Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  The Indians held a meeting to counteract the White Leaguers. They gathered in a hall in Johannesburg’s Fox Street to hear the BIA chairman, Abdul Gani, complain that the Crown had betrayed them. If the soil of the Transvaal was ‘watered with the blood of Englishmen, have not the Indians, too, done their share?’ They had hoped that a British victory would bring justice, that their handicaps would ‘vanish, as if by magic, as soon as the Union Jack waved over the capital’. This was not to be. For

  someone in authority soon discovered that, though British subjects, we were Asiatics after all, so the yoke of the Asiatic Office was placed on our necks. The Asiatic officers naturally, to justify their existence, unearthed the Asiatic laws for us. And now here we are faced with total social destruction … We are to be branded as a class apart, cooped up in locations, euphemistically to be called bazaars, and probably prevented from owing a patch of land, except in bazaars, and compelled to pay a registration tax of £3. In short, if we would live in the Transvaal we would be content to live as social lepers.17

  In 1897–8, when he was based in Natal, Gandhi had thought of starting a newspaper focusing on the Indian question in South Africa. Now, in the summer of 1903, he reactivated the idea, and found two men willing to help him. The first, Mansukhal Hiralal Nazar, was a widely travelled Gujarati who had studied medicine in Bombay and run a business in London before migrating to South Africa. The second, Madanjit Vyavaharik, was a former school teacher who owned a printing press in Grey Street in Durban. The press printed wedding cards, business cards, menus, account forms, memoranda, circulars, receipt books, and so on, in ‘Gujarati, Tamil, Hindi, Urdoo, Hebrew, Marathi, Sanscrit, French, Dutch, Zulu, &c. &c.’18 To this already extensive list would now be added a weekly journal of opinion.

  Both Vyavaharik and Nazar were active members of the Natal Indian Congress. In 1895 and 1896, Vyavaharik had been asked by Gandhi to go from door to door in Grey Street and around, collecting money for the Congress. Since he had a beautiful hand and Gandhi an illegible one, he had also put the lawyer’s words on paper in petitions sent to the government. Nazar, meanwhile, had travelled to London in 1897, sent by Gandhi to counter the colonists’ propaganda against the Indians and their ways.19

  Gandhi’s collaborators were based in Durban, the centre of Indian life in South Africa. Vyavaharik’s task now was to raise money from merchants and acquire type in the four languages the weekly would print in – English, Gujarati, Hindi and Tamil. Nazar’s job was to plan each issue, arrange for articles and translations, edit copy, and see the magazine through the press. From Johannesburg, Gandhi would provide intellectual and moral direction, which included writing many articles himself.20

  In 1903 there were fourteen printing presses in Durban. All were owned and staffed by whites – with the exception of the press run by Vyavaharik. The new, multilingual journal stood out against a monochromatic background of periodicals written, printed and read in English alone. The staff was suitably diverse – including a Cape Coloured, a man from Mauritius, several Gujaratis and at least two Tamils.21

  The journal was named Indian Opinion. The first issue, appearing on 4 June 1903, announced itself as the voice of the Indian community, now ‘a recognized factor in the body politic’ of South Africa. The ‘prejudice’ against them in ‘the minds of the Colonists’ was based on an ‘unhappy forgetfulness of the great services India has always rendered to the Mother Country ever since Providence brought loyal Hind under the flag of Britannia’. An article in the same issue qualified this loyalism, noting that in South Africa, ‘if an European commits a crime or a moral delinquency, it is the individual: if it is an Indian, it is the nation.’22

  In starting Indian Opinion, Gandhi was setting himself up as a knowledge-broker and bridge-builder. The journal would carry news of Indians in South Africa, of Indians in India, and general articles on ‘all subjects – Social, Moral, and Intellectual’. It would ‘advocate’ the Indian cause, while giving Europeans ‘an idea of Indian thought and aspiration’. Missing from this statement of the journal’s aims was any mention of the largest section of the population of South Africa – the Africans themselves.23

  Each issue of Indian Opinion ran to eight pages. A cover page listed the journal’s title and the languages it was printed in. A series of advertisements followed. A shop in Durban drew attention to its Raleigh cycles of ‘the rigid, rapid, reliable kind’; another shop alerted readers to its stocks of ‘Oriental Jewellery’. General merchants in the towns of Natal placed insertions, as did specialized shops selling cigarettes and clothing. Other ads were issued by the paper itself; these asked for a ‘good machine boy’, for ‘a first class Tamil compositor’, and for someone who could read both Hindi and English.

  Such was the first page; news and commentary in English followed. Later pages carried material in Gujarati and, at the end, in Hindi and Tamil. The annual subscription was twelve shillings and sixpence in Natal and seventeen shillings elsewhere (payable in advance). Single copies sold at threepence each.

  New laws in Natal or the Transvaal that affected Indians, news from the Motherland about protests, plagues and great patriots – these were reproduced in Indian Opinion in all the languages it printed in. Other articles were tailored to individual communities. The Tamil section covered festivals observed only in South India. It also focused rather more on schools for girls, since – at this stage – Tamils were more keen to educate their women than the Gujaratis.24

  The English and Gujarati sections of Indian Opinion both depended heavily on Gandhi’s contributions (often printed without a byline). He wrote short notes and leaders on a variety of topics. The statements of mayors and governors were reproduced. Government dispatches and documents were summarized. Cases of harassment and discrimination were analysed.

  The post between Durban and Johannesburg was kept busy by a ceaseless flow of letters, articles and proofs between the editor of Indian Opinion and the lawyer who, from several hundred miles away, directed its operations. M. H. Nazar worked ferociously hard, planning issues a week in advance, soliciting and editing articles, and supervising translations. Funds ran low, as did stocks of type – a compositor told Nazar that he had better go slow on the Gujarati equivalent of the letter ‘a’ since they had not enough in stock. Nazar wrote to Gandhi that he was ‘quite done up’ and ‘too fagged to think of anything’. The editor worked well past midnight on press days, which meant that he often missed the last tram and had to walk home through the unlit streets of Durban.25

  As for Gandhi, his writings for this period are very heavily dominated by his public activities. Amidst hundreds of pages of editorials and reports for Indian Opinion, petitions to officials and legislators, legal notes and letters to sympathizers in the United Kingdom and India, there are rare, brief, glimpses into his personal life. These include two letters written on the same day, 30 June 1903, six months after his return to South Africa.

  The first letter was addressed to his friend Haridas Vora, a fellow lawyer based in Rajkot. Gandhi’s eldest son Harilal, now fourteen, had been unwell. Vora had helped him through his recovery. Gandhi thanked his friend for having ‘supplied my place to Harilal…. I can only wish that he was here to be attended by me and regret that he should have been a source of anxiety and worry….’ He then turned to his own life in Johannesburg. He had ‘built up a decent practice’, but his public work was causing him ‘very great anxiety.’ It kept him busy from nine in the morning until ten at night, with intervals only for meals and a short walk.

  Gandhi saw no chance of the pace slackening, as the Transvaal Government was planning new legislation aimed at the Indians. Before he left Bombay, he had told his wife that ‘either I should return to India at the end of the year or that she should come here by that time.’ He did not think he could fulfil the promise. Kasturba could join him, but, he warned, ‘she had very little of my company in Natal; probably, she would have less in Johannesburg.’ If the family came to South Africa, th
e time spent with them, away from work, might mean it would take up to ten years to meet his obligations. On the other hand, if they stayed on in India, that ‘would enable me to give undivided attention to public work’, and he could return more quickly, say in ‘three or four years’. Would Kasturba ‘consent to remaining there all that time?’ Having posed the question, he told his friend that ‘I wish to be guided entirely by her sentiments and I place myself absolutely in her hands.’

  Also on 30 June 1903, Gandhi wrote to his nephew Chhaganlal enclosing a copy of his letter to Haridas Vora. Chhagan was told to

  read it out and explain the situation here to your aunt. It is highly desirable that she should decide to stay on there as life here is rather expensive. If she remains there, savings made in this place will enable her and the children to lead a comparatively easy life in India. In that case, I may be able to return home in two or three years time … If, however, she decides to leave, make all requisite preparations by October and take the first available boat in November. But do try to convince her that it will be best for her to remain in India.26

  From his earliest days in South Africa, Gandhi had collected news clippings on relations between the races. Now, these were raided for publication in Indian Opinion. A report from the Transvaal Leader featured a white Labour League which opposed Asiatic immigration. The League believed that ‘this nation, occupying the strongest geographical position in the Southern hemisphere, will hold in the event of any great European war, the key to the South and the East, and that its future must never depend on a race of helots.’27 A liberal paper, the Standard, remarked that ‘the Hindus appear to have been treated throughout South Africa much as the Jews were in Europe during the Middle Ages, and as they are, to a considerable extent, in Russia at this very day.’28

  In September 1903, an official in the Transvaal Government named W. H. Moor prepared a report on the Indian question. There were, he estimated, about 13,000 Indians at the time of the war. When hostilities broke out most left for Natal, the Cape, or Portuguese territory. From September 1901 they had begun returning, with a ‘committee of influential Asiatics’ consulted on whom to award permits. In September 1902 this committee was disbanded, and a Department of Asiatic Affairs formed to regulate re-entry into the Transvaal. From the end of war to March 1903, some 4,900 permits were issued.

  The report was reproduced in full by Indian Opinion. Moor had summarized the ‘popular feeling’ of the whites in the Transvaal and the counter arguments of the British Indians. He did so sequentially, but I have clubbed them together in a chart, so that they can be read side by side. Interestingly, if not unexpectedly, the official spelt out the European position at greater length than the Indian one.29

  * * *

  Popular Feeling about Indians

  Arguments of British Indians

  * * *

  That their mode of life is mean and dirty.

  They deny that they are worse citizens than their fellow subjects; they are ready to submit to sanitary and municipal regulations.

  That their low standard of living enables them to accept wages on which a white man cannot thrive and live.

  They are anxious for education and capable of benefiting by it.

  That they are not good colonists inasmuch as they do not bring money with them, and send their savings to their own countries.

  They are industrious, temperate, frugal, law-abiding, and are prepared to settle in the country.

  That South Africa is a country where white people can live and make their homes and establish their race; that the Oriental races have ample opportunity for exclusive colonization where the climate suits them, and where white people cannot settle.

  As British subjects, they are entitled to equal treatment with others, regardless of colour, caste or creed.

  That the invincible hostility and repugnance felt towards the indigenous black races has produced so marked a line of cleavage on the basis of colour that the Asiatic races cannot ever be treated on a basis of equality with the white races; so that the introduction of the Asiatic races adds unnecessarily a third element which cannot be refused and an additional complication in the settlement of the disturbances in South Africa.

  They have proved themselves to be public spirited, liberal and charitable, and they maintain their poor.30

  An editorial in an early issue of Indian Opinion sought to see ‘The Bright Side of the Picture’. The situation now looked bleak, but the hope, in the long-term, was that

  as the European community grows older, the awkward corners would be rubbed out, and that the different members of the Imperial family in South Africa would be able to live in perfect peace in the near future. The time may not come within the present generation; we may not live to see it, but that it will come no sane man will deny; and that being so, let us all strain our every nerve to hasten its coming … by trying to step into the shoes of our opponents and endeavouring to find out what may be running in their minds – to find out, that is to say, not merely the points of difference, but also points of agreement.31

  It was barely five years since Gandhi had been attacked by a mob that spoke for the white population of Durban, a handful of liberals excepted. Even as he wrote, there was a regular flow of derisive remarks against him in the white press, and of course his compatriots were subject to racial prejudice on a daily basis. And yet, here was the leader of the Indians seeking to live in ‘perfect peace’ with their oppressors.

  Surely, this optimism was a product of the friendships that he had forged. Josiah Oldfield and members of the Vegetarian Society in London; the lawyer F. A. Laughton and the policeman R. C. Alexander in Durban; lay preachers like A. W. Baker in Pretoria – to this list were now added white men in Johannesburg with whom Gandhi took walks, shared meals, and debated the rights of the different races in South Africa.

  In his first year in Johannesburg, Gandhi befriended four Europeans with whom, for reasons of class and education, he was more temperamentally akin than the Indians whom he represented in court. Of this quartet, the first to enter his life was a man named L. W. Ritch. He was Jewish and originally from London, in which city he (like Gandhi) had sought to broaden his faith with an infusion of Theosophy. He moved to Johannesburg in 1894, and helped found a Theosophical Lodge. This met every Thursday to discuss the works of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant.

  In a letter to The Theosophist, Ritch described the Transvaal

  as a republic in name only. Racial hatred, directed most strongly against any nationality of sable exterior, is its most marked feature. This is so even in Natal, where only recently an attempt was made to prevent a number of Indians landing, an attempt however which proved abortive, chiefly to the pluck and persistence of my Indian friend, Mr Gandhi, Barrister-at-Law, a gentleman who has for a long time past been fighting the Indian battle in Natal, almost single-handed.

  L. W. Ritch first met Gandhi before the Anglo-Boer War, on one of the lawyer’s visits from Durban to Johannesburg. During the war, Ritch left the city. He returned after the peace treaty was signed, and set about re-establishing the Theosophical Lodge. This new, syncretic, cosmopolitan creed was at odds with the prevailing ethos of a city displaying ‘the concentrated essence of selfishness, individualism, greed and mammon worship’. Gandhi, who had now moved to Johannesburg – to almost single-handedly fight the Indian battle there – began visiting the Lodge regularly. In and apart from these meetings, he and Ritch found they had much to talk about.32

  Two other friends came to Gandhi as a consequence of his tastes in food. The lawyer often ate his meals at Johannesburg’s only vegetarian restaurant, the Alexandra Tea Room. Another regular visitor to the eatery was an Englishman named Albert West. He has left behind a vivid portrait of the place and its milieu, c. 1903:

  Around a large table sat a mixed company of men comprising a stockbroker from the United States who operated on the Exchange in gold and diamond shares, an accountant from Natal, a machinery agent, a y
oung Jewish member of the Theosophical Society [this must have been L. W. Ritch], a working tailor from Russia, Gandhi the lawyer, and me a printer. Everybody in Johannesburg talked about the share market, but these men were food reformers interested in vegetarian diet, Khune [sic] baths, earth poultices, fasting, etc. I was specially attracted by this man from India, and Gandhi and I soon became close friends.33

  It was at the same restaurant that Gandhi met Henry Solomon Leon Polak, a thin, lean, intellectually-minded Jew who had lately arrived from Britain. He, like West, was in his early twenties, a full decade younger than the lawyer he was to befriend. His family were originally from the Continent – one grandparent spoke Dutch, another German. They had moved to England, where Polak’s father worked as the advertising manager of a newspaper. Henry himself had studied at a school in Neuchâtel, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and then at London University.

  While a student, Henry Polak began writing for a Jewish weekly on political matters. He fell in love with a girl named Millie Graham, who was both a Christian and, as an ‘ardent social reformer’, a supporter of women’s suffrage. His family were distressed by the romance, so – in an attempt to break it – they dispatched Henry to join an uncle in South Africa. However, before he left he insisted on formalizing his engagement to Millie.34

  Polak worked at first in his uncle’s business in Cape Town. He soon moved to Johannesburg, where he joined the staff of a local weekly, the Transvaal Critic. He had begun reading the works of Leo Tolstoy, and it was a fellow Tolstoyan, a painter and stage actor, who took him to the vegetarian restaurant patronized by an Indian who also admired the Russian writer. As they entered the eatery one day in 1904, the painter pointed Gandhi out to his friend. Polak then took