heard loudest here. As one who asked for greater rights for Indians overseas, Gandhi expected a sympathetic hearing; instead, he was given the cold shoulder. The editor of a prominent Indian newspaper took him to be ‘a wandering Jew’. Another kept him waiting for an hour; when he was finally called in, Gandhi was told that ‘there is no end to the number of visitors like you. You had better go. I am not disposed to listen to you.’20

  This lack of enthusiasm may have been because there were fewer Bengalis in South Africa. Or it may have been a manifestation of arrogance. Gandhi spent two weeks in Calcutta, staying at the Great Eastern Hotel in the heart of the city, across the street from the Viceroy’s residence. Judging by his account book, he was less busy than in Madras or Bombay. He had his hair cut, his clothes washed, and sent plenty of letters and telegrams. He also went one evening to the theatre, where he watched a Bengali musical. But he was unable to arrange a public meeting.21

  On 5 November, Gandhi wrote to F. S. Taleyarkhan, asking whether he would be ready to come back to Natal with him (the Parsi asked for more time). He planned to sail from Bombay before the end of the month. The Natal Legislature was due to reconvene in January, when it would discuss the amended franchise, the £3 tax, and other matters of interest – or concern – to Indians.

  Gandhi went back now to the west coast, where he attended a public meeting in Poona, lobbied further in Bombay, and prepared his family for the journey to South Africa. He was particularly concerned about the dress his wife and children would wear. He decided it was best they emulate the Parsis, then regarded as the most progressive people in India. The boys were thus fitted out in trousers and a long coat, while Kasturba was made to wear her sari the Parsi way, with an embroidered border, and her sleeves fully covered.22

  Mohandas, Kasturba, Harilal and Manilal Gandhi left Bombay for Durban on 30 November by the SS Courland. With them was Gandhi’s sister’s son Gokuldas, who had been placed in his care. Their passages were free, since the ship was owned by the patriarch’s friend, client and fellow community activist, Dada Abdulla.

  While Gandhi was away, the whites of Natal had become further agitated about the Indian question. In August 1896, the Tongat Sugar Company asked the Government’s help in importing some thirty bricklayers, carpenters, fitters and blacksmiths from India. The company said they would pay three times the wage of an indentured labourer. ‘We are not particular as to whether they are Madras or Calcutta men,’ said the company, ‘but, of course, we want good men.’

  Private entrepreneurs, motivated by production and cost efficencies, wished to import skilled labour from wherever they could find it. This rational, capitalist impulse however fell foul of racial and national prejudices. How dare a Natal entrepreneur transport Asians to do jobs that whites could as well undertake? And so the Tongat Sugar Company’s application was leaked to the press, prompting ‘an indignation meeting of European artisans’ in Durban, worried that Indians would take over trades previously in white hands. The ‘room was packed to overflowing, the entire audience standing wedged in close contact’. A speaker joked that ‘perhaps after the recent ravages of the locusts they [the plantation owners] were going to employ coolie house painters to tip the canes with emerald green (laughter)’. Shouts of ‘Black vermin!’, ‘We won’t have the coolie here!’ and ‘Put a poll tax of £100 on them; that will stop them!’ were heard. The meeting asked the Government to immediately stop the import of Indian artisans into the colony.

  Unnerved by the protest, the company withdrew their application. Writing to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Governor of Natal said the incident was ‘of interest as exemplifying the jealousy with which the competition of Asiatics, except, perhaps in the matter of unskilled labour, is regarded in Natal’.23

  Such was the mood in August. In September, the Natal Mercury published a cable sent by the news agency, Reuters, that summarized Gandhi’s ‘Green Pamphlet’, then just off the press in Rajkot, in this single sentence: ‘A pamphlet published in India declares that the Indians in Natal are robbed and assaulted, and treated like beasts, and are unable to obtain redress’. The newspaper commented that by uttering these ‘infamous falsehoods’ Gandhi had ‘done his countrymen a bad turn’.24

  This bare and not entirely accurate summary of a forty-page booklet prompted a series of verbal attacks on Indians in general and Gandhi in particular. The ‘one great point that the Indians individually and collectively seem to forget,’ wrote the Natal Mercury, ‘is that South Africa was captured from the native inhabitants after long years of fighting, and the expenditure of blood and treasure, not one penny of which was borne by the Indians, nor one drop of Indian blood spilt voluntarily.’25 An editorial writer wrote angrily of ‘the agitator Gandhi, whose slanderous statements made before his fellow-countrymen in Bombay have justly roused the resentment of the European colonist.’26 The attacks on Gandhi in the Durban press prompted his estranged friend, Sheikh Mehtab, to defend him. Having been thrown out of the lawyer’s house, Mehtab now lived by himself in a locality named Stamford Hill. From there he wrote a letter pointing out that Gandhi’s ‘Green Pamphlet’, the subject of outrage in Natal, was merely a reprise of his ‘Open Letter’ and ‘Appeal’, previously published and circulated in the Colony. ‘If all Indians in Natal are robbed, and assaulted, and treated like beasts, and are unable to obtain redress,’ remarked Mehtab to the readers of the Natal Advertiser, ‘you should not be surprised.’ He urged a fresh reading of Gandhi’s earlier pamphlets. ‘If you read those two books again,’ said Mehtab to the Europeans in Natal, ‘you will be able to understand a few subjects very well. If you concede that those two books are right, you should not be surprised that Indians are “shamefully treated”.’27

  In August and September, several ships from India arrived in Durban. They carried indentured labourers contracted for by plantation owners, residents of the colony returning from a visit to their homeland, and some new immigrants. The ships intensified the paranoia and the panic. These landings appeared to be part of an ‘organized effort’, one ‘of those great waves of emigration which sometimes occur, which relieve one country at the time that other countries are peopled’. On 15 October the members of the Natal Government sent an urgent telegram to their Prime Minister, Sir John Robinson, who was then in England: ‘Five hundred free Indians arrived last week. Inrush must be stopped, or all lower branches of trade and farming will pass into Indian hands. Explain to Mr Chamberlain we must follow New South Wales’ (the Australian colony that had banned immigration of coloured peoples).28

  The Ministers were reflecting the sentiments of their electorate. On 26 November a large meeting was held at Durban’s Town Hall, which urged the Government to preserve Natal as an English colony and ‘to maintain the race pure and undefiled’ by putting an end to Indian immigration. The hall was packed, with many ladies also in attendance. One speaker, a Mr O’Hea, said

  It was sad to see the flood-gates opened for the entrance to this Colony of these dark and dismal people, who were absolutely useless to the community. They were useless to the butcher, for they did not eat meat (laughter); they were useless to the baker, for they only ate rice (laughter) – the profits on the growth of which went to India, and the profits on the introduction went to the [Indian ship-owners] Dada Abdoolas and Moosas (loud laughter). They were useless to the shoemaker, for they went bare-footed, and they were useless to the tailor because (saving the presence of the ladies) they did not require any of the niceties of the sartorial art (laughter) to produce their unmentionables.29

  In the next fortnight, three further meetings were held to oppose Indian immigration. The chairman of the Society of Carpenters and Joiners said that at the time of the next election, members ‘
should vote straight for the candidate who would do his utmost to stop the invasion of the Asiatics’. To the argument that Indians were British subjects, the speaker said

  he should like to know how long the sentiment of British subjects would stand supposing these Asiatics were brought into Lancashire to weave cotton, or into Yorkshire to weave cloth. The sentiment of British subject would be gone in 24 hours – (applause) – and the Government would very soon be compelled to find a method to exclude these Asiatics from England, and if they had to find a way, surely the Colony of Natal could also find a way to exclude them.30

  In the third week of December 1896, the SS Courland arrived off the coast of Durban. With it was another ship, the SS Naderi, also coming from India. Between them, the vessels had some 600 Indians on board, Mohandas Gandhi and his family among them. The ships were asked to wait out at sea while the passengers were examined by doctors. There had been an outbreak of plague in the Bombay Presidency, and the authorities were concerned the migrants might be infected with the disease. The etiology of plague was imperfectly understood; it was not yet established that rats and fleas were the disease’s main carriers. Some doctors, and more ordinary folk, feared that it could spread through human contact.31

  As the ships lay moored off the Natal coast, the twelfth annual meeting of the Indian National Congress convened in Calcutta. Gandhi was an absent presence, with his recent lobbying in India informing its deliberations. Among the twenty-four resolutions passed by the Congress was one recording a ‘most solemn protest against the disabilities imposed on Indians in South Africa, and the invidious and humiliating distinctions made between them and European settlers’. Moving the resolution, G. Parameshvaram Pillai of Madras observed that while in India, Indians could become members of the Legislative Council, and in England they could win election to the House of Commons, in Natal

  we are driven out of tramcars, we are pushed off footpaths, we are kept out of hotels, we are refused the benefit of the public baths, we are spat upon, we are hissed, we are cursed, we are abused, and we are subjected to a variety of other indignities which no human being can patiently endure.32

  On the other side of the Indian Ocean, the mood was very different. Gandhi had become a hate-figure among the whites of Natal, on account of what he was supposed to have said in his travels in India. On 23 December, the Natal Advertiser printed a plea urging swift action against the ‘great Gandhi [who] has arrived at the head of the advanced guard of the Indian army of invasion – the army that is to dispossess us of our country and our homes … We must be up and doing, and make our arrangements so as to be able to give the invaders a fitting reception.’33

  A week later, the same newspaper revealed the plan of action decided upon by the hostile whites of Durban. On the day the Indians disembarked, they would be met at the port by a mass of Europeans, formed in ‘human lines three or four deep’ which, ‘with locked hands and arms’, would ‘offer a complete bar to the immigrants’.34

  The anger against Gandhi and company was compounded by a paranoia about the germs they allegedly carried. The doctors who came aboard the two ships said they could not yet allow them to land; in their view, plague germs took three weeks to incubate, and it was better to wait and watch. The ships’ captains were instructed to have the decks washed and cleaned daily with a mixture of water and carbolic acid. Sulphur fires were kept burning day and night to cleanse the passengers and their possessions of any remnants of the dreaded germs.35

  A rumour reached Durban that the Indians on board would sue the Government of Natal for illegal detention. Swallowing the rumour whole, a local newspaper concluded that Gandhi’s

  keen legal instincts have scented a splendid brief to occupy himself immediately on his release from the ‘durance vile’ of the quarantine and purifying effects of the carbolic bath. The large sum of money said to have been subscribed for the purpose would naturally go to Mr Gandhi whether the case was won or lost, and nothing in fact could suit the gentleman better than such an interesting case to devote his attention to immediately he got on shore.36

  This representation of Gandhi as a malevolent, money-grubbing lawyer further consolidated the anti-Indian sentiments on shore. On 4 January 1897, some 1,500 whites gathered for a meeting in Durban’s Market Square. As the chairman, a certain Harry Sparks – the owner of a butcher’s shop – moved into his chair, it began to rain. He decided to shift the meeting to the Town Hall nearby. Thereupon

  a unanimous and spontaneous move was made in the direction of the municipal hall, the verandahs and space immediately around the main entrance being quickly thronged with a surging crowd of interested and enthusiastic burgesses. Some little time elapsed before the gates were opened, but in the meantime the lights were switched on, and in a few minutes after the gates were thrown open the central hall was thronged from floor to ceiling. The audience when Mr Sparks resumed the chair must have numbered 2,000 … 37

  The meeting called upon the Government to send the two ships back to India, and to disallow all Indians other than indentured labourers from entering Natal. A voice in the crowd shouted: ‘Let them take Gandhi with them!’ The main speaker, a Dr McKenzie,

  relieved himself freely of his opinion about the mischievous Mr Gandhi … [H]e said Mr Gandhi had gone away to drag our reputation in the gutters of India, and he had painted Natal as black and filthy as his own skin … Mr Gandhi had come to the colony to take everything that was fair and good, and he had gone out of it to blackguard the hospitality with which he had been indulged. They would teach Mr Gandhi that they read from his actions that he was not satisfied with what they had given him and wanted something more. They would give him something more.

  The ships carrying Indians to Durban, alleged Dr McKenzie, were part of a larger conspiracy to overturn the racial order in Natal.

  It was the intention of these facile and delicate creatures to make themselves proprietors of the only thing that the rulers of this country had withheld from them – the franchise. It was their intention to put themselves in parliament and legislate for the Europeans; to take over the household management, and put the Europeans in the kitchen.38

  Three days later the whites of Durban held another meeting. Dr McKenzie was once more the lead speaker. ‘The Indian Ocean was the proper place for these Indians (applause),’he began. The whites ‘were not going to dispute their right to the water there; but they must be careful that they did not give them the right to the land adjoining that ocean (applause).’39 This meeting, even bigger and more passionate than the last, demonstrated (according to the Natal Mercury) that

  Mr Gandhi has made a big mistake in imagining that the Europeans of Natal would sit still while he organised an independent emigration agency in India to land his countrymen here at the rate of from 1,000 to 2,000 per month … Despite his cleverness, [Gandhi] has made a sorry mistake … Our forefathers won this country at the point of the sword, and left us the country as our birthright and heritage. That birthright we have to hand down as it was handed down to us.’40

  A phrase, and headline, much favoured by the Natal papers in the last weeks of 1896 was ‘Asiatic invasion’. The colonists feared that the few hundred passengers waiting off the coast were the beginnings of large-scale immigration that would decisively alter the demographic profile of Natal. One man was presumed to be at the head of the horde: the lawyer, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

  Gandhi was reading the Natal newspapers, which came aboard daily, courtesy of the supply boats. He also got news of the mood on shore from letters sent by friends. An English lawyer wrote to Gandhi on 8 January that if he decided to come off the boat he would ‘be roughly handled’. In fact ‘the public feeling against yourself, and the landing of the free Indians … is so great that I begin to doubt if you will make it ashore.’ In Gandhi’s absence, the Englishman was assisting his clients, and asked him to send a cheque now to cover his fees. For it seemed quite likely that the Naderi and the Courland would be forced to r
eturn to Bombay with their passengers, who were so unwelcome in Natal.41

  The ships had been moored offshore for some twenty days. In Durban, a ‘European Protection Association’ was formed to resist the Asiatic invasion. The Association’s first meeting was held on 10 January. When one speaker said that the ‘mouthpiece’ of the Indians ‘was a gentleman of the name of Ghandhi [sic]’, a voice from the crowd interjected: ‘Don’t say a gentleman’. A rumour spread that Gandhi was cowed by the protests; one newspaper even claiming that ‘some of the officials who visited the vessels this morning report that Mr Gandhi and the Indians on board are in a state of “funk”, and several were pleading to be taken back to India direct.’

  On 11 January, a reporter of the Natal Advertiser went on board the SS Naderi to interview the captain. There were, he found, 356 passengers on board, including ‘infants in arms’; and contrary to the fears on shore, there were no artisans among them. To the question, ‘How do the passengers look upon Gandhi?’ the captain answered: ‘There is not a man on board these ships who knew Gandhi until they landed here. I never heard of him either, and only read his pamphlet during my quarantine.’ 42

  The next day the reporter obtained an interview with Gandhi himself. The lawyer refuted the rumours that there were blacksmiths and carpenters on board, and that he was importing a printing press. Most of the passengers were Natal residents, returning after a holiday in India. The newcomers were traders, shopkeeper’s assistants, and hawkers. And he had ‘absolutely nothing whatever to do’ with bringing these other passengers to Natal.

  Gandhi drew attention to the wider Imperial dimensions of the controversy. ‘Every Britisher is agreed,’ he remarked,

  that the glory of the British Empire depends on the retention of the Indian Empire and on the face of this, it looks very unpatriotic of the Colonists of Natal, whose prosperity depends not a little on the introduction of the Indians, to so vigorously protest against the introduction of free Indians. The policy of exclusion is obsolete, and Colonists should admit Indians to the franchise and, at the same time, in points in which they are not fully civilized, Colonists should help them to become more civilized. That, I certainly think, should be the policy followed throughout the Colonies, if all the parts of the British Empire are to remain in harmony.