Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  On 19 January 1902, Gandhi was the main speaker at a meeting in the Albert Hall, off College Street in north Calcutta. He was introduced by Gokhale, who praised his ‘ability, earnestness and tact’, and professed a ‘profound admiration’ for his work in South Africa. He said that ‘Mr Gandhi was a man made of the stuff of which heroes are made.’ If ‘Mr Gandhi settled down in this country, it was the duty of all earnest workers to place him where he deserved to be, namely, at their head’.60

  Gandhi spoke on successive weeks at the Albert Hall. One talk focused on the handicaps of Indians in South Africa. Another spoke of the Anglo-Boer War and of the Indian contribution to it. In peacetime the colonist was rude and hostile, but while at war, recalled Gandhi, the British soldier was ‘altogether loveable. He mixed with us and the men freely. He often shared with us his luxuries whenever there were any to be had.’ From his time on the battlefield Gandhi had arrived at this intriguing, complicated, conclusion: ‘As a Hindu, I do not believe in war, but if anything can even partially reconcile me to it, it was the rich experience we gained at the front.’61

  In the last week of January, Gandhi took a ship from Calcutta to Rangoon. On board he wrote a letter of thanks to Gokhale. ‘I cannot easily forget how anxious you were to wipe out the distance that should exist between you and me,’ he remarked. Then he apologized for raising the question of Gokhale’s mode of transport. He had ‘no right to question your taste on Monday evening … Had I known that I would cause you thereby the pain I did cause, I should certainly have never taken the liberty.’ He added a further healing touch, by saying that ‘your great work in the cause of education has admirers even on board this little vessel.’62

  Gandhi had gone to Rangoon to see his old friend Pranjivan Mehta. His medical degree notwithstanding, Mehta had joined the family jewellery business, opening a profitable branch in Burma and establishing himself as a prominent member of the Indian diaspora. From their London days he had been a confidant of Gandhi’s. They corresponded regularly, and Mehta had visited the Gandhis in Durban in 1898. We have no record of their conversations in Rangoon, which must have focused on the lawyer’s plan of work in India.

  While in Calcutta, Gandhi had written to one of his nephews, Chhaganlal, asking him to supervise his children’s education. He wanted the boys to be read stories from the Kavyadohan, a Gujarati compilation of Hindu myths and legends, since ‘there isn’t so much moral to be drawn from the works of the English poets as from our old story-poems.’ The nephew, himself in his early twenties, was asked to ‘see that no bad habits of any kind are picked up by the boys. Mould them in such a way that they always have deep love for truth.’63

  Gandhi returned to Rajkot in early February. He chose to send his eldest son, Harilal, to a boarding school in the nearby town of Gondal. Chhaganlal taught the other boys, while Gandhi sought to establish a law practice.64 He stayed in his parents’ old house, which still followed the regimen laid down by his mother, of prayers and hymns in the morning and evening. In between, Gandhi attended to his children, went for walks, and looked for clients.

  The intrigues in Porbandar were now a distant memory; a decade after the palace break-in in which his brother was an accomplice, there was no lingering shadow of suspicion over this Gandhi from Kathiawar. Even so, he found it hard to establish a legal practice in Rajkot. In several months he acquired only three briefs. One took him to Veraval, where a plague was raging, so the court hearing was held in open fields outside the town. The experience encouraged Gandhi to raise funds for the sick. He got Pranjivan Mehta to write a handbook on the treatment of plague victims and distributed it to volunteers.

  Gandhi also busied himself with work related to South Africa. He wrote articles for the papers, and sent copies of petitions to public men around India. The costs were paid by the Natal Indian Congress, which granted him an allowance to engage a clerk who took dictation and helped with packing and posting.65

  The briefs, however, still would not come. Mohandas Gandhi was now a failed lawyer in Rajkot, where his father had once been, as Diwan, the second most important man in town. In July 1902, he moved to Bombay, to make one more attempt at establishing himself in the High Court. He rented an office, and some rooms in Girgaum for the family. Later, they shifted to a larger house in the northern suburb of Santa Cruz.

  Meanwhile, in South Africa, the last roaming bands of Boers had surrendered. On the last day of May 1902 the warring parties had signed a treaty at Vereeniging, by which the Boers recognized the British monarch as their sovereign. In exchange, the British agreed that Dutch would continue as the language of choice in the schools and courts of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The two former republics would be ‘Crown colonies’, run directly from London. In time they would be granted their own legislatures. The treaty however noted that ‘the question of granting franchises to natives will not be decided until after the introduction of self-government.’66 With this last clause, it became clear that (in the words of a later historian) Vereeniging was in essence ‘a tribal peace, written and subscribed to in European interests alone’.67

  That all of South Africa was now under British control was a source of gratification to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain. He planned a trip to the new dominions in the New Year. Hearing of this, the Natal Indian Congress wrote to Gandhi asking him to return. He was needed to secure their rights under the new dispensation. Gandhi agreed at once.

  In early November, Gandhi wrote to a friend that he hadn’t decided whether Kasturba would accompany him. Even if she did, he would leave Harilal and Manilal behind in Rajkot, where they would study in his old school, while ‘a trustworthy, paid man … would look after their education’. The friend, a former fellow student in London who was now a successful barrister in Rajkot, was asked to allow the boys the use of his tennis court.68

  In the event, Kasturba and the boys decided to stay in Bombay. Harilal was in boarding school in Gondal, while the other boys were in the care of their mother and their elder cousin Chhaganlal.69 As in 1893, this time too Gandhi would travel alone in search of better prospects in South Africa.

  In his autobiography, Gandhi is enigmatic about why he chose to go back a year after he had left Durban, as he thought (and hoped) at the time, for good. He writes that he was ‘settling down as I had intended’ in Bombay, and ‘felt that before long I should secure work in the High Court’. But ‘God has never allowed any of my own plans to stand. He has disposed of them in His own way.’70

  Memoirs are notoriously misleading, not least because memories are notoriously fallible. When he wrote his autobiography in the 1920s, Gandhi was a great Indian nationalist, the symbol of a country struggling for political freedom. How to explain to himself or to his readers why, back in 1902, he had left the motherland once more? In truth, the decision to leave for South Africa was mandated not by the mysterious ways of fate, but by the mundane facts of failure. Writing to a friend in August 1902, Gandhi noted that he was ‘free to lounge about the High Court letting the Solicitors know of an addition to the ranks of the briefless ones’. The response from the political class was likewise dispiriting; when he went to Pherozeshah Mehta for advice, the statesman ‘gave me a curse which as he said might prove a blessing. He thought, contrary to my expectations, that I would be foolishly wasting away in Bombay my small savings from Natal.’71

  Gandhi was unable to break into the ranks of well-established lawyers in the High Court. Those his age, who had been called to the Bar in the early 1890s, had a decade of experience behind them. The man from Rajkot via Durban was, in professional and social terms, an outsider. In any case, the wire from Natal was not a summons but an invitation. If the offer attracted Gandhi, it may have been because in Bombay he was a still unsuccessful lawyer, whereas in South Africa he had loyal and admiring clients.

  7

  White Against Brown

  Gandhi sailed from Bombay in the last week of November 1902. With him were his n
ephews Maganlal and Anandlal, who had decided to try their luck in South Africa. Their ship reached Durban in the third week of December. The boys proceeded to the village of Tongat, where they planned to open a shop. Their uncle, meanwhile, placed himself at the service of the community. The Mayor of Durban had fixed an appointment for an Indian delegation to meet Joseph Chamberlain – the visiting Secretary of State for the Colonies – on the afternoon of 26 December. Gandhi asked for, and received, a day’s postponement, on the grounds that the 26th was a Friday, ‘the very time for prayer which most of the [Muslim] gentlemen, who are to form the deputation, would be quite unable to forgo’.1

  At the meeting on the 27th, Chamberlain was presented with a petition asking for, among other things, the relaxation of the licensing laws in Natal and the provision of schools for Indian children. Chamberlain then took a train inland to Johannesburg, with Gandhi following some days later. The Indians in the Transvaal had asked that, since they had for some years past been ‘guided by the advice of Advocate M. K. Gandhi’, he also come along with them to meet the dignitary. The government wrote back stiffly that ‘the deputation will consist of not more than 15 people, of whom Mr Gandhi cannot be one as he is not a resident of the Transvaal.’2

  The merchants could not take their man along, but they could at least present to Chamberlain the petition he had drafted on their behalf. This asked that Indians be allowed to own property and trade anywhere, instead of being restricted to specific locations. It claimed that Indians in the Transvaal were ‘worse [off] than before’ the Anglo-Boer War. The next week, Gandhi posted a petition to his Indian friends in Cape Town, which they would present to Chamberlain when he visited that city. Thus, within two weeks of his return to South Africa, Gandhi had written three different petitions on behalf of his countrymen, dealing with their predicament in three different provinces. However, he was less than hopeful of their impact, writing to Dadabhai Naoroji in the last week of January 1903 that he found Chamberlain had been swayed by the colonists’ claim that unless stringent measures were put in place, ‘this sub-continent would be swamped by the Indians’.3

  With his family in India, Gandhi corresponded mainly with his nephew Chhaganlal. It was through him that he communicated with Kasturba and the children. Kasturba could read Gujarati, but not, it appears, write it with any fluency. She, in turn, passed on her news by using their nephew as a scribe.

  In the first week of February, Gandhi told Chhaganlal that it was not right to have withdrawn Manilal from music lessons, adding: ‘The blame is not yours, but your aunt’s.’ He then turned to his own predicament. There was ‘great uncertainty’ about his future; life as a lawyer-activist was ‘no bed of roses’. The next month was crucial – if he found that it was not possible for him to continue in South Africa, he would return to India and rejoin the family. On the other hand, if he chose to stay on, ‘it will be possible to bring you all after six months.’4

  For the moment, Gandhi chose to base himself in Johannesburg. After the war, the Transvaal had been constituted as a ‘Crown Colony’. The Governor, Lord Milner, was the head of its administration. In time, the colony would, on the model of Natal, have its own elected government, run by white legislators elected by white males alone. In this transitional period, it was crucial that Gandhi was at hand to lobby for the Indians.

  In the last week of March 1903, Gandhi asked to be enrolled as a practising attorney in the Supreme Court of the Transvaal. He attached a certificate from the Inner Temple and proof that he had practised both at the High Court of Bombay and the Supreme Court of Natal. On 14 April his application was approved.5 A few months later, he found office space at the corner of Rissik and Anderson Streets, and a room to live in the same block.6

  Johannesburg in the early 1900s was very much a work-in-progress. The journalist Flora Shaw captured its mood well, remarking that the city was ‘much too busy with material problems. It is hideous and detestable, luxury without order, sensual enjoyment without art, riches without refinement, display without dignity.’7 Another British journalist observed that everyday life in Johannesburg partook of an ‘inborn restlessness. Everybody seems to be always shifting his place of abode. At the end of each month waggonloads of miscellaneous furniture jolt slowly to some new suburb.’8

  There was an overwhelming preponderance of men in Johannesburg, the gender ratio being two males to each female among the white population, and close to ten males for each female among the black population. The social diversity was enormous – with almost every nation in Europe represented in the city, and almost every tribe in southern Africa too. Fortune seekers and job hunters descended on Johannesburg ‘from the ends of the earth: miners from Mozambique, Nyasaland, Cornwall, and Australia; artisans and engineers from Scotland; shopkeepers from Lithuania and Gujarat; financiers from England and Germany’. This was a city where ‘everybody came from somewhere else, social arrangements had to be constructed from scratch and everything was up for grabs’.9

  A census conducted shortly after Gandhi moved there estimated Johannesburg’s population to be a little over 150,000. It was growing at almost 10 per cent a year. The city’s residents seemed to be in ‘a state of perpetual haste’. New roads were being dug, new homes and offices constructed. Wood and other building materials lay piled up on the ground, and a cloud of dust hung in the air. To moderate private enterprise and manage its excesses, the elements of a municipal administration were being put in place. In 1903, as Gandhi made his home in Johannesburg, the first sewage pipes were laid under the ground, and the first storm-water drains constructed above them. In this decade, gas and electricity also made their first appearance in the city.10

  The year Gandhi moved to Johannesburg, the writer John Buchan published a short, sharp portrait of the city. Buchan was then working on the staff of the Governor, Lord Milner. He saw Johannesburg as ‘a city still on trial, sensitive, ambitious, profoundly ignorant of her own mind’. It had a ‘short and checkered past’; once a mining camp, then a mining city, would it ever become a cosmopolitan centre of culture and the arts? Would Johannesburg, asked Buchan, ‘go the way of many colonial cities, and become vigorous, dogmatic, proud, remotely English in sentiment, consistently material in her outlook, and narrow with the intense narrowness of those to whom politics mean local interests spiced with rhetoric’; or, as she was ‘already richer, more enlightened, and more famous than her older sisters’ (such as Melbourne in Australia or Wellington in New Zealand), would Johannesburg ‘advance on a higher plane, and become in the true sense an imperial city, with a closer kinship [to the mother country] and a more liberal culture’?11

  The Indians in Johannesburg lived chiefly in two suburbs – Fordsburg, to the west, and Vrededorp, to the north-west. Mohandas Gandhi, however, worked and slept in the very heart of the city, within a stone’s throw of its stock exchange, its main post office and its law courts. Records of Gandhi’s law practice in Johannesburg, preserved in the National Archives of South Africa, tell us his clients were almost all Indian. Some had lived in Transvaal before the war and wanted to re-enter the province. Others were already based in Transvaal but wanted a relaxation of the trading laws. Yet others wanted permits facilitating travel between the different provinces of South Africa. Their appeals were drafted and put before the authorities by Gandhi.12

  As in Natal, Gandhi’s law practice was conducted side-by-side with his public work. The first was necessary to make a living; the second (so to speak) to live. There was a British Indian Association in Transvaal. Its chairman was a Muslim merchant, Abdul Gani, whose firm, Messrs Mahomed Cassim Camrooden and Co., had offices in both Durban and Johannesburg. The organization’s name was noteworthy: these were not just Indians, but ‘British Indians’, appealing to His Majesty for their rights as subjects of the Empire.

  In the third week of May 1903, the Association sought an appointment with Lord Milner. Milner’s ambivalent attitude towards the coloured races is manifest in two letters sent in quick
succession to his superiors in London. On 11 May he had proposed making Indians and Chinese live (and work) in designated areas, because of their ‘very insanitary habits’, and because it would ‘mitigate the intense hostility felt towards them by the European element, a hostility which, in view of the possible introduction of self-government, is the greatest danger by which they are confronted’.13

  The next day, Milner wrote that he was in favour of importing Chinese and Indian workers for the railways and the mines. The ‘enormous resources’ of South Africa could not be exploited because of a shortage of labour, which was ‘beginning to assume a really alarming aspect’. ‘At present,’ complained Milner, ‘we are in the absurd position of being flooded by petty Indian traders and hawkers, who are no benefit whatever to the community, and not allowed to have Indian labourers, whom we greatly need.’14

  When he met Milner, on 22 May, Gandhi told the proconsul that his people ‘needed rest from the constant changes of passes and permits’. Milner answered that it was ‘no use forcing the position here against the overwhelming body of white opinion’. He defended the policy of creating Asian-only bazaars, arguing that ‘it would be a distinct advantage to the Indian community to occupy them instead of causing general opposition to themselves by settling down here, there, and everywhere, among people who do not want them.’15

  Ten days later, Milner met with members of an organization named the ‘White League’. They told the Governor they were opposed to Asians whether as merchants or labourers. The ‘Chinese are most immoral’, they claimed; as for the Indians, ‘coolies are traders, not producers’. One White Leaguer angrily asked Milner: ‘How is it that in Canada we do not hear of this sort of thing? There, when they want labour they get white labour from home.’16