M.K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law

by DiSalvo, Charles R.

  The month after his failed Congress speech, Gandhi drew on his courage and gave another talk in Calcutta. The record does not disclose how Gandhi dealt with his nervousness. A press report, however, recounts Gandhi’s remarks: “The hatred of the Colonials against them [South African Indians] was no doubt intense, but what Mr. Gandhi proposed was to conquer that hatred by love.”5

  These themes of humble service and uncompromising good will toward the opponent would appear with great frequency and be developed in depth first on Gandhi’s return to South Africa and then later in India.

  While Gandhi’s attempt to make the treatment of South African Indians an issue for the Congress failed, he was able to establish a relationship with one important nationalist leader, Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Gokhale’s influence over Gandhi was both personal and political. Gandhi was struck by the efficiency and single-mindedness with which Gokhale conducted his affairs. Gandhi would later write: “To see Gokhale at work was as much a joy as an education. He never wasted a minute. His private relations and friendships were all for the public good.”6 Gokhale provided a model that the already quite efficient and single-minded Gandhi could emulate.

  Gandhi was also taken with Gokhale’s admiration for a number of prominent figures in the Indian legal community. Gokhale impressed upon Gandhi the devotion these men had both to their profession and to the nationalist cause, a devotion with which Gandhi could certainly identify.

  Gokhale and Gandhi became quick and close friends, and while Gokhale was easily able to introduce Gandhi to a number of leading public figures in the Indian community, he apparently could not help Gandhi with a larger and more immediate crisis.

  Gandhi had no money.

  DUNNING IN RAJKOT

  After a month of living with Gokhale, after many weeks of touring India and Burma in early 1902, and after he had handed over the savings he had accumulated in Natal to his extended family (greatly exceeding the amount it had expended in seeing him through his London legal studies), the barrister lacked not only good health but now financial resources too. Moreover, he did not even have access to the basic tool of his trade—a decent typewriter.

  After more than three months in India, Gandhi managed to open a practice. Gokhale had urged him to practice in Bombay, where he could help with the work of the Congress, but Gandhi lacked the confidence needed to practice in the Bombay environment. He was plagued, as he would later write, by the “unpleasant memories of past failure.” In addition, he “still hated as poison the use of flattery for getting briefs.” He resolved instead to practice in the less challenging surroundings provided by Rajkot, in his home state of Gujarat.

  His first order of business was to drum up some money by dunning his South African clients. When he wrote to the Natal managing partner of Camrooden and Company, Gandhi was plain: “You have not acknowledged any of my letters. I shall thank you to let me have [a] draft for the balance of my bill which I need badly.”7 In early June, after almost another month, he wrote to Nazar and Khan, asking them to have the NIC send him money to cover his expenses on behalf of the South African Indian cause. In the course of this letter he stated that he had not expected his “pecuniary position to be so bad as it is.”8

  Fortunately for Gandhi, his health, while still far from good, had improved sufficiently for him to take on some litigation in Rajkot. Kevalram Mavji Dave, the vakil who on the death of Gandhi’s father had advocated that Gandhi train in the law, referred three cases to him. Two were low-level appeals, both of which Gandhi won. The third was an original case in Jamnagar, a town to the west of Rajkot. While we know nothing about the substance of the case, we do know that it was a “rather important” one in Gandhi’s estimation, causing him to question his ability to undertake it. Dave assured him by saying, “Winning or losing is no concern of yours. You will simply try your best, and I am of course there to assist you.”9

  Gandhi’s preparation for the case was typical of his best work in South Africa. He prepared with his usual meticulousness, meeting extensively with Dave and drawing on his recently acquired knowledge of the Indian Evidence Act. In emulation of Pherozeshah Mehta, whose success Gandhi believed was based in large part on his mastery of evidence law, Gandhi had studied the act on his voyage from South Africa. Now that knowledge, as well as his seasoning in South Africa, stood him in good stead. He won the case and “gained some confidence.”10

  CONFIDENCE IN BOMBAY

  The win made Gandhi think he might be able to survive in Bombay, after all. Not entirely certain of his prospects there, however, he continued to stay on in Rajkot. Eventually Dave came to him: “Gandhi, we will not suffer you to vegetate here. You must settle in Bombay.”11 There were now two influential people in Gandhi’s life urging him to go to Bombay.

  Gandhi’s concern about having enough work to keep him afloat there was met with Dave’s assurance that he would help provide him with sufficient work: “We shall bring you down here sometimes as a big barrister from Bombay and drafting work we shall send you there. It lies with us vakils to make or mar a barrister. You have proved your worth in Jamnagar . . . and I have therefore not the least anxiety about you. You are destined to do public work, and we will not allow you to be buried in Kathiawad.”12

  Gandhi was hesitant; Mehta had warned him that Bombay would eat up any savings from Natal he might have. Accordingly, he wanted a little more money to use to set up shop in Bombay. At the time Dave urged the move upon him, Gandhi was expecting a remittance from Natal. Two weeks later he received an amount in excess of 3,000 rupees.

  He was off to Bombay. When he leased a room on the second floor of the Aga Khan building, opposite the High Court, for 20 rupees a month, it was Gandhi’s intention to give Bombay “a year’s trial.”13

  He seems to have had a bit more time for unproductive activities than he wished. He attended court-sponsored moots and also took in High Court arguments—but not to learn anything, as he later candidly admitted. He was in the well-ventilated courthouse, “like other fresh barristers,” to enjoy “the soporific breeze coming straight from the sea.” He “loung[ed] about the High Court” for a somewhat more elevated reason, as well: he wanted to make contact with solicitors who could send him clients.14

  By November of 1902 Gandhi had been practicing in Bombay for about five months. During this time, he never had a case before the High Court. He seemed, however, to have finally jettisoned the lack of confidence that had haunted him earlier, for he felt that it was but a matter of time before he would have a case requiring him to appear before the High Court, despite the warnings of local solicitors who told him he would have to wait a long time to get cases from them.15 Even as early as August, when the work was “uphill,” he had a certain confidence. He appreciated the “regular life and the struggle that Bombay impose[d]” on him.16

  After a few months he felt he was doing well enough financially. Just as work from the big trading firms in South Africa had carried him there, so too did it in Bombay. His former clients sent work his way. This work and the drafting work sent to him by D. B. Shukla, Gandhi’s Rajkot barrister friend, provided him with enough work such that he could say in November that his income was sufficient to meet his expenses. While his expenses were higher than he had anticipated, and while he was not overflowing with confidence, Gandhi was “not . . . anxious about the future.”17 One senses that Gandhi believed his practice would grow and prosper.

  SOUTH AFRICA CALLS

  When Gandhi left Natal, his fellow Indians there had extracted from him a promise to return to South Africa “if, within a year, the community should need [him].”18 Gandhi was not happy about this pledge. He understood from the beginning how disruptive keeping it would be. In fact, shortly after he arrived in India, he wrote to his colleagues in South Africa, asking “that, if our people propose to enforce the promise made by me, it should be done while my plans are yet unsettled, though . . . there is no such condition attached to the promise.”19 Then, at the end of March,
he wrote to Khan and Nazar, repeating this request and stating that it “would be a gracious act to free me unless it is to be enforced in the near future.”20

  The request that Gandhi dreaded came just as he felt he was finally settling down. The South African Indians wanted him to first visit London on their behalf and then come to South Africa. His immediate response was to say “no—unless it was absolutely necessary.” In support of his resistance, he cited his children’s illness and his own lack of strength. Adding mystery to the exact nature of the condition he had brought with him from South Africa, Gandhi stated that “I do not yet feel strong enough for the mental strain a visit to London and South Africa would require.”21

  Gandhi negotiated by telegram with his correspondents in South Africa, who appear to have addressed, if not fully allayed, his concerns about the strain. He also seems to have eliminated the London leg of the trip. It was Gandhi’s understanding that the South African Indians wanted him back principally to help them lobby Secretary of State for the Colonies Chamberlain, whose visit to South Africa was imminent.22 This was an attractive mission to Gandhi. When the South Africans remitted the funds necessary for Gandhi’s travel, there were no reasons left for Gandhi not to come.

  Except deeply personal ones. He was in the process of establishing himself professionally in Bombay. He had secured a nice suburban home for his family. His children needed his attention. He had a comfortable existence, taking a first-class train every day to a job that did not seem to overly tax him. But his countrymen needed him and he felt a sense of obligation to them. He would go.

  Gandhi, however, wanted help. He wanted to take as many as six barristers back to South Africa with him. He lobbied his friend Devchand Parekh and other bar colleagues to throw their lot in with him, assuring them that if they “were to come with one eye on their living and the other on public work, much of the burden may be distributed—not to speak of the relief in the pressure here.”23 Gandhi’s entreaties fell on deaf ears. No one would come with him.

  His immediate family, too, would stay behind, with Shukla looking after them. After all, Gandhi thought, he would only be gone for a year or so.

  What Gandhi could not foresee was that there was something important in South Africa for him. His work as a barrister in Bombay had no political aspect to it. It was simply a way of earning a living. While he had failed in India to get heavily involved in nationalist work, South Africa was calling him to do so. In South Africa he could use a good deal of his professional skill and time to serve the cause.

  In India, his practice was his job.

  In South Africa, it would become his vocation.

  TWELVE

  * * *

  Transition and the Transvaal

  If we are swamped by these people, trade by Europeans will be impossible, and we shall one and all become subjected to the horrible danger inseparable from close contact with a large body of uncleanly citizens, with whom syphilis and leprosy are common diseases, and hideous immorality a matter of course.

  The Press, Pretoria, South African Republic, April 5, 1895

  The Transvaal Government have gone so far in their prejudice, that the whole of the Republic, although the soil is very fruitful, remains a desert of dust.

  GANDHI, May 18, 1895

  WHEN GANDHI OPENED HIS LAW office in Johannesburg in 1903, it was a time of new beginnings for the thirty-three-year-old lawyer. His Durban practice was behind him, as was his struggle to establish himself in India. It was also a time of new beginnings for the Transvaal. The last armed elements of a stubborn Afrikaner resistance had been extinguished and the South African Republic with it. The Transvaal was a British colony.

  BOER RULE

  Before, during, and after the British, there were the Afrikaners, the descendants of the Dutch who settled South Africa beginning in 1652. Having migrated to the interior from their original settlement in the Cape, the Boers, as they are sometimes also known, named their country that lay beyond the Vaal River the South African Republic. The Republic, established in 1858, took in a land of vast mineral resources. The Afrikaners did a poor job of managing their new government, however, resulting in British annexation of the area in 1877.

  This phase of British control did not last long. A war for Afrikaner independence broke out in 1880, resulting in an odd 1881 settlement that permitted the Afrikaners to have internal independence while the British controlled external affairs.

  In the 1880s and 1890s, the country’s extraction industries began to mature. Diamond production was concentrated under the wing of the powerful company DeBeers Consolidated, and gold mining, taking off from the 1886 discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand, came under the control of a few large entities. Just as the plantations in Natal demanded a large supply of labor, so did these mining industries. Unlike Natal’s natives, however, the Republic’s natives did not resist employment under the European yoke. They manned the mines. When a shortage of labor did develop (natives often worked just long enough to raise the funds to buy farms), the Europeans did not replicate the Natal strategy by bringing in waves of indentured Indians. Rather, the Republic turned to China, which, unlike India, did not demand that its workers be permitted to stay in South Africa after their terms of work were complete.1 Many of the first Indians who did come to the Transvaal in the early 1880s were merchants in search of profit,2 or Natal Indians who had served out their terms of indenture and were now in search of employment in the Transvaal. The lack of reliance by the European establishment on indentured Indian labor, and the subsequent absence of discriminatory legislation aimed particularly at them, would, as historian Maureen Swan points out, have an enormous effect in later years on Indian politics in South Africa and on Gandhi’s ability to mobilize the lower classes of the Indian community.

  With control of the Cape Colony and Natal in British hands and control of the South African Republic and the Orange Free State in Afrikaner hands, the stage was set in the 1890s for a struggle over who would control the whole of South Africa. When Joseph Chamberlain took the reins of the British Colonial Office in 1895 as its secretary, he was clear in his intent to establish British paramountcy over South Africa. To achieve this ambition, he used as his proxy Cecil Rhodes, then not only the force behind DeBeers but also the prime minister of the Cape. It was Rhodes’ plan to invade and conquer the South African Republic by using police from Bechuanaland, led by Leander Jameson, while simultaneously instigating an uprising among the non-Afrikaner English-speaking population (known as “uitlanders”) of the mining region in the Republic.

  The Jameson party was captured by Transvaal forces when Rhodes was unable to rally the uitlanders. In the wake of this embarrassment, Chamberlain took another tack. In 1897, he appointed Alfred Milner as Britain’s high commissioner for South Africa. Milner harbored a deep dislike of the Afrikaners and possessed an equally intense allegiance to the notion of British superiority. Milner’s first hope, that the Republic would disintegrate from within, faded when he watched Paul Kruger easily win his fourth term as president of the Republic in 1898. He also found himself unable to flood the Transvaal with enough British settlers to dominate the political system. Milner’s fallback plan was to find “fault with every action taken” by the Republic and to refuse “any compromise” and reject “every concession the Republic offered.”3 The high commissioner’s goading worked. Sensing that the British were preparing for war, the Republic and the Afrikaners struck first, attacking the British on October 11, 1899. In the end, however, the Afrikaners were no match for the British. By 1900 the British had established control over Johannesburg and Pretoria, and by 1902 they had overcome the last traces of Afrikaner military resistance.

  The Afrikaners lost the war, but they won the peace. They negotiated a peace treaty with the British that expressed an “expectation of ultimate political autonomy.” Indeed, it was under the shelter of this expectation that the British, who had sometimes protested against the discriminatory treatment of nonw
hite British subjects under the Republic’s rule, permitted the Afrikaners to continue to enforce certain racial legislation after 1902.

  LAW 3 OF 1885

  South African Republic Law 3 of 1885 was the most prominent of the old republic’s racial laws.4 Subtitled “Coolies, Arabs and other Asiatics,” the legislation unapologetically discriminated against “persons belonging to any of the native races of Asia, including the so-called Coolies, Arabs, Malays, and Mahomedan subjects of the Turkish Empire.” The act denied these classes of people citizenship rights, prohibited them from owning fixed property, required registration and a £25 registration fee, and, notably, permitted the government to restrict Indians and others to certain locations determined by the government.

  To understand the legal and political environment of the Transvaal into which Gandhi entered in 1903, it is necessary to understand something of the history of Law 3 and Gandhi’s eventual involvement with it.5 The agreement that ended the 1880 war for Afrikaner independence was known as the Pretoria Convention of 1881, later amended by the London Convention of 1884. Article 14 of the London Convention granted full citizenship rights in the South African Republic to “all persons, other than natives.”6 In early 1885 a question arose as to whether Article 14 prevented the Republic from discriminating against the growing Indian population. Europeans took the position that Article 14 did not give Indians citizenship rights. Acting in conciliatory fashion, the British response was to suggest an amendment of the convention that would permit the Republic to deprive Indian manual laborers (pejoratively known as “coolies”) of citizenship rights just as it did natives. The British were opposed, however, to any restriction of the rights of Indian merchants—persons who belonged, according to the British, to “a superior class.” Because the Republic wanted to discriminate against all Indians, the parties did not come to an agreement on this point, and the convention was not amended.