Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  One of the accused had in fact already decided to go somewhere else. On the 27th, Ram Sundar Pandit was present in Gandhi’s chambers when the Police Commissioner’s notice came. He promised to attend court the next day, but when he reached Germiston that evening, he ‘called one or two of his disciples and told them that he was thinking of running away, since he could not face a second term of imprisonment. His disciples expostulated with him but he was overcome with fear.’ On the morning of the 28th, the Pandit picked up his belongings and took a train to Natal. Gandhi dryly commented that Ram Sundar’s fall

  was as sudden as his rise. I have written at great length about him in this paper. All this has turned out to be mistaken. The poems about him have been meaningless. A bad coin will always remain a bad coin. This is a struggle such as will expose everyone in his true colours. So far as the community is concerned, Ram Sundar is dead henceforth. We are to forget him.23

  Meanwhile, as news of Gandhi’s own conviction spread, messages of support began pouring into the offices of the British Indian Association. They came from (among other places) Durban, Pietermaritzburg, the Cape, Bombay and Madras. ‘Mr Gandhi will not leave [the Transvaal]’, ran one news headline in Natal, continuing, ‘Widespread Sympathy’.24

  The day that Gandhi was tried and convicted, the year’s last issue of Indian Opinion was printed in Durban. Copies reached Johannesburg by the evening. Readers would have noticed a call urging them to send in Indian equivalents for the terms ‘passive resistance’ and ‘civil disobedience’, which had been coined by British Nonconformists and an American writer respectively. Gandhi wanted indigenous replacements, since ‘to respect our own language, speak it well and use in it as few foreign words as possible – this is also a part of patriotism.’ The prize for the best entry was ten copies of a booklet on the Asiatic Act, which the winner could circulate among his friends.

  On 28 December Gandhi had been ordered to leave the colony within forty-eight hours. A week passed, but the summons did not come, perhaps because magistrates and policemen alike were occupied with the New Year’s festivities. Telegrams protesting the charges were flying thick and fast between the three continents with which the accused had connections. The British Indian Association in Transvaal wired the South Africa British India Committee in London that the impending arrest of Gandhi and his colleagues placed an ‘undue strain [on] Indian loyalty’. The Government of India in Calcutta wired the Imperial Government in London that a meeting of more than 7,000 Gujaratis in Surat had asked the Viceroy to intervene in having the charges against Gandhi and company dropped, and the Act itself withdrawn.25

  On New Year’s Day, 1908, a Baptist minister named Joseph J. Doke walked into Gandhi’s chambers at the corner of Anderson and Rissik Street. From a family of Cornish tin miners, Doke had followed his father into the ministry. As a young man he travelled extensively through India, concluding from his experiences of Banaras, Calcutta and Bombay, and Hindus, Muslims and Parsis, that the land was a ‘perfect mixture of opposites: I don’t understand it.’ In later years, he served as a minister in Devon and in New Zealand, before moving to a church in Grahamstown, in the Cape, in 1903. In November 1907, he took charge of the Central Baptist Church in Johannesburg.

  Gandhi’s campaign appealed to Doke because of its obvious resonances with the passive resistance of his fellow Baptists against the Education Act in England, which discriminated against children (and families) who were not of the dominant Anglican faith. That this Hindu lawyer regularly and approvingly quoted Christ was an added point in his favour. Doke, writes his biographer, was distressed by the fact that ‘the leaders of Christian thought and energy on the Rand were either apathetic or antagonistic’ to Indian aspirations. He, on the other hand, could not remain ‘untouched and indifferent to the cry of a people where a question of conscience, even religion, was involved’.26

  When he walked into Gandhi’s chambers on New Year’s Day, Doke found a crowd of Indians already there. Later, he sketched the scene from memory: men in turbans, standing; women in saris, squatting, some with children in their arms. In the ante-room a flaxen-haired woman could be seen taking down a client’s particulars.27 This was Gandhi’s young secretary, Sonja Schlesin, a Lithuanian Jew who had arrived in Johannesburg via Moscow and Cape Town. Hermann Kallenbach had recommended her to Gandhi, who became greatly dependent on her shorthand and typing skills.28 By his own admission, Gandhi knew ‘very few whose writing is worse than mine’;29 it fell now to Miss Schlesin to decipher his drafts and render them in legible English.

  Doke went past the secretary’s room into the lawyer’s office, which, he found, was ‘meagrely furnished and dusty’. As for the man himself, the minister had expected to find ‘a tall and stately figure, and a bold, masterful face, in harmony with the influence he seemed to exert in Johannesburg.’ To his surprise, Gandhi turned out to be ‘small, lithe, spare’, with a dark skin and dark eyes. His hair was black, with a sprinkling of grey.

  Seeing the white minister enter, the Indians who were already there silently left the room. Doke immediately asked Gandhi a direct question: ‘How far are you prepared to make a martyr of yourself for the good of the cause?’ and received an equally direct answer: ‘It is a matter with me of complete surrender … I am willing to die at any time, or to do anything for the cause.’30

  Gandhi met the Reverend Joseph Doke on the morning of 1 January 1908; the same afternoon, he participated in a meeting held in the Fordsburg Mosque. He spoke for himself, but also for his secretary, Sonja Schlesin, who had written a speech but was too shy to read it herself. Gandhi, stepping in, conveyed the European lady’s advice that the Indians should ‘continue steadfast in your heroic resolve to give up all, aye life itself, for the noble cause of country and religion’. She, and he, reminded them of the struggle of suffragettes in England, who, ‘for the sake of a principle’, had ‘to brave innumerable trials’, including imprisonment.31

  On 3 January, Gandhi defended two passive resisters in court. They were former soldiers of the Indian Army, both Pathans, who had seen action and suffered wounds in the Anglo-Boer War. These facts their lawyer successfully impressed on the magistrate sentencing them. A few days later, Gandhi told the Star newspaper that Indians were actually worse off now than under the Boer regime. In another interview, with the Transvaal Leader, he complained that Smuts had referred to Indians as ‘coolies’. So long as the General ‘holds British Indians so cheap and denies them the full status of British subjects’, he insisted, ‘so long must Indians rest content with imprisonment or deportation’. However, he was still open to a compromise, telling a correspondent from Reuters that if the Act was suspended, he would undertake that every Indian in Transvaal would register himself within a month, ‘in accordance with a form to be mutually agreed upon’.32

  Composing that week’s ‘Johannesburg Letter’ for Indian Opinion, Gandhi noted that of the several suggestions for an Indian equivalent to ‘passive resistance’, one was described as ‘not bad’. This was sadagraha, which roughly translated as ‘firmness in a good cause’. The suggestion came from Maganlal Gandhi. His uncle, and leader, took the liberty of refining it further, to satyagraha, or the ‘force of truth in a good cause’. ‘Though the phrase does not exhaust the connotations of the word “passive”’, remarked Gandhi, ‘we shall use satyagraha till a word is available which deserves the prize.’33

  On 10 January, this particular passive resister – or satyagrahi – was called to appear before a judge for not complying with the sentence to leave the colony. Gandhi reached the court by 10 a.m., with many supporters in tow. The hearing had however been postponed to the afternoon. The Indians then repaired to the Fordsburg Mosque, where, in an impromptu meeting, their leader told them to refute Smuts’ claim that ‘the whole of this agitation depended upon a few Indians.’ If they now demonstrated to the General that ‘the majority of Indians were not going to accept the Act, but would rather suffer imprisonment and degradation, [and] f
orfeiture of all their goods’, then Smuts would come to appreciate their qualities and himself say, ‘these are the people whom I shall prize as fellow-citizens’.

  After lunch, the accused and his associates proceeded to court. It had begun to rain, so an admirer held an umbrella for Gandhi to walk under. A rush of Indians entered the courtroom, before the police barred the rest. Inside, Gandhi pleaded guilty to the charge of disobeying the order to leave the Colony within forty-eight hours. He asked for the ‘heaviest penalty’ under the law, which was six months in prison with hard labour and a fine of £500. The judge, the same H. H. Jordan, declined to meet his request, instead sentencing him to two months without hard labour.34

  Gandhi was taken to the Fort Prison, sited on Hospital Hill, a great mound of earth overlooking the cricket and rugby grounds known as ‘The Wanderers’. Built in the 1890s, the prison had separate quarters for whites and natives. As an Indian, Gandhi could not be placed with the former, so he had perforce to be put in with the latter. As a free man, he had lived pretty austerely. Although his forefathers had served kings, his own homes were modest. Even so, his new place of residence must have seemed confining, a narrow, dark, ‘native block’ that contained some seventy-two prisoners.35

  The arrest of Gandhi, and the course of the passive resistance movement in the Transvaal generally, attracted attention in the neighbouring colony of Natal. Militant whites thought Natal should emulate Transvaal by framing laws ‘that will force the Asiatic to leave with disgust’.36 Less short-sighted whites were not so sanguine; a ‘perplexing inter-Colonial situation’ might develop should, as some suspected, General Smuts attempt to push the offenders out of the Transvaal. The ‘deportation of recalcitrants’ would result in an ‘unseemly state of things upon the Natal border’. As the Natal Mercury put it, ‘in this Colony we have our own Asiatic problem, and we do not wish it to be aggravated by the conversion of Natal into a dumping ground for the people of whom the Transvaal wants to rid itself.’

  Natal was smaller in size than the Transvaal, yet already had ten times as many Asians. Besides, unlike the Boers, the British had a sentimental and imperial connection to India. The growing movement for national independence there worried them. These fears underlay the somewhat critical coverage given by the Mercury to the speeches of General Smuts. It warned that his tactics of intimidation would only make martyrs of Gandhi and his colleagues, and ‘produce quite unforeseen results, both here and in India.’37

  The Natal Indians, for their part, threw their numbers and their funds behind the passive resistance movement. Hindu and Muslim merchants competed with one another to offer support for the wives and children of those sent to prison in the Transvaal. The ever-generous Parsi Rustomjee pledged to ‘stake every penny I had in the world to free South African Indians from the degradation of the Asiatic Act’. Pietermaritzburg alone contributed £3,700 to a fund for the resisters.38

  The day after Gandhi was incarcerated, a large meeting was convened by the Natal Indian Congress, held in the market adjoining the mosque off West Street in Durban. Here Parsee Rustomjee said the arrests would further test India’s loyalty to the Empire, already under strain due to food scarcity and the drain of wealth to England. A second speaker, Hassim Jooma, was reported as saying that all

  Mr Gandhi asked was that no odious class legislation be inflicted indiscriminately upon high and low, educated and illiterate, bonafide pre-war residents and unauthorised entrants into the country. Their blood boiled when they remembered that the Indian ex-soldiers, who, after the war, had made the Transvaal their home, had been given rigorous imprisonment … although they fought for the land on behalf of Britain, suffered all the horrors of war, sustained physical wounds and indescribable misery, and now, after the conquest, they were not allowed a peaceful residence in the very land they fought to acquire.

  A third speaker, a Dr Nanji, said that there was no need to pity Gandhi, for by his sacrifice ‘he had made a name for himself and was known all over the world. But it was Mrs. Gandhi who was grieving over her loss, and they must sympathise with her (Applause).’ 39 The meeting sent a collective telegram to Phoenix offering ‘their sincere sympathy to Mrs. Gandhi and family during their trouble for the splendid self-sacrifice made by Mr Gandhi in the Indian cause. May India produce many more Gandhis.’ This was one of forty-eight telegrams received by Kasturba in the first day after Gandhi’s arrest, in which (as Indian Opinion reported) ‘the prevailing tone was one of congratulation rather than commiseration.’40

  That the whites of Natal would be ambivalent about the struggle in the Transvaal, and that the Indians of the colony would be supportive, was to be expected. More surprising was the endorsement of Gandhi’s movement by the African educator John L. Dube. Writing anonymously in his newspaper Ilanga lase Natal, Dube praised ‘the courageous manner in which the Indians are acting in the Transvaal.’ ‘It is common for the Bantu to admire “pluck”,’ said the reformer, ‘especially when the plucky contender has a fair claim for justice.’ He sagaciously added that ‘slaves never yet made a nation or an Empire; meanness and hopelessness of life are the factors that weaken the Empire, no matter how strong it may have been at first.’ In Dube’s view, the conflict in the Transvaal was ‘the outcome of vanity and inability to guide the differing influences into their respective and proper channels’.41

  The assessment was wise, and the sentiments uncommonly generous. Dube’s own Inanda settlement lay in close proximity to Gandhi’s Phoenix farm. This, and his own big-heartedness, may have led him to forgive or forget the Indians’ characteristic tendency to distinguish their cause from that of the ‘Kaffirs’, whom they thought less civilized than themselves.

  13

  A Tolstoyan in Johannesburg

  In going to jail for a political principle, Gandhi chose to follow people he had previously praised in the pages of Indian Opinion – such as the Indian nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the American radical Henry David Thoreau, the Russian pacifists, and the British suffragettes. Even so, the experience was novel for the London-trained barrister, a venture into the unfamiliar, and the unknown.

  When, on 10 January 1908, Gandhi reached Johannesburg’s Fort Prison, he was undressed and weighed, and his fingerprints were taken. He was given a set of prison clothes, consisting of trousers, shirt, jumper, cap, socks and sandals. Then, since it was already evening, he was sent off to his cell with 8 ounces of bread for his evening meal. The cell was labelled ‘For Coloured Debtors’, and Gandhi had to share it with a dozen others. They slept on wooden planks, with ‘an apology for a pillow’. The meals were dominated by what was known locally as ‘mealie pap’, a porridge made of maize, which he found difficult to digest. When he protested (in writing), he was given an extra helping of vegetables.

  The next morning, the prisoners were taken to a small yard, where they could walk about. The latrines and bathing area were also located here. Gandhi was relieved to see that the cells were washed and disinfected daily. However, with no combs or towels to hand, he worried that he might get scabies. He got permission to call in a barber and have his moustache shaved, and also his head.

  At half-past five in the evening the prisoners were taken back to their cells. There was a single light bulb, by which one could read until eight, when this too was switched off. On 14 January, Gandhi was happy to welcome into jail his friends Thambi Naidoo and Leung Quinn, president of the Chinese Association. During the course of the week more passive resisters joined them. They included Tamils, Gujarati Hindus and Muslims. They had now been permitted to receive rice rations, and to prepare their own meals. Thambi Naidoo took charge of the cooking, while Gandhi supervised the serving and washing-up. They found the jail staff quite helpful, except for a stern warder who was nicknamed, inevitably, ‘General Smuts’.

  The prison authorities had agreed to place a table in Gandhi’s cell, and to provide pens and an ink-pot. Gandhi alternated between reading and writing. He had brought the Bhagavad-Gita with him, a
s well as some books by or about Tolstoy, Socrates and Ruskin. From the prison library he borrowed the works of Thomas Carlyle and a copy of the Bible, whose contents he discussed with a Chinese prisoner.

  As more Indians came pouring in, the warders were compelled to erect tents in the yard. Gandhi, out of solidarity, joined his compatriots in sleeping in the open, but worried that their habit of spitting everywhere would lead to the place becoming dirty and infected. Another complaint was directed at the authorities – whereas the prison had a chapel for the Christian inmates, why did they not allow Hindu priests or Muslim imams to visit their co-religionists?1

  The day after Gandhi’s arrest, many Indian stores in Natal and the Transvaal closed in honour of their leader. The lawyer’s European friends were also speaking out in support of his movement. Addressing his congregation on 12 January, the Reverend Joseph Doke called Gandhi’s campaign ‘a heroic struggle for conscience’s sake’. He marvelled that ‘a little handful of Indians and Chinese should have so imbibed the teaching of Christ in regard to the inherent nobility of man that they should become teachers of a mercenary age, while Christians stand by and smile or are silent as they suffer’. Two days later, Henry Polak told a crowded and enthusiastic meeting of the Chinese residents of Johannesburg that ‘the 15,000 Asiatics in the Transvaal were fighting a race fight which was of the utmost importance for the whole world, and that struggle was whether the Asiatic peoples were eternally to be kept in subjection or treated on terms of equality, regarded as fellow-men, as fellow human beings, to be treated as men to men, and not as men to slaves.’2