Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  21. Cf. Vernon February, The Afrikaners of South Africa (London: Kegan Paul International, 1991), Chapters 1 and 2. The British annexed the Transvaal in 1877, but restored it to the Boers in 1881, on condition that Britain retained control over its foreign relations.

  22. See J. Emrys Evans, ‘Report on Indian Immigration into the Transvaal’, 2 March 1898, in L/P&J/6/478, File 789, APAC/BL.

  23. See, for an excellent overview, Bala Pillay, British Indians in the Transvaal: Trade, Politics and Imperial Relations, 1885–1906 (London: Longman, 1976), Chapters 1 and 2. Cf. also Iqbal Narain, The Politics of Racialism: A Study of the Indian Minority in South Africa down to the Gandhi–Smuts Agreement (Delhi: Shiva Lal Agarwal and Co., 1962), Chapters 6 and 7.

  24. I have borrowed this story from Edward Roux, Time Longer than Rope: The Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa (first published 1948; 2nd edn, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), p. 102.

  25. The judgment is reproduced in Papers Relating to the Grievances of Her Majesty’s Indian Subjects in the South African Republic (London: HMSO, 1895 [C. 7911]), p. 24. This assertion of the right of ‘every European nation’ to ‘exclude alien elements which it considers to be dangerous’, seems strikingly contemporary, with the rise of right-wing nativist parties across Western Europe whose platform rests on such sentiments (or prejudices).

  26. Petition dated 31 December 1898, signed by ‘Tayob Hajee Khan Mohammed, Hajee Habib Hajee Dadee Hajee Cassim, H. Joosw, Mohammed H. Joosw, and 27 others’, in Natal Government House Records, on microfilm, Reel 2, Accession No. 2175, NMML. This petition is not in the Collected Works, but a document in the archives confirms that it was Gandhi’s handiwork. Forwarding it to his boss in Cape Town, the British Agent in Pretoria said that ‘they [the traders] informed me that the petition had been drawn up by Mr Gandhi’ (Edmund Fraser, Her Majesty’s Agent in Pretoria, to High Commissioner, Cape Town, 31 December 1898, in Natal Government House Records, on microfilm, Reel 2, Accession No. 2175, NMML.)

  27. For the Uitlander point of view, see Alfred Hillier, South African Studies (London: Macmillan and Co., 1900) and J. P. Fitzpatrick, The Transvaal from Within: A Private Record of Public Affairs (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1899); for accounts sympathetic to the Boer perspective, F. Reginald Statham, South Africa As It Is (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1897) and F. V. Engelenburge, ‘The South African Question from the Transvaal Point of View’, in John Clark Ridpath and Edward S. Ellis, eds., The Story of South Africa: An Account of the Transformation of the Dark Continent by the European Powers and the Culminating Contest between Great Britain and the South African Republic in the Transvaal War (London: C. B. Burrows, 1899). Cf. also Murat Halstead, Briton and Boer in South Africa (Philadelphia: The Bell Publishing Co., 1900) and C. E. Vulliamy, Outlanders: A Study of Imperial Expansion in South Africa, 1877–1902 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938), Chapters 10 and 11.

  Two useful recent summaries of the background to the conflict are James Barber, South Africa in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1999), Chapter I, ‘Prelude to War: Afrikaner and British Imperial Nationalism’ and Hermann Gilimore, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003), Chapter VIII, ‘The Crucible of War’. The definitive history remains Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (first published in 1979; reprint, London: Abacus, 2007).

  28. Milner, quoted in John Marlowe, Milner: Apostle of Empire (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976), p. 47; Chamberlain, quoted in Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism in the Dark Continent (New York: St. Martins Press, 1961), p. 455.

  29. M. K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, translated from the Gujarati by Valji Govindji Desai (2nd edn, 1950; reprint, Ahmedabad: Navjivan Press, 1972), pp. 65–6.

  30. Letter of 19 October 1899, CWMG, III, pp. 134–5.

  31. See S. N. 3302, NGM.

  32. See M. K. Gandhi, ‘Indian Ambulance Corps in Natal’ and ‘Indian Ambulance Corps’, in CWMG, III, pp. 163–9, 174–6.

  33. Vere Stent, ‘On the Battle-field’ (originally published in 1911), reprinted in Chandrashanker Shukla, ed., Gandhiji as We Know Him: By Seventeen Contributors (Bombay: Vora and Co., 1945), pp. 18–19.

  34. Herbert Kitchin to M. K. Gandhi, 20 April 1900, S. N. 3444, NGM.

  35. News clipping dated 16 March 1900, S. N. 3412, SAAA.

  36. See Indian Opinion, 12 November 1903.

  37. CWMG, I, pp. 188, 199, 233; CWMG, III, pp. 4, 44, 108, 137.

  38. Gokhale, quoted in David Omissi, ‘India: Some Perceptions of Race and Empire’, in David Omissi and Andrew S. Thompson, eds, The Impact of the South African War (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 224.

  39. Gandhi, An Autobiography, Part III, Chapter X.

  40. Peter Warwick, Black People and the South African War, 1899–1902 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 110–11. See also Hulme T. Siwundhia, ‘White Ideologies and Non-European Participation in the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902’, Journal of Black Studies, 15:2 (1984).

  41. Gandhi, An Autobiography, Part III, Chapter V.

  42. See ‘Report on the James Godfrey Case’, in Natal Government House Records, on microfilm, Reel 1, Accession No. 2174, NMML.

  43. Gandhi, An Autobiography, Part III, Chapter V.

  44. Gandhi, An Autobiography, Part IV, Chapter X.

  45. M. K. Gandhi to Revashankar Zaveri, 21 May 1901, in CWMG, III, pp. 230–31.

  46. CWMG, XIII, p. 143.

  47. Gandhi, ‘Preface to “Srimad Rajchandra”’, CWMG, XXXII, pp. 9–13.

  48. Gandhi, An Autobiography, Part III, Chapter XII.

  49. Charles DiSalvio, The Man Before the Mahatma: M. K. Gandhi, Attorney-at-Law (NOIDA, UP: Random House India, 2012), p. 147.

  50. See S. N. 3920, SAAA.

  51. NA, 16 October 1901, S. N. 3919, SAAA.

  52. M. K. Gandhi to Parsee Rustomjee, 18 October 1901, CWMG, III, pp. 246–7.

  53. Gandhi, An Autobiography, Part III, Chapter XII. Kasturba’s chastisement is here rendered in Mahadev Desai’s English translation of her husband’s recollections; it would, of course, originally have been offered in Gujarati.

  54. Parsee Rustomjee to M. K. Gandhi, 19 October 1901, S. N. 3924, SAAA.

  55. This account of Gandhi’s visit to Mauritius is largely based on the news reports (in French and English) reproduced in Pahlad Ramsurrun, Mahatma Gandhi and his Impact on Mauritius (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1995), pp. 120–31; supplemented by U. Bissoondoyal, Gandhi and Mauritius and Other Essays (Moka: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 1988), pp. 6–12.

  56. Annie Besant, ed., How India Wrought for Freedom: The Story of the National Congress told from Official Records (Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1915), pp. 333–40.

  57. CWMG, III, pp. 252–5.

  58. The standard biography, on which these paragraphs draw, remains B. R. Nanda, Gokhale: The Indian Moderates and the British Raj (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). Also useful is Govind Talwalkar’s Gopal Krishna Gokhale: His Life and Times (New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2006).

  59. Gandhi, An Autobiography, Part III, Chapter XVII.

  60. Indian Mirror, 26 January 1902, quoted in Gopalkrishna Gandhi, ed., A Frank Friendship: Gandhi and Bengal (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007), pp. 26–9.

  61. CWMG, III, pp. 255–7, 260–66.

  62. Gandhi to Gokhale, 30 January 1902, CWMG, III, pp. 266–7.

  63. Gandhi to Chhaganlal Gandhi, 23 January 1902, CWMG, II, p. 257.

  64. Chandulal Bhagubhai Dalal, Harilal Gandhi: A Life, edited and translated from the Gujarati by Tridip Suhrud (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007), pp. 4–5.

  65. Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi, II: The Discovery of Satyagraha – On the Threshold (first published in 1980; reprint, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1997), pp. 399–403; CWMG, III, pp. 274–306.

  66. See Arthur Percival Newton, ed., Select Documents Relating to the Unification of South Africa (1924; reprint
, London: Frank Cass, 1968), vol. I, pp. 205–8.

  67. A. P. Thornton, The Imperial Idea and its Enemies: A Study in British Power (first published in 1959; 2nd edn, London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 137.

  68. Gandhi to D. B. Shukla, 8 November 1902, CWMG, III, pp. 315–6.

  69. See Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Gandhi’s Prisoner? The life of Gandhi’s Son Manilal (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2004), p. 50.

  70. Gandhi , An Autobiography, Part III, Chapter XXIII.

  71. Gandh to Devchand Parekh, 6 August 1902, CWMG, III, pp. 312–13.

  7 WHITE AGAINST BROWN

  1. CWMG, III, p. 316.

  2. W. H. Moor, Assistant Colonial Secretary, to Tayob Hadji Khan Mohomed, 6 January 1903, in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 2, Accession No. 2175, NMML.

  3. CWMG, III, pp. 325–32.

  4. Gandhi to Chhaganlal, 5 February 1903, CWMG, III, p. 337.

  5. See Application 252, vol. 8/654, ZTPD, NASA.

  6. Eric Itzkin, Gandhi’s Johannesburg: Birthplace of Satyagraha (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2000), pp. 12–3.

  7. Quoted in Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Randlords (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), p. 4.

  8. ‘Johannesburg: A City of Unrest’, originally published in the Pall Mall Gazette, reproduced in Indian Opinion, 12 May 1906.

  9. Jonathan Hyslop, ‘Gandhi, Mandela, and the African Modern’, in Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, eds, Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 121–2. Cf. also Nechama Brodie, ed., The Joburg Book: A Guide to the City’s History, People and Places (Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan South Africa, 2008), Chapter 3, ‘Foundations of the City’.

  10. Hannes Meiring, with G-M van der Waal and Wilhelm Grütter, Early Johannesburg: Its Building and its People (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 1985), pp. 36–8; Diary of the Town Clerk of Johannesburg for 1904, Reel 34, Lionel Curtis Papers (on microfilm), Bodleian Library, Oxford.

  11. John Buchan, The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstuction (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1903), Chapter 15, ‘Johannesburg’.

  12. See for instance, File 8593, vol. 367, CS; File 9199, vol. 377, CS; File 8491, vol. 365, CS; all in NASA.

  13. Milner to Joseph Chamberlain (Secretary of State for the Colonies), 11 May 1903, in Despatch from the Governor of the Transvaal Respecting the Position of British Indians in that Colony (London: HMSO, 1903 – Cd. 1684).

  14. Milner to Joseph Chamberlain, 12 May 1903, in Correspondence Relating to a Proposal to Employ Indian Coolies Under Indenture on Railways in the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony (London: HMSO, 1903 – Cd. 1683). On Milner’s attitude to Indians, see also Cecil Headlam, ed., The Milner Papers: South Africa, 1899–1905, vol. II (London: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1933), pp. 429–30.

  15. CWMG, III, pp. 364–71.

  16. Rand Daily Mail, 6 June 1903, clipping in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 3, Accession No. 2176, NMML.

  17. ‘Indians in the Transvaal: The Johannesburg Meeting’, IO, 4 June 1903.

  18. Cf. advertisement in IO, 4 June 1903.

  19. Burnett Britton, Gandhi Arrives in South Africa (Canton, Maine: Greenleaf Books, 1999), pp. 232, 303: CWMG, II, p. 251 and footnote.

  20. Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, ‘From Advocacy to Mobilisation: Indian Opinion, 1903–1914’, in L. Switzer, ed., South Africa’s Alternative Press: Voices of Protest and Resistance, 1850–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

  21. Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘Gandhi’s Printing Press: Print Cultures of the Indian Ocean’, in Kris Manjapra and Sugata Bose, eds, Cosmopolitan Thought Zones (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

  22. CWMG, III, pp. 376–7, 380.

  23. IO, 3 June 1903.

  24. Cf. Vijaya Ramaswamy, ‘Indian Opinion: Voice of the Tamil Diaspora’, in The Editor Gandhi and Indian Opinion: Seminar Papers (New Delhi: National Gandhi Museum, 2007).

  25. See Surendra Bhana and James D. Hunt, eds, Gandhi’s Editor: The Letters of M. H. Nazar, 1902–1903 (New Delhi: Promilla and Co., 1989), pp. 94–5, 99–100, 107–8, etc; Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi, III: The Birth of Satyagraha – from Petitioning to Passive Resistance (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1986), pp. 74–7.

  26. CWMG, III, pp. 424–7.

  27. IO, 9 July 1903.

  28. IO, 10 September 1903.

  29. See IO, 13 August 1903.

  30. To this dispassionate summary, we might juxtapose the rather more fevered language of the common-or-garden variety of colonist. In 1902, a Uitlander published a book defending the Boer treatment of Indians. This rejected the idea that as ‘British subjects’ they deserved a sympathetic hearing. Indian traders and hawkers constituted a ‘frightful danger to public health’. Their removal to locations out of sight of whites was ‘a most necessary sanitary reform’. Warming to his theme, the colonist claimed that it was ‘quite a common thing to find the coolies – the majority of them fruit and vegetable hawkers – not only huddled together, men, women, and children, to the number of eight or ten, or even more, in a tin shanty of perhaps less than ten feet square, with their stock-in-trade in the same room, as often as not packed under the bed, if indeed there was a bed at all, but in some cases actually sleeping on the vegetables which the following day they would be hawking around the town.’ See Edward B. Rose, The Truth about the Transvaal: A Record of Facts Based upon Twelve Years Residence in the Country (London: published by the author, 1902), pp. 142–4.

  31. IO, 25 June 1903, in CWMG, III, pp. 417–19.

  32. See letter from L. W. Ritch, published in The Theosophist, April 1897. (I am grateful to Shimon Low for this reference.)

  33. Albert West, ‘In the Early Days with Gandhi – 1’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 3 October 1965.

  34. These biographical details are drawn from H. S. L. Polak, ‘Who’s Who? An Essay in World Consciousness’, typescript written probably in the 1940s, in Mss Eur D.1238/1, APAC/BL. Cf. also ‘Mr and Mrs. Polak’, IO, 13 January 1906.

  35. H. S. L. Polak, ‘Mahatma Gandhi: Some Early Reminiscences’, typescript probably from the early 1930s, in Mss Eur D.1238/1, APAC/BL.

  36. Cf. Gustav Saron and Louis Hotz, eds, The Jews in South Africa: A History (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 85–6, 89.

  37. See Shimon Low, ‘Mahatma Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach in South Africa, 1904–1914’, MA dissertation (Faculty of Humanities, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, April 2010), pp. 26–9, 35–40, etc. As this book goes to press, Mr Low’s dissertation has been published as Soulmates: The Story of Mahatma Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach (Hyderabad: Orient Black-Swan, 2012).

  38. In 1895, when the first attempts to consign Asians to locations were made, a group of forty European merchants wrote to the government saying the Indians in Johannesburg kept ‘their business places, as well as their places of residence, in a clean and proper sanitary state – in fact, as good as the Europeans’. The names appended to this letter were mostly Jewish – Schneider, Fogelman, Behrens, Friedman, etc. See correspondence in File 3681, L/P&J/6/783, APAC/BL.

  39. Cf. File 402, L/P&J/6/628, APAC/BL.

  40. The letters of Bhownaggree, Lyttelton, Lawley and Milner are printed in Correspondence Relating to the Position of British Indians in the Transvaal (in Continuation of Cd. 1684) (London: HMSO, 1904). Despite his manifest prejudice against Indians, Alfred Lawley was, shortly afterwards, appointed Governor of the Madras Presidency.

  41. For details, see John Mcleod, ‘“Indian Tory”: A Biography of Sir Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree’ (book manuscript in preparation), Chapter 12.

  42. See Daily Graphic, 5 August 1904, S. N. 4201, SAAA. Bhownaggree was answered in the same columns by the president of the Amalgamated Chambers of Commerce of the Transvaal, who accused Indian merchants of ‘unfair competition’, claiming ‘the encroachments’ they had made were already so large that, if left unchecked, they ‘could only ultimately result in South Africa becoming an Asia
tic country’. The white trader was answered in turn by an Indian student from London University, who noted that in Bombay, Europeans and Indians lived and traded side by side, because ‘the English traders do not want their 25 to 30 per cent on their capital, as the traders and capitalists in South Africa do.’ See letters by H. R. Abercrombie and S. B. Gadgil, Daily Graphic, 16 and 24 September 1904, clippings in Mss Eur. F 111/258, APAC/BL.

  43. CWMG, IV, pp. 49–50, 112–13.

  44. CWMG, IV, pp. 149–51.

  45. West, ‘In the Early Days with Gandhi – 1’; IO, 30 April 1904.

  46. Keith Brown, Johannesburg: The Making and Shaping of the City (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2004), pp. 75–8.

  47. CWMG, IV, pp. 183–4, 203–5.

  48. Note of a meeting held on 26 February 1904, in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 3, Accession No. 2176, NMML.

  49. See IO, 27 May 1905.

  50. Reports in IO, 28 May, 4 June and 13 August 1904.

  51. ‘National Convention re Asiatic Question held at the Opera House, Pretoria, Thursday, 10 November 1904: Verbatim Record of Proceedings’, in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 3, Accession No. 2176, NMML.

  52. Governor of the Transvaal to Secretary of State for the Colonies, letters of 13 May and 13 July 1904, in ibid.

  53. M. K. Gandhi to Private Secretary to Lord Milner, High Commissioner and Governor of the Transvaal, 3 September 1904, in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 3, Accession No. 2176, NMML. (This letter is not in CWMG.)

  54. Cf. Arthur Percival Newton, ed., Select Documents Relating to the Unification of South Africa (1924; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1968), vol. II, pp. 1–2.

  55. Letter of 3 October 1904, CWMG, IV, pp. 272–3.

  56. Emily Hobhouse, quoted in Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 34.

  57. Saul Dubow, ‘How British Was the British World? The Case of South Africa’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37:1 (2009), p. 13.

  58. John Ruskin, ‘Unto This Last’: Four Essays on the First Principles of Political Economy, edited and introduced by Lloyd J. Hubenka (first published 1860; this edition, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967).