Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  The Rand Daily Mail had claimed that the Asiatics were ‘unanimously’ against the Act, and the whites just as unanimously in favour of it. There were, in fact, some exceptions – Indians who secretly signed on for permits; Europeans who openly crossed racial boundaries and identified with the protesters. Hermann Kallenbach sent a letter to the Star deploring the depiction of men ‘who are unselfishly and strenuously’ working for their compatriots as ‘aggressive agitators’. ‘I shall consider it a privilege to visit my Indian friends in gaol,’ said Kallenbach, ‘and to do my utmost to reduce the hardships of prison life which they are prepared to undergo.’45

  Similar letters were sent to the press by other white sympathizers, among them a jeweller named Isaac and a draper named Vogl (both also Jewish). But the European who most explicitly identified with the Indians was Henry Polak. Polak published a series of sharp and occasionally savage essays in Indian Opinion. One article made fun of the paranoia in the white press about the leader of the passive resisters:

  That remarkable man Mr Gandhi will go down to posterity as a miracle-worker. In the first place, he is supposed to be the fons et origo of the opposition to the Law; then he is supposed to have actively incited every Indian in the Transvaal not to obey its provisions; and, lastly, he is supposed to be here, there, and everywhere at the same time urging a policy of non-submission.

  These remarks were prompted by reports in one paper that Gandhi had addressed a meeting in Pietersburg; in another paper that he had done the same in Potchefstroom. In fact he had been in neither place recently. ‘What feeble creatures Indians are supposed to be!’, commented Polak. ‘They must always have their nurse with them before they can be trusted to trot along alone.’ No one from Johannesburg visited Pietersburg when the Permit Office was opened, nor would anyone go to Potchefstroom or Klerksdorp when the Office shifted there, for ‘the local Indians don’t require any pin-pricks to make them jump.’46

  Polak was prophetic. The Permit Office moved on, and the Indians moved away. In early September he wrote mockingly of how ‘that ramshackle machine, the Government “perambulator”, is still squeaking from town to town, unoiled for lack of registration.’ Two weeks later he wrote that ‘the “perambulator” is at last to find a resting place for a whole month at a time, after which, no doubt, it will be relegated to the Pretoria Museum, to be kept there until the next Asiatic invasion arrives.’ When the Permit Office did reopen, as planned, in Johannesburg, ‘the tobacconists of this town shall rejoice greatly at the prospects of all the cigarettes that will be smoked’ as the Registration Officials ‘while away the weary hours waiting for the unregenerate to reform’.47

  Some of Polak’s pieces were signed, others unsigned. Yet others used the nom de plume ‘A. Chessell Piquet’.48 An essay under this name presented a series of satirical ‘silhouettes’ of how whites saw the conflict. For the ‘Small White Storekeeper’ the new law was ‘a splendid thing’, keeping the coolies in their place. The ‘European Wholesale Merchant’ thought both the Government and Indians were fools. (Complaining that he hadn’t had an order from an Indian merchant for months, he said he would meet Smuts and ‘ask him to administer the Law mildly’.) The ‘Consumer’ admitted the Indians charged far less than the white shopkeepers who lived in style, with ‘their plate-glass and stained ceilings’. As for the ‘Registration Official’, while pleased that ‘accommodation up country is much better than it was three or four years ago’, he complained that the Indians were ‘absolutely misled by their leaders’. He could not bear anyone to mention ‘G[andhi]’, whose name made him ‘quite nervous’. There was, finally, the ‘Common-Sense Individual’, who thought the passive resistance movement ‘splendid’, and the ‘only way to make an impression on these colour-blind fanatics.’49

  Henry Polak may have been exceeded in energy and commitment by Gandhi, and by some other Indian passive resisters. But no one enjoyed the struggle as much as he did, the joy – and the passion – expressed in the stream of polemics and satires that poured out from his pen.

  In September 1907 the name of Henry David Thoreau appeared in the columns of Indian Opinion for the first time. Gandhi had only recently become acquainted with his tract on civil disobedience. The jail-going resolution of 11 September 1906 had been invented on the spot; in later weeks and months, Gandhi sought precedents in Indian traditions of boycott and protest. Then he began using the term ‘passive resistance’, whose origins lay rather in the boycott by Nonconformists of schools that indoctrinated their pupils in the teachings of the Church of England. Now, a full year after the technique of protest was first proposed, the teachings of an American radical were invoked to support it. In Gandhi’s paraphrase, Thoreau said that ‘we should be men before we are subjects, and that there is no obligation imposed upon us by our conscience to give blind submission to any law, no matter what force or majority backs it.’ The American’s ‘example and writings,’ thought Gandhi, ‘are at present exactly applicable to the Indians in the Transvaal.’

  This was unexceptionable. But Gandhi also wrote that ‘historians say that the chief cause of the abolition of slavery in America was Thoreau’s imprisonment and the publication by him of the above-mentioned book [On the Duty of Civil Disobedience] after his release.’ No historians were named, perhaps because they could not be. That Thoreau’s tract helped end slavery was, of course, outrageous hyperbole. Was Gandhi writing out of ignorance, or did the claim need to be made to boost his people’s morale?50

  The answer, very likely, is the latter. In a letter written many years later, Henry Polak disputed, as I have here, the view that Gandhi derived his ideas from Thoreau’s tract on civil disobedience. Passive resistance had been going on for some time in South Africa before Gandhi became acquainted with the American thinker. However, once he read Thoreau, Gandhi seized upon his ideas as proof of the power of his own approach. In this sense, noted Polak, what Thoreau provided Gandhi with was ‘encouragement, not inspiration’.51

  As passive resistance in the Transvaal gathered momentum, Gandhi was engaged in an intense exchange of letters with a Christian priest who wished to become his disciple. Of German extraction, John Cordes had once been a missionary in Rhodesia. At some stage he acquired and divorced (or abandoned) an African wife. His readings and journeys had turned him away from conventional Christianity and towards Theosophy, the hybrid, occultist religion then gathering a rush of new converts across the world.

  Cordes contacted Gandhi in early 1907. He felt constrained by the company of his fellow whites, and thought a spell with Indians in general, and this Indian in particular, would free him more fully from the prejudices of his upbringing. He had heard of Gandhi’s work from mutual friends, and had also been reading Indian Opinion. He wanted now to cut himself loose, to ‘throw the race goggles on the dust heap, to better enjoy the mountain air of freedom from social trammels and acquire a sight fitted for wider truths’.52

  In Johannesburg, immersed in the protests against the Asiatic Act, Gandhi could not supervise Cordes directly. So he suggested the priest move to Phoenix, where he would be part of a living community. The settlement was now in its third year. It had eight homes, built of corrugated iron supported by wooden planks. Each had two small bedrooms, a living-and-dining room, a kitchen and a bathroom. The fittings in the last were ingenious: with water dripping down from the roof into a watering can, held up by a rope, which served as a shower. The more adventurous could bathe in the stream running through the property. Drinking water came from the heavens; rainwater being collected and stored for future use.

  Each house had a vegetable plot attached to it; some settlers maintained these energetically, while others left them to the elements. There were no domesticated animals; no cows and sheep, nor any dogs (but plenty of snakes and jackals). The nearest shops were in Durban, fourteen miles away. During the day the press hummed with activity, compositors setting type and working it through the machines. After dusk, the only noises one heard were t
he chirping of birds; the only lights one saw flickered in Zulu homes in the valley.53

  In the first week of July 1907, John Cordes took a train from Rhodesia to Natal. He told his new mentor (whom he had not yet met) that he ‘had no breakfast, managing my pursestrings on strictly Gandhian lines’. Within a few days of his arrival at Phoenix he was exulting in the surroundings. ‘What a blessing it is,’ he told Gandhi, ‘to get away from town & its noise & smell, how pleasant to be rid of cuffs & collars, braces and the trappings of towns’ war-paint. The wind is nothing, being the mere equinoctial night & morning breeze, to which I am accustomed from Bulawayo.’

  Cordes was equally impressed by the human material at Phoenix. ‘Dev[a]das will make a splendid lawyer,’ he told the (mostly) absent father, ‘fancy him cross questioning his elder brother Ramdas the way he does. Manilal will not bless many visitors like me I reckon, he had to work like a horse, & did so like a Trojan, betw[een] his lessons, & his composting job.’54 Gandhi, in reply, shifted the conversation from his sons to his wife. ‘How were you received by Mrs. Gandhi?’ he asked Cordes. ‘She tells me she feels too shy to sit at the same table with you … [S]he is terrified ever having to attend to a guest who is a perfect stranger, and, what is more, wearing a white skin … What changes you may have wrought in her mental condition after presenting yourself and your credentials I do not know.’55

  Gandhi approved of Cordes’s desire to ‘reach the ladies through the kiddies. I have no doubt that you will succeed. It is the best point of attack.’ He was keen to have the visitor’s opinion about a community he had founded but could rarely be part of. ‘I want to know everything about you and your view of the surroundings,’ said Gandhi. ‘Are you in tune with them?’56

  Manilal and Ramdas reported to Gandhi how Cordes was getting along. They told him the priest was doing odd jobs in and around the house. Gandhi wrote to Cordes approvingly; he had, it seems, ‘won Mrs. Gandhi entirely to your side. She now says you can remain with her for as long as you like.’ To make himself even more at home, Cordes should learn Gujarati, so that ‘you may understand the people around you and for whom you are working’.57

  By October, Cordes was well settled at Phoenix, with a plot of land to call his own, and a modest house under construction. ‘Mrs. Gandhi tells me that your palace is visibly growing,’ wrote Gandhi in encouragement. ‘I only hope that it will be perfectly satisfactory when it is finished, that is to say simple, artistic, hygienic, rain-proof, rat-proof, and a temple of peace.’58

  These letters between a Christ-loving Hindu and a Hindu-loving Christian escaped the attention of the editors of the Collected Works, for they lay in a private home in the town of Haifa, in Israel, a country with which India had no diplomatic relations for decades. The correspondence provides a fascinating window into Gandhi’s gift for friendship and his penchant for attracting disciples. Six months after John Cordes moved to Phoenix, he received a letter from Henry Polak agreeing that

  it is very difficult to develop a spirit such as that which moves Mr Gandhi. You are perfectly right in calling it a privilege to be invited to assist him in the task that he has set before himself, and it is in that light that I have always regarded the matter. Whilst I have the ordinary human sympathy for the people down there being kept up all hours of the day and night towards the end of the week [when Indian Opinion went to press], I will admit to you quite frankly and privately that I think that no one at Phoenix should raise his voice against it, even though it means death to him. I consider this is a splendid cause to die for, if it is not possible to live for it. The difficulty is, as always, to develop the faculties of imagination and sympathy. It is rarely that his purpose so possessed a man as to make him forget his own comfort, his own health, his own interests, and the happiness of those who serve him. I am more and more coming round to the Ibsen idea that truth must be sought at any cost, and to realise day by day more vividly that, in the words of Dr. Staubman, the greatest man is he who stands most alone. All this, of course, is for your private consumption.59

  These remarks beautifully capture the ideals and eccentricities of the Gujarati lawyer whom these two Europeans now acknowledged as their mentor and master.

  12

  To Jail

  On 1 October 1907, the Permit Office – which Indian Opinion had taken to calling the ‘Plague Office’ – opened in Johannesburg, which was the Transvaal’s largest and richest city and had the largest (and richest) concentration of Indians as well. The fate of the Asiatic Law Amendment Act would be determined by what happened here. Gandhi warned picketers against any intimidation or violence. ‘A watchman’s duty is to watch, not to assault … Our whole struggle is based on our submitting ourselves to hardships, not inflicting them on anyone else, be he an Indian or European.’1

  A meeting of Indians was held every Sunday in the premises of the Hamidia Islamic Society, in the Johannesburg district of Pageview. When Gandhi was in town, he was always the main speaker. Prominent Gujarati merchants such as Essop Mia and Abdul Gani often spoke. The Tamils were represented by Thambi Naidoo, the carrier who was rapidly emerging as a leading activist in the struggle. To show that the movement was not racist, Henry Polak sometimes added his voice to the chorus. The leader of the Chinese Association, Leung Quinn, was an occasional guest speaker.

  Speeches were also being made elsewhere, and by other people. In the first week of October, Jan Smuts told his constituents that the Indians were ‘detrimental to the everlasting prosperity of South Africa’. Smuts claimed that their frugal ways were a cause of the current economic depression. He charged that certificates of residence were bought and sold not just in Johannesburg, but also in Durban and as far afield as Bombay. ‘I have no quarrel with the Indians,’ said Smuts: ‘the object is not persecution, but a stoppage of the influx of Indians. We have made up our mind to make this a white man’s country, and, however difficult the task before us is in this matter, we have put our foot down, and shall keep it there.’ His remarks were greeted with ‘loud applause’.2

  Meanwhile, a white-owned newspaper warned Indians not to listen to Gandhi, a ‘mischief-monger’ who, after the current conflict was over, would ‘pick up his briefcase and go elsewhere’. The warning was disregarded. The picketing in Johannesburg was largely successful. The tactics of Gandhi’s own newspaper certainly helped here, for it now published two lists each week, one of new subscribers, the other of Indians who had taken out permits – lists of loyalists and traitors respectively. Among the traitors was a certain S. Haloo, who went to Gandhi’s office to explain why he had applied for a permit. Some militants wrote to the lawyer saying that if he entertained this blackleg again, he too would be boycotted. Gandhi endorsed the threat – he wanted, he said, ‘all Indians to have the same burning enthusiasm always’.3

  Through September and October, a petition against the Act, drafted by Gandhi, was circulated among the towns and villages of the Transvaal, and 4,522 signatures were obtained. The document was then posted to General Smuts, along with a breakdown of signatories by religious and provincial affiliations – namely, Surtis (1,476), Konkanis (141), Memons (140), Gujarati Hindus (1,600), Madrassis (991), Northerners (157) and Parsis (17). Of perhaps 8,000 Indians resident in the Transvaal, only about 350 had applied for permits. Ninety-five per cent of these came from a single community, the Memons, a cautious, conservative caste of traders and merchants.4

  The petition was evidence of Gandhi’s wish to show the depth of his support, and a last attempt to get Smuts to withdraw the Ordinance. He was not, it seems, absolutely certain the ‘burning enthusiasm’ of the Indians would translate itself into courting arrest. For his part, Smuts extended the deadline for Indians to register for a month, from 31 October to 30 November. The two lawyers, placed on opposite sides, each hoped the other would blink first. Gandhi thought the weight of numbers carried by the petition would convince Smuts to repeal the Act. Smuts hoped the passage of time would lead the Indians to reconsider their oppositi
on.5

  A very large proportion of Indians in the Transvaal were now solidly behind Gandhi. There was a surge in subscriptions to Indian Opinion – now up to 3,000, more than twice as many as when the passive resistance movement started.6 An Indian in Europe was less impressed with Gandhi’s movement; this was his former friend and sparring partner, Shyamaji Krishnavarma. In the summer of 1907, Krishnavarma had fled London – after charges were brought against him for preaching disaffection against the Empire – to the relative safety of Paris. From there he followed, with interest and increasing dismay, the progress of the passive resistance movement in the Transvaal.

  Krishnavarma’s hatred for the British Empire compelled him to make common cause with the Boers. Like the Indians in India, he argued, they were a beleaguered community, fighting for freedom. Recalling Gandhi’s support for the British during the war of 1899–1902, he asked, ‘What right have the Indians to claim good treatment from the people whom they once injured both morally and politically out of selfish motives?’ Under ‘such provoking circumstances’, he thought the Boers would ‘be justified in expelling from the Transvaal, nay extirpating every Indian who had any claim in depriving them of their national political individuality’.

  He prefaced his broadside by speaking of Gandhi as ‘an amiable person’, whose ‘gentility and suavity of manner endear him to all with whom he comes in contact’. Despite his ‘personal regard’ for the lawyer, the radical felt obliged to expose ‘him for the mischief he is doing by his public acts and utterances to the cause of political freedom’. It is not clear whether Gandhi read this article, which was published in an émigré journal printed in Paris.7