Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  In truth, these concerns were not always appreciated by Gandhi’s contemporaries, nor even by some of his friends. In her book Mr Gandhi: The Man, an always affectionate, often insightful, and absolutely indispensable account of their life together in South Africa, Millie Polak could not conceal her puzzlement with her friend’s sometimes strange ways. Her husband Henry, while deeply devoted to his Bada Bhai’s political programme, was not particularly enchanted by his social or natural philosophy either. Neither Millie nor Henry spent much time at Phoenix or Tolstoy Farms; neither subjected themselves to steam baths and mud packs; neither ever remotely contemplated the practice of celibacy.

  To some people then (and now), Gandhi’s ascetic, austere regimen, his idiosyncratic diet, his refusal to take pills when sick, his sexual abstinence, were hard to take and harder to understand. If one admired Gandhi’s political philosophy, then – like the Polaks – one treated these as amiable eccentricities, as fads. If one disagreed with Gandhi’s political philosophy, then one saw in these obsessions confirmation of how irrelevant his entire world-view was to the modern era. The prominent Indian Communist E. M. S. Namboodiripad, writing of Gandhi’s membership of the Vegetarian Society of London as a law student, thought it an early illustration of the ‘extremely reactionary social outlook which guided Gandhi throughout his activities’. Namboodiripad continued:

  While Gandhi, the young barrister, was writing articles for the Vegetarian, Lenin, also a young lawyer, was translating Marx, Sydney Webb, etc., and himself writing The Development of Capitalism in Russia. Lenin combined the militant mass movement of the working class with the most advanced ideology. Gandhi combined it with the most reactionary and obscurantist of ideologies that was current in the contemporary world.20

  In the first half of the twentieth century, Marxism had an enormous appeal. Well-read young men all over the world saw it as the way, and wave, of the future. (The French sociologist Raymond Aron, a precocious dissenter himself, termed it the ‘opium of the intellectuals’.) These same men, if they knew or knew of Gandhi, saw him as ‘reactionary and obscurantist’ because he used a religious idiom rather than a secular-scientific one, because he preached a moderation of material wants rather than welcoming the cornucopian promises of modernity, because he advocated the (to them) tame, timid, effeminate alternative of satyagraha to the militant, masculine route of armed struggle.

  Namboodiripad’s emphatic dismissal of Gandhi (and Gandhism) was first published in the winter of 1955–6. The next year, Khrushchev’s speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union confirmed the murderous outcomes of the ‘most advanced ideology’ of Lenin and his successor Stalin. The image of Marxism took a battering in subsequent decades. News of the Gulag, the purges, the brutal suppression of minorities, and the mass famines induced by Communist regimes, have made it less easy to hail Marxism as ‘progressive’ while dismissing Gandhism as ‘reactionary’.

  But let us not win the argument between these rival philosophies through hindsight, but rather try and see Gandhi’s own experiments as he saw them, as steps to a purer, more meaningful life. To simplify his diet, to reduce his dependence on medicines and doctors, to embrace brahmacharya, were all for him ways of strengthening his will and his resolve. By conquering the need to be stimulated by sex or rich food – the ‘basal passions’ according to his teacher Tolstoy – Gandhi was preparing himself for a life lived for other people and for higher values. If he ate little, and that merely fruits and vegetables, without salt, sugar and spices; if he didn’t care how often (or if at all) he had sex with his wife (or with others); if he dressed simply and didn’t own property or jewellery, he could more easily embrace the rigours of prison life, more fully and whole-heartedly devote his being and his body to the oppressed Indians of Natal and the Transvaal.

  His religious quest, his individual and social relationships, his work as writer and editor, his legal career, his lifestyle choices – these were all subordinated, in lesser or greater degree, to Gandhi’s work for the rights of the Indians in South Africa. This subordination of individual choice to social commitment happened incrementally, over the twenty-odd years that Gandhi spent there.

  This gradualism may have had its roots in the time he spent as a student in London. As his old flatmate Josiah Oldfield once noted, the vegetarians provided ‘a fine training ground in which Gandhi learnt [that] by quiet persistence he could do far more to change men’s minds than by any oratory or loud trumpeting’.21

  Henry Salt, who was, properly speaking, Gandhi’s first mentor (since he met him even before he met Raychandbhai) had said that ‘to insist on an all-or-nothing policy would be fatal to any reform whatsoever. Improvements never come in the mass, but always by instalment.’ Likewise, Gandhi’s policy for personal improvement as well as his agenda for social reform was that of one step at a time. However, even if he recognized that the individual self was not, ultimately, perfectible, he never lost sight of the ultimate social goal of racial and national equality.

  Someone who understood the pragmatic roots of Gandhi’s gradualism was his friend L. W. Ritch. When asked why Indians did not immediately demand the franchise, Ritch answered that ‘the whole tone and temper of white South Africa was such that any claim of that kind was absolutely outside the range of practical politics.’ Then he continued, ‘Still, the ideals of the one day become the practical politics of another, and the children of a later generation will in all likelihood look with amazement upon what they will doubtless consider the narrow-mindedness of their predecessors.’22

  While fighting for the repeal of an unjust law or tax, or for more freedom of movement or of trade, Gandhi did not go so far as to press for equal citizenship or for voting rights for Indians. To speak of comprehensive equality for coloured people was premature in early twentieth-century South Africa. Nonetheless, Gandhi believed that in time such equality would come, that (as he put it in a speech of May 1908) the rulers would one day recognize the need to raise subject peoples ‘to equality with themselves, to give them absolutely free institutions and make them absolutely free men’. Six years later, in his farewell speech to the Europeans of Durban, he told them that they could not forever postpone the day when coloured peoples would enjoy ‘a charter of full liberties’ in South Africa.

  As his political thought evolved, so also did Gandhi’s confidence in himself as a leader and maker of men. His letters to Lord Milner in 1903 and 1904 were extremely deferential in tone. Within a few years this had changed. Gandhi’s letters to General Smuts were courteously worded, yet far more assured. He spoke to him as the leader of one community to another. To be sure, equivalence did not imply equality, since the whites were the dominant race in a political as well as economic sense. Still, the confidence conveyed in Gandhi’s exchanges with Smuts is unmistakable, a product of the fact that so many Indians had followed his call and courted arrest.

  This political and personal evolution was also accompanied by shifts in how Gandhi viewed rival cultures and civilizations. When he first went to South Africa, Gandhi was both an Empire loyalist and a believer in the superiority of British justice and British institutions. He was, in dress and orientation of mind, a Westernized Oriental Gentleman, a modern man who admired and was comfortable with (European) modernity. Reading Tolstoy and Ruskin, and re-reading Raychandbhai, led him to reconsider his position. He began to exalt the rural against the urban, the agrarian against the industrial and, eventually the Indic versus the European. As this London-trained barrister began to think more like an Indian, he began to look more like an Indian too. His adoption of the home-spun dress of a peasant after the satyagraha of 1913 was the analogue, in apparel, of the intellectual indigenism contained within the pages of Hind Swaraj.

  Gandhi’s experiences in South Africa were astonishingly varied and always intense. Life in Durban and Johannesburg, at Phoenix and Tolstoy farms, in court and in jail, on the road and on the train, gave him a deeper understanding of what div
ided (or united) human beings in general and Indians in particular. Two decades in the diaspora gave him the eyes to see and the tools to use when he came back home. As writer, editor, leader, bridge-builder, social reformer, moral exemplar, political organizer and political theorist, Gandhi returned to India in 1915 fully formed and fully primed to carry out these callings over a far wider spatial, social and – not least – historical scale.

  The South African years were crucial to Gandhi, and to the distinctive form of political protest that is his most enduring legacy to India and the world. From 1894, when the Natal Indian Congress was founded, until 1906, Gandhi and his colleagues relied on letters, articles, petitions and deputations to make their case. On 11 September 1906, the Indians of the Transvaal made a radical departure, when, in that mass meeting at Johannesburg’s Empire Theatre, they resolved to seek imprisonment if their demands were not met. Gandhi now travelled to London to give the older methods a last chance. He returned empty-handed. The following year he led hundreds of Indians (and some Chinese) in courting arrest by breaking the law.

  In subsequent years, satyagraha took various forms: hawking without a licence, crossing colonial boundaries without a permit, refusing to provide thumb impressions when asked to do so, burning registration certificates that the law obliged one to possess and carry at all times. The actions were individual and collective – first conducted by a person acting alone, then by a few people acting together, then, in the march across the border in November 1913, by thousands of people at once. These methods of civil disobedience lay in between the older method of petitioning the authorities and the rival method – then gathering ground in India – of bombing public places and assassinating public officials.

  Gandhi was both a practitioner and a theorist of satyagraha. He planned his campaigns meticulously. Which law was to be broken when, by whom, in which place and in what manner – to these matters he gave careful attention and issued precise instructions. Before and after these campaigns he explained the wider moral and political significance of satyagraha. In letters, speeches, articles, editorials, and in his book Hind Swaraj, he explained why non-violence was more effective as well as more noble than the armed struggle to which some brilliant and courageous young Indians were more immediately attracted.

  In August 1911, a time we may describe in retrospect as a lull between two storms, after one major satyagraha and before another, The Times of London carried a leader on ‘The Asiatic Problem in South Africa’, This summarized the campaigns of Indians in South Africa, conducted ‘under the guidance of Mr M. K. Gandhi, an able and tenacious leader’.23 The description was not inaccurate. For Gandhi was in 1911 essentially a community leader, who represented the interests of about 100,000 Indians in South Africa.

  To be sure, given what we now know of the man and his impact on his country and the world, we may think the praise parsimonious. So, had they read The Times at the time, would some of Gandhi’s closest friends. The people of Porbandar, writing to Lord Morley in 1908, insisted that in the struggle led by their native son ‘the fate and future of India is involved’. Kallenbach, writing a few years later, thought history would place Gandhi alongside Tolstoy and Ruskin. Pranjivan Mehta went even further – he called his fellow Gujarati a ‘Mahatma’, the sort of spiritual leader born every few hundred years to rescue and redeem the motherland.

  Kallenbach was Gandhi’s most devoted European friend; Mehta, Gandhi’s oldest and most steadfast Indian admirer. They would have followed their leader wherever he went, even down the path of armed struggle had he chosen that route instead. The moral force of Gandhi’s political method, however, was better appreciated by two men, one Indian, the other European, whose personal affection for the man was matched by a sharp understanding of his political technique. In a speech in Johannesburg in November 1908, the trader A. M. Cachalia observed that ‘the passive resister is higher in the moral scale, and in that of human development than the active resister … Passive resistance is a matter of heart, of conscience, of trained understanding.’ Speaking to a reporter in Durban in September 1910, Henry Polak observed that ‘our programme will remain, as it has always been, not one of violence or attempts to disturb, but one of suffering on the part of our people, who intend to go on enduring these hardships until they make the authorities ashamed of themselves.’

  Gandhi’s own belief in the power and relevance of non-violent resistance was enormous, and unshakeable. As early as November 1907 – when the first protests against permits were taking shape in the Transvaal, and when he had not yet been jailed himself – he said of passive resistance that it ‘may well be adopted by every oppressed people [and] by every oppressed individual, as being a more reliable and more honourable instrument for securing the redress of wrongs than any which has heretofore been adopted’. Two years later, writing to Tolstoy from London, he went so far as to claim that ‘the struggle of the Indians in the Transvaal is the greatest of modern times, inasmuch as it has been idealised both as to the goal as also the methods adoped to reach the goal.’ Then, in June 1914 – on the eve of his departure from South Africa – he described satyagraha as ‘perhaps the mightiest instrument on earth’.

  As I write this in August 2012, sixty-five years after Indian independence, forty-four years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the United States, twenty-three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, eighteen years after the ending of apartheid, and in the midst of ongoing non-violent struggles for democracy and dignity in Burma, Tibet, Yemen, Egypt and other places, Gandhi’s words (and claims) appear less immodest than they might have seemed when he first articulated them.

  1. The home in Porbandar where Mohandas Gandhi was born.

  2. The home in Porbandar where Mohandas Gandhi was born.

  3. The school in Rajkot, where Mohandas Gandhi did not distinguish himself as a student.

  4. Mohandas's father, Karamchand (Kaba) Gandhi.

  5. Mohandas's mother Putlibai.

  6. Mohandas, in traditional Kathiawari dress.

  7. Gandhi’s preceptor, the Jain scholar Raychandbhai.

  8. The successful lawyer in Durban, c. 1898.

  9. Kasturba Gandhi and children, c. 1899. The infant in her arms is Ramdas, the one on the stool Manilal, the one to the right Harilal. The eldest of the boys in the picture, on the left, is Gandhi's sister’s son Gokuldas. The Gandhis’ youngest son, Devadas, was born the following year.

  10. A front page of Indian Opinion, the journal Gandhi founded in 1903. Note the map on the masthead, linking the motherland to the diaspora. The petition that this issue reproduces, although sent in the name of A. M. Cachalia, was almost certainly written by Gandhi.

  11. Gandhi's closest adviser: the Jewish radical Henry Polak.

  12. Gandhi's closest adviser: the Gujarati patriot Pranjivan Mehta.

  13. Gandhi’s most devoted assistant: his secretary Sonja Schlesin.

  14. Gandhi’s most devoted assistant: Hermann Kallenbach.

  15. The great European who loomed large in Gandhi’s life in South Africa: his principal adversary, the Boer general Jan Christian Smuts.

  16. Another great European who loomed large in Gandhi’s life in South Africa: Leo Tolstoy.

  17. Gandhi, taken in 1909. This was presented by Hermann Kallenbach to Thambi Naidoo, with the inscription (clearly visible): ‘If we are true to him we will be true to ourselves.’

  18. Gandhi’s staunchest supporter: the Johannesburg merchant A. M. Cachalia.

  19. Gandhi’s staunchest supporter: the English vegetarian Albert West.

  20. Gandhi’s staunchest supporter: the Tamil radical Thambi Naidoo.

  21. Gandhi’s staunchest supporter: Durban merchant Parsee Rustomjee.

  22. Gandhi’s argumentative housemate Millie Graham Polak.

  23. Gandhi’s son Harilal.

  24. Maganlal Gandhi.

  25. Chhaganlal Gandhi.

  26. Contemporary cartoon of the satyagraha in the Transvaal.


  27. The Baptist Minister Joseph Doke, Gandhi’s friend, host, and first biographer.

  28. Leung Quinn, the leader of the Chinese satyagrahis.

  29. Two Indians Gandhi greatly looked up to: the liberal politician Gopal Krishna Gokhale (left) and the Parsi philanthrophist Ratan Tata (right). The photograph was taken in or about 1914, probably in the garden of Tata's house in Twickenham.

  30. Gandhi’s key lieutenant, Thambi Naidoo, addressing a crowd in or near Durban during the 1913 satyagraha.

  31. Gandhi, early 1914, wearing white to mourn the deaths of Indian strikers killed in police firing.

  A Note on Sources

  The first twelve volumes of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi run to some 5,000 pages in print. They cover his years in Kathiawar, London, Bombay and South Africa. Two scholars played a critical role in putting together these volumes. They were K. Swaminathan, chief editor of the project; and his deputy, C. N. Patel. Swaminathan was previously a professor of English in Madras; he had also briefly edited a Sunday newspaper. Patel had also been an English teacher (in a college in Ahmedabad); and he was a native Gujarati speaker.