Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  January 6, 1906: A few people were invited to dinner at Bhai’s house in connection with Mr Polak’s marriage. Among the guests were English people, Muslims and Hindus. I felt that they had crossed the limits in their jokes at dinner.

  January 11, 1906: Smith, Polak and Mrs. Polak, who are staying at Bhai’s house, behave very freely, which makes me think.27

  Chhagan was puzzled and confused by what he saw – the white lady secretary in his uncle’s office, the jokes and the banter and the displays of physical affection (between Henry and Millie) in his uncle’s home, the eating at the same table of Hindus, Muslims and Europeans. To his conventional Bania eyes, the household was eccentric. To the conventional white Christian in Johannesburg, the household was positively heretical.

  In his first years in Johannesburg, Gandhi deepened his interest in other religions, while befriending several European men (and at least one European woman). Meanwhile, his horizons were being further extended by encounters with mixed-race Africans. Gandhi occasionally visited Cape Town, where there was a small but active Indian community, and where the British administrators he dealt with maintained residences. On these visits he came to know a Coloured politician named Dr Abdullah Abdurahman. A Cape Malay, like Gandhi Abdurahman had been professionally trained in the United Kingdom (he studied medicine in Glasgow). Back home in Cape Town, he (like Gandhi again) combined professional work with public service.

  Dr Abdurahman was the moving spirit behind the African Political Organization (APO), which pressed for housing rights and the franchise for Coloured people. In 1905 and 1906, Gandhi attended some APO meetings and occasionally wrote for its journal. For Abdurrahman himself he had considerable respect. But ultimately he felt that their causes must stay separate and distinct. In a fascinating piece in Indian Opinion he spelt out his reasons for this:

  This Association of Coloured People does not include Indians who have always kept aloof from that body. We believe that the Indian community has been wise in doing so. For, though the hardships suffered by those people and the Indians is almost of the same kind, the remedies are not identical. It is therefore proper that the two should fight out their cases, each in their own appropriate way. We can cite the Proclamation of 1857 in our favour, which the Coloured people cannot. They can use the powerful argument that they are the children of the soil. They can also argue that their way of life is entirely European. We can petition the Secretary of State for India, whereas they cannot. They belong largely to the Christian community and can therefore avail themselves of the help of their priests. Such help is not available to us.28

  The statement represented a distinct evolution of Gandhi’s views – he now quite clearly recognized that all races other than Europeans suffered from structural discrimination in South Africa. The Indians were not alone. Yet each community had to work out its own path in overcoming the disadvantages peculiar to it.

  An Englishman who moved to Johannesburg soon after Gandhi found it ‘the most perplexing, and perhaps the most fascinating’ place in the world. This city on the make and on the move became more diverse every month (if not every minute). Migrants arrived from at least four continents, seeking a slice of the wealth the gold underneath had spawned. It was ‘this cosmopolitan character of the population which forms at once the attractiveness and perplexity of the place. There is no cohesion, there is no monotony.’29

  This lack of cohesion was a matter of much concern to the ruling race. The Boers had moved to the hinterland of South Africa to escape British domination. There, they had established a simple social order, with two, unequal, divisions: Boer and Black. The Uitlanders and the Indians then came to complicate it. A compromise (following a bitter war) was forged with the Uitlanders. The Indians, however, were not European; but nor were they African. They were a perplexing element that complicated the black-and-white social order the whites had hoped to construct in South Africa.

  In England and the Netherlands, the countries where the majority of the colonists came from, whites were demographically dominant. In India and Indonesia, countries over which they had political control, the Dutch and the English did not wish to make a permanent home. In this respect South Africa was peculiar and even unique. The Europeans wanted to claim it as their own, an objective to which – at the time – the Indians, and the Indians alone, posed a serious challenge. Hence the enormous hostility towards them. An Englishman visiting the Transvaal in 1905 noticed that, whether as labourers, servants, hawkers or traders, the Indians ‘did their work well’. They were ‘deft [and] quiet’. The trouble was that ‘an Asiatic who competes with a white man is resented; that the man who sells or rents land to him for gain is looked upon as a traitor; and that his competition with white men is regarded as unequal’.30

  In 1905–6 the Transvaal was in a period of transition. After the end of the Anglo-Boer war it had been constituted as a Crown Colony; now, however, it prepared to be granted ‘responsible government’. A new spirit of ‘white South Africanism’ was abroad, seeking a rapprochement, cultural as well as political, between Dutch and English colonists. These two groups, so recently at war, now forged a common front against blacks and coloureds.31

  The new constitution of the Transvaal allowed the franchise only to those of European descent. However, for the ruling race that was not enough: they wished to put in place laws and procedures that would steadily reduce the number of Indians. Here, the colonists in the Transvaal found a strong ally in the new Governor, Lord Selborne. Selborne vigorously promoted the agenda of his predecessor, Lord Milner. In secret letters to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, he advanced a novel argument for keeping out coloured immigrants: that the Indians were not wanted because they did not know how to use arms. Whereas ‘the white man must always be a fighter’, Indians ‘are not of any martial race’. What if the Dutch and the British fell out again in the future? It was then likely that the Transvaal would fall ‘again under Boer domination, owing largely to the absence of Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Irishmen, ousted by their pressure into other lands’.32

  Selborne held out the example of Mauritius, a once uninhabited island, discovered by Europeans, that now supported a large population of which 70 per cent was Indian and less than 3 per cent white. If Asians were not kept out of the Transvaal, he warned, then they would likewise come to form a majority of the province. ‘Under these conditions,’ wrote the Governor, ‘South Africa will, for all time, require to be occupied by troops imported from Europe, not only for its protection against foreign invasion but even for the enforcement of order among its native population.’33

  Gandhi, unaware of these letters, hoped to persuade the new Governor of the Indian case. On 29 November 1905, a delegation led by the lawyer, whose other members were four Gujarati Muslims and a Tamil, met Selborne in his office. They urged him to allow bona fide refugees to return to the Transvaal, and also allow merchants to import qualified assistants to work with them. The delegation asked for Indians to have ‘perfect freedom of owning landed property and of living where we like under the general municipal regulations as to sanitation and appearance of buildings’. They added a reassuring caveat: ‘What we want is not political power; but we do wish to live side by side with other British subjects in peace and amity and with dignity and self-respect.’

  Three months later, another delegation led by Gandhi met the Assistant Colonial Secretary in Pretoria. They presented a list of sixteen complaints, among them the delays in getting permits, the insistence that applicants produce witnesses, the refusal to exempt women (even though ‘they at any rate do not compete with whites’), the difficulties that children faced in re-entering the Transvaal, and the continuing discrimination on trains and trams.34

  The complaints were disregarded. Some Indians, with Gandhi’s encouragement, now sought to overturn the convention whereby Europeans and coloured people did not – or could not – travel together in public. Electric trams had just been introduced in Johannesburg. In March 1906, a
Gujarati merchant named E. S. Coovadia took a tram in the company of an English lawyer who worked with Gandhi. Then Henry Polak accompanied the President of the British Indian Association, Abdul Gani, on a similarly transgressive journey. In both cases, the Indians were asked to get off, but appealed against their ejection in court, with Gandhi appearing for them.

  The Anglo-Boer regime in Johannesburg was new, and trams were newer still. There was no clear law regulating their use. But custom, or prejudice rather, mandated that they be reserved for whites only. The all-white Town Council debated the matter. One member argued that by allowing coloured people to buy tickets the operations would be made profitable. Other members disagreed, saying that if Indians came aboard, whites would boycott the trams, forcing the company to close. Eventually, regulations were drafted reserving trams for Europeans and their pets alone.35

  In his dealings with government, the official with whom Gandhi was most frequently in contact was Montford Chamney, who bore the title of Protector of Asiatics. Chamney had previously worked in the tea plantations of eastern India, and had a smattering of Hindustani. He was peppered with requests from Gandhi to grant permits for those hoping to join their families or business partners in the Transvaal. He was impressed with the lawyer’s analytical skills, as in ‘the facility of fruitful scanning of legal documents and statutes for any blemishes contained’. The appreciation did not extend to the Indian’s lifestyle: ‘Mr Ghandi’s strong predilection for seclusion and the simple life,’ complained Chamney, ‘made his town residence insipid or even nauseous.’ That is to say, dinners in the Gandhi home were – unlike parties on tea plantations in upper Assam – bereft of meat, drink or music, in keeping with the fact that the patriarch ‘took no pleasure in sports, games, or general pastimes’.36

  The relationship between Chamney and Gandhi mixed respect with irritation. When the Protector of Asiatics rejected what seemed a straightforward case, Gandhi wrote saying the decision had come ‘as a disagreeable surprise’. He assumed that ‘the refusal is more a symptom of the official mind than of your own conviction.’ Another time, Gandhi wrote an extended complaint against one of Chamney’s subordinates, a ‘young man, rather impetuous’, prone to ‘roughly handle’ permit-seekers by kicking them on their shins as they stood to have their height taken.

  For his part, Chamney was exasperated with the lawyer’s persistence, complaining to a colleague that ‘one of the Agents most affected [by the refusal of Permits] is Mr Gandhi himself, who has, I am informed, been accustomed to pledge himself to clients that after they have paid him his fees he will guarantee the issue of permits in their favour.’ This was very nearly libellous, but another charge laid by him at Gandhi’s door was largely true. Commenting on the spate of letters received by the Government from ‘Abdul Gani, Chairman of the British Indian Association’, Chamney pointed out that Mr Gani was ‘an illiterate man and little more than a figure-head, and that the Secretary of the Association, namely, Mr Gandhi, is the individual with whom we are invariably dealing, no matter who signs these letters.’37

  In April 1906, a Zulu revolt broke out in Natal. The Government had imposed a poll tax of £1 per head on every male African, aimed at raising revenues and at forcing Zulus into paid employment. The tax caused widespread resentment. Several chiefs sent word to the Natal Government that villagers could not afford to pay the tax. The complaints were disregarded. When the police came to collect the tax by force, the Zulus exchanged non-compliance for armed resistance. The uprising (known as the ‘Bambatha Rebellion’ after its main leader) quickly gathered momentum, and spread throughout Natal.38

  The question before the Indians of Natal now was – what position, if any, should they take on the revolt? Gandhi, mindful of making a good impression on the rulers while the Indian community’s fate in the Transvaal hung in the balance, told the readers of Indian Opinion that ‘it is not for me to say whether the revolt of the Kaffirs is justified or not. We are in Natal by virtue of British power. Our very existence depends upon it. It is therefore our duty to render whatever help we can … That is, if the Government so desires, we should raise an ambulance corps.’ The ‘nursing of the wounded,’ said Gandhi, was ‘just as honourable and necessary as the shouldering of a rifle’.39

  In the first week of June, twenty Indians were recruited as volunteers. Gandhi’s was the first name; the others included several Tamils and a few people from North India. The Gujarati merchants provided goods in kind, such as flour and plates, as well as money, which went to buy overcoats, caps and socks. Thirteen of the twenty volunteers had previously been under indenture. Their tasks were to disinfect camps, dress wounds and carry men on stretchers. The work was hard, with marches sometimes commencing at 3 a.m. The men were often very close to the firing line.40

  After six weeks at the front, the ambulance corps was disbanded. When they reached Durban, the Natal Indian Congress gave them a reception, at which Gandhi suggested the Government set up an Indian Corps, and ‘if for any reason, the traders could not enlist, other educated Indians as well as the servants and clerks of traders could easily do so.’ On the battlefield, ‘the whites [had] treated the Indians very cordially’; if this fellow-feeling was consolidated in the form of a permanent corps, ‘it was likely that in the process white prejudice against Indians might altogether disappear.’41

  It had cost the state nearly £1 million to suppress the rebellion. Thirty-one combatants on the Government side lost their lives, as against nearly 4,000 Africans, in a war ‘carried out with machine guns against spears and shields’. While loyal to the British flag, the Indian ambulance corps tended to the wounded regardless of colour. As an early historian of the rebellion pointed out, ‘the whites had no desire to minister to wounded Zulus; without the Indian stretcher-bearers these would possibly have been left to die. There were also hundreds of Africans who had been sentenced to flogging. The Indians ministered to their festering sores.’42

  There, were, circa 1906, six separate strands in the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi. First, there was his legal career, his paid work on behalf of his clients in Johannesburg and Durban. Second, there was his work as a political campaigner, his efforts to safeguard the rights of Indians in the Transvaal and Natal. This work was unpaid, but perhaps not without other rewards, as in the esteem it acquired for him within and beyond his community. Third, there was Gandhi the propagandist, who ran a weekly newspaper and wrote much of it, and who, going by the tenor of his writing, seems to have taken great pleasure in the craft of composing an article or a series. His fourth preoccupation, linked to the second and expressed through the third, was to help heal divisions within the Indian community, whether between South Indians and Gujaratis or Hindus and Muslims. Fifth, there were his obligations to his family, which involved not merely earning enough money to keep the household going, but also being a companion to his wife – lonely in a foreign land where she did not speak the language – and a mentor to his sons, whose upbringing had been disturbed by the many moves made as a result of their father’s peripatetic career. Finally, there was Gandhi’s own process of self-discovery, as manifest in his interest in inter-religious dialogue and in what constituted an appropriate diet. Those two interests, in spirituality and health, were of long standing; to these was now added a third, a concern – soon to become an obsession – with the maintenance of celibacy.

  It was in the late (South African) summer of 1906 that Gandhi took the vow of brahmacharya. He would now eschew all sexual relations with his wife. By his recollection, the idea had been brewing in his head for some time. Perhaps its roots lay in a conversation he once had with the Jain sage Raychandbhai. When Gandhi praised the conjugal love between Gladstone and his wife – as illustrated by her making tea for him even in the House of Commons – his teacher asked,

  Which of the two do you prize more? The love of Mrs Gladstone for her husband as his wife, or her devoted service irrespective of her relations to Mr Gladstone? Supposing she had been his sister, o
r his devoted servant, and ministered to him the same attention … would you have been pleased in the same way? Just examine the viewpoint suggested by me.

  By reflecting on Raychandbhai’s question, Gandhi came to the conclusion that he had to make his relations with his wife purely disinterested. She had, in particular, to stop being the ‘instrument’ of his lust. The attachment to her had to be other than sexual. So Kasturba and he began to sleep in separate beds. The decision was helped by the fact that both agreed that they did not want any more children.

  In the Jain tradition, celibacy occupied an exalted place. Sexual activity involved passion, and was hence injurious to the soul. Jains also thought that sexual intercourse destroyed a number of animate objects dwelling in the female body. Celibacy was thus part of the pursuit of pure ahimsa, or non-violence. A gradualist approach was recommended – the practitioner was first told to not have sex during the day, preparing himself in stages for the achievement of complete abstinence. The aspiring brahmachari had to stop wearing expensively tailored clothes, and stay away from soap, scents, jewellery and other means of enhancing his attractiveness.43

  Raychandbhai had, in his early thirties, taken a vow of brahmacharya himself. In a discourse entitled ‘Views about Woman’ he explained its reason and logic. He rejected the common male view that ‘a woman has been imagined and taken as a source of worldly happiness.’ The pleasure from sexual intercourse was ‘only momentary and a cause of exhaustion and repeated excitements’. The organ used ‘for the enjoyment of conjugal bliss’, commented the Jain sage, ‘when looked at through the piercing eyes of discrimination, does not stand fit even for a worthy receptacle for vomiting’.44

  From 1891, when Raychandbhai and Gandhi first met, until 1901, when he died, the Jain scholar had been a moral compass for the lawyer. His memory became more sacred after his death, as is sometimes the case with a teacher who dies young. (When the person you most revere is no longer around, you tend to strive even harder to live up to what you think he may have expected or hoped from you.) So it was with Gandhi and Raychandbhai. His detachment from worldly ambition, his non-attachment to possession or physical pleasure, impressed Gandhi more and more with every passing year. In a verse Raychand composed when he was eighteen, and which Gandhi liked to quote, we may see the origins of the latter’s decision to embrace celibacy in 1906: