Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  Two days after Gandhi’s delegation met Lord Elgin, The Times printed a long article on its mission. Before the Anglo-Boer War, perhaps the Imperial Government could have intervened in favour of the Indians, but it would ‘be injudicious, and indeed impracticable, to attempt to settle such a question from Downing Street now, when the colony will enjoy within a few months all the rights of responsible government.’ The paper explained why the Indians’ claims and demands could not, or rather would not, be conceded:

  No young democratic community of white men can be expected to deal out even-handed justice to formidable rivals in their trade and business who come from another race, with other traditions, other creeds, and other complexions than their own. The fact that the interlopers are subjects of the same Sovereign, and can claim to be treated as members of the same Empire, will probably never, in our time, outweigh these considerations with them. The lapse of years, and perhaps of generations, may be needed to create, if indeed it can ever be created, such a spirit of common Imperial citizenship as will greatly mitigate the combined force of race prejudice and of self-interest.23

  As a student, Mohandas Gandhi had proved impervious to the delights and distractions of London. Plays, parties and cricket matches did not interest him then. Now he had neither the interest nor the time. He worked from nine in the morning until midnight, lobbying editors, politicians and other men of influence. They, and others like them, were besieged by a torrent of letters. Apparently, as many as 5,000 penny stamps were used by the delegation.

  Among the men Gandhi met in pursuit of his case was the campaigning journalist W. T. Stead. Stead had famously – or perhaps notoriously – been sympathetic to the Boer cause during the War, abandoning his earlier support for the imperialism of Cecil Rhodes. Gandhi asked him now to write an article on the Indian question in ‘your own graphic style’; he had ‘no doubt that some at least of the Boer leaders would listen to you and give effect to your suggestions’.24 Stead did not write the article requested, but other grandees were more amenable to Gandhi’s lobbying. The doctor and naturalist George Birdwood, an old India hand, was deeply impressed with Gandhi’s petition to Elgin. He read it ‘with the greatest personal delight for the evidence it affords of the ability and wisdom with which young Hindoos like you can handle such intricate and trying [questions of] Imperial policy’. The rejection of the Indian plea, thought Birdwood, would be an ‘irretrievable blow to the consolidation of the [British] Empire’. In his view, there was

  no historical people on earth – not even the Scots – who have a better conceit of themselves or better deserve [it] than the Hindoos, who have given India her immemorial name and fame, and a wanton outrage against their racial pride such as that by which they are affronted in South Africa, will strike a deadly blow to their loyalty towards the British ‘Raj’ which is the mightiest corner-stone of our world-wide Empire.25

  Meanwhile, pressed by Gandhi, the liberal MPs Harold Cox and Henry Cotton raised a series of questions in Parliament on the harassment of Indians in the Transvaal. They were answered by the Under-Secretary of State, Winston Churchill, a man noticeably sympathetic to the idea that white and brown could never mix. One question related to an eviction notice issued to about a hundred Indian traders in the Johannesburg locality of Vrededorp. The traders had been there for years, and their vested property was valued at £20,000. When Cotton asked why the Indians were made to vacate their stands, Churchill said that there were also Boer traders operating in the market, and ‘it is very desirable to keep the white and Coloured quarters apart, as the practice of allowing European, Asiatic, and native families to live side by side in [a] mixed community is fraught with many evils, and, in Lord Selborne’s opinion, is injurious to the social well-being of all three.’26

  Gandhi immediately wrote to Lord Elgin, taking issue with Churchill’s claims. He said, first, that the Indians in the suburb had legally acquired rights of residence; second, that Indian shops, described by Churchill as ‘tin shanties’, were in fact ‘superior to many of the buildings in Vrededorp’; and third, and most tellingly,

  that if the doctrine of the desirability of keeping the white and the Coloured quarters apart is sound, I fear that there will be an end to British Indian residence in the Transvaal with any degree of self-respect. The logical conclusion of such a doctrine will be a system of locations which can only result in ruination to hundreds of law-abiding and respectable Indians.27

  On 27 November, Gandhi and Ally met the Under-Secretary of State in his rooms in the Colonial Office. Churchill asked them to send him a short note, no longer than one foolscap page, of what they ‘had to say on this Ordinance, on the Vrededorp Stands Ordinance and on the question as a whole’. Ally then reminded him that

  he was the same person who had been present at the Point [in Durban] to receive Mr Churchill on his return from the [Boer] war. And it was the same Mr Churchill that he now pleaded for redress on behalf of the Indian community. Mr Churchill smiled, patted Mr Ally on the back and said he would do all he could. This answer added to our hopes.28

  His experiences in the imperial capital, meeting doors open, closed and ajar, convinced Gandhi that the Indians needed an organized body to represent them in London. Working via the mail and the telephone, he established a South Africa British Indian Committee (SABIC), which was supported by, among others, Griffin, Naoroji and Bhownaggree. L. W. Ritch, his friend from Johannesburg who had now qualified as a lawyer in London, would serve as secretary. ‘I have not told you all about Mr Ritch’s capabilities,’ wrote Gandhi to Bhownaggree.

  He has handled many a meeting and has been secretary of more than one organization. He was twenty years ago perhaps what people may call a rabid Socialist. His has been a most chequered career. Today, I do not own a friend who knows me more than he does. He is one of those men who believe in dying for a cause that he holds dear.29

  It was Bhownaggree who chaired a farewell meeting for the deputation. This was held on 29 November, in the Richelieu Room of the Hotel Cecil. In attendance were an array of pro-Indian members of the British Establishment, among them the former Governor of Bombay, Lord Reay; the former Principal of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, Theodore Morrison; sundry ex-I. C. S. officials and serving Members of Parliament. Those with more personal connections to Gandhi included J. H. L. Polak (father of Henry) and Dr Josiah Oldfield.30

  Speaking to the gathering, Gandhi singled out the Indian students in the room, whose predicament highlighted the trouble in the Transvaal. These young men contemplated their return to South Africa ‘with considerable anxiety and apprehension’; they worried they would share the fate of the dispossessed Indians in the colony. For, as Gandhi observed, ‘here, in England, they will become barristers or doctors, but there, in South Africa, they may not even be able to cross the border of the Transvaal.’31

  Gandhi’s energetic lobbying in London alarmed the Transvaal Government. As the deputation sailed back to South Africa, the colony’s Lieutenant-Governor wrote to his boss grumbling that ‘His Majesty’s Government have evidently been greatly impressed by the representation of Messrs. Gandhi and Ally.’32 The Governor of the Transvaal, Lord Selborne, then wrote a letter to his superior, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, pointing out that the Ordinance was ‘regarded almost unanimously by the European community as being vital to the best interests of the Colony’. He defended the proposal to make registration compulsory, and warned that the provision of appeal to the Supreme Court (which the Indians were agitating for) would defeat the legislation’s purpose, since ‘experience has shown how difficult it is when once an Asiatic has entered the country to find him again’. The Governor remarked that

  Mr Gandhi must know better than most people that there is an extensive traffic in permits and registration certificates, and he has had unique experience of the ease with which the Courts can be moved (and rightly so while the law remains as it is) to upset any administrative action which is intended to carry out an e
ffective control over immigration.

  The parenthetical comment scarcely served to soften what was a direct insinuation against Gandhi’s motives: namely, that he had a vested interest in the old law, and in profitably fighting court cases under it. Selborne then explained the larger project of which the Ordinance was part. ‘Every patriotic South African,’ he wrote,

  looks forward to the establishment of a large and vigorous European population here … The immigration of an Asiatic population on a large scale he regards as a menace to the realisation of this ideal. He sees already in Natal a picture which impresses even the casual observer of the rapidity with which the Asiatic is filling a place in trade, and now even in agriculture, which otherwise would have afforded scope for a growing European population. He sees the same process at work in the Transvaal, more slowly at present, but, capable, as he believes, of rapid acceleration. He is quite willing to recognise the claims which British Indians naturally have on His Majesty’s Government, but he protests against, and is prepared to resist, those claims when they involve the peopling of his country which he believes to be fitted to be the home of a strong European nation with a people who can never be to him anything but an alien race.33

  This defence of the white case begged a crucial question – why were the Indians more ‘alien’ than the Europeans? Unlike the Africans, neither had originated in the continent. Both groups had come from across the oceans, the Europeans from the West, the Indians from the East, each seeking better prospects for themselves and their families. The Europeans now claimed that South Africa was their home. But why couldn’t the Indians be likewise ‘patriotic’ about a land where they too lived and worked? Evidently, the Indians were seen as the main, perhaps only, threat to the creation of a settler state to be ruled and dominated by whites, with a submissive native population alongside. For South Africa to become more like Australia, Canada and New Zealand, it was imperative that no more Indians were allowed into the territory.

  The intensity and passion, even paranoia, that characterized the presentation of the colonists’ case was an indirect tribute to Gandhi. The opposition led by him had unnerved and unsettled them. To the Governor’s private warnings were now added a book published in London with the alarmist title, The Asiatic Danger to the Colonies. Written by the Johannesburg journalist L. E. Neame, this aimed at influencing ‘home’ opinion against the Indians, and thus smoothing the path for the new policies in the Transvaal. Neame was particularly worried by the rise of nationalism in India, as manifest in the Swadeshi movement. He warned that ‘the idea is gaining ground that a weak spot has been found in the armour of Europe.’ This activist spirit would not just be aimed at British rule in India; it ‘may be used for the forcing of many a closed door’. Like Europe, Asia ‘too needs room for its surplus population’; hence the demand, led by Gandhi, to allow Indians the freedom to move to South Africa on the grounds that it was also part of the British Empire.

  It was not, however, merely a question of competing numbers. As Neame acutely observed, ‘the Asiatic has another fault – from the white man’s standpoint. He is ambitious. The plantation coolie may die a coolie; his son may become a landowner, or a small trader or storekeeper, even a merchant on a considerable scale.’ As successive generations of Indians graduated to more sophisticated occupations, they took away jobs and trades previously monopolized by the whites. And so this European in Johannesburg plaintively asked: ‘What is to be their future if the Indian works in the farm, owns the store, and performs skilled labour in the factory?’

  Gandhi and company, complained Neame, had mobilized the support of ‘Members of Parliament who know India but not the Colonies’. To counteract this, the colonist appealed to the baser instincts of the mother country, by arguing that

  in the end the colony with the largest Asiatic population where white men should dwell will be of least value to the Empire. It is an economic axiom that the white man consumes more than the Asiatic. The trade of a colony with a big white population must be more remunerative to England than that of a colony where a decreasing white population is struggling hard against the competition of the Eastern peoples.34

  L. E. Neame was answered by Henry Polak, a European who had crossed the racial divide to stand up for the underdog. In a four-part review in Indian Opinion, Polak (writing as ‘The Editor’), accused Neame of a ‘Caucasian bias’, as one ‘who does not question the ultimate and inherent superiority of the white race’ while relegating ‘the disturbing Asiatic to the limbo of permanent inferiority’. By dividing the world into Asiatic and non-Asiatic, Neame had shown that he ‘does not, evidently, believe in the brotherhood of man and his unity with Nature. He cannot conceive that men are moulded, all the world over, in the same general way by the same series of circumstances.’

  Of Neame’s argument that Asiatic traders would swamp white competition, Polak archly noted that ‘his plea is not that the white man should make a living, but that the Asiatic should not.’ For if the Caucasians were indeed ‘inherently superior’, then

  what is the added advantage to be derived from Registration Laws, Immigration Acts, commercial barriers, protective walls [and other such methods] … betokening, not a calm self-assurance, not a strong sense of breathing a purer atmosphere than that breathed by any other, but a mortal fear lest the phantom of an alleged superiority should be discovered and exposed to public derision – a terror lest the windy dummy of inflated self-importance be pricked.35

  Gandhi and company did not really want to challenge, still less overthrow, European rule in the Transvaal. What they asked for was the safeguarding of existing and previously guaranteed rights of residence, trade and travel. They had said time and again that the political superiority of the whites was not in question, but the ruling race was not reassured. Unlike the Africans, the Indians were adept at trade and (as Gandhi’s own example had shown) at the professions. Here they directly competed with Europeans. The danger in admitting more Indians was that the economic challenge would intensify, leading to claims for political representation as well. Hence, as L. E. Neame put it, the door had to be firmly shut to the Indians.

  11

  From Conciliation to Confrontation

  Gandhi returned to South Africa in the third week of December 1906. Landing at Cape Town, he and his colleague H. O. Ally took the train to Johannesburg. Arriving on the morning of the 22nd, they were met at Park Station by a large crowd of Indians. The next day an even larger gathering welcomed the duo at the hall of the Hamidia Islamic Society.1

  The next week Gandhi and Ally were in Natal, speaking at Verulam and then at Durban, where so many gathered to hear them that the meeting was shifted from the Congress Hall to the covered market at Pine Street. Afterwards, Parsee Rustomjee hosted a dinner in their honour. The next day, Gandhi took Ally and a few others on a tour of Phoenix, where ‘the various departments were inspected with interest and the visitors expressed pleasure at what they saw.’ That, at any rate, was the claim of Indian Opinion; perhaps the epicurean Ally, unused to and disenchanted by the ascetic life, saw things rather differently.2

  Gandhi had come to Natal not merely to garner praise. The Natal Government was planning fresh curbs on merchants who were not white. On board the RMS Briton he had written a note urging that Indian traders be allowed to import clerks and assistants; that when denied a licence they be permitted to appeal to the courts; and that educated or propertied Indians be granted the municipal franchise. Gandhi insisted that ‘Natal cannot be allowed to draw upon India for a supply of indentured labour when she refuses to treat the resident Indian population with justice and decency.’3

  Sent the note by the Imperial Government, the Natal Ministers refuted Gandhi’s points one by one. There were already more Indians than whites in Natal; now, ‘if permission were accorded to Indian clerks or domestic servants to enter the Colony temporarily, as proposed by Mr Gandhi, insuperable difficulties would be opposed to returning them at the end of their time.’ As f
or greater leeway in the granting or renewal of dealers’ licences, ‘the Indian Merchant has already a very strong footing in the Colony’ and his European rivals were ‘determined that Natal shall be a white-man’s colony and that they shall not be ousted by those who are incapable of governing the Colony and whose only object is to make money’. Since the Indians were said to be more loyal to India than to Natal, they could not be trusted with the vote either: ‘The European Colonists intend to reserve the franchise, political and municipal, for those who will exercise it for the best interests of Natal.’4

  Fourteen years of representative government had made the Natal colonists more truculent, more willing to disregard the Imperial interest and treat their coloured subjects as they pleased. Inspectors of the Natal Government would not renew Indian traders’ licences, citing unsanitary conditions or unconventional book-keeping. These were the professed reasons; often, it was prejudice or fear of competition that lay behind the refusal.5

  In the Cape, traditionally the most liberal of the South African provinces, feelings against Indians likewise hardened. When, in 1907, the councillors of Cape Town considered nine applications by Indian traders, they rejected seven outright, referring the other two for more information. The report of the meeting contained the forceful yet representative views of a councillor named Gibbs:

  ‘Indians’, said Mr Gibbs with great scorn, ‘I want none of them – none of that nationality! I’m not in favour of these Indians coming here at all, and I would like to see as many of them as possible getting out of this country … I really think a good deal of the depression existing at this time is due to them. Why, they live on the smell of an oil-rag, and sleep on the butter! (laughter) I’ll do everything possible in my power, whatever Council I’m on, to drive them out. Look at the Post Office returns, and you’ll see that all their money gets sent out of the country’.6