Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  Despite all these signals and assurances, some of the mine executives voiced their deepest fear: that in addition to calling out his indentured countrymen, he’d seek, finally, to widen the stoppage by involving African workers. Gandhi denied having any such intention. “We do not believe in such methods,” he told a reporter from The Natal Mercury.

  John Dube’s Ilanga, reacting to the Indian strikes, slyly took note of white fears that Africans might follow this example. The first of several commentaries ended with a Zulu expression that can be translated, “We wish you the best, Gandhi!” or even, “Go for it, Gandhi!” Later, when it seemed likely that the agitation might gain some privileges denied Africans from a white Parliament simultaneously engaged in passing the egregious Natives Land Act, an undertone of resentment crept in.

  By October 26, the leader had landed back in the coalfields. All the women he’d dispatched to the area to win over the indentured had by then been arrested and sentenced to prison terms of up to three months, including his wife—along with scores of strikers identified by mine supervisors as “ringleaders,” many of whom would eventually be deported back to India—but an unfazed and completely focused leader was now ready to stay put with the strikers, to take over as field commander of what The Star, in a small headline, sneeringly mislabeled MR. GHANDI’S ARMY. In the next eleven days, until he himself was finally locked up on November 11, Gandhi would have his most prolonged and intense engagement with indentured laborers in his two decades in South Africa.

  Within a day of his return to Newcastle, Gandhi hit on a tactic for bringing the conflict to a head. It involved forcing the authorities to contemplate mass arrests, far beyond the capacity of the prisons to hold those it detained. With this end in view, Gandhi urged the miners to leave the compounds and court arrest by marching across the Transvaal border at Volksrust. It was “improper,” he said, for them to be consuming the rations of the mining companies when they had no intention of working until the head tax had been abolished. Another point probably counted for more but was left unstated: as long as the strikers were at the mines, there was a danger they could be sealed off in the compounds, limiting the possibility of communication and further mass action. On October 28, the first batch of marchers set out from Newcastle in the direction of the provincial border. The next day Gandhi himself led another two hundred from the Ballengeich mine. The procession, according to a tabulation he made later, reached five hundred, including sixty women, voicing religious chants as they marched: “Victory to Ramchandra!” “Victory to Dwarkanath!” “Vande Mataram!” Ramchandra and Dwarkanath were other names for the gods Rama and Krishna, heroes of the great Hindu epics. The last cry meant “Hail, Mother!” or, more specifically, Mother India, fusing high-flown religious and political connotations. “They struck not as indentured laborers but as servants of India,” Gandhi wrote. “They were taking part in a religious war.”

  With Kallenbach, during 1913 strikes. Gandhi’s secretary, Sonja Schlesin, center. (photo credit i5.3)

  By November 2, about two thousand miners and other indentured laborers had assembled at Charlestown, the Natal railway terminus, where the young Gandhi had boarded a stagecoach on his first journey to the Transvaal in 1893. Charlestown is thirty-four miles from Newcastle, mostly uphill, sometimes steeply. Here a reporter for the Sunday Times found Gandhi in shirtsleeves in “the evil-smelling backyard of a tin shanty … sitting on an upturned milk case.” Next to him was a galvanized tub “full of an unsavory concoction which I took to be soup,” also sacks containing hundreds of bread loaves. The future Mahatma, working with “incredible rapidity,” was serving as quartermaster, cutting the loaves into three-inch hunks, then, according to this description, digging with his thumb a small hole into each hunk, which he then filled with coarse sugar as the men filed by in successive batches of a dozen strikers each.

  It’s a picture to fix in the mind: Gandhi, in the thick of his struggle, feeding his followers—described by another reporter on the scene as “consisting mostly of the very lowest castes of Hindus,” plus “the merest smattering of Mohammedans”—with his own hands. That a certain proportion of the strikers (maybe 20 percent, maybe more) were once considered untouchable in the Tamil villages from which they originally hailed is no longer, for Gandhi, something to be remarked upon. In his own mind, feeding them one by one in this way is basic logistics, not a display of sanctity. But for however many hundreds or thousands who received their food directly from his hands, he set a new standard for Indian leadership, for political leadership anywhere. Later he wrote that he’d made serving food in Charlestown his “sole responsibility” because only he could persuade the strikers that portions had to be tiny if all were to eat. “Bread and sugar constituted our sole ration,” he said.

  On November 5, he tried to get through to Smuts in Pretoria by phone in order to give him one last chance to renew his pledge on the tax. By then, Smuts was flatly denying that there had ever been such a pledge. Gandhi was curtly rebuffed by the minister’s private secretary. “General Smuts will have nothing to do with you,” he was told. Then and now, the provincial border consisted of a little stream on the edge of Volksrust. (Under majority rule, names have changed. What was Natal is now KwaZulu-Natal; that portion of the Transvaal is now Mpumalanga.) The geography of this hinterland was familiar to Gandhi, who’d been arrested in 1908, at this same point, for crossing the same provincial border without a permit.

  On the morning of November 6, shortly after dawn, he set out from Charlestown with 2,037 men, 127 women, and 57 children. Gandhi told them that their destination was Tolstoy Farm, a distance of about 150 miles. A small police detachment was waiting for them at the border, but the “pilgrims,” as Gandhi had taken to calling them, swarmed across. Volksrust’s Afrikaners, who’d threatened to fire on the marchers, looked on passively as the procession passed through the town in regular ranks. Their first encampment was eight miles down the road. There, that night, Gandhi was arrested and taken back to Volksrust to appear before a magistrate who granted the retired barrister’s professionally argued request for bail. The sequence of arrest, arraignment, and bail was repeated the next day, so twice in two days he was able to rejoin the marchers. On November 9, with the procession already past the Transvaal town of Standerton, more than halfway to Tolstoy Farm, their leader was arrested for a third time in four days. Denied bail this time, he was hauled back to Natal where, two days later in Dundee, yet another coal-mining town with a British antecedent, he was found guilty in a small whitewashed courtroom—still in use in the postapartheid era—on three counts relating to his having led indentured laborers out of their mine compounds and out of the province. As always, Gandhi eagerly pleaded guilty to each charge. The sentence—welcomed by Gandhi, who was never truer to his principles than when he found himself in the dock—was nine months of hard labor.

  Strikers march into the Transvaal at Volksrust (photo credit i5.4)

  If the authorities calculated that the detention of Gandhi and his Jewish lieutenants, Polak and Kallenbach, would be enough to break the back of the strike, they soon discovered that it had a momentum all its own. The indentured mine workers from Natal got within fifty miles of Johannesburg before a mass arrest could be organized. They had to be reminded by Polak that satyagraha ruled out active resistance to arrest. It took two days to pack them into three special trains that were waiting for them in the town of Balfour. Unlike Gandhi, the authorities made no provision for feeding the strikers, who were immediately prosecuted when they got back to Natal for the statutory crimes of abandoning their workplaces and illegally crossing the provincial border. They were then sentenced to hard labor underground at the mines, which had been conveniently certified as annexes to the overflowing Newcastle and Dundee jails—“outstations,” they were called—with their white foremen deputized as warders. Hard labor meant there would be no pay for the six months the sentences would last. Beatings with sticks and sjamboks, whips made out of rhino or hipp
o hide, were among the methods used to herd the strikers back to work.

  At the Ballengeich mine, the source of the first coal miners to march with Gandhi, the indentured laborers had been absent from the compound for nearly two weeks by the time they were returned. Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai, two South African scholars who have written a comprehensive account of the repression that followed the strike, offer the testimony a laborer named Madhar Saib later gave to the so-called protector about his encounter with a white mine captain named Johnston: “He gave me strokes with a sjambok on the posterior, the Kaffir policeman holding me by one of my hands. He then told me to go to work … [then] tripped me with his foot and I fell down, whereupon he placed his foot on my throat and gave me another stroke which caught me on the penis. When I urine it hurts.”

  Having discovered that hunger and exhaustion wouldn’t be enough to break the strikes, the authorities had now determined on a crackdown. “Any government worth its salt would put its foot down,” said Smuts, noting with scathing accuracy that the demand for the repeal of the head tax on former indentured workers had been “an afterthought” for Gandhi. His elevation of the head tax as an add-on to his earlier list of demands, Smuts said in a telegram to the mine owners, was a political maneuver “intended to influence Natal Indians, to whom the real grounds which he started the passive resistance movement, and which never included this tax, do not appeal.”

  The mine owners, disillusioned by the losses they’d suffered after listening to Gandhi’s sweet talk, were now pressing for action. The Natal Coal Owners Association said the time had come for the strikers to be arrested. Taking their cues, editorial writers demanded to know why the government’s response had been so feeble. The Star, which never bothered to dispatch a reporter to the scene, called on it to end its “shilly-shallying” in an editorial that ran under a headline that shouted COOLIE INVASION. How was it possible, the newspaper asked, that “a handful of fanatics, however conscientious,” could get away with preaching “defiance of the laws of the Union”?

  Adding to the gathering pressure for a crackdown was the spread of the strike’s seeming flood tide even after Gandhi and his lieutenants had been locked up, even after the Natal strikers had been shipped back to the coal mines as not merely indentured laborers but prisoners of the state. From the coalfields in the hinterland it now reached the sugar lands on the Indian Ocean coast, leading at the height of the harvest season to a seemingly spontaneous succession of walkouts from the plantations and sugar refineries where indentured Indians still amounted to three-quarters of the workforce, taking in places where Gandhi had never campaigned.

  The first walkout from a sugar estate appears to have come on November 5, at Avoca on the north shore, not far from Phoenix. By November 8, sugar refineries on the south shore had been hit, and by the middle of the month, when a stoppage by Indian street cleaners, water carriers, household servants, railway men, and boatmen briefly paralyzed Durban, there were probably more than ten thousand indentured Indians on strike in the province. In Durban, the strike was “practically universal,” the chief magistrate reported on November 17. Sporadic incidents of sugarcane fields being set ablaze spread panic among the planters, some of whom bundled their wives and children off to safer precincts in the city.

  The authorities now found themselves spread thin. Detachments of British troops had to be rushed from as far away as King William’s Town in the Eastern Cape and Pretoria. At the height of the unrest, Durban found that its only detectives who could speak Hindustani or Tamil had been dispatched to Dundee to work on the case against the imprisoned Gandhi, who by then had been moved to Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, where Indians were basically banned. Rajmohan Gandhi suggests that this was done “so that no Indian could see Gandhi or carry messages from him.”

  The impression that this resistance and strife in the sugar country was spontaneous, that Gandhi the prisoner had willed or organized none of it, seems plausible on its face. How and when could he have done so? Nevertheless, there are scattered hints that the idea of calling out the plantation workers had crossed his mind. Before his own arrest on November 10, Hermann Kallenbach said as much in an interview in Johannesburg. “The leaders of the movement will not have the least compunction about asking all Indians on the sugar plantations to come out,” he was reported to have said, at least two weeks before any had done so. The Indians could “get work on the farms anywhere,” the report of his musings continued, “because they were more intelligent than the natives.” In five years at Gandhi’s side, the architect appears not to have learned how the indenture system, with its binding contracts, operated, or what he was supposed to think about the mental capacity of Africans. Perhaps his words were just bluster, intended merely to add to the pressure on the authorities. Nevertheless, Vahed and Desai found evidence that Gandhi’s followers in the newly formed Natal Indian Association were sufficiently on top of events, despite the spreading turmoil, to ship food to striking laborers on a north-coast sugar estate after their employers had cut off rations.

  The plantation to which the food aid was shipped happened to be at Mount Edgecombe, where Gandhi had encountered the African leader John Dube under the auspices of its owner, Marshall Campbell, eight years earlier. Campbell had been sympathetic to Gandhi’s movement up to this point. He’d given a lunch honoring Gokhale the previous year; he was also a consistent opponent of the three-pound tax on former indentured workers. After his release from prison, Gandhi would write to him to say how sorry he was that Campbell’s plantation was one of the first hit. He’d told his supporters in Durban, Gandhi’s letter said, that “your men should be the last to be called out,” acknowledging plainly enough that before being jailed, he’d been in on a discussion of tactics for extending the strike to the coastal sugar lands. “Had I been free and assisted in calling out the men,” Gandhi told Campbell, “I must freely admit that I would have endeavored to call out your men also; but, as I have already stated, yours would have been the last estate.”

  For Campbell the letter was a last straw. His estates had seen weeks of turmoil. Gandhi’s fine words about nonviolence were contradicted, he replied, by “grave threats of personal violence made by persons whom I believe to be your agents.” Campbell writes as one who’s sure of his facts. He’d actually been away from Natal and is relying on the testimony of his son William, who was relying in turn on that of his youngest brother, Colin. “The men will not listen to anybody but Ghandi [sic] or the gun,” William wrote to his father who stopped short of calling Gandhi a hypocrite but lectured him severely on the harm done to defenseless Indians he was purporting to lead:

  You have admittedly started a movement which grew … till it was entirely beyond your control, and has culminated in riot, turbulence, and bloodshed, and the sufferers in this carnival of violence have been, and will be the ignorant laborers … and the intelligent Natal Indians … More and more of those you lead are realizing the weakness of your policy … and are coming to the conclusion that to use a large body of, in the main, contented but ignorant people … as a tool for procuring political rights by which most of them will never benefit, even if they are attained … is not a policy dictated by wisdom and far-sightedness.

  In a second letter noticeably less apologetic than his first, Gandhi replied with the perfunctory distress of a field commander who has been informed of civilian casualties in an operation he ordered. Passive resistance, he reminded Campbell starchily, was the community’s “only weapon.” Obviously, its use over a wide area would have caused “much greater suffering” than earlier satyagraha campaigns. It could not have been otherwise. As he said in his first letter to Campbell, “In all our struggles of this nature, the innocent as well as the guilty suffer.”

  Neither Gandhi nor the plantation owner makes the slightest allusion to the role played by Campbell’s son Colin in the deadliest of the confrontations at Mount Edgecombe. The account eventually accepted by a magistrate acknowledged that the
violence had its origins in an attempt by the younger Campbell to force the striking laborers back to work with the support of mounted police. It also acknowledged that Colin Campbell drew his revolver and fired four shots. By his own testimony—accepted without question by the police, the magistrate, and the white press—the shooting came when he was already under attack; because his horse was agitated, he said, his shots went wild. Indians testified that he fired the first shots, killing an indentured worker named Patchappen, one of eight Indians killed or mortally wounded on the morning of November 17, and wounding another. Though Gandhi later mourned indentured workers who lost their lives in such confrontations as martyrs, he refrained from laying blame only on the side of the whites. On his farewell tour of South Africa a half year later, making his final rounds on Natal’s north coast, he sounded as if he’d come to accept some of the elder Campbell’s strictures. Fighting with sticks and burning fields of sugarcane were not passive resistance, he told an audience of indentured cane workers, according to a paraphrase of his remarks that ran in Indian Opinion. If he’d not been in jail, he’d “have repudiated them entirely and allowed his head to be broken rather than permit them to use a single stick against their opponents.” It wasn’t a point Gandhi often made on his farewell tour, which took on a triumphalist air, but it may have lodged in his consciousness. Later, in India, much to the dismay of his lieutenants in the nationalist movement, he regularly put the brakes on satyagraha campaigns at the first sign that the discipline of nonviolence was giving way.