Parsi Rustomji gave Gandhi corrugated iron sheets and other building material. Indian carpenters and masons who had joined Gandhi during the Boer War helped erect a seventy-five-foot by fifty-foot shed, and the press was moved there within a month of Gandhi’s arrival in Durban. On 24 December 1904, the first Phoenix-printed editions were dispatched.
Apart from writing his pieces, Gandhi did not hesitate to advise Nazar on the rest of the journal. ‘The Indians and the Europeans both knew that though I was not avowedly the editor of Indian Opinion, I was virtually responsible for its conduct’ (A 252). Recalling, in the Autobiography, his role with the journal, he would claim that not a word he wrote over a ten-year period was consciously exaggerated, or written without thought or merely to please.
At times history, biography and world events joined Indian and South African subjects in its columns. Abraham Lincoln, Booker T. Washington, Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale were featured. In 1905, a piece by Gandhi hailed Japan’s win over Russia in a naval war, underlined the Asian nation’s successful spying and scouting, and held that the secret of its ‘epic heroism’ was ‘unity, patriotism and the resolve to do or die’ (Indian Opinion, 10 June 1905; 4: 313).
The Indian community ‘made the paper their own’ and about 10 per cent subscribed to it. The force behind Indian Opinion and the creator of the rural settlement in Natal could not, however, ignore his work in Johannesburg. He had to be there.
Gandhi was delighted, therefore, when Polak offered to reside in Phoenix, for which he, after all, bore some responsibility. Giving The Critic a month’s notice, Polak moved to Phoenix, where each participating family lived in a house of corrugated iron on a three-acre plot. Considerations of time and expense killed Gandhi’s hopes of small brick houses, or mud huts thatched with straw.
‘By his sociability’ Polak ‘won the hearts of all’ in Phoenix. Indeed he took to the settlement like a duck to water, but Gandhi soon needed him in his Johannesburg law offices, for Ritch, who was carrying a major load there, wanted to go to England for further studies. Responding swiftly to a request from Gandhi, Polak left Phoenix and returned to Johannesburg, where he signed articles with Gandhi.
When the dedicated Mansukhlal Nazar died suddenly in January 1906, he was briefly followed as editor of Indian Opinion by Herbert Kitchin, an electrical engineer (and theosophist) who had joined the settlement. Later in 1906 Polak became the editor, functioning from Johannesburg. But the journal never became profitable, not even after its costly Tamil and Hindi editions were closed in 1906, and survived only on Gandhi’s savings.
Family in Johannesburg, 1904-6. When pressed for time, Gandhi dictated, in English, his letters to Kastur, who had been left in India. Typed by Miss Dick and posted to Bombay, the letters were translated there into Gujarati and given to Kastur. In the middle of 1903, realizing that he was not likely to return anytime soon to India, Gandhi sent for his wife and boys, but difficulty in finding an escort and other hitches delayed their arrival until the last quarter of 1904.
The eldest son, Harilal, now sixteen, remained in India, schooling in Bombay under Laxmidas’s distant eye and interested in marrying Chanchal Gulab, an educated daughter of Haridas Vora of Rajkot, whom Gandhi knew and liked. Though he had reluctantly approved of Harilal’s betrothal to Gulab, Gandhi was against an early marriage and unhappy with Harilal’s decision not to accompany his mother and brothers to South Africa, and probably unhappy, too, with Laxmidas’s supervision of Harilal.
When Kastur and Harilal’s brothers emerged from their ship in South Africa, Gandhi’s third son, six-year-old Ramdas, was wearing a sling, having broken an arm while playing with the captain. ‘In fear and trembling’ Gandhi ‘undid the bandage, washed the wound, applied a clean earth poultice and tied the arm up again’. Daily, ‘Doctor’ Gandhi dressed the injury in this manner; in a month the arm was healed (A272).
For his family Gandhi rented (again with the help of Ritch) a two-storey house with a garden in Johannesburg’s upscale Troyeville area. Though this home where Kastur, Manilal, Ramdas, Devadas and Gandhi moved, and lived for about two years (1904 to 1906) was fair-sized, modern and in an enviable location, life inside it was being drastically simplified ‘in the light of Ruskin’s teaching’ (A 275).
There was a servant in the house, living ‘as a member of the family’, and ‘the children used to help him in his work’. A municipal sweeper removed the night-soil from the house but Gandhi and his family, rather than the servant, cleaned the toilet.
Bread was not bought at a baker’s. Unleavened wholemeal bread was baked at home according to Kuhne’s recipe, made from flour ground at home by two males working a hand-mill that Gandhi had purchased for seven pounds.
At about this time, influenced by the notion of aparagriha, Gandhi decided to cancel his insurance policy. He was there himself, Gandhi reasoned, to support his family. If he were to die God would look after them, or they themselves would; he should not rob them of their self-reliance. ‘What happened to the families of the numberless poor in the world? Why should I not count myself as one of them?’ (A 231)
More difficult was a letter he wrote in May 1905 to Laxmidas, the head of the Gandhi family and the recipient thus far of a good chunk of Gandhi’s savings. By 1902, Gandhi had sent him 60,000 rupees (some of the amount settling debts incurred by brother Karsandas), apart from repaying the 13,000 rupees spent on Gandhi’s studies in England.
Henceforth, Gandhi wrote, Laxmidas should not expect any money from him. Any savings now and in the future would go to Indian Opinion and to the Indian community in South Africa (A 233-4). Gandhi added that his ambitions now were ‘very high’, he did ‘not even recognize fear now’, and he was willing if need be to ‘embrace death’.9
A shaken and indignant Laxmidas accused Mohandas of wanting to be ‘wiser than our father’ and of neglecting the family (A 233-4). Gandhi’s answer was that he now had a new and larger family.
Father and sons. Gandhi’s companion at the hand-mill in the Troyeville house was Henry Polak, who had accepted Gandhi’s invitation to move into it. Polak was a bachelor but not for long. As soon as Gandhi suggested that Polak should marry his fiancée, Millie, who was in England waiting for a propitious time for marriage, Polak announced to her that the time had come. Millie quickly arrived in Johannesburg, and Gandhi was the best man at the civil marriage of Henry, a Jew, with the Christian Millie, who joined her husband in the home of the Gandhis.
We can only imagine the feelings of Kastur at having to share her home and husband, soon after rejoining him, with a white couple, and her reactions to the hard routine that Gandhi had introduced into their home. We do not have her recollections. Gandhi acknowledges ‘some unpleasant experiences’ between ‘Mrs Polak and my wife’, adding that such experiences ‘happen in the best-regulated homogeneous families’ and were only to be expected in his ‘essentially heterogeneous family’ (A274).
As before in Durban, the boys were educated at home. Gandhi’s earlier objection to a European school for his children had now been reinforced by his encounters with the Asiatic Department, with the ‘coolie location’ and with Ruskin. There is no evidence that in Johannesburg he even tried to have a private tutor. He seemed to think that he himself would make an adequate teacher. ‘Had I been able to devote a least an hour to their literary education with strict regularity,’ he writes in the Autobiography, referring to this Johannesburg phase, ‘I should have given them, in my opinion, an ideal education’ (A 276).
But Indian Opinion, the community’s needs, his practice, Phoenix and the running of his home took up all his time, and he did not find the hour-a-day to teach his sons. He tried to instruct them (he says) on walks to his office and back from it, getting the boys to join him on these walks. Gandhi admits that even these ‘street’ instructions were liable to be interrupted or abandoned if someone else was ‘claiming [his] attention’.
Gandhi would claim that in Johannesburg his boys learned to grind
wheat, ‘got a good grounding in general sanitation’, developed no ‘aversion for scavenger’s work’, kept fit, did not fall ill, learnt nursing and enjoyed ‘what I imparted to them by word of mouth’ in Gujarati, which was the result of ‘all that I had digested from my reading of various books’ (A 275 & 301). For the boys, however, the deprivation of literary education in their childhood and early youth would remain a lifelong grievance. In the Autobiography Gandhi would offer a limited apology:
My sons have therefore some reason for a grievance against me… and I must plead guilty to a certain extent… It has been their, as also my, regret that I failed to ensure them enough literary training (A 276).
Polak, from whom the boys learned much, had ‘very heated arguments’ with Gandhi—not, apparently, on their not being sent to a school but on their father speaking to them in Gujarati rather than in English. ‘With all the vigour and love at his command’, Polak contended that the children would have a competitive advantage if they learnt English from childhood.
Gandhi felt, on the other hand, that while daily contact with Europeans would in any case teach good English to his boys (it did), without a knowledge of Gujarati they would seem foreign to Indians—in Johannesburg in 1904-6 India was very much on Gandhi’s mind.
What was best for his wife and children was not Gandhi’s primary quest. He led his children and wife into a lifestyle he thought best for his goals: ‘I sacrificed their literary training to what I genuinely, though maybe wrongly, believed to be service to the community’ (A 276).
His children doing scavengers’ work, grinding wheat and speaking fluent Gujarati may have been an admirable example to a hierarchical, colonized community that saw indignity in manual labour and in a native tongue. Yet the family paid a price for his noble ambition, and if the Gandhi boys displayed gifts in the future, it was despite the inadequacy of their education.
East & West. The East-West merger we find around Gandhi is noteworthy for its time. The Polaks living in the Gandhi home, Gandhi’s role in their marriage, Albert West’s responsiveness and faithfulness to Gandhi, who soon got West also married, the stay thereafter of West, his wife (‘a beautiful young lady’ from a family of shoemakers in Leicester), and mother-in-law in Phoenix (which grew into a little village of several families, including those of Chhaganlal and Maganlal Gandhi), the partnership of brown and white against the plague, the almost simultaneous impact on Gandhi of the Gita and of Unto This Last—in the opening years of the twentieth century these were unusual occurrences.
However, we must mark the absence from these events of South Africa’s largest group, the Africans.
Another European whom Gandhi met ‘accidentally’ in Johannesburg in 1906 and who would interact significantly with him was a German Jew, Hermann Kallenbach, a flourishing architect who at his first meeting asked Gandhi about the Buddha’s renunciation (A 293).
We may note that Gandhi’s reference in the Autobiography to his ‘essentially heterogeneous family’ in Johannesburg was at once followed by a correction: ‘When we come to think of it, the distinction between heterogeneous and homogeneous is… merely imaginary. We are all one family’ (A 274).
Re-registration of the Transvaal’s Indians, 1905-6. Signs that they were not wanted were meanwhile adding to the insecurity of Indians in the Transvaal. While every law that directly or indirectly discriminated against the British was repealed following the Boer defeat, anti-Indian laws were not only retained; they were compiled into a single manual for the convenience of officials, and all loopholes were diligently closed. Boer laxity became a thing of the past.
That some Indians had managed to buy land in auctions was bitterly resented by the whites, and Indian traders were marked out for dislike. The intention to bar, and if possible banish, enterprising Indians was masked by what Gandhi called a ‘pseudo-philosophical’ argument that the West and the Indians represented rival cultures that could not coexist. One culture was supposed to be ‘fond of good cheer, anxious to save physical labour, and prodigal in habits’, the other frugal and otherworldly.
‘If thousands of Orientals settled in South Africa, the Westerners must go to the wall.’ Since self-preservation was a supreme right, Indians had to be kept out (S 83-4). However, the real reasons, as Gandhi saw it, were trade and colour. Indian trade clearly hit British merchants, and the coloured skin was disliked.
In any case, officials in the Transvaal asked the territory’s Indians to re-register themselves so as to prevent illegal immigration. Despite the animus around them, in 1905 the Transvaal’s Indians agreed, in negotiation with the authorities, to do this, even though no new law obliged them to do so.
They agreed in the hope of avoiding new anti-Indian legislation, and to demonstrate their disapproval of illegal immigration. By early 1906, all the Indians in the Transvaal had exchanged their old permits for new ones.
Harilal. In May 1906 Harilal, who had stayed behind in India and was now eighteen, married Gulab. Believing that the two were still too young, Gandhi had asked Harilal to wait further for marriage and join him meanwhile in South Africa. But Harilal was keen and so was Laxmidas, who arranged an expensive wedding and later asked Gandhi to reimburse him. The younger brother said he could not.
Gandhi and Kastur felt disappointment on another score: Harilal was not writing to them or answering their letters. Asking his son to realize that his parents were ‘affected by separation’ from their son, Gandhi recalled the long letters he wrote from London, when he was nineteen, to Laxmidas, who was ‘like a father to me’. Added Gandhi (28 Dec. 1905):
Obviously, your mother would be more anxious [for] your letters. Still, you have not written even a small note… You have not fulfilled my natural curiosity to know every aspect of your life, your thoughts, your desires, etc.10
But the dissatisfaction was mutual and the son had his grievances. He had received insufficient attention, he felt, from his father; and he did not approve of the changes in his parents’ lifestyle.
Responding to the Zulu Rebellion, 1906. Just when Gandhi thought he had settled down in the Transvaal, albeit to a stricter life-pattern, a crisis occurred in Natal that broke up the Johannesburg establishment. After a Zulu chief rejected a new tax, a white man sent to collect the tax was assegaied; another white man was also killed. In punishment twelve Zulus were blown to death at the mouth of a cannon before an audience that included several chiefs. The Zulu revolt persisted, and military action to crush it was announced.
Gandhi was quick to evaluate the significance of what had happened. He wrote in Indian Opinion of ‘important events, the effects of which will not be forgotten for many years’ and of ‘great changes likely to take place in South Africa’. ‘The Indians and other Blacks,’11 he added, ‘have much to ponder and act with circumspection’ (Indian Opinion [Guj.], 7 April 1906; 5: 162).
Though he doubted the revolt’s wisdom, Gandhi’s sympathy was with the Zulus, ‘who had harmed no Indian’ (A 278). But in South Africa the Indians existed on British sufferance, and he again concluded, as he had over the Boer War, that they had to support the authorities. In Indian Opinion he wrote:
What is our duty in these calamitous times in the colony? It is not for us to say whether the revolt… is justified or not. We are in Natal by virtue of the British power. Our very existence depends upon it. It is therefore our duty to render whatever help we can (Indian Opinion [Guj.], 14 April 1906; 5: 179).
We may note here that even John Dube, the Zulu leader who ran the Ohlange Centre in Phoenix and would help found the ANC, expressed the view that while the Zulus had serious grievances, ‘at a time like this we should all refrain from discussing them, and assist the government to suppress the rebellion’.12
To the governor of Natal Gandhi offered, ‘with the community’s permission’ (S 90), an Indian Ambulance Corps, and to Kastur and the Polaks he pointed out that if the offer was accepted the Johannesburg establishment would have to be broken up: Kastur and the boys would go
to Phoenix, and the Polaks to a smaller home in Johannesburg.
In the Autobiography Gandhi claims that he had Kastur’s ‘full consent to this decision’ (A 278). Though often reacting against her husband’s ways, Kastur did not try to block the unknown path when, from time to time, destiny opened it for him.
The governor accepted his offer, Kastur and the boys went to Phoenix, and Gandhi again found himself leading a ‘battlefield’ corps, this time comprising twelve south Indians, five Gujaratis, two from the Punjab and one from Calcutta. Fourteen out of the twenty were Hindus, and six Muslims. They served in an undulating terrain in the Zulu country, in areas north of Phoenix and west of Stanger, including Mapumulo, Umvoti valley and Imati valley.
CLARITY, CHASTITY, CERTAINTY
Three chapters in the Autobiography—‘The Zulu “Rebellion”’, ‘Heart Searchings’ and ‘The Birth of Satyagraha’—describe this critical phase in Gandhi’s life when he found a certainty about his mission and clarity about his road.
Gandhi and his colleagues were on active service in the Zulu terrain for four weeks in June-July 1906, carrying on stretchers Zulu friendlies mistakenly shot by British soldiers and nursing these Zulu friendlies as well as Zulu suspects whose wounds received from British lashes had festered for days.
In addition Gandhi had to ‘compound and dispense prescriptions for the white soldiers’. This was easy enough for Gandhi, who had learnt to do this in Dr Booth’s little hospital. Noticing Gandhi’s service, two whites who had led the bitter opposition to his return to Durban in 1896-7, a prominent butcher named Sparks and another man named Wylie, called on Gandhi to thank him (A 279).
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 16