Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  34. See L. E. Neame, The Asiatic Danger to the Colonies (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1907), pp. 4–6, 31–3, 53–4, 89–90, etc. Neame’s book drew on a series of articles previously published by him in the Rand Daily Mail, here revised and rewritten for a British audience.

  35. ‘A Book – and its Misnomer: A Review’, IO, 11, 18, 25 May and 1 June 1907.

  11 FROM CONCILIATION TO CONFRONTATION

  1. IO, 29 December 1906.

  2. IO, 5 January 1907.

  3. See A Proceedings, no. 14, December 1907, in Department of Commerce and Industry (Emigration), NAI; CWMG, VI, pp. 253f.

  4. Memorandum by Ministers of the Natal Government, dated 19 February 1907, in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 1, Accession No. 2174, NMML.

  5. See File 2726, L/P&J/883, APAC/BL; Vishnu Padayachee and Robert Morrell, ‘Indian Merchants and Dukawallahs in the Natal Economy, c. 1875–1914’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 17:1 (1991).

  6. Cape Times, 6 November 1907, File 4238, L/P&J/6/839, APAC/BL.

  7. Report of the Select Committee on Asiatic Grievances (Cape Town: Government Printers, 1908), in File 4490, L/P&J/6/907, APAC/BL.

  8. IO, issues of 26 January and 2 February 1907, CWMG, VI, pp. 291–5, 308–9.

  9. Letter of 28 January 1907, CWMG, VI, pp. 301–2.

  10. CWMG, VI, pp. 320–21.

  11. Gandhi to Chhaganlal, 24 April 1907, copy in Gandhi–Polak Papers, vol. I, Manuscript Section, NAI.

  12. Harold Spender, General Botha: The Career and the Man (London: Constable and Company, 1916), pp. 22, 166–7, 178–80, etc.

  13. Letter of 1 April, in Further Correspondence Relating to Legislation Affecting Asiatics in the Transvaal (Cd. 3887 – in continuation of Cd. 3308) (London: HMSO, 1908).

  14. CWMG, VI, pp. 381–2, 394–408.

  15. IO, 20 April 1907. Cf. also Karen L. Harris, ‘Gandhi, the Chinese and Passive Resistance’, in Judith M. Brown and Martin Prozesky, eds, Gandhi and South Africa (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1996).

  16. See File 2659, L/P&J/6/823, APAC/BL.

  17. See petitions to Colonial Office and India Office by Joseph Royeppen, 24 April 1907, in File 1338/L/P&J/6/809, APAC/BL.

  18. The paragraphs that follow draw largely on the standard (and still unsurpassed) biography by W. K. Hancock: Smuts, I: The Sanguine Years, 1870–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962).

  19. Emily Hobhouse to Smuts, 29 May 1904, in W. K. Hancock and Jean van der Poel, eds, Selections from the Smuts Papers, II: June 1902– May 1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 253 (emphasis in original).

  20. See ibid., pp. 25–6, 64–5, 116, 125–6.

  21. CWMG, VI, pp. 416–17, 423–7.

  22. Letter written ‘about April 20, 1907’, CWMG, VI, pp. 423–7.

  23. IO, 27 April 1907, CWMG, pp. 439–43.

  24. IO, 11 May 1907.

  25. CWMG, VI, pp. 480–81, 486; VII, pp. 6–7, 121–3.

  26. See IO, issues of 18 and 25 May, 1 June 1907.

  27. Letter of 5 May 1907, in Further Correspondence Relating to Legislation Affecting Asiatics.

  28. CWMG, VII, p. 56.

  29. Rand Daily Mail, 2 July 1907, CWMG, VII, p. 67.

  30. Rand Daily Mail, 9 July 1907, CWMG, VII, p. 87.

  31. Rand Daily Mail, quoted in IO, 6 July 1907.

  32. IO, 6 July 1907.

  33. CWMG, VII, pp. 89, 97, 98, 117.

  34. ‘A Serio-Comedy’, IO, 20 July 1907.

  35. CWMG, VII, pp. 113–44.

  36. IO, 27 July 1907, CWMG, VII, pp. 128f.

  37. IO, 3 August 1907, CWMG, VII, pp. 134–6.

  38. IO, 27 July 1907, CWMG, pp. 123–4.

  39. Reports in IO, 3 and 10 August 1907.

  40. Cf. correspondence in CWMG, VII, pp. 147–9, 162.

  41. Reports from the Star and the Rand Daily Mail in IO, 17 September 1907.

  42. CWMG, VII, pp. 152, 154, 164.

  43. Quoted in IO, 24 August 1907.

  44. CWMG, VII, pp. 170–71, 180–84, 492–6.

  45. See IO, 8 June 1906.

  46. ‘Johannesburg Jottings’, IO, 17 August 1908.

  47. IO, 7 and 21 September 1907.

  48. I am grateful to the Gandhi scholar Anil Nauriya for working out the origins of this penname. If Polak’s initials, ‘HSL’, are said very fast, they sound like ‘A. Chessell’, while ‘piquet’ is French for ‘pole’.

  49. IO, 24 September 1907.

  50. CWMG, pp. 211, 217–18, 228–30.

  51. Polak to P. Kodanda Rao, 9 April 1948, in Kodanda Rao Papers, NMML.

  52. John Cordes to M. K. Gandhi, 3 June 1907, KP.

  53. This description of Phoenix, c. 1906–7, draws on Millie Graham Polak, Mr Gandhi: The Man (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931), pp. 47–50, 56–7; and Prabhudas Gandhi, My Childhood with Gandhiji (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1957), pp. 37–9.

  54. Cordes to Gandhi, 9 July 1907, KP.

  55. Gandhi to Cordes, 12 July 1907, KP.

  56. Gandhi to Cordes, letters of 12 and 13 July 1907, KP. None of the Gandhi letters quoted in this section are in CWMG.

  57. Gandhi to Cordes, letters of 17 July and 16 August 1907, KP.

  58. Gandhi to Cordes, 12 October 1907, KP.

  59. Polak to Cordes, 20 November 1907, KP. Ibsen was of course the great Norwegian playwright. I am unable to trace who Dr Staubman was.

  12 TO JAIL

  1. ‘Pickets’s Duty’, IO, CWMG, VII, pp. 255, 258.

  2. IO, 12 October 1907, CWMG, VII, p. 285.

  3. IO, 19 October 1907, CWMG, VII, pp. 295–6, 316.

  4. See CWMG, VII, pp. 320–21.

  5. IO, 9 November 1907.

  6. Cf. Monica Barlow, ‘The Clouded Face of Truth: A Review of the South African Newspaper Press Approaching Union’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Department of History, Bristol University, 1988), p. 172.

  7. See Indulal Yajnik, Shyamaji Krishnavarma: Life and Times of an Indian Revolutionary (Bombay: Lakshmi Publications, 1950), pp. 241f.

  8. Essop Mia (M. K. Gandhi) to Rash Behari Ghosh, 4 November 1907, CWMG, VII, pp. 332–4.

  9. This account of the Ram Sundar Pundit case is based on newspaper clippings in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 4, Accession No. 2177, NMML; CWMG, VII, pp. 33–6, 365–8, 380–81.

  10. Letter of 22 November, CWMG, VII, p. 376.

  11. Letter of 11 November 1907, in Further Correspondence Relating to Legislation Affecting Asiatics in the Transvaal (Cd. 3887 – in continuation of Cd. 3308) (London: HMSO, 1908).

  12. See CWMG, VII, pp. 409–11, 422, 446.

  13. CWMG, VII, pp. 416–18.

  14. Selborne to Smuts, 30 November 1907; Smuts to Selborne, 6 December 1907, in Box 62, Selborne Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

  15. Smuts to J. X. Merriman, 8 January 1908, in W. K. Hancock and Jean van der Poel, eds, Selections from the Smuts Papers, II: June 1902– May 1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 373.

  16. Report in NM, 3 December 1907.

  17. Gandhi to Cordes, 3 December 1907, KP. (This letter is not in CWMG.)

  18. The Friend, excerpted in IO, 23 November 1907.

  19. See IO, 7 December 1907.

  20. CWMG, VII, pp. 429–30, 439–40, 443.

  21. CWMG, VII, p. 449.

  22. News reports in CWMG, VII, pp. 463–8.

  23. IO, 4 January 1908, CWMG, VII, p. 473.

  24. NM, 31 December 1907.

  25. Telegrams dated 27 December 1907 and 7 January 1908, in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 4, Accession No. 2177, NMML.

  26. William Cursons, Joseph Doke: The Missionary-Hearted (Johannesburg: The Christian Literature Depot, 1929), pp. 35–6, 141, etc.

  27. This sketch, signed ‘J. J. D.’, is in the J. J. Doke Papers.

  28. See George Paxton, Gandhi’s South African Secretary: Sonja Schlesin (Glasgow: Pax Books, 2006), pp. 3–4.

  29. Ga
ndhi to Richard B. Gregg, 29 May 1927, CWMG, XXXIII, p. 396.

  30. Joseph J. Doke, M. K. Gandhi: An Indian Patriot in South Africa (London: The London Indian Chronicle, 1909), pp. 5–6, 9.

  31. See CWMG, VIII, pp. 24–5.

  32. CWMG, VIII, pp. 8–9, 13–17, 19.

  33. IO, 11 January 1908, CWMG, pp. 22–3.

  34. CWMG, VIII, pp. 33–8.

  35. Cf. Eric Itzkin, Gandhi’s Johannesburg: Birthplace of Satyagraha (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2000), pp. 30–33.

  36. Letter to editor from ‘Pro Bono Publico’, NM, 20 November 1907.

  37. NM, 7 January 1908.

  38. See NM, 7 and 14 January 1908; IO, 28 September 1907.

  39. NM, 13 January 1908, IO, 18 January 1908.

  40. IO, 18 January 1908.

  41. Excerpts from an article entitled ‘Courage’ in Ilanga lase Natal, reproduced in NM, 13 January 1908.

  13 A TOLSTOYAN IN JOHANNESBURG

  1. This account is based on six articles on his jail experiences that Gandhi later published in Indian Opinion, reproduced in CWMG, VIII, pp. 119–20, 134–6, 139–43, 145–7, 152–6, 158–62.

  2. As reported in the Transvaal Leader, 13 and 15 January 1908.

  3. Letter to the editor, dated 14 January, Transvaal Leader, 16 January 1908.

  4. ‘Passive Resistance and the Native Mind: A Remarkable Article’, Transvaal Leader, 28 January 1908.

  5. ‘General Smuts’ Apologia’, IO, 15 February 1908.

  6. Viceroy to Secretary of State for India, 30 January 1908, in Further Correspondence Relating to Legislation Affecting Asiatics in the Transvaal (Cd. 4327 – in continuation of Cd. 3892) (London: HMSO, 1908).

  7. Telegram dated 26 January 1908, copy in File No. 5, Servants of India Society Papers, NMML.

  8. Merriman to Smuts, 13 January 1908, in W. K. Hancock and Jean van der Poel, eds, Selections from the Smuts Papers, II: June 1902– May 1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 394–6.

  9. CWMG, VIII, pp. 40–42, 161, 517.

  10. Gandhi to John Cordes, 7 February 1908, in KP. (This letter is not in CWMG.)

  11. Rand Daily Mail, 31 January 1908, in CWMG, VIII, pp. 42–3.

  12. Undated news clipping entitled ‘At Mr Gandhi’s Office’, in J. J. Doke Papers.

  13. Letter of 31 January 1908, CWMG, VIII, pp. 49–51.

  14. IO, 8 February 1908, CWMG, VIII, 59–60.

  15. NM, 4 February 1908.

  16. NM, 11 February 1908.

  17. Cf. report in IO, 15 February 1908.

  18. Olive C. Doke, ‘Mr Gandhi in South Africa’, C. M. Doke Papers.

  19. See ‘My Reward’, IO, 22 February 1908, in CWMG, VIII, pp. 93–7.

  20. IO, 22 February 1908.

  21. Cf. Gandhi to Olive Doke, 3 April 1908, Doke Papers, UNISA (this letter is not in the CWMG).

  22. ‘Letter to Friends’, dated 10 February 1908, CWMG, VIII, pp. 75–6.

  23. ‘Meeting of Punjabis’, undated news clipping in J. J. Doke Papers.

  24. ‘A Denial’, letter in the Transvaal Leader, 15 February 1908, signed by Emam A. K. Bawazeer, M. P. Fancy, Essop Ismail Mia, Syed Mustafa, Allibhai Akooji and M. E. Nagdee.

  25. Star, 13 February 1908.

  26. Reports in NM, 13 February 1908.

  27. CWMG, VIII, pp. 76–86.

  28. See reports in IO, 22 and 29 February 1908.

  29. ‘A Disorderly Meeting’, IO, 7 March 1908.

  30. CWMG, VIII, p. 132.

  31. CWMG, VIII, pp. 148–50, 162–3.

  32. See IO, 18 April 1908.

  33. Gandhi to Chamney, letters of 12 and 13 March 1908, in File E 8979, vol. 480, IND, NASA (these letters are not in CWMG).

  34. NM, 6 May 1908. On the other hand, the more hardline Natal Advertiser (in its issue of the same date) supported the Bills, arguing that the interests of the ruling race required the ‘elimination, or restriction to the narrowest possible limits, of the Asiatic, on the simple and sufficient ground that there is no room for him’.

  35. CWMG, VIII, pp. 214–15, 221–2.

  36. Gandhi to E. F. C. Lane, 14 May 1908, in CWMG, VIII, p. 231. (Lane was a senior official in the Colonial Department, working closely with Smuts.)

  37. Gandhi to Smuts, 21 May 1908, CWMG, VIII, pp. 253–4.

  38. E. F. C. Lane to Gandhi, letters of 15 and 22 May 1908, in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 4, Accession No. 2177, NMML; IO, 30 May 1908.

  39. CWMG, VIII, pp. 261–7.

  40. For details on the Smuts–Gandhi meetings in June 1908, see CWMG, VIII, pp. 277–9, 290–92, 306–9, 316–17.

  41. Smuts to William Hosken, letters of 24 March and 6 June 1908, S. N. 4802 and S. N. 4823, SAAA.

  42. Cf. ‘Mass Meeting of British Indians’, IO, 27 June 1908.

  43. CWMG, VIII, pp. 319–24.

  44. Johannesburg correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, quoted in IO, 27 August 1908.

  45. These paragraphs draw on the translated reports of native newspapers in the Madras and Bombay Presidencies for 1907–9, contained in the series L/P&J/R/5, File nos. 113, 114, 162 and 163, APAC/BL.

  46. The previous paragraphs are based on the letters and telegrams in File 598, L/P&J/6/849; and in File 516, L/P&J/6/848, both in APAC/BL; and on reports in IO, 18 and 25 January, 14 and 21 March 1908.

  47. See news clippings in CID Reports for November 1908, Tamil Nadu State Archives, Chennai.

  48. Cf. CWMG, XI, p. 136, footnote.

  49. As reported in The Evening Post, 18 May 1912, in http://hpaperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgibin (accessed 24 September 2010). F. B. Meyer was a prolific author of books and pamphlets with titles such as ‘The Soul’s Wrestle with Doubt’, ‘The Duty of the Free Churches in an Age of Reaction’ and ‘Open Air Services: Hints and Suggestions’.

  50. F. B. Meyer, A Winter in South Africa (London: National Council of Evangelical Free Churches, 1908), pp. 71–3.

  51. Eric Itzkin, Gandhi’s Johannesburg: Birthplace of Satyagraha (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2000), pp. 70–72.

  52. See Gandhi to Harilal, undated letter c. 1909 (not in CWMG), reproduced in Nilam Parikh, Gandhiji’s Lost Jewel: Harilal Gandhi (New Delhi: National Gandhi Museum, 2001), pp. 121–2; Gandhi to Cordes, letter quoted in Shimon Low, ‘Mahatma Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach in South Africa, 1904–1914’, MA dissertation (Faculty of Humanities, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, April 2010).

  53. Cf. ‘Tolstoy and the Nonviolent Imperative’, Chapter IV of Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, from Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Also useful is Martin Green’s comparative study, The Origins of Nonviolence: Tolstoy and Gandhi in their Historical Settings (1986; reprint, New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers India, 1998).

  54. Charlotte Alston, ‘Tolstoy’s Guiding Light’, History Today, 60:10 (2010).

  55. As related in Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Gandhi’s Prisoner? The Life of Gandhi’s Son Manilal (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2004), p. 118.

  56. Letter to Charles Turner, c. July 1892, in Rosamund Bartlett, Tolstoy: A Russian Life (London: Profile Books, 2010), pp. 342–3.

  57. The Gandhi–Kallenbach joint experiment in celibacy was subject to a series of spectacular misreadings following the publication of Joseph Lelyveld’s book Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi’s Struggle with India (New York: Alfred Knopf, Jr., 2008). Basing his analysis on the published letters between the two men, Lelyveld concluded that the relationship was ‘homoerotic’; but his interpretation was wrong-headed, and his research incomplete. He had not consulted the Kallenbach Papers in Haifa, which would have set him right as to the depth of the architect’s commitment to celibacy, c. 1908–13, and to his heterosexual instincts before and after. (Kallenbach was attracted only to women: years later, after Gandhi had returned to India, he abandoned brahmacharya to have affairs with women.) Lelyveld found support for his claim in casual gossip that he picked up de
cades after Gandhi left South Africa. He thus claimed that among ‘South Africa’s small Indian community’, it ‘was no secret then, or later, that Gandhi, leaving his wife behind, had gone to live with a man.’ (p. 88). No references were provided for this attribution; who said this, to whom, and when? Such talk is entirely absent from the archival record. The hard historical evidence, on the other hand, is very clear that Gandhi was based in the Transvaal in these years because the Indians in that province were faced with the threat of eviction and deportation. That is to say, Gandhi was living in Johannesburg out of social obligation, not sexual desire.

  While Lelyveld’s research was suspect, his prose is understated, and his conclusion cautious – Gandhi and Kallenbach were, he suggested, in a ‘homoerotic’ relationship. He did not explicitly rule out sexual relations, but did not claim these existed either. This restraint was not echoed by his reviewers. One described Gandhi as a ‘sexual weirdo’ (also as a ‘political incompetent’ and ‘fanatical faddist’), whose ‘organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908’. (Andrew Roberts, ‘Among the Hagiographers’, Wall Street Journal, 26 March 2011.) Roberts’ screed in turn prompted a story in a British tabloid with the headline ‘Gandhi “Left His Wife to Live with a Male Lover” New Book Claims’ (Daily Mail, 28 March 2011). This article concluded – on the basis of Roberts’ misreading of Lelyveld’s misreading of the friendship – that Gandhi was ‘bisexual’ and, further, that ‘after four children together [with Kasturba] they split up so he could be with Kallenbach.’ The reproduction of these reports in India prompted the country’s Law Minister to propose a ban on the book, a threat fortunately not carried out (in part because two of Gandhi’s distinguished grandsons, the historian Rajmohan and the civil servant and diplomat Gopalkrishna, came out strongly against it).

  The speculation that Gandhi and Kallenbach were (real or suppressed) lovers is perhaps not unrelated to the fact that three great Western moral traditions – the Jewish, the Protestant and the atheistic – are all antipathetic to celibacy. And so the most widely read and cosmopolitan people tend to assume that two men living together, who wrote affectionate letters to one another, must be in a homosexual relationship. That so many Catholic priests bound in theory to celibacy have been exposed for sexually abusing young boys makes the post-modern mind even less likely to understand that other people in other times may have been deeply and honestly committed to sexual abstinence.