Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  The letter received an arch reply, which noted that ‘the point which you wish to press upon Lord Morley is not new to him’. Morley would not grant another interview. Gandhi and Habib were told to meet the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Crewe, instead. When they did, Crewe asked: ‘Can you not accept the substantial thing that General Smuts is willing to give?’ Gandhi answered that Smuts’ proposal to admit educated Indians by administrative discretion ‘still leaves the racial taint on the Statute-book’. Crewe responded, ‘What you say is just and proper, but General Smuts is not an Englishman and, therefore, does not like the idea even of theoretical equality.’

  At this stage, Hajee Habib played the Imperial card, noting that ‘the matter was exciting a very great deal of commotion in India.’ Gandhi added that ‘the racial question is being very keenly resented in India.’ Crewe said he had already spoken to Smuts of the wider repercussions, but the General felt that ‘if theoretical equality were kept up, it might be used for fresh agitation in order to increase the demands.’ Gandhi clarified that if the principle of right was conceded, ‘we should not raise any further agitation.’ Crewe said, in closing, that he would discuss the question again with Smuts.33

  Henry Polak’s campaign in India – mentioned meaningfully to Lords Morley and Crewe – had indeed been bearing fruit. Landing in Bombay in the first week of August, he met newspaper editors, leading industrialists (such as the Parsi, Jehangir Petit), rising lawyers (among them the London-educated Gujarati Muslim, Mohammed Ali Jinnah) and veteran nationalists, notably Dadabhai Naoroji, who, despite being very old and very frail, read Indian Opinion regularly and said he admired Gandhi’s ‘persistence and perseverence’. ‘All my time has been occupied,’ wrote Polak to Gandhi, ‘in seeing people [and] being interviewed.’ His friend’s mentor, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, had placed ‘the whole of his organisation [the Servants of India Society] at my disposal’. Although Gokhale was ‘killing himself with overwork’, and had just received ‘a most depressing report’ from his doctor, he had found time to read a draft of a pamphlet Polak had written on the situation in South Africa. The Professor ‘thinks it good, has read it, and whilst he thinks it much too strong in parts (I have since toned it down somewhat), has passed it.’ Polak was now in search of a publisher, armed with an assurance from Jehangir Petit that he would underwrite the cost of printing 20,000 copies.34

  Having acquired a smattering of Hindustani, Polak had taken to addressing Gandhi as ‘Bhai’, or brother (he later amended this to ‘Bada Bhai’, elder brother). Hearing of the stonewalling by the big men in London, Polak wrote that ‘yours is splendid patience. I envy you. I see more and more the beauty of the Gita teaching – act, and don’t worry about results. But I see more and more how difficult it is to do this and admire the man who can.’

  Three weeks talking to Indians in India had only consolidated Polak’s respect for Gandhi. ‘The conclusion I have [come] to after all these conversations and interviews,’ he wrote,

  is that India, even at its most intelligent, is many miles behind us in the Transvaal. The people here admit the value of passive resistance, but say that you wouldn’t get anyone to go to gaol. I don’t know what my countrymen are worrying about India for. It seems a harmless enough country. Provided they don’t send another Curzon or anyone … approaching one here, the country is safe for apparently hundreds of years. They want a couple of hundred Gandhis here. Do you know, I haven’t met a man here who approaches you spiritually or in intensity of devotion. Mr G[opal] K[rishna] G[okhale] is the nearest, and though he is probably ahead of you intellectually, in public experience, and in administrative power, he is not in the running so far as pure religion is concerned and he himself admits it.35

  On 14 September, a large public meeting in support of the Transvaal Indians was held in Bombay’s Town Hall. Polak and sundry Servants of India did the organizing. An array of knights were in attendance, of different faiths – Sir J. B. Petit, Sir V. D. Thackersey, Sir Currimbhoy Ibrahim. Among the untitled grandees were the lawyer M. A. Jinnah and the editor K. Natarajan. The main speaker was Gokhale, who, after rehearing the facts of discrimination and the course of the struggle, saluted the leadership of ‘the indomitable Gandhi, a man of tremendous spiritual power, one who is made of the stuff of which great heroes and martyrs are made’. Gandhi and his colleagues were ‘fighting not for themselves but for the honour and future interests of our motherland’. ‘I am sure,’ said Gokhale, that ‘if any of us had been in the Transvaal during these days we should have been proud to range ourselves under Mr Gandhi’s banner and work with him and suffer in the cause.’ This was extraordinary praise, from a man who was perhaps the pre-eminent Indian statesman of his day. Polak, speaking after Gokhale, stressed the unity that had been forged by the struggle. The Indians in the Transvaal had thrown aside ‘all ancient misunderstandings. Hindu, Mahomedan, Parsi, Christian, and Sikh have … stood in the same prisoner’s dock and starved in the same gaol.’ Class as well as community differences were transcended, as ‘the merchant and the hawker, the lawyer and the priest, the Brahmin and the man of low caste, have all drunk the same bitter sweet draught, have all eaten from the same dish of bitter experience.’ Polak then named some stalwarts, such as the Tamil Thambi Naidoo, ‘who goes to jail with a smile on his face’; the Muslim A. M. Cachalia, who ‘lost his whole fortune rather than break his solemn oath’ (to go to jail); the Parsi, Rustamjee, who would ‘give all he could himself, in the cause of his country’; and, not least, ‘Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, saint and patriot, who would gladly allow his body to be torn asunder by wild horses rather than compromise his honour and that of his country.’36

  The press reports of this meeting reached Gandhi in London, to cheer and console him after the failure to get the Imperial Government to see his point of view. Later letters from Polak, who had been to stay with the Indian leader in Poona, passed on confirmation of Gokhale’s admiration. He held Gandhi up ‘as an example of patriotism, moderation, endurance, self-sacrifice and practical endeavour’. ‘His profoundest regret,’ continued Polak, ‘is that you are not here to join him and inspire him in his work. Were you two together, it would be a rare combination of soul forces.’37

  From Bombay, Polak proceeded to Gandhi’s homeland, Gujarat, where meetings were held in Surat, Kathore and Ahmedabad, all passing resolutions condemning the ‘unjust and degrading legislation’ in Transvaal and saluting the sacrifice of those who opposed it.38

  Polak now moved south to Madras, to the land of the Tamils who had been in the vanguard of the satyagraha in the Transvaal. His host there was G. A. Natesan, an energetic editor, printer and publisher known to his friends as an ‘American hustler’. Polak spoke at a public meeting, where, as he told Gandhi, ‘I had a fine ovation, and people told me it drew tears. Isn’t it wonderful! And yet, the Transvaal story is enough to bring tears.’ The people he met in Madras were, like Gokhale, impressed above all by the inter-religious harmony that underlay the struggle in South Africa. ‘Everybody to whom I have spoken,’ he reported, ‘Hindu, Mahomedan and Parsi alike, feels that we are far advanced politically over the majority of Indians here. They all feel that we have sent a lesson which they ought to follow but that they will have the greatest possible difficulty in following.’

  Polak travelled from Madras to the mofussil, to the interior of the Tamil country where so many of the indentured labourers in Natal had their roots. Among the towns Polak visited and spoke in were Madurai, Tirunelveli, Trichy and Tuticorin, drawing the comment from Gandhi that he had seen ‘practically the whole of India – a privilege I have myself not yet been able to enjoy’.39 Not the ‘whole of India’, actually, for, as Polak cheekily told his friend, he still hoped to ‘go over to Malabar before I leave here, in order to see the Nair women, who I am told, take one husband after another. That beats you all, who take one wife after another. I am inclined to think the women are right!’40

  In the last week of October, G. A. Natesan br
ought out Henry Polak’s pamphlet The Indians of South Africa: Helots Within the Empire and How They Are Treated. This was divided into two parts, the first providing an overview of Indian migration into South Africa, the migrants’ work as labourers and traders, and the restrictions they faced in different provinces; the second focusing on the Transvaal and the resistance movement there. Written with passion and clarity, it described indenture as a system of ‘heartlessness and cruelty’, and the free Indian as always living ‘in peril of having his feelings outraged and his sense of decency offended in a number of ways’. The anti-Asiatic prejudices of colonial statesmen like Lord Milner and General Smuts were exposed and documented. The struggle of the Indians, who had ‘deliberately pitted soul-force against brute-strength’, was narrated and celebrated.

  While Polak spoke at length of the heroism of ordinary folk, he did not fail to draw attention to Gandhi’s own sufferings. He mentioned a protest by him which led to better food being served to the prisoners. He wrote in vivid, even lurid, detail of how a Chinese prisoner attempted a ‘bestial act’ on an African, with Gandhi, in the same cell, ‘dread[ing] every moment that the Chinese, foiled of his horrible purpose with the powerful Kaffir, would direct his attentions to himself (Mr Gandhi)’. On another occasion, Gandhi, reaching for a closet to answer nature’s call, ‘was seized by a burly Kaffir, lifted high in the air, and dashed violently to the ground. Had he not seized hold of a door-post as he fell he would undoubtedly have had his skull split open!’

  Polak ended his pamphlet with a pointed, passionate wake-up call to India and Indians:

  Do the names of Gandhi, Dawood Mahomed, Rustomjee Jeevanjee, Cachalia, Aswat, Thambi Naidoo, Vyas, Imam Abdul Kadir Bawazeer, and a host of others, not call forth the flush of shame and indignation upon the cheek of the leaders of Indian thought and life, that these men should have done so much for India, and they so little for their humble suffering brethren in the Transvaal? Mahomedan, Hindu, Parsee, Christian, Sikh, lawyer, priest, merchant, trader, hawker, servant, soldier, waiter, poor man, rich man, grey-beard, child, man, and woman have suffered alike in this gigantic struggle to maintain the national honour unsullied. The Transvaal Indians have understood that upon their efforts depended whether or not this race-virus should infect the rest of South Africa and the rest of the Empire, whether India herself would not have to suffer and drink deep of the cup of humiliation. What of all this has India realized? Have the bitter cries from the Transvaal Indians penetrated to the ears of their brethren in the Motherland?

  What patriotic Indians should do, said Polak, was to form a national body with branches in every major city, which would make ‘powerful representations’ to the Government on the condition of their compatriots in South Africa. Simultaneously, ‘the press should agitate the question in season and out of season.’ Surely it was not ‘beyond the powers of the accumulated intelligence of India … to keep the ship of State off the rocks of racialism’.41

  Polak’s pamphlet was deemed dangerous enough for the South African authorities to publicly denounce it.42 On the other hand, his publisher, G. A. Natesan, was so impressed that he now asked Polak to write a short life of Gandhi, in a series that had previously seen profiles of Dadabhai Naoroji, M. G. Ranade, G. K. Gokhale, Lajpat Rai and other leaders of the Indian national movement.

  Modestly titled M. K. Gandhi: A Sketch of His Life and Work, this second pamphlet was published anonymously. Polak began by speaking of Gandhi’s ‘extraordinary love of truth’, his ‘proverbial’ generosity, his ‘sense of public duty’. The ‘majestic personality of Mohandas Gandhi’, wrote this friend and follower, ‘overshadows his comparatively insignficant physique. One feels oneself in the presence of a moral giant, whose pellucid soul is a clear, still lake, in which one sees Truth clearly mirrored.’

  These personal qualities were oriented towards a large cause. ‘Mr Gandhi had appointed for himself one supreme task – to bring Hindus and Mussalmans together and to make them realise that they were one brotherhood and sons of the same Motherland.’ Polak made the large, daring, claim that ‘perhaps, in this generation, India has not produced such a noble man – saint, patriot, statesman in one.’ Gandhi, said his English admirer, ‘lives for God and for India’. His ‘one desire is to see unity among his fellow-countrymen’. By forging unity among Hindus and Muslims in South Africa, Gandhi had demonstrated ‘the possibility of Indian national unity and the lines upon which the national edifice shall be constructed’.43

  Polak wrote to his friend that ‘with your great modesty you will probably be unable to appreciate the fact that you are regarded as one of India’s greatest men today. But I am afraid I shall play but a poor Boswell to your Johnson.’ In another letter he was slightly less modest. ‘I have revealed to the Indian leaders what sort of man you are,’ wrote Polak to Gandhi. ‘Do you know, I have not met one man to equal you in meekness, spirituality, devotion, and practical energy. I don’t believe any other country could have given you birth.’

  Through his conversations, speeches and writings in India, Polak had helped make Gandhi far better known in his own country. The admiration was manifest and genuine, and the subject was suitably grateful. When an Anglo-Indian paper dismissed Polak as a ‘paid agent’ of the Transvaal Indians, Gandhi wrote a spirited rejoinder, praising his commitment and sacrifice, and saying, with uncharacteristic sharpness, that ‘if a son in a joint family dying in the performance of his sonship may be described as a paid agent, because he is clothed and fed out of the family funds, then Mr Polak is undoubtedly a paid agent, but not until then.’44

  The Government of India knew how important and effective Polak’s work was. He was followed everywhere by police spies, who tampered with his mail, and asked questions of those working in the homes and inns where he stayed. Polak noticed this with amusement at first, but with time also with irritation. ‘The authorities must be mad,’ he told Gandhi, ‘to follow that damnable Russian System [of spying] which in England we affect to condemn but apparently it is all lies and hypocrisy!’45

  When told of the spies, Gandhi told Polak that he could ‘understand my letters to you being opened, but that Millie’s letters to you are deliberately opened, passes my comprehension. Let us hope they are wiser for having read the letters, and also that they have learnt the meaning of wifely devotion.’46 Polak’s reply underscored the difference between the marriage of the Gandhis, based as it was on obligation and tradition, and his own, based rather on love and romance. ‘You take the opening of Millie’s letter more philosophically than she and I do,’ he remarked. ‘I see that your days of writing love-letters are over! I am sorry for you! I haven’t yet authorised Millie to start classes in marital devotion!’

  Polak’s extended trip to India was itself an object lesson in devotion to a friend and a cause. The real nature of his sacrifice is revealed in a letter that thanked Gandhi, with sincerity and also envy, for spending so much time with his family in London. ‘Don’t you find Millie more lovable as time passes?’ he wrote, adding, ‘I do!!! (Amazing discovery, isn’t it?)’47

  From Madras, Polak took a boat to Rangoon. He was met at the wharf by Pranjivan Mehta – now back from London – and by Madanjit Vyavaharik, one of Gandhi’s original collaborators on Indian Opinion, who was also based here, editing a journal called United Burma.48 Polak stayed with Mehta, discussing, among other things, the past and future of their mutual friend. Either off his own bat, or in consultation with Polak, Mehta wrote Gopal Krishna Gokhale a remarkable letter which began:

  Dear Sir,

  During my last trip to Europe I saw a great deal of Mr Gandhi. From year to year (I have known him intimately for over twenty years) I have found him getting more and more selfless. He is now leading almost an ascetic sort of life – not the life of an ordinary ascetic that we usually see but that of a great Mahatma and the one idea that engrosses his mind is his motherland.

  It seems to me that any one who desires to work for his country ought to study Gand
hi and his latest institution – Phoenix Colony and Phoenix School. The passive resistance as carried on in the Transvaal under his Guidance can also be better studied on the spot.

  Mr Polak who is now here and living with me, tells me that the ‘Servants of India’ are doing excellent work; it seems to me that the study of every worker for India is not complete unless he has studied Mr Gandhi and his Institutions.

  Mehta went on to offer to fund an associate of Gokhale’s to go to South Africa ‘and put himself absolutely at the disposal of Mr Gandhi’. He even suggested a name – that of the Madras scholar and orator, V. S. Srinivasa Sastri.49

  This was a precocious pronouncement of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s greatness. Particularly striking is Mehta’s use of the honorific ‘Mahatma’, ‘great and holy soul’, normally reserved for spiritual figures whose influence resonates down the centuries, here conferred on a mere lawyer and activist. The conventional wisdom has it that it was the poet Rabindranath Tagore who, around 1919, first began to call Gandhi ‘Mahatma’, after he had become a major figure in Indian politics. An alternate claim has been made on behalf of the Gujarat town of Gondal, which seems to have conferred the title on Gandhi when he visited it on his return from South Africa in 1915. Pranjivan Mehta preceded them both – although, of course, in a private letter rather than a public declaration.