Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  These attacks spoke of a certain desperation. The majority of Indians were solidly behind Gandhi, and the pace of registration steadily picked up. In its issue of 7 March, Indian Opinion observed that ‘the Permit Office does not have a moment’s respite’ (in striking contrast to the situation a bare six months previously, when, as the same paper had reported, it was desolate and lifeless). By now, more than 4,000 Indians had already registered, among them some previously recalcitrant Pathans.30

  On 14 March the British Indian Association gave a dinner for the Europeans who had stood by them. The event was held in the Masonic Lodge, the reservation being made on Gandhi’s behalf by Hermann Kallenbach. Forty Indians, paying two guineas each, entertained some twenty-five whites, these being journalists, legislators and lawyers sympathetic to their struggle. The dinner consisted of twenty-four vegetarian items, washed down with lime juice and soda water. The menu card carried the line: ‘This dinner is arranged as an expression of gratitude to those whites who fought for truth and justice during the satyagraha campaign.’

  Furthering this spirit of inter-racial solidarity, the Chinese gave a dinner on 20 March for their Indian and European friends. Our source does not tell us what food was served, but we may presume that it did not exclude fish and meat (nor whisky and wine either). We do know that a Chinese band was in attendance. The band fell silent to allow an oak desk to be presented to Joseph Doke for looking after Gandhi, and a gold watch to be given to Albert Cartwright for his part in arranging the compromise. Henry and Millie Polak also received gifts. Gandhi was presented with an address which praised his ‘political acumen’. In a report for his newspaper, Gandhi admitted the Chinese had surpassed the Indians in ‘culture and generosity’.31

  Absent from these dinners was one very early, and very steadfast, European supporter of the Indians – L. W. Ritch. He was now based in London, lobbying the Imperial Government. When a Jewish newspaper took notice of his contribution, Ritch wrote in to say that ‘it cannot, of course, be a matter of surprise that the Jew should figure prominently in any movement directed against persecution and intolerance, whether of race or religion.’ Speaking of the work in the Transvaal of ‘my friends Polak and others’, Ritch asked: ‘What Jew dare coquette with the demons of racial prejudice, religious intolerance, or the jealousies engendered by superior business acumen, thrift, sobriety and general self-discipline?’32

  In the first week of April 1908, Henry Polak enrolled as an attorney of the Supreme Court of Transvaal. He had completed three years as a clerk in Gandhi’s office, and also passed the necessary examinations. As for Gandhi himself, he continued to draft petitions on behalf of clients travelling to India, who wished to have the paperwork in place to allow them re-entry. His clients included Muslims, Hindus, Parsis, Christians and – significantly – some Chinese. Gandhi complained to Montford Chamney of excessive delays in granting exit permits, and of the ‘latent feeling of suspicion’ in the minds of many Indians that they were being singled out for special harassment.33

  In the last week of April, three new bills were introduced in the Natal Legislature. The first sought to stop the import of indentured Indian labour after June 1911; the second to suspend the issuing of new trading licences to Indians after August 1908; the third to terminate existing Indian licences after ten years, subject to the payment of compensation equivalent to three years’ profit. The bills were clearly meant to protect the interests of European traders against their hardworking Indian counterparts. Even so, they were extremely severe. As a liberal white newspaper pointedly asked:

  Is an Indian not to be allowed to keep a barber’s shop to shave and cut the hair of his own countrymen? Is he not to be allowed to hawk the vegetables he grows on the little garden he has, or to sell the fish he may have caught in the Bay or on the open sea? Is he not to be allowed to supply the special wants of his own countrymen in the peculiar articles, some of them connected with religious observances, which no European could very well deal in?34

  Gandhi welcomed the first bill, for he too wished to see the ending of the harsh, dehumanizing system of indentured labour. But, he wrote, ‘the other two Bills are as ignorant as they are tyrannical.’ If not rescinded, they might have to be fought ‘with the sword of satyagraha’.35

  In the Transvaal, the compromise between the Indians and the Government was coming under strain. In early May, Smuts decided that the window of voluntary registration would be open for three months altogether. Former residents coming back to the colony after 9 August would have their cases examined under the notorious (and still unrepealed) act of 1907. Gandhi wrote to the Government to reconsider. He had very nearly lost his life as a result of the compromise on the fingerprint question. Now, if he was seen as having acquiesced in closing the door to late-comers, he would be ‘totally unworthy of the trust reposed in me by my countrymen’.36

  On 17 May, the President of the British Indian Association, Essop Mia, was set upon by a Pathan in the street, and badly injured. He was targeted because of his closeness to Gandhi. Gandhi wrote to Smuts, warning that ‘many more may be assaulted in [the] near future’. He ‘daily receive[d] indignant letters saying that I have entirely misled the people as to the compromise and that the law is not going to be repealed at all’. He asked the Colonial Secretary, ‘for the sake of those who have helped the Government’, to announce that the Asiatic Act of 1907 would be rescinded, and that new arrivals could register themselves voluntarily.37

  The Government was unyielding. Voluntary registration would not be permitted beyond 9 August. Smuts’ secretary told Gandhi, somewhat gratuitously, that ‘if you think that your person is in any way in danger, you will immediately avail yourself of the protection of the police, which the Government will be only too glad to supply.’38

  The insensitivity of the Government was answered by a hardening of the Indian position. In the last week of May, Gandhi wrote to Montford Chamney asking him to return the papers submitted with his application for registration. He wanted the papers back, he said, because of the Government’s ‘breach of spirit of the compromise’. Leung Quinn and Thambi Naidoo, his fellow signatories to the pact with Smuts, likewise wrote asking for their papers. Both insisted that ‘the only reason we accepted the compromise was in order to bring about the repeal of the Act’. Hundreds of Indians and Chinese followed their leaders in demanding the return of their papers. They were all ‘once more prepared … to submit to the punishments involved in non-submission to the Asiatic Act’.39

  Smuts now summoned Gandhi to Pretoria. They met on 6 June, with Gandhi reminding the General of his promise, made in January, that ‘if the Asiatics carried out their part of the compromise, you will repeal the Act’. Smuts remembered their conversation differently; he had, he claimed, given no such assurance. The lawyer returned to Johannesburg ‘without a definite assurance of repeal’. In despair, Gandhi wrote to Albert Cartwright asking him to resume his role as an ‘Angel of Peace’ and change the Government’s mind in ‘favour of Justice and Righteousness’.

  Gandhi and Smuts met again the following week. The conversation was less than courteous. The Colonial Secretary said new legislation to govern Indian immigration was under consideration. Gandhi asked that it allow pre-(Boer)war residents and possessors of Boer-issued certificates to voluntarily register, and that educated Indians be allowed to enter on the same terms as Europeans, namely, after passing a test. Smuts would not commit to these terms; what was worse, he insinuated that Gandhi did not really represent the Indians of the Transvaal.

  On 22 June, Gandhi met Smuts for the third time in as many weeks. The discussions proved fruitless. In a statement issued to the press, Gandhi charged the General with having ‘wrecked a whole compromise to avoid the possible accession to the Asiatic population of the Colony of two thousand Asiatics as an outside figure’. He recalled that when, back in January, he had commenced talks with the Government, some colleagues had warned that the rulers were not to be trusted. They argued that
the repeal of the 1907 Act should have preceded voluntary registration. Gandhi had told them ‘that was not a dignified position to take up’; now, it seemed, his critics had been vindicated.40

  Smuts expressed his own frustrations to the businessman William Hosken. While other concessions were possible, said the General, ‘the repeal out and out of the Asiatic Act’ was out of the question. The ‘white population is becoming daily more exasperated and demanding even more stringent legislation’. By making fresh demands, Gandhi had ‘thrown away’ a ‘golden chance for a final settlement’.41

  The battle lines had once more been drawn. A meeting of Indians was convened on the afternoon of Wednesday 24 June 1908. The venue was the Fordsburg Mosque in Johannesburg, and delegates from all over the Transvaal were in attendance. The meeting resolved that, since the Gandhi–Smuts compromise had been breached by the Government, the Indians would withdraw all applications for licences, reaffirming ‘the solemn declaration made on the 11th day of September, 1906, not to submit to the Asiatic Law Amendment Act, but to suffer, as loyal citizens and conscientious men, all the penalties consequent upon non-submission thereto.’42

  The next issue of Indian Opinion, out that same Saturday, warned that in view of the impasse, satyagraha might now have to resume. Gandhi reminded his readers that ‘in any great war, more than one battle has to be fought’. In the past decade, the Boers had fought the British and Japan had fought Russia, each war lasting for several years and involving several famous battles. The Indian struggle, though waged with satyagraha rather than gunpowder, was ‘no whit less of a war’ than the others. The example most relevant to them was that of Japan, for when that nation’s ‘brave heroes forced the Russians to bite the dust of the battle-field, the sun rose in the east. And it now shines on all the nations of Asia. The people of the East will never, never again submit to insult from the insolent whites.’43

  In 1903, when Lord Milner first sanctioned specific locations for Indians, a British journalist warned that ‘the controversy it will arouse will not be confined to the Transvaal, but will extend to England and India.’44 And so it did. The facts of the satyagraha in the Transvaal were becoming known in Gandhi’s homeland. Copies of Indian Opinion were read in Bombay and Madras, and further afield. Letters by Gandhi to Gokhale were circulated within and beyond Congress circles. From the last months of 1907 through the first half of 1908, the satyagraha in South Africa was the subject of reports and editorials in (among other journals) the Sasilekha of Madras, the Vokkaliga Patrike of Bangalore, the Indu Prakash of Bombay, the Kesari of Poona, the West Coast Spectator of Calicut and the Desamata from Rajahmundry – these published in English, Urdu, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil and other languages.

  The Indian reports on the Transvaal protests argued that discrimination abroad was a consequence of oppression at home. Once India became a free country, it would be difficult for foreigners to treat its citizens with impunity. An Urdu weekly from Madras said racial distinctions in the Transvaal were particularly invidious because the Boers were ‘not educated and cultured like the Indians’. They were, in fact, quite ‘wild’, their wildness evidenced by the fact that there was not a single university in their country. A Tamil weekly printed in the same city called the satyagrahis ‘true Aryaputras’, who had chosen to go to jail to uphold national honour and self-respect. The Shakti of Surat interpreted the struggle more broadly still: the protests of Indians in South Africa, it said, reflected Asia’s awakening after centuries of deep slumber. It was a microcosm of a wider ‘struggle for existence between the white and the black races’.

  The Gujarati press wrote appreciatively of the man leading the resistance, their native son, Mohandas K. Gandhi, born in Porbandar and educated in Rajkot. Vartaman, a Gujarati paper published out of Bombay, said the ‘whole of India was proud’ of ‘Mr Gandhi and his gallant band’. The Mahi Kantha Gazette of Surat invoked the epics: ‘The success of Mr Gandhi,’ it claimed, ‘has proved to the world that in spite of her poverty, Mother India is not yet bankrupt of men of the type of Bhishma, Arjuna, Drona and others.’45

  This widespread coverage in the press was consolidated by public meetings held in solidarity with the resisters. A meeting in Karachi on 28 January 1908 conveyed its support to ‘the relations of Mr Gandhi’. The next day, the Aga Khan chaired a meeting in Bombay, at which some 7,000 people were present. Here, ‘references to Mr Gandhi’s imprisonment were received with prolonged cries of “Shame”.’ The repression in the Transvaal, said one speaker, had ‘produced a growing sense of wrong and universal indignation among all creeds and castes in India’. Another speaker warned of the dangers to the Raj if the methods practised in South Africa were extended to the subcontinent. ‘How will British statesmen carry on the Empire,’ he asked, ‘if 300,000,000 [Indians] are degraded today, disaffected tomorrow, and rebellious in the end?’

  At a meeting in Madras, the social reformer and campaigning journalist G. Subramania Aiyar commended the ‘manful struggle against oppression and persecution’ of Gandhi and company. A meeting in Patna proclaimed that ‘India cannot pray to have truer sons than Mr Gandhi and his compatriots.’ Other meetings of solidarity and support were held in Surat, Ahmedabad, Kathiar, Lahore, Aligarh, Coimbatore and Jullundur.

  The name of Mohandas K. Gandhi was now becoming reasonably well-known in India. A meeting which may have given him great cheer was held in his home town, Porbandar, on 18 January 1908. The venue was an historic building known as the Satsvarup Haveli. A Muslim was in the chair; a Hindu made the main speech. Four resolutions were passed. The last three chastised, in different ways, the Imperial Government for not honouring its obligations to its Indian subjects. These were cast in general terms; the first resolution, on the other hand, expressed a more intimate, local pride and patriotism. It said that

  the people of Porbandar have learnt with great sorrow that Mr M. K. Gandhi, who was born at Porbandar, as also other respectable Indians, have been imprisoned by the Transvaal Government. This meeting emphatically declares that they are proud of Mr Gandhi, and that they highly appreciate the services that he is rendering to the Mother-country.

  The resolutions were sent to the Secretary of State for India, Lord Morley, urging him to ‘view this question from a point considering yourself to be an Indian for the time being. The fate and future of India is involved.’46

  The support for Gandhi’s movement disgusted a visitor to the subcontinent – a globetrotting British preacher named G. N. Thompson. Thompson had spent time in South Africa, where he was persuaded of the need to keep out Asiatics. In the summer and autumn of 1908, he toured the districts of the Madras Presidency, telling audiences that it was ‘quite unreasonable for the Sedition mongers here to talk that the Indians in the Transvaal are being ill-treated by the British and consequently loyalty in India is being strained.’ For ‘the Boers are no subject race and will never be dictated to’. ‘Boer law will prevail in the Transvaal’; and ‘Mr Gandhi is most perverted in his agitation.’47

  Back in Johannesburg, Gandhi was cultivating new friendships with white people. A jeweller named Gabriel I. Isaac had become increasingly attracted to the Indian lawyer and his cause. An English Jew, and a practising vegetarian, Isaac raised money for Indian Opinion and lived for a time at Phoenix. In a more emphatic expression of support, he offered to temporarily take over the running of shops owned by satyagrahis in jail.48

  In May 1908, Gandhi spent several days in the company of a visiting English clergyman named F. B. Meyer. Meyer was the pastor of Regent’s Park Chapel in London, and a past president of the Baptist Union and of the National Federation of Free Churches. He was well known as a campaigner against prize-fighting. (When asked whether he had ever seen a boxing match, Meyer answered that he would rather undergo a surgical operation than watch one.)49

  Meyer and his wife had come on a tour of South Africa. They arrived in Johannesburg by way of Cape Town, Kimberley and Bloemfontein. His main contact in
the city was his fellow Baptist Joseph Doke, who put him on to Gandhi. After ‘prolonged walks and talks’ with the lawyer, Meyer ‘was led to form a high estimate of his personal character.’ Among the topics they discussed were the Hindu view of life (and death), and the use of water in prayer. The priest was impressed to find that ‘whilst tenacious of his Hindoo religious views’, Gandhi had ‘a great reverence for Jesus Christ’.

  Meyer expressed a cautious sympathy with Gandhi’s movement of passive resistance. On the one hand he seemed persuaded that the Asiatic Act was, in his new friend’s words, ‘class legislation of a degrading type’. On the other, the whites in the Transvaal had complained to him of the trade practices of the Indians. That prisoners of conscience were put to hard labour made him slightly less than even-handed. ‘Obviously I cannot take sides,’ remarked the minister, ‘and I can have no sympathy with any unfair cutting of prices, but it seems barbarous to put Hindoo gentlemen to menial work, generally given to Kaffirs.’50

  Gandhi was also having regular walks and talks with a European resident in Johannesburg, his friend the architect Hermann Kallenbach. In March 1908, with his family still at Phoenix, Gandhi moved out of the house he shared with the Polaks into Kallenbach’s home in the suburb of Orchards. The house combined European elements, such as large bay windows, with African ones, such as a thatched roof. In deference to the latter the owner had called it ‘The Kraal’.51

  The change of residence was prompted by two things. Henry and Millie now had children of their own, and needed the space. And Gandhi wished to pursue his own self-improvement more seriously, a project in which Kallenbach was a far more congenial partner than the Polaks. Before he met Gandhi, Kallenbach had lived luxuriously. After coming under his influence, he had reduced his expenses by some 90 per cent, a fact reported with some satisfaction by Gandhi. Rising at five a.m., they did all their own cooking and cleaning; theirs must have been the only house in this white neighbourhood without a servant. By Gandhi’s admission the bulk of the work fell on his Jewish friend. Carpentry was Kallenbach’s particular passion, here manifest in the making of new tables and chairs and in continuing modifications to windows and doors.