But Gandhi quickly saw that the military exercise supported by him was only a man-hunt. Whatever his head may have advised, his heart was with the unfortunate Zulus, and ‘every morning’ he was assailed by bitter qualms as he heard ‘rifles exploding like crackers in innocent hamlets’ (A281).
His conscience was somewhat eased by the fact that he and his corps nursed innocent Zulus who would otherwise have been uncared for. Dr Savage, the ‘very humane’ doctor in charge of ambulance, had told him that white nurses were not willing to attend to the wounds of the Zulus. In fact, white soldiers tried to dissuade the Indians from doing so.
When the Indians did not heed them, the soldiers ‘poured unspeakable abuse on the Zulus’. (S 90; A 279) Though the Indians could not understand what the Zulus said, they could make out ‘from their gestures and the expressions of their eyes’ that they seemed to feel ‘as if God had sent us to their succour’ (S 91).
The Indians were serving in a sparsely populated, beautiful part of the country. ‘Few and far between in hills and dales were the scattered kraals of the simple and so-called “uncivilized” Zulus.’ With or without the wounded, Gandhi and his colleagues marched long distances, at times forty miles a day.
In his treks ‘through these solemn solitudes’, Gandhi ‘often fell into deep thought’ (A 281). The horrors of war were ‘brought home’ to him with ‘vividness’, and Gandhi’s conscience pricked him for being on the side of those who had practised great brutality.
He was reminded of India’s 1857 rebellion, which too witnessed great brutality, including floggings and the blowing of men off a cannon-mouth. That rising had only consolidated British power in India, even as the Zulu revolt seemed to be doing in South Africa.
As the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson puts it, the exercises of cleansing the gunshot wounds and binding rents made by the lash—the experience of ‘witnessing the outrages perpetrated on black bodies by white he-men’—aroused in Gandhi ‘both a deeper identification with the maltreated and a stronger aversion against all forms of male sadism’.13
But if in the Zululand solitudes Gandhi reflected on the pangs of the weak and the cruelties of the armed, he also realized the folly of being excited into violence against the strong-in-arms.
And he saw that these latter were not really strong: the truly strong person was the pure in heart—the brahmachari, the celibate—especially if he was free also of the drag of possessions and thus capable of ‘undertaking… the largest risks’. In his treks in the Zulu country, Gandhi seemed to sense there that he would have ‘more and more occasions’ for struggle, and that he would have to embrace what he had admired for years, brahmacharya, and also—‘as a constant companion in life’—poverty (S 91; A 282).
The less he had, the more he would become. He had to be lean and clean, and his battles and weapons too had to be unsoiled. In the Autobiography he recalls his choice: ‘In a word, I could not live both after the flesh and the spirit’ (A 281). But this purely spiritual wording is misleading, for it leaves out the political, strategic and pragmatic dimensions of Gandhi’s Zululand decisions.
Caritas had indeed triumphed over Eros,14 but a readiness to struggle had also triumphed over the survival instinct,15 and a strategy of wisdom over that dictated by anger. The chastity vow was connected, too, to Gandhi’s unwillingness to be tied down by more children (A 180), and also perhaps—although this is speculation—to a wish to prove to Harilal that the sex desire could be overcome.
In the Zulu country Gandhi sensed that he himself would battle well and on a large canvas. ‘A mission… came to me in 1906, namely, to spread truth and nonviolence among mankind in the place of violence and falsehood in all walks of life,’ he would say in 1942.16
He may not have used identical words in 1906, but the sense of a calling was present. He would recall that the solemn decisions produced ‘a certain kind of exultation’. ‘Imagination,’ he adds in the Autobiography, ‘also found free play and opened out limitless vistas of service’ (A 281). By service he here chiefly seems to mean struggle.
That a struggle was ahead was suggested by letters and telegrams to Zululand asking him to return to the Transvaal, where new anti-Indian steps were being designed. ‘My people were excited,’ Gandhi would later recall, ‘and there was talk of wreaking vengeance. I had then to choose between allying myself to violence or finding out some other method of meeting the crisis… and it came to me that we should refuse to obey legislation that was degrading and let them put us in jail if they liked’.17
Once again a crisis (which this time included an uneasy conscience) had become a springboard for Gandhi. This time the results were bigger than before.
Within months of the Zulu rebellion, the Transvaal Indians launched their first nonviolent defiance or, as it would eventually be called, satyagraha (‘truth-force’), with Gandhi saying on 11 September 1906, ‘I can boldly declare, and with certainty, that so long as there are even a handful of men true to their pledge, there can be only one end to the struggle, and that is victory’ (5: 335).
In the Autobiography Gandhi says (A 284) that his Zululand decisions were a necessary ‘preliminary… to satyagraha’. Zululand had led to ‘the gift of the fight’18 that he would share with South Africa, India and the world. Every individual anywhere had the power to resist oppression, and nonviolent resistance was legitimate.
Concluding justly that ‘the turning point in Gandhi’s personal life came in 1906’ in Zululand, Jonathan Schell notes equally correctly that whereas in both East and West, holy vows have usually been accompanied by a withdrawal from the world and from politics, ‘Gandhi proceeded in exactly the opposite direction’. His vows had freed him not from, but for, action.19
The Zululand decisions for chastity and poverty were similar to and yet different from ‘giving God your life’. Cost at one level, freedom at another, and finality were written into his decisions, yet Gandhi was not abdicating personal responsibility for his life or control over it. While the God he spoke of (and prayed to) often seemed a personal God, in his Zululand reflections Gandhi focused on what he should do, not on what God might do. He would cry for God’s aid, but the burden was primarily his.
The Asiatic law. As soon as the Corps was disbanded, Gandhi went to Johannesburg via Phoenix, where, as he recalls in the Autobiography, he ‘eagerly broached the subject of brahmacharya with Chhaganlal, Maganlal, West and others’. He claims too to have ‘consulted’ his wife, who ‘made no objection’, but we do not know the details of this conversation.20 Some in Phoenix, the Autobiography adds, ‘set themselves bravely to observe the vow’ and some ‘succeeded also’ (A 282).
We will look again and often at Gandhi’s brahmacharya, but here let us mark what he says in Satyagraha in South Africa, written before the Autobiography and revealing the growth of the political Gandhi even as the Autobiography recounts his spiritual/ethical/dietetic experiments: ‘On return from the war, I just met the friends at Phoenix and at once reached Johannesburg’ (S 91).
‘Eager’ (as he tells us in the Autobiography) about the vow, he was just as eager, or even more, for action, and wanted ‘at once’ (as Satyagraha informs us) to be where ‘letters and telegrams’ had asked him to return.
In the Transvaal a young man in the Asiatic Department called Lionel Curtis had argued that Indians exchanging their old permits for new ones was not enough. Re-registration by mutual consent, said Curtis, lacked the force of law. Worse, the process of mutual consent had raised the prestige of the Transvaal’s Indians. To put them in their place, new legislation was needed, which could also serve as a model for the rest of South Africa and for parts of the Empire like Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Curtis’s arguments found responsive ears, and on 22 August 1906 a gazette extraordinary of the Transvaal government published a draft, written by him, for amending the territory’s Asiatic law.
Arriving in Johannesburg, where he stayed with Hermann Kallenbach in the latter’s house i
n Orchards, three miles outside the city, Gandhi took a copy of the gazette extraordinary ‘to a hill near the house’ to study the draft law and translate it into Gujarati. It required every Indian who was eight or older, male or female, to obtain a new certificate of registration from the registrar of Asiatics and provide finger and thumb impressions and other marks of identification. Failure to comply would invite a fine, imprisonment and/or deportation. Once obtained, a certificate was to be produced each time a police or government officer asked to see it; and police officers could enter private houses to inspect it.
Gandhi saw ‘hatred of Indians’ in the offensive law, which he explained the next day to ‘a small meeting of leading Indians’, who were all as shocked as Gandhi had been.
One of them said in a fit of passion: ‘If any man comes forward to demand a certificate from my wife, I will shoot him on the spot and take the consequences.’ Gandhi ‘quieted him’ and told those gathered that the proposed law was ‘the first step with a view to hound us out of the country’. If they acquiesced in it, the law would be replicated across South Africa; many more than the 10,000 to 15,000 Indians in the Transvaal would be affected.
But haste, anger and impatience would be a poor response. They had to ‘calmly think out’, Gandhi said, ‘measures of resistance’ and ‘in time carry them out’. And they had to present ‘a united front’ (S 93-4). In an Indian Opinion editorial on 8 September he asked the community to learn from the self-sacrifice that Russian workers had recently shown in brave strikes against oppression, but to reject their violence.
‘We won’t submit.’ On 11 September 1906 the Jewish-owned Empire Theatre was ‘packed from floor to ceiling’ with Indians. Always a student of his audiences, Gandhi thought he saw ‘in every face the expectation of something strange to be done or to happen’. Abdul Ghani, one of the oldest Indian residents of the Transvaal and chairman of the Transvaal British Indian Association, presided, and the meeting considered a resolution expressing solemn determination not to submit to the ‘galling, tyrannous and un-British requirements’ laid down in the proposed law and to suffer all penalties their resistance might invite.21
The audience heard Gandhi patiently as he explained the resolution. Indian Opinion would summarize his remarks:
He had thought the matter over seriously and earnestly before he had given his opinion upon the step they should take, and he felt that it was their bounden duty to adopt the course laid down… He admitted that the responsibility for the serious step… was upon his shoulders, and he took the responsibility in its entirety.
But he knew them; he knew that he could trust them, and he knew also that, when occasion required an heroic step to be taken—he knew that every man among them would take it (Indian Opinion, 22 Sept. 1906; 5: 333).
Speaker after speaker supported the resolution, and one of them, Haji Habib, another seasoned resident, said, ‘We must pass this resolution with God as witness.’ Habib ‘went on solemnly to declare in the name of God that he would never submit to that law’.
Recalling the occasion in Satyagraha, Gandhi says that he was at first ‘startled’ and ‘put on [his] guard’ by Habib’s reference to ‘God as witness’ and by his declaration ‘in the name of God’. Then, ‘in a moment’, he ‘thought out the possible consequences’ and his ‘perplexity gave place to enthusiasm’. He saw that the daunting responsibility ‘a solemn oath’ would place on his shoulders, and on the shoulders of the community, was also an opportunity to be grasped.
His eyes and instincts had told him that the assembly in the Empire Theatre was willing. The ‘solemn oath’ that Habib was asking for merged with his solemn decisions in Zululand and with his vision there of great battles ahead. Here was the threshold of the first of these. He should summon his soldiers.
‘A NEW PRINCIPLE’
Obtaining the chair’s permission to explain the implications of Habib’s remarks, Gandhi said that Habib had introduced a novel yet serious element. The God of Hindus and Muslims was one and the same. A pledge in the name of that God was not something to be trifled with. All present had to search their hearts and should take the pledge only if they were ready to carry it out.
If a majority of the Transvaal’s Indians took the pledge and remained true to it, it was possible that the proposed law would be withdrawn. But it was also possible that only a minority would pledge themselves, and as a result invite ridicule, imprisonment, hunger, floggings, deportation and even death. But if ‘even a handful of men’ remained ‘true to their pledge, there can be only one end to the struggle, and that is victory’.
Gandhi spoke in a Gujarati that Hindi-speakers too could follow, and his remarks were also translated into Tamil and Telugu. He ended by saying that while it was unlikely that he would be ‘left alone to face the music’, he was ready to stand on his own, and he asked those unsure of their ‘will or ability to stand firm even when [they] are perfectly isolated’ to declare their opposition to the pledge.
After the chair endorsed the proposal, ‘all present, standing with upraised hands, took an oath with God as witness not to submit’ to the proposed law (S 97-100). The next day an accident produced a fire that destroyed the Empire Theatre, yet Gandhi felt that ‘some new principle had come into being’ there the previous day (S 102).
An upheaval in his family life had coincided with the birth of a new principle. The Zululand experience that led to ‘the new principle’ had separated him from his family and forced them to leave their upmarket Johannesburg house for a rough settlement in Natal. Earlier, his return to South Africa (in response to a cable) had led to a separation of two years, with the family left behind in Santa Cruz in Bombay. Before that, his prompt acceptance of the first invitation to South Africa had caused a three-year separation, as his London visit had done earlier.
Embracing his destiny is our Gandhi’s priority, not the stability of his family, who stay put or move out as the day might require. We should absorb this even as we mark Gandhi’s ability, time after time, to respond swiftly to a need or opportunity.
He is nailed not to a place, home or family but to an inner voice, or—perhaps we should say—to a people larger than his family. For their sake he will pull up old roots or send down new ones. He is free to fight for them; his family is compelled to adjust. He expands a tiny window into a large door for his oppressed people; his family is obliged to move into a more austere space.
For some time Gandhi and others would describe the Indians’ response to the new law as passive resistance, but he was not satisfied with the English phrase. In 1907 Indian Opinion announced a small prize for an alternative, which Maganlal won with his suggestion of ‘sadagraha’ or ‘firmness for the good’. Gandhi altered the prize-winning entry to ‘satyagraha’ or ‘firmness for the truth’.
In September and October 1907—a year after the Empire Theatre meeting—Gandhi extensively quoted the American, Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), in Indian Opinion, including Thoreau’s statements about that government being best which governs the least, the duty of civil disobedience, and prison as the true place for a just man. Thoreau, Gandhi wrote, ‘was a great writer, philosopher, poet, and withal a most practical man, that is, he taught nothing he was not prepared to practise in himself. He was one of the greatest and most moral men America has produced’ (Indian Opinion, 26 Oct. 1907; 7: 279).
Gandhi would also acknowledge later that Thoreau ‘invented’ the idea of civil disobedience,22 and that he had read Thoreau, whom he found ‘so convincing and truthful’, with ‘great pleasure and equal profit’.23 The evidence suggests that Gandhi’s close and warm reading of Thoreau took place well after, rather than before, the Empire Theatre meeting, and that he found powerful confirmation and encouragement in Thoreau for what Zululand and the Asiatic Act had already engendered in him.
Using truth as a synonym for love, justice and the soul, and equating firmness with force, Gandhi would allow ‘satyagraha’ to be translated into English as truth-force, or lov
e-force or soul-force. The American philosopher William James had called for ‘the moral equivalent of war’. Gandhi felt he had found it.24
Chapter 5
Hind Swaraj
South Africa and England, 1906-10
Still, in 1906, a Crown Colony, though assured by London of self-government in the very near future, the Transvaal required imperial consent for any new law. To urge Britain to reject the anti-Asian legislation, Gandhi and Haji Ojer Ali, an influential Muslim merchant, sailed for England early in October 1906, on the Armadale Castle.
Arguing that Gandhi represented not the Hindus but ‘the Indian community as a whole’, some Hindus in the Transvaal had wanted the deputation to include an additional Hindu ‘to balance Ali’. The proposal, which was rejected, revealed Gandhi’s non-communal standing as well as a ‘Hindu/Muslim’ element in the politics of South Africa’s Indians (S109).
In an Indian Opinion piece (17 Nov. 1906) Gandhi reported that the Armadale Castle was ‘as big as a small town. There must be about a thousand persons on board, but there is no noise, no disorder.’ He noted, too, that the English lawyer or businessman who had ‘trekked long distances in the Zulu war and felt happy with dry bread’ now did no work on the ship. ‘He presses a button and an attendant stands before him. Why indeed should such a people not rule?’ Gandhi asked. (He would say this sort of thing to Indians in South Africa, not to the British.)
But the people ruling the Empire from London knew who in South Africa they wished to placate. Though Lord Elgin, Secretary of State for the Colonies, said to Gandhi and Ali that the Empire could not support discrimination against Indians, and later indeed advised the King to withhold assent to the Transvaal law, he simultaneously assured Sir Richard Solomon, the Transvaal’s representative in London, that the Empire would not intervene once the same law was passed by a self-governing Transvaal.
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 17