THE SHINING PATH
Gandhi, twenty-four years old and trained as a lawyer in London’s Inner Temple, arrived in South Africa in May 1893. He had a job as legal adviser to a wealthy Gujarati Muslim merchant. Imperial Britain was tightening its grip on the African continent. Gandhi was unkindly jolted into political awakening a few months after he arrived. Half the story is legendary: Gandhi was thrown out of a “Whites only” first-class coach of a train in Pietermaritzburg. The other half of the story is less known: Gandhi was not offended by racial segregation. He was offended that “passenger Indians”—Indian merchants who were predominantly Muslim but also privileged-caste Hindus—who had come to South Africa to do business, were being treated on a par with native Black Africans. Gandhi’s argument was that passenger Indians came to Natal as British subjects and were entitled to equal treatment on the basis of Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation, which asserted the equality of all imperial subjects.113
In 1894, he became secretary of the Natal Indian Congress, founded and funded by rich Indian merchants and traders. The membership fee, of three pounds, was a princely sum that meant the Natal Indian Congress would remain an elite club. (For a sense of proportion—twelve years later, the Zulus would rise in rebellion against the British for imposing an unaffordable one-pound poll tax on them.)
One of the earliest political victories for the Natal Indian Congress came in 1895 with a “solution” to what was known as the Durban Post Office problem. The post office had only two entrances: one for Blacks and one for Whites. Gandhi petitioned the authorities and had a third entrance opened so that Indians did not need to use the same entrance as the “Kaffirs.”114 In an open letter to the Natal Legislative Assembly dated December 19, 1894, he says that both the English and the Indians “spring from common stock, called the Indo-Aryan,” and cites Max Müller, Arthur Schopenhauer, and William Jones to buttress his argument. He complains that the “Indian is being dragged down to the position of a raw Kaffir.”115 As spokesman for the Indian community, Gandhi was always careful to distinguish—and distance—passenger Indians from indentured (bonded) workers:
Whether they are Hindus or Mahommedans, they are absolutely without any moral or religious instruction worthy of the name. They have not learned enough to educate themselves without any outside help. Placed thus, they are apt to yield to the slightest temptation to tell a lie. After some time, lying with them becomes a habit and a disease. They would lie without any reason, without any prospect of bettering themselves materially, indeed, without knowing what they are doing. They reach a stage in life when their moral faculties have completely collapsed owing to neglect.116
The Indian indentured labor whose “moral faculties” were in such a state of collapse were largely from the subordinated castes and lived and worked in conditions of virtual slavery, incarcerated on sugarcane farms. They were flogged, starved, imprisoned, often sexually abused, and died in great numbers.117
Gandhi soon became the most prominent spokesperson for the cause of the passenger Indians. In 1896, he traveled to India where he addressed packed—and increasingly indignant—meetings about the racism that Indians were being subjected to in South Africa. At the time, the white regime was getting increasingly anxious about the rapidly expanding Indian population. For them Gandhi was the leader of the “coolies”—their name for all Indians.118 In a perverse sense, their racism was inclusive. It didn’t notice the distinctions that Gandhi went to such great lengths to make.
When Gandhi returned to Durban in January 1897, the news of his campaign had preceded him. His ship was met by thousands of hostile white demonstrators, who refused to let it dock. It took several days of negotiation before Gandhi was allowed to disembark. On his way home, on January 12, 1897, he was attacked and beaten. He bore the attack with fortitude and dignity.119 Two days later, in an interview with the Natal Advertiser, Gandhi once again distanced himself from the “coolies”:
I have said most emphatically, in the pamphlets and elsewhere, that the treatment of the indentured Indians is no worse or better in Natal than they receive in any other parts of the world. I have never endeavoured to show that the indentured Indians have been receiving cruel treatment.120
In 1899, the British went to war with Dutch settlers over the spoils of South Africa. Diamonds had been discovered in Kimberley in 1870 and gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886. The Anglo-Boer War, as it was called then, is known more properly today as the South African War or the White Man’s War. Thousands of Black Africans and indentured Indian laborers were dragooned into the armies on either side. The Indians were not given arms, so they worked as menials and stretcher-bearers. Gandhi and a band of passenger Indians, who felt it was their responsibility as imperial subjects, volunteered their services to the British. Gandhi was enlisted in the Ambulance Corps.
It was a brutal war in which British troops fought Boer guerrillas. The British burnt down thousands of Boer farms, slaughtering people and cattle as they swept through the land. Tens of thousands of Boer civilians, mostly women and children, were moved into concentration camps, in which almost thirty thousand people died. Many simply starved to death.121 These concentration camps were the first of their kind, the progenitors of Hitler’s extermination camps for Jews. Several years later, after he returned to India, when Gandhi wrote about the South African war in his memoirs, he suggested that the prisoners in the camps were practicing a cheerful form of satyagraha (which was the course of action he prescribed to the Jews of Germany too)122:
Boer women understood that their religion required them to suffer in order to preserve their independence, and therefore, patiently and cheerfully endured all hardships…. They starved, they suffered biting cold and scorching heat. Sometimes a soldier intoxicated by liquor or maddened by passion might even assault these unprotected women. Still the brave women did not flinch.123
After the war, the British announced that their troops would be given a slab each of “Queen’s Chocolate” as a reward for their bravery. Gandhi wrote a letter to the colonial secretary to ask for the largesse to be extended to the Ambulance Corps leaders, who had volunteered without pay: “It will be greatly appreciated by them and prized as a treasure if the terms under which the gift has been graciously made by Her Majesty would allow of its distribution among the Indian leaders.”124 The colonial secretary replied curtly to say that the chocolate was only for noncommissioned officers.
In 1901, with the Boer War now behind him, Gandhi spoke of how the objective of the Natal Indian Congress was to achieve a better understanding between the English and the Indians. He said he was looking forward to an “Imperial Brotherhood,” toward which “everyone who was the friend of the Empire should aim.”125
This was not to be. The Boers managed to outmaneuver and out-brotherhood Gandhi. In 1902, they signed the Treaty of Vereeniging with the British. According to the treaty, the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State became colonies of the British Empire under the sovereignty of the British Crown. In return, the British government agreed to give the colonies self-rule. The Boers became the British government’s brutal lieutenants. Jan Smuts, once a dreaded Boer “terrorist,” switched sides and eventually led the British Army of South Africa in World War I. The white folks made peace. They divided the diamonds, the gold, and the land between themselves. Blacks, Indians, and “coloreds” were left out of the equation.
Gandhi was not deterred. A few years after the South African War, he once again volunteered for active service.
In 1906, the Zulu chief Bhambatha kaMancinza led his people in an uprising against the British government’s newly imposed one-pound poll tax. The Zulus and the British were old enemies and had fought each other before. In 1879, the Zulus had routed the British Army when it attacked the Zulu kingdom, a victory that put the Zulu on the world map. Eventually, over the years, because they could not match the firepower of British troops, they were conquered and driven off their land. Still, they refused to w
ork on the white man’s farms, which is why bonded, indentured labor was shipped in from India. Time and again, the Zulus had risen up. During the Bhambatha Rebellion, the rebels, armed only with spears and cowhide shields, fought British troops equipped with modern artillery.
As the news of the rebellion came in, Gandhi published a series of letters in Indian Opinion, a Gujarati–English newspaper he had started in 1903. (One of its chief benefactors was Sir Ratanji Jamsetji Tata of the Tata industrial empire.) In a letter dated November 18, 1905, Gandhi said:
At the time of the Boer War, it will be remembered, the Indians volunteered to do any work that might be entrusted to them, and it was with great difficulty that they could get their services accepted even for ambulance work. General Butler has certified as to what kind of work the Natal Indian Volunteer Ambulance Corps did. If the Government only realised what reserve force is being wasted, they would make use of it and would give Indians a thorough training for actual warfare.126
On April 14, 1906, Gandhi wrote again in Indian Opinion (translated from Gujarati):
What is our duty during these calamitous times in the Colony? It is not for us to say whether the revolt of the Kaffirs [Zulus] is justified or not. We are in Natal by virtue of British Power. Our very existence depends on it. It is therefore our duty to render whatever help we can. There was a discussion in the Press as to what part the Indian community would play in the event of an actual war. We have already declared in the English columns of this journal that the Indian community is prepared to play its part; and we believe what we did during the Boer War should also be done now.127
The rebellion was eventually contained. Chief Bhambatha was captured and beheaded. Four thousand Zulus were killed, thousands more flogged and imprisoned. Even Winston Churchill, Master of War, at the time under secretary of state, was disturbed by the violence. He said: “It is my duty to warn the Secretary of State that this further disgusting butchery will excite in all probability great disapproval in the House of Commons … The score between black and white stands at present at about 3500 to 8.”128
Gandhi, on his part, never regretted the role he played in the White Man’s War and in the Bhambatha uprising. He just reim-agined it. Years later, in 1928, in Satyagraha in South Africa,129 the memoirs he wrote in Yerawada Central Jail, both stories had, shall we say, evolved. By then the chessmen on the board had moved around. Gandhi had turned against the British. In his new account, the “Truth” about the stretcher-bearer corps in the Bhambatha Rebellion had “grown” into another “Truth”:
The Zulu “rebellion” broke out just while attempts were being made to impose further disabilities upon Indians in the Transvaal… therefore I made an offer to the Government to raise a Stretcher-bearer Corps for service with the troops…. The corps was on active service for a month…. We had to cleanse the wounds of several Zulus which had not been attended to for as many as five or six days and were therefore stinking horribly. We liked the work. The Zulus could not talk to us, but from their gestures and the expression in their eyes they seemed to feel as if God had sent them our succour.130
The retrospectively constructed image of the flogged, defeated Zulu—a dumb animal conveying his gratitude to God’s missionaries of peace—is completely at odds, as we shall see, with his views about Zulus that were published in the pages of his newspapers during those years. In Gandhi’s reimagining of the story of the Bhambatha Rebellion, the broken Zulu becomes the inspiration for another of his causes: celibacy.
While I was working with the Corps, two ideas which had long been floating in my mind became firmly fixed. First, an aspirant after a life exclusively devoted to service must lead a life of celibacy. Second, he must accept poverty as a constant companion through life. He may not take up any occupation which would prevent him or make him shrink from undertaking the lowliest of duties or largest risks.131
Gandhi’s experiments with poverty and celibacy began in the Phoenix Settlement, a commune he had set up in 1904. It was built on a hundred-acre plot of land in the heart of Natal amidst the sugar fields that were worked by Indian indentured labor. The members of the commune included a few Europeans and (nonindentured) Indians, but no Black Africans.
In September 1906, only months after the Bhambatha Rebellion, despite his offers of friendship and his demonstrations of loyalty, Gandhi was let down once again. The British government passed the Transvaal Asiatic Law Amendment Act. Its purpose was to control Indian merchants (who were regarded as competition to white traders) from entering the Transvaal.132 Every male Asian had to register himself and produce on demand a thumbprinted certificate of identity. Unregistered people were liable to be deported. There was no right of appeal. Suddenly, a community whose leader had been dreaming of an “Imperial Brotherhood” had been once again reduced “to a status lower than that of the aboriginal races of South Africa and the Coloured People.”133
Gandhi led the struggle of the passenger Indians bravely and from the front. Two thousand people burned their passes in a public bonfire; Gandhi was assaulted mercilessly, arrested, and imprisoned. And then his worst nightmares became a reality. The man who could not bear to even share the entrance to a post office with “Kaffirs” now had to share a prison cell with them:
We were all prepared for hardships, but not quite for this experience. We could understand not being classed with the Whites, but to be placed on the same level with the Natives seemed to be too much to put up with. I then felt that Indians had not launched our passive resistance too soon. Here was further proof that the obnoxious law was meant to emasculate the Indians … Apart from whether or not this implies degradation, I must say it is rather dangerous. Kaffirs as a rule are uncivilised—the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals.134
A year later, the sixteenth of the twenty years he would spend in South Africa, he wrote “My Second Experience in Gaol” in Indian Opinion (January 16, 1909):
I was given a bed in a cell where there were mostly Kaffir prisoners who had been lying ill. I spent the night in this cell in great misery and fear…. I read the Bhagvad Gita which I had carried with me. I read the verses which had a bearing on my situation and meditating on them, managed to compose myself. The reason why I felt so uneasy was that the Kaffir and Chinese prisoners appeared to be wild, murderous and given to immoral ways…. He [the Chinese] appeared to be worse. He came near the bed and looked closely at me. I kept still. Then he went to a Kaffir lying in bed. The two exchanged obscene jokes, uncovering each other’s genitals…. I have resolved in my mind on an agitation to ensure that Indian prisoners are not lodged with Kaffirs or others. We cannot ignore the fact that there is no common ground between them and us. Moreover those who wish to sleep in the same room as them have ulterior motives for doing so.135
From inside jail Gandhi began to petition the white authorities for separate wards in prisons. He led battles demanding segregation on many counts: he wanted separate blankets because he worried that “a blanket that has been used by the dirtiest of Kaffirs may later fall to an Indian’s lot.”136 He wanted prison meals specially suited to Indians—rice served with ghee137—and refused to eat the “mealie pap” that the “Kaffirs” seemed to relish. He also agitated for separate lavatories for Indian prisoners.138
Twenty years later, in 1928, the “Truth” about all this had transmogrified into another story altogether. Responding to a proposal for segregated education for Indians and Africans in South Africa, Gandhi wrote:
Indians have too much in common with the Africans to think of isolating themselves from them. They cannot exist in South Africa for any length of time without the active sympathy and friendship of the Africans. I am not aware of the general body of the Indians having ever adopted an air of superiority towards their African brethren, and it would be a tragedy if any such movement were to gain ground among the Indian settlers of South Africa.139
Then, in 1939, disagreeing with Jawaharlal Nehru, who beli
eved that Black Africans and Indians should stand together against the white regime in South Africa, Gandhi contradicted himself once more: “However much one may sympathise with the Bantus, Indians cannot make common cause with them.”140
Gandhi was an educated, well-traveled man. He would have been aware of the winds that were blowing in other parts of the world. His disgraceful words about Africans were written around the same time W. E. B. Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk: “One ever feels this two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”141
Gandhi’s attempts to collaborate with a colonial regime were taking place at the same time that the anarchist Emma Goldman was saying:
The centralisation of power has brought into being an international feeling of solidarity among the oppressed nations of the world; a solidarity which represents a greater harmony of interests between the working man of America and his brothers abroad than between the American miner and his exploiting compatriot; a solidarity which fears not foreign invasion, because it is bringing all the workers to the point when they will say to their masters, “Go and do your own killing. We have done it long enough for you.”142
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