Given Waller’s oft-expressed sentiments that the company had mistreated Adams, it was no surprise at all that Waller found that Adams had been improperly dismissed. He awarded him the damages he sought, £96, representing six months of salary.
The issue that was open was the question of the rate at which Adams should be reimbursed for supplying the ship with its provisions. Because this item constituted the single largest item of damages in Adams’ case, the parties were undoubtedly anxious about what Waller would decide. Here is what the magistrate wrote:
The charge made by the plaintiff for victualling in his account rendered to the defendants in February differs from the charge made by him at Bombay on the 15th January. In that account the charge is at the rate of one rupee and eight annas per head per diem, whereas in the account rendered to defendants in Durban the charge made is at the rate of 8s 6d. per head per diem. . . . I have . . . come to the conclusion that the plaintiff cannot alter the charge in the manner in which he has done. I think he is bound as to the rate by the account rendered in Bombay. . . . I . . . will reduce the amount of the victualling charges by £141 5s.
To get out-of-colony testimony, Gandhi had applied for adjournment after adjournment. When his efforts failed, he used the testimony of the witnesses he was able to call to paint the best picture he could of Adams’ chicanery. Even without being able to take the testimony of all the witnesses he felt he needed on this issue, Gandhi had prevailed on the key issue in the case.17 After Adams’ damages were offset by the £21 that Waller ruled Adams owed the company on the counterclaim, the final amount of damages to which Waller found Adams entitled stood at just over £237, just slightly over half of what Adams had claimed he was owed. Gandhi had prevailed in the biggest issue of the trial and even had won a bit of his counterclaim. Because of his doggedness, he had kept Adams’ damages to the smallest amount reasonably possible under the circumstances of the case. Of the many traits Gandhi took from his law practice to his independence work in India, tenacity was one of the foremost.
But not the only one.
Toughness was another. He had persevered against insult and ridicule from the court. He had managed not to be discouraged by the applause from those present at trial when he was humiliated by the magistrate. And he had stood toe-to-toe with Farman.
All this time he never took his eye off the central issue in the case. And when he prevailed on that issue, he did so without surrendering one other defining characteristic that would remain important to him for the rest of his life.
TRUTH
The proceedings in Adams concluded in late May. Just a few days later, on the morning of June 5, 1896, Mohandas K. Gandhi arose at his house at Beach Grove to the most remarkable sound. It was the noisy buzz of a crowd of some five hundred Indians, led by several of the most influential Indian merchants, there to escort Gandhi to the water’s edge on this the day of his departure for India. As Gandhi boarded his ship, loud, wild cheering erupted.18 What were Gandhi’s thoughts as he stood on deck, watching this tumultuous sight fade into the distance?
It was surely a time for taking stock. His first thought might have been of one of his most recent experiences—the Tuesday-night gathering at the new Congress Hall, where an enormous crowd had gathered to toast him. In response to the cheers he received from those present, he had stood on his feet before the assembly and delivered a speech that lasted two hours—a physical and intellectual feat of some substance. Could this have been the same Gandhi who nearly collapsed from fright in his first court appearance in India?
And surely some of his experiences at the Durban bar came to mind. In later years, Gandhi spoke, thought, and wrote more passionately about truth than any other subject. His unswerving allegiance to truth was one of the pillars of both his personal and political philosophy. In the 1920s, he would write in My Experiments with Truth, his autobiography: “My uniform experience has convinced me that there is no other God than Truth. . . . The little fleeting glimpses . . . that I have been able to have of Truth can hardly convey an idea of the indescribable lustre of Truth, a million times more intense than that of the sun.”19
What had Gandhi learned about the truth from his practice of law in Durban?
Percy Coakes, the man Gandhi chose for his first partner and mentor, prevaricated and, largely for that reason, was humiliated, chastised, and suspended from practice—all in the full, glaring eye of the Natal press and public. As any human being would, Gandhi must have asked himself how Coakes’ troubles reflected on his own probity—and the public’s estimation of it. As an Indian barrister, one of a kind, he already drew an unusual amount of attention. From the beginning, he knew he needed to be above reproach if he were to successfully represent the Indian community in South Africa. Now, he must have thought, if he did not act to counter the injurious effect of Coakes’ suspension on his own reputation, his entire effort for Indian rights could be ruined.
Gandhi’s first fully public opportunity to distinguish himself from Coakes was undoubtedly fresh in his mind. It arose in the Adams trial when Magistrate Waller focused Gandhi’s attention on a single, sharp question. “Have you read your shipping law?” demanded Waller in a case that was all about shipping law.
“Have I read my shipping law?” Gandhi stood alone in a public courtroom, with reporters from the Natal papers scrutinizing his every move, being forced by the judge to make a fundamental choice about who he was, as both a man and a lawyer. He could say he had not read it and show himself to be embarrassingly unprepared, or he could claim that he had and find Coakes reborn in himself. Gandhi’s answer would help set his life’s direction.
“No.”
Gandhi chose the truth and never let it go.
EIGHT
* * *
A Public Man
In taking leave of Mr. Gandhi, the reporter laid stress on the very strong feeling against him at present in Durban, and advised him, for his own sake, to be exceedingly careful in regard to disembarking, since he was determined to land.
Natal Mercury, January 16, 1897
One, whom God wishes to save, cannot fall even if he will.
GANDHI
GANDHI WENT TO INDIA IN 1896 to promote the South African Indian cause, to recruit Indian barristers to assist in the Indian rights movement in Natal, and to relocate his family to South Africa. An unintended consequence of the Indian experience, however, was that it would shock Gandhi into an accurate understanding of how far he still had to go before he could count himself an accomplished public person.
FAILURE REDUX
While in India Gandhi made it his business to visit Bombay and several of its leading legal figures, among them Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, a distinguished lawyer whose advocacy skills had earned him the title “the Lion of Bombay” and whose nationalism had earned him yet another title, “the uncrowned King of the Presidency.” When Gandhi pleaded with Mehta to bring the cause of the South African Indians to Bombay’s attention, Mehta agreed to call a public meeting in the city to give Gandhi an audience. Mehta instructed Gandhi to report back to him on the day before the meeting.
When at 5 P.M. Gandhi appeared as requested, Mehta asked him for a copy of his speech. Gandhi confessed that he had none and stated that he intended to speak extemporaneously. Mehta made it very clear that this would not do, for the Bombay press was not capable of getting a speech right without having a text. Mehta dispatched Gandhi to write his speech. After a long night’s effort, Gandhi turned in his manuscript to the printer and retired shortly before midnight.
When Gandhi arrived at the meeting hall the next day, he found a huge crowd, the very size of which astonished and frightened him. In the face of the challenge of speaking to this enormous group, which Gandhi would appear? The Gandhi who had been gaining so much confidence in South Africa that he could hold forth in public for two hours at his Durban send-off party? Or the Gandhi who collapsed in fright at his first court appearance in India several years earlier?
; The answer was soon apparent. As he attempted to speak, Gandhi’s body shook beyond control. His voice failed to project outward to the large crowd. Over and over, Mehta importuned him to speak louder. Mehta’s urging was of no help; in fact, Gandhi only became more conscious of his failure.
Before long Gandhi gave up. In despair, he surrendered the text to a friend. Keenly aware of what was going on, the audience, however, called out for one of Mehta’s associates, Dinshaw Edulji Wacha. Adding to Gandhi’s embarrassment, Wacha, having engaged in no preparation, performed superbly in his place, with the crowd paying rapt attention and punctuating the talk with applause and cries of “Shame!” The speech was a hit with Mehta and the audience, even if the original speaker was not.1
Gandhi learned a hard lesson. He may have been a successful public figure in the backwaters of provincial Natal where, by his own admission, “forensic talent [was] not of a very high quality,”2 but he was an unpolished pretender in mother India. He could write a good speech in the quiet of an office, but he could not deliver it in the face of a huge crowd. He would need more time to develop his skills and self-confidence out of sight in South Africa before he would be ready to take the Indian stage.3
A COALESCENCE OF FORCES
Gandhi would soon find out that South Africa was ready to give him all the preparation for public life he could handle. Because of his status as a British-educated barrister, he had been treated far better in Natal than his countrymen. It was often written and said by Natal’s whites that were all Indians of Gandhi’s caliber, there would be no “Asiatic problem.” Unbeknownst to Gandhi, however, several disparate forces were coalescing to test his physical and emotional courage. The coming together of these forces would also reveal that just below the community’s superficial respect for Gandhi lay bitter hostility.
The first of these forces was a reaction to Gandhi’s own writing. On his voyage to India Gandhi had written a long propaganda piece arguing the case of South Africa’s Indians.4 (Because its formal title, The Grievances of the British Indians in South Africa: An Appeal to the Indian Public, was so lengthy, it quickly became known as the Green Pamphlet for the color of its cover.5) The Green Pamphlet was the work of a lawyerly mind, methodically exposing the abuses to which Indians were subjected and referring repeatedly to court cases in which Gandhi and others had attempted to defend victims of European abuse. In the pamphlet, Gandhi specifically disavowed any intention to focus attention on the poor treatment of indentured Indians. He was interested only in the legal disabilities to which the colonists were subjecting all Indians. In this respect, the pamphlet was a powerful and effective statement of the Indian case.
Gandhi sought to give the Green Pamphlet the widest possible currency and, accordingly, had ten thousand copies printed and distributed. He also made it his business to promote it with newspaper editors in India, one of whom operated The Pioneer, an English-language newspaper in Allahabad. There he received a hospitable welcome. Later the paper printed a summary of the Green Pamphlet, which was itself then summarized in a bulletin by Reuters to London. There it was summarized once more by Reuters in a bulletin to South Africa. By the time this latest version arrived in South Africa, it had Gandhi writing fairly inflammatory material—which, in fact, he had not.6 In typical Gandhi fashion, the pamphlet’s actual tone was strong but respectful. Indeed, Gandhi said nothing in the pamphlet that he had not already said openly in Durban. As the Natal reaction would soon demonstrate, however, there were those in Durban who did not appreciate Gandhi’s washing the colony’s dirty clothes in public.
At the same time that the press was exaggerating the tone of Gandhi’s writing, the Durban working class was revolting against the continued importation of Indian laborers. Tradesmen and artisans feared that the Indians would take away their jobs and depress wages. Grassroots protest organizations sprang up, and mass meetings of disaffected workers issued demands that the government protect the economic interests of the European common folk.
The final element in this drama was provided by the plague. The Durban papers regularly reported its eruption in India and helped stir fears among the colony’s European population of its transmission to Natal via Indian immigrants.
WALKING WITH LAUGHTON
Gandhi and his family left India for South Africa on November 30, 1896. When Gandhi’s ship, the Courland, arrived in the port of Durban on December 12, it met with the full force of all three of these developments. To make matters worse, by happenstance a second Dada Abdulla ship, the Naderi, entered the port simultaneously. Together the two ships held 617 Indian passengers. When the European workers learned of this, they quickly organized against the landing of the Indians. At numerous mass meetings, they resolved not to let the Indians ashore, not knowing that only a small minority of the 617 were newcomers bound for Natal.7 The Europeans threatened violence against Gandhi and the passengers if they attempted to land, bluntly—and accurately—stating that they had “thousands of men . . . ready and waiting to oppose their landing.”8 In the meantime, the authorities kept the ships at sea by imposing a lengthy and quite baseless quarantine on the ships, justifying this action by referring to the plague present in India.
At this point, Attorney General Harry Escombe appeared on the stage. Escombe played a delicate middle game. He was intent on currying political favor with the European protestors while at the same time doing what he could to prevent violence against the Indians. Escombe, Gandhi’s Beach Grove neighbor, openly met with a committee representing the protestors. Escombe stated that the protestors might “show the force they possessed, but it was the men who possess the force and could use it without making ill use of it, who gained their ends.” He argued that he and the government were sympathetic to the concerns of the “anti-Asiatics,” but that there was little the government could do immediately about the ships then in the harbor. Were it a matter of cost, the government would gladly pay the £10,000 it would take to ship the Indians back home. Were it a matter of honoring the wishes of the Durban protestors alone, that could be done, but the Durban protestors represented but one aspect of a larger constituency to which the government was accountable. Escombe’s fundamental message was that the protestors were correct to call the problem of Indian immigration to the government’s attention, but that they should go home and let the government respond in due course. In particular, he intimated his support for a special session of the Natal Parliament to deal with the issue, while at the same time urging the protestors to permit the passengers on the two ships to land.
At a public meeting of protestors following the committee’s meeting with Escombe, plans for a demonstration against the landing of the Indians were discussed. The meeting chairman, a Durban butcher named Harry Sparks, acceded to Escombe’s desire that there be no violence, but with what appears to be a reservation directed squarely at Gandhi: “The demonstration would be a peaceful demonstration as regards of the Indians on board; as regard to one man it would be left to the leaders . . . to deal with him down there.” The press reported that this sentiment was greeted with “loud cheers and laughter.”9
The Natal health authorities gave the captains of the two ships permission to land, and arrangements were made to do so on January 13. Trumpets sounded the call for the European protestors to assemble. Escombe addressed the mob and succeeded in cajoling the demonstrators to go home. Thanks in large part to Escombe’s intervention, the demonstration of 3,500 to 5,000 protestors remained peaceful.10 Although the passengers landed without incident shortly after noon, they did so without Gandhi. He stayed on board, weighing the conflicting advice he was getting from two different lawyers. One, the attorney general, aware of the protestors’ pronounced hatred of Gandhi, advised him to land under cover of darkness and be escorted home by the port superintendent. A Natal Advertiser reporter also warned Gandhi to be careful in disembarking. Indeed, there were explicit threats of violence against him.
A second lawyer, Frederick Laughton, a highly skille
d forty-two-year-old Natal advocate, a former partner of A. W. Baker, now a partner in a leading Natal law firm,11 and a lawyer with professional ties to Dada Abdulla and Company, took a more sanguine view. Laughton forecast that Gandhi would not be hurt because the crowd of whites had dispersed and the scene had quieted down. Laughton, whom Gandhi would later describe as “powerfully built,”12 urged Gandhi to let him accompany him ashore during the daylight, but in a party separate from the other members of Gandhi’s family. Should there be some violence, Laughton’s view was that Gandhi “should not sneak into Durban like a thief in the night, but that he should face the music like a man and like a political leader.” It was Laughton’s hope that his (Laughton’s) “presence would save him from insult.”13
In the days leading up to the disembarkation of the Indians, Laughton, acting for Dada Abdulla and Company, had been tangling with Escombe over the quarantining of the ships and the looming European demonstration. After a personal meeting and an exchange of letters, each effectively accused the other of not telling the truth.
With Laughton identified with the Indians and Escombe with the Europeans, it is not surprising that it was Laughton’s advice that Gandhi took. Without first informing the police, he came ashore with Laughton under an overcast sky shortly before 5 P.M. on January 13.14 Laughton and Gandhi planned to make their way on foot to the store and home of Parsi Rustomji, a distance of some two miles. Because this was a summer day in South Africa, there was still a fair amount of daylight left. There was no crowd, but Gandhi and Laughton were soon spotted by several children, who immediately alerted others in the area with their shouts of “Gandhi! Gandhi!” When the children were joined by a half-dozen adult men, Laughton, hoping for a quick escape, called for a rickshaw. Gandhi hesitated; he believed it was wrong to be pulled about by a human being. Finally, he agreed, but by then the crowd was too much for the rickshaw operator Laughton had hailed. He fled, sparing Gandhi, as he would write later, of the “shame of a rickshaw ride.” Now he and Laughton were left to the mercy of the growing crowd. The two lawyers were able to make their way from Stanger Street to West Street, a main thoroughfare, at which point the size of the crowd restrained their progress. Laughton attempted to keep the attackers at bay, but the effort was doomed. A man who could match Laughton’s own strength attacked Laughton and separated him from Gandhi. Those in the mob administered a thorough beating to Gandhi. One enterprising citizen took a riding whip to him, while others entertained themselves by stealing away his turban. Still others made him the object of pelts of mud, stones, rotten eggs, and stale fish. A stone struck Gandhi in the temple, causing his head to bleed. The mob, which had grown in size to two hundred men, eventually reduced Gandhi to a dazed and bleeding pulp, forcing him at one point to hang on to a fence railing for dear life. As luck would have it, however, Jane Alexander, the wife of the police superintendent, happened upon the scene and, by placing herself between Gandhi and his attackers, saved his life.15
M.K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law Page 15