Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  Gandhi used this comparison to urge the colonists to raise the standing and status of the Indians, their fellow immigrants; allowing them to ‘live freely without being restricted, move freely without being restricted, own land, and trade honestly.’ He acknowledged that to speak of political rights for Indians and Africans was premature, but insisted these too would come, that, in fact, it was ‘the mission of the English race, even when there are subject races, to raise them, to equality with themselves, to give them absolutely free institutions and make them absolutely free men.’ If ‘we look into the future,’ he daringly asked, ‘is it not a heritage we had to leave to posterity that all the different races commingle and produce a civilisation that perhaps the world has not yet seen?’63

  Gandhi was now the leading coloured resident of Johannesburg. His speech bore marks of his elevated status, and the responsibilities that went with it. For perhaps the first time in public, he used the neutral ‘Africans’ instead of the pejorative ‘Kaffirs’. The change in language reflected a deeper change in his way of thinking about the world. When he first came to South Africa, Gandhi had pleaded for Indians to be distinguished from Africans, whom he then considered ‘uncivilized’. Now, fifteen years later, he brought all races within a single ambit. They all had similar hopes, and would one day have the same rights. In the future, Indians and Africans would be absolutely free men, mingling with Boers and Britons in a nation where one’s citizenship did not depend on the colour of one’s skin.

  With no possibility of a settlement, the protests resumed. From July 1908, Indians began courting arrest by hawking without a licence. They carried baskets of fruit on their heads, went from door to door, and waited for the police to arrest them. Gandhi defended these resisters in court. He asked the accused to make it clear that this was not their normal profession, and that they had taken to hawking to protest against the Government’s policies. If Gandhi was busy elsewhere, his colleague Henry Polak defended the violators.64

  The sentence for hawking without a licence was normally one week in prison. Some satyagrahis became serial offenders, among them Thambi Naidoo. Back in July 1907, when the Indians were resisting registration, the Tamil activist had led the picketing of the Permit Office. When they decided to court arrest, he was one of the first to enter jail. When Gandhi forged a compromise with Smuts, he threw the weight of his fellow Tamils behind the settlement. When Smuts dishonoured the pact, he led the satyagrahis into jail once more.

  Thambi Naidoo was born and raised in Mauritius, a British colony where Indians were free to live and trade as they wished. He chafed at the restrictions in the Transvaal, which brought to the fore his natural combativeness and militancy. A carrier by profession, when the satyagraha began he was happy to do any task assigned to him. Posting letters, carrying loads, arranging seats or chairing a meeting himself – all these he did till the time came to go to jail. With the Gujaratis wavering, Gandhi had come to depend on Thambi more and more. He was now Gandhi’s chief lieutenant, his position consolidated by the fact that he had, with the adroit use of that umbrella, warded off the lawyer’s potential assassins.

  Gandhi was suitably grateful to Thambi Naidoo for his support. He called him a satyagrahi ‘with few equals’, and ‘perhaps the bravest and staunchest’ of all the Indians in prison. Although he had never been to India, ‘his love for the homeland knew no bounds’. Meanwhile, Indian Opinion wrote that

  before the movement commenced Mr Thambi Naidoo was a self-satisfied trolley contractor earning a fat living, and was a happy family man. Today, he is a proud pauper, a true patriot, and one of the most desirable of citizens of the Transvaal, indeed of South Africa. His one concern, whether in jail or outside it, is to behave like a true passive resister, and that is to suffer unmurmuringly.

  With Thambi in prison, his wife Veerammal had to take care of their brood of children. She had neither the time nor the expertise to manage his business, and so to keep the debtors away she began to sell off his horses and carts, one by one, living from week to week on the proceeds.65

  In the last week of July 1908, after Thambi Naidoo had been sentenced for the third time within a month, Gandhi, accompanied by Polak, Doke and Maulvi Ahmed Mukhtiar of the Hamidia Islamia Society, called on Mrs Naidoo to ‘express their sympathy with her in her difficult position, and the admiration that they feel for her husband’s courage and fortitude’. Gandhi and Polak, Hindu and Jew, stood with the family while Doke, the Christian minister, ‘offered up a brief prayer asking for help, and Maulvi Sahib told Mrs. Naidoo that his co-religionists were all praying for her husband’s welfare.’66

  Mrs Naidoo was heavily pregnant; the following week, when the child was delivered, it was still-born. Polak accompanied the grieving mother to the cemetery. Later, he composed an editorial suggesting that, in the court of Indian public opinion, ‘the murder of Mr Naidoo’s child has been attributed to General Smuts.’67

  To further test the Government, the British Indian Association asked a literate Parsi named Sorabjee Shapurjee Adajania to enter the Transvaal. Adajania, who spoke fluent English, had matriculated from the Surat High School and now worked as a manager of a shop in the Natal town of Charleston. He was as well educated as most Europeans who wished to make a home in the colony. However, his qualifications were, in the eyes of the law, nullified by the fact that he was an ‘Asiatic’. He entered the Transvaal in the last week of June, claiming the right to reside as an educated immigrant. He was charged with violating the law, and defended in court by Gandhi. Told to leave the colony within a week, he refused to do so, and was summoned once more to court. The magistrate hearing the case was constrained to admit that Gandhi’s arguments were ‘very subtle and very able’. The law’s racial underpinnings stood nakedly exposed. But the judge was paid to adminster it, which meant that Adajania was sentenced to one month in jail with hard labour.68

  On 28 July, Gandhi defended six Indians charged with hawking without a licence. Gandhi was now appearing in court two or three times a week for the same purpose. This case was somewhat different, however, for among the accused was Harilal, his eldest son. Harilal, who had just turned twenty, was living at Phoenix, with his mother, his brothers and his wife Chanchal, who had recently joined him from India. He had been persuaded by his father to join the satyagraha. Entering Transvaal from Natal, he was detained at the town of Volksrust for not having a valid certificate, and told to apply for one in Pretoria. Instead, he proceeded to Johannesburg and immediately began to hawk fruit. Harilal was fined one pound or seven days hard labour; like the others, he opted for imprisonment.

  The day Harilal was released, Gandhi wrote a letter to his old adversary Montford Chamney. The tone mixed truculence with triumph. The judge had given Harilal Gandhi another chance to register for a permit. ‘I have the honour to inform you,’ wrote Gandhi to Chamney, ‘that my son has no desire to do so, and that he will be prepared to answer any proceedings that might be instituted against him for breach of the Asiatic Act.’69

  Shortly after 11 a.m. on 10 August, Harilal Gandhi was asked to produce a registration certificate by a policeman in Johannesburg. When he refused, he was arrested and his fingerprints forcibly taken. (These still exist in a file preserved in the National Archives of South Africa – black smudges of the right and left thumbs, and ‘the plain impressions of the Four Fingers [of each hand] taken simultaneously’.) His particulars were taken down – he was, said the record, five feet, four inches in height, of ‘stout’ build and ‘light’ complexion, with black hair and two scars on his forehead.70

  The same afternoon, Harilal appeared in court before Mr Jordan, with ‘Gandhi, sen.’ appearing for the defence. The father asked that the accused be ordered to leave the colony within twenty-four hours, ‘as he wished to go to prison with his friends’. The judge refused to comply, instead giving Harilal a week to leave, or face the consequences. On the morning of the 18th, the grace period having elapsed, Harilal was arrested for refusing to comply with
the court order. He appeared once more before Mr Jordan, who sentenced him to a month’s imprisonment with hard labour.

  The conviction and incarceration of the younger Gandhi generated a wave of sympathy among the Indians of the Transvaal. The Hamidia Islamia Society met and passed several resolutions, the first of which ‘congratulate[d] Mr Harilal Gandhi for his courage in suffering for his community at any cost’; the second of which ‘sincerely sympathise[d] with and congratulate[d] Mr and Mrs Gandhi on account of the sentence passed upon their son Harilal through the injustice of the Transvaal Government’.71

  The imprisonment of his teenage son provoked a complex set of emotions in Gandhi. ‘I want every Indian to do what Harilal has done,’ said Gandhi père in a letter to Indian Opinion. ‘It will be a part of Harilal’s education to go to gaol for the sake of the country.’ By going to prison the boy had, in a sense, substituted for the father. As Gandhi explained,

  I have advised every Indian to take up hawking. I am afraid I cannot join myself since I am enrolled as an attorney. I therefore thought it right to advise my son to make his rounds as a hawker. I hesitate to ask others to do things which I cannot do myself. I think whatever my son does at my instance can be taken to have been done by me.72

  There was, then, a sense of pride, and of vindication. But there appears also to have been a residual sense of guilt. ‘Harilal is only a child,’ said Gandhi in that same letter. ‘He may have deferred to his father’s wishes in acting in this manner. It is essential that every Indian should act on his own …’ Might it have been that while the boy was willing and the father willing him on, his mother and wife were not so keen on Harilal’s courting arrest?

  14

  Prisoner of Conscience

  The escalation of passive resistance in the second half of 1908 was viewed with some dismay by the white press. A paper in Pretoria thought General Smuts had ‘lowered the prestige of the Colony by his handling of the Asiatic question’. It chastised him for having ‘started another controversy with Mr Gandhi’. A paper in Johannesburg was less even-handed. It argued that Gandhi’s testimony that Smuts had promised the repeal of the 1907 Act was ‘certainly not conclusive’; in any case, the General would have had to ratify the promise in the legislature. The paper concluded that ‘whatever hardships the Asiatics have suffered they owe entirely to the recalcitrancy and folly of their leader.’1

  Whether sympathetic to Gandhi or hostile, such comments represented a huge leap in the Indian’s standing in the Transvaal. Before the satyagraha of 1907–8, his opposite number on the white side was Montford Chamney. In fact and in fancy, the lawyer was opposed to the bureaucrat, the permit-seeker to the permit-giver. Now, however, he was being equated with the scholar and war hero General Smuts in the popular imagination. They were the leaders of their respective communities, engaged in an argument about the rights and claims of those they represented. This new equivalence is reflected in the cartoons of the time, which, for example, showed the Asiatics led by Gandhi as akin to an elephant, barring the passage of a steamroller driven by the General himself.2

  On 14 August 1908, Gandhi wrote to Smuts announcing that the Indians would meet soon to burn their registration certificates. Then, characteristically, he tempered his militancy, asking the General to recognize that ‘the difference between you, as representing the Government, and the British Indians is very small indeed.’ The discrepancy could be removed by the Government accepting the admission of educated Indians and pre-war residents of the Transvaal.3

  On the afternoon of Sunday 16 August, some 3,000 Asians congregated outside the Fordsburg Mosque. On a raised plaform sat Gandhi, Essop Mia of the British Indian Association, Dawad Mahomed and Parsee Rustomjee of the Natal Indian Congress, the Cape Indian leader Adam Mahomed, and Leung Quinn to represent the Chinese. Below the podium was ‘the Press table, and beyond that, a sea of upturned and expectant faces, with determination and a bitter merriment stamped deep upon each of them.’4

  The main speaker, inevitably, was Gandhi. Once too shy to read from a prepared text, he was now, a decade later, very willing to directly address a large (and mostly captive) audience. Claiming the country to be ‘as much the Indians’ as the Europeans”, he said the recent laws sought to treat them as cattle and not men. ‘I would far rather pass the whole of my lifetime in gaol and be perfectly happy than see my fellow-countrymen subjected to indignity and I should come out of gaol.’ The lesson of their struggle was that

  unenfranchised though we are, unrepresented though we are in the Transvaal, it is open to us to clothe ourselves with an undying franchise, and this consists in recognizing our humanity, in recognizing that we are part and parcel of the great universal whole, that there is the Maker of us all ruling over the destinies of mankind and that our trust should be in Him rather than in earthly kings, and if my countrymen recognize that position I say that no matter what legislation is passed over our heads, if that legislation is in conflict with our ideas of right and wrong, if it is in conflict with our conscience, if it is in conflict with our religion, then we can say that we will not submit to the legislation.

  This flight into the Empyrean was followed by a direct attack on an earthly being – the Protector of Asiatics, whom Gandhi charged with ‘hopeless incompetence and ignorance’. Unless Montford Chamney was removed from his job, claimed the lawyer, ‘there will be no peace’.5

  After Gandhi had spoken, the Indians came up to place their individual certificates in a large three-legged pot previously saturated with wax.

  Paraffin was then poured in, and the certificates set on fire, amid a scene of the wildest enthusiasm. The crowd hurrahed and shouted themselves hoarse; hats were thrown in the air, and whistles blown. One Indian, said to be a leading blackleg, walked on to the platform, and, setting alight his certificate, held it aloft. The Chinese then mounted the platform, and put in their certificates with the others.6

  The day after this conflagration, Gandhi was summoned to Pretoria to meet General Smuts. Also present were the Prime Minister (General Botha), the leading Opposition politician Sir Percy Fitzpatrick (representing the British interest), William Hosken, Albert Cartwright and Leung Quinn. They talked for three hours; eventually, the Government agreed to allow prewar residents to return and register; not to register children under sixteen; and to allow thumb impressions or signatures when issuing trading licences. Having yielded on many points, the Government remained adamant that it could not allow the admittance of educated Indians. As for the 1907 Act, it would not be repealed but remain a ‘dead letter’.7

  Three days after this meeting, Smuts introduced a new bill in the Transvaal Legislature, which contained the concessions regarding Boer certificates and minors, but still barred educated Indians. Moving this ‘Asiatic Registration Amendment Bill’, the Colonial Secretary admitted the depth of the popular opposition he had faced from the Indians. There was, he said,

  no more awkward position for a Government than a movement of passive resistance … In more primitive times one would have met it by simply issuing a declaration of war. But in these times it is impossible to do that, and therefore the situation became a very difficult one for us to handle. I did my best … to carry out the law and apply the penalties which have been fixed under the law, and as a result early this year many Asiatics were languishing in prisons from one end of the country to the other. This was an undesirable state of affairs.8

  With outright repression having failed, said Smuts, he had decided to release Gandhi and his colleagues, and draft a bill less onerous than its predecessor, providing for the voluntary registration of all Asiatics legally resident in the Transvaal. Smuts assured his colleagues that compromise certainly did not mean capitulation. Thus,

  Mr Gandhi has referred to Indians being in partnership with the white population of this country. I have nothing to say against that. It is a claim which may appeal strongly to the Indians and those who are interested in them, but it is a claim that the white population wi
ll never allow (sustained cheers). It will be impossible to meet them on that ground.9

  The former Jameson Raider Percy Fitzpatrick spoke next. Before the War, Smuts and he were on opposite sides; now, with Boer and Briton reconciled, he endorsed the closed-door policy against the Indians. The House had to ‘be absolutely firm on the policy that this Colony was not going to be the home for immigrant Asiatics (Cheers)’. South Africa, thundered Fitzpatrick, ‘was redeemed from barbarism by the white people’; and it was ‘the white people who will have to carry it on, and defend it if needs be.’10

  The bill was passed by the House within twenty-four hours of its first reading. Writing to the Governor of the Transvaal, Prime Minister Botha claimed it met ‘every reasonable claim’ put forward by the Indians. The Governor, in turn, wrote to the Colonial Office asking it to recommend that His Majesty assent to it immediately, otherwise ‘the Indians will continue their campaign of resistance against the laws in force in the hope that by so doing they may influence the judgement of the Imperial authorities for the purpose of obtaining concessions they are not entitled to in law, in justice, or in reason.’11

  The questions that immediately come to mind when reading this, are of course: Whose Justice? Which Rationality?12

  The concessions offered by the Government did not satisfy the Indians. For the notorious Asiatic Act had not been formally repealed, while educated Indians were still barred from entering the Transvaal. So, on 23 August, another bonfire of certificates was organized outside the Fordsburg Mosque. This time, some Pathans also joined in after having ‘admitted their previous errors’. The next day, Gandhi wrote to Smuts about this meeting and the strong sentiments expressed therein. He hoped that ‘colonial statesmanship will still find a way out of the difficulty, and close the struggle that has now gone on for nearly two years’.13