It is cruel, this question mark against ‘harbouring’ his wife if she submits to the government. (Some will be reminded of Rama’s lines to Sita in the Ramayana.) Replied Kasturba:
You may have nothing to do with me if being unable to stand jail I secure release by an apology. If you can endure hardships and so can my boys, why can’t I? I am bound to join the struggle (S 255).
Kasturba and the others in Phoenix were told several times by Gandhi to enter the satyagraha only if they felt they would hold on ‘whether the struggle was short or long, whether the Phoenix settlement flourished or faded, and whether he or she kept good health or fell ill in jail’. There was no shame, he explained, in staying out. All said they were ready (S256).
The imminence of battle called for major changes. Tolstoy Farm was closed—its inmates were at last needed for the task for which they had been marking time. Not that Gandhi had an army at his disposal. In a message to Gokhale, who had inquired as to numbers, Gandhi wrote that satyagrahis he was sure of added up to a minimum of sixteen and a maximum of sixty-five or sixty-six (S 250).
But he was not going to limit the coming battle to his satyagrahis. The man who had seemingly disappeared into Tolstoy Farm was in fact monitoring a larger territory.
Strategy & tactics. He had realized, for one thing, that Phoenix, located in Natal, would be a more natural centre for a struggle against the three-pound tax. Yet Natal’s Indian elites were not eager for jail-going. In April 1913 two joint secretaries of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) publicly voiced their dissent from satyagraha, and a public meeting of Indians seemed to support the two.
Even before this signal from a section of the Indian elite, Gandhi was eyeing the indentured and the ex-indentured. He was alert, too, to the situation in the coal mines of northern Natal, not far from the Transvaal border, where many of the indentured worked. Confronted with a depressed economy,21 these Indian workers, he suspected, would be more than open to a call in respect of the three-pound tax.
In June he said in a letter to Kallenbach: ‘I am resolving in my own mind the idea of doing something for the indentured men.’22 What he came up with is revealed in Gandhi’s account of ‘the strategy [he had] thought out and unfolded before the Transvaal sisters’, to quote his words (S 254).
Gandhi told the Tamil-speaking women satyagrahis of the Transvaal that they should break the law by entering Natal. If they were arrested, it would make news—with luck, outside as well as inside South Africa. If not arrested (which was more likely, for governments did not want to publicize a satyagraha and arrested a satyagrahi ‘only when they cannot help it’), the women ‘should proceed to and post themselves in Newcastle, the great coal-mining centre in Natal (thirty-six miles south of the border), and advise the indentured Indian labourers there to go on strike’.
Gandhi figured that ‘if the labourers struck in response to the sisters’ appeal, government was bound to arrest them along with the labourers, who would thereby probably be fired with still greater enthusiasm’ (S 253-4).
Simultaneously, sixteen from Phoenix, including four women (Kasturba, Chhaganlal’s wife Kashi, Maganlal’s wife Santok, and Pranjivan Mehta’s daughter Jayakunvar Doctor) and Gandhi’s third son, fifteen-year-old Ramdas, would move in the opposite direction; they would ‘invade’ the Transvaal by entering it without permits from Natal, and thus court arrest.
If the border police asked for their names and addresses, they should, Gandhi advised, refuse to reveal these. This would ensure their arrest, whereas disclosure of names and addresses would reveal their connection to Gandhi and probably result in their satyagraha being ignored.
The battle. Gandhi’s anticipations proved remarkably accurate. The Phoenix party told the border police that they would only reveal their names in an open court. So they were arrested, sentenced on 23 September to three months’ imprisonment with hard labour, and sent to the jail in Pietermaritzburg. The Transvaal women were not arrested when they crossed into Natal, and again left alone when they hawked goods without permits.
Walking the thirty-six miles to Newcastle, they ‘set about their work according to the plans previously settled’. Accompanying them was Thambi Naidoo, veteran satyagrahi and president of Johannesburg’s Tamil Benefit Society. ‘Their influence spread like wildfire,’ and ‘the pathetic story of the wrongs heaped up by the three-pound tax touched the labourers to the quick’ (S 257).
On 15 October, seventy-eight Indian workers at the Farleigh Colliery struck work after hearing the Transvaal sisters. A Gandhi not quite ‘prepared for this marvellous awakening’ left at once for Newcastle: he knew that he would have to look after the men striking at his call (S 257). Within a week 2,000 were out and in the following week another 3,000 were also on strike.
As Maureen Swan, a critical scholar of Gandhi’s South African battles, notes, ‘The swift success of the strike call derived from the fact that Gandhi had expressed a deeply-felt economic grievance by demanding the repeal of the tax.’23
On 21 October the Transvaal women were arrested, sentenced for three months’ hard labour, and sent to Pietermaritzburg jail, where they joined the Phoenix party. The picture of Kasturba and other innocent, respectable Indian women kept alongside ordinary criminals in a South African jail stirred the Indian heart, including in India, ‘to its very depths’.
In a speech in the Bombay Town Hall, even Pherozeshah Mehta, who had discouraged Gandhi’s South African involvement, said that ‘his blood boiled’ at the picture; India, he added, ‘could not sleep over the matter any longer’ (S 258).
Unable to eat jail food, the women were told that jail was not a hotel when they asked for a different diet. Some emerged from prison as skeletons, and one young woman, sixteen-year-old Valliamma Munuswami Mudaliar, died on 22 February 1914, within days of her release and shortly after Gandhi had seen her tall emaciated figure, ‘a terrible thing to behold’.
Asked by Gandhi whether she repented of having gone to jail, Valliamma replied that she would go again if needed and did not mind if she died as a result. ‘The name of Valliamma will live,’ Gandhi would later write, ‘… as long as India lives’ (S 258-9).
Fatima Mehtab. Gandhi must have derived special satisfaction from the decision of Bai Fatima of Durban to offer satyagraha. Fatima was the wife of Sheikh Mehtab, who had stayed on in South Africa, working for Muslim merchants, after his 1895 ouster from Gandhi’s house in Durban.
Though we do not have accounts of any conversations between Gandhi and Mehtab thereafter, Mehtab seems to have supported Gandhi’s satyagrahas. Writing and singing patriotic songs (in Gujarati, Urdu and English) was one way in which he did this; he also often appeared at Parsi Rustomji’s house in Durban to show support, which took a little courage, for by this time many of the Muslim merchants of Natal had become unfriendly towards satyagraha.
Inspired by the fight of the Transvaal women, Fatima, along with her seven-year-old son and her mother, Hanifabai, attempted to enter Volksrust by crossing the border. Asked to give fingerprints, she refused, whereupon, on 13 October, she and her mother were sent to prison for three months.
The scholar Martin Green has tried to recover some of Mehtab’s doings in Durban. He thinks that Mehtab may have put on street-corner plays and taught at a mosque and possibly provided a ‘convivial masculine presence, hearing and retailing gossip [and] reciting poems and songs’. According to Green, Mehtab finally acknowledged that Rajkot’s ‘timid little Mohan Gandhi’ had won the ‘struggle between the two of them over Gandhi’s claim to be a moral hero and lawgiver’.24
THE MINERS MARCH
Since the Natal Indian Congress founded by him seemed hesitant about satyagraha, on 19 October Gandhi backed the formation of a new body, the Natal Indian Association (NIA), which started a strike fund.25
When light and water were cut off from some of the miners’ quarters, which belonged to the mine-owners, and a few strikers were flogged, the choice was between going back to work or leaving th
e quarters with their families. Gandhi’s host in Newcastle, a Christian Tamil called D. Lazarus, fed and housed scores in his small house, but the stream of homeless miners was daily getting bigger.
Gandhi asked them to march out as pilgrims. If the marchers were willing to walk to the Transvaal border (thirty-five miles) and then on to Johannesburg (125 miles) and beyond to Tolstoy Farm in Lawley (another twenty-two miles), he and Kallenbach would house them there. He would walk, eat and sleep with them. The disabled would be sent by rail.
In villages and towns along the way he would hope for provisions from Indian traders, or feed them with bread and sugar. If the government arrested them for crossing into the Transvaal and put them all in prisons, that would speak to the world—and relieve Gandhi of the burden of feeding and housing them.
Learning of the planned march, the mine-owners held talks with Gandhi in Durban. He told them that the strikers would go back to work the moment the tax was repealed, asked them to contact Smuts (which they did), and returned to Newcastle.
On the way to Durban and back (in a third-class compartment) Gandhi noticed that guards and other train staff ‘would surround me, make diligent inquiries and wish me success’. The firmness of illiterate Indian mine-workers had astonished and impressed at least a section of South Africa’s whites.
Early in the morning of 28 October, having rejected the option of returning to work, ‘a continuous stream of pilgrims who [had] retired from the household life to the houseless one’ set forth from Newcastle with their wives and children with bundles on their heads (S 263).
Every bit of Gandhi’s experience of the Boer War and Zulu Rebellion marches, and of organizing the Phoenix and Tolstoy Farm communities, was utilized on this trek, yet ‘it was no joke to control a multitude’ that he thought amounted to ‘5,000 or 6,000’.
The pilgrims’ chief, or the army’s general, had read out the rules to them. They were not to carry more clothes than necessary or touch another’s property. Each marcher would daily get a-pound-and-a-half of bread and an ounce of sugar. If abused or even flogged, they were to remain patient and peaceful. If arrested they should submit; if Gandhi was arrested they should continue with the march.
Food collected by some of the Indian elites was distributed along the line of the march from the coal district to the village (thirty-three miles from Newcastle) of Charlestown, on the Natal side of the border, with a population of about 1,000. However, two babies carried by their mothers died en route to Charlestown, one from exposure and the other falling while the mother crossed a stream.
For several days Charlestown served as the marchers’ camp. Indian traders living there made rice and dal available, and provided pots in which food was cooked on a ground next to the village mosque. Women and children were packed in the traders’ houses, the men slept in the open. ‘Luckily the weather was favourable, there being neither rain nor cold’ (S 269).
Though alarmed by the influx, the district health officer, Dr Briscoe, cooperated with the marchers, if only to prevent the spread of disease. Gandhi ensured sanitation in the space occupied by the marchers; the workers joined him in the sweeping and scavenging. Recalling the experience later, Gandhi would write:
Much can be done if the servant actually serves and does not dictate to the people… Where the leader himself becomes a servant, there are no rival claimants for leadership (S 268).
In these sentences Gandhi hints that he was aware in 1913 that the route of service, including menial labour, could take him to unrivalled leadership, in South Africa and in India.
Several experienced co-workers joined Gandhi in looking after the pilgrims in Charlestown, including Kallenbach, Sonja Schlesin, P.K. Naidoo and Albert Christopher. (Joseph Doke, who too would have offered support, had died in August in Rhodesia.)
A couple of miles across the border was the Transvaal town of Volksrust, where white residents were said to be excited and talking of disrupting the march. Visiting Volksrust ahead of the marchers, Kallenbach told a residents’ meeting there that the Indians were entering the Transvaal not to settle but to show opposition to an unjust tax. They would not retreat, Kallenbach added. The people of Volksrust should ‘beware and save [themselves] from perpetrating a wrong’.
Also, Gandhi tried to reach Smuts over the phone from Charlestown and told the minister’s secretary of the possibility of trouble in Volksrust, adding that the march would be stopped if Smuts promised repeal. Smuts refused to take the phone. His secretary said to Gandhi: ‘General Smuts will have nothing to do with you. You may do just as you please’ (S 273).
The brusqueness hurt Gandhi, who had enjoyed civil relations with Smuts for six years, but ‘as I would not be elated by his courtesy, I did not weaken in the face of his incivility’ (S 273-4).
At 6.30 a.m. the next morning (6 November) the march recommenced ‘in the name of God’. From Charlestown hundreds had indeed turned back; however, the pilgrim band that continued consisted of 2,037 men, 127 women and fifty-seven children. The idea was to march if possible twenty to twenty-four miles a day in a north-westerly direction and reach Tolstoy Farm in about eight days.
Volksrust. To quote Smuts’s words, he was aware that Gandhi ‘would be glad to be relieved of further responsibility’ for the marchers’ needs.26 He therefore did not arrest the marchers. Fortunately for them, the trouble predicted in Volksrust did not occur.
Despite his curtness when Gandhi phoned, Smuts may have alerted the town’s authorities. In any event, no European in the streets of Volksrust attempted even a jest when the Indians marched through. ‘All were out to witness [a] novel sight, while there was even a friendly twinkle in the eyes of some’ (S 275). And a white baker in Volksrust agreed to send bread for the marchers at every halt.
The baker did not take advantage of our awkward plight to charge us higher than the market rates, and supplied bread made of excellent flour. He sent it in time by rail, and the railway officials, also Europeans, not only honestly delivered it to us, but they took good care of it in transit and gave us some special facilities (S 273).
We must assume a role in eliciting this ‘white’ cooperation by persons like Kallenbach and Schlesin—and by Gandhi’s personality, seen as animus-free by numerous whites. As for the Indian workers, they were now calling him Gandhi Raja or King Gandhi; earlier he had been Gandhi Bhai or Brother Gandhi to them.
At 5 p.m., on 6 November, the caravan reached the scheduled halt, Palmford, about eight miles beyond Volksrust. The women who were carrying children in their arms were in no condition to continue further, and Gandhi handed them over to ‘a good Indian shopkeeper’ who lodged them and undertook to send them to Tolstoy Farm or, if the marchers were arrested, to their homes.
That night, when most were asleep in the open, Gandhi heard a tread and saw a lantern and realized that he was being arrested. Rousing P.K. Naidoo, who was sleeping next to him, Gandhi told him that the march should proceed in the morning as planned. Also, the marchers should not be told of Gandhi’s arrest until they halted for a meal, though anyone directly asking about Gandhi could be quietly told. If arrested, the marchers should submit. ‘Naidoo had no fears at all.’
Lodged at the Palmford railway station for the rest of the night, Gandhi was taken by train in the morning to Volksrust, where he obtained bail, citing the more than 2,000 people that he was escorting (S276). Kallenbach took him in a car to rejoin the marchers, along with the special reporter of The Transvaal Leader, who wrote ‘a vivid description’ of how the marchers welcomed Gandhi back.
Gandhi was rearrested at Standerton the next morning (8 November). (For some of this journey, the marchers took the route along which, in 1893, Gandhi had been roughed up.) The magistrate who had come to arrest him waited until Gandhi had completed distributing bread (and marmalade, presented by Indian traders) to the marchers.
‘You are my prisoner,’ the acquaintance finally said, and took Gandhi to the courtroom, where five other marchers, including P.K. Naid
oo and Rahim Khan, were also in the dock. Again Gandhi succeeded in obtaining bail; the others were jailed.
Occurring the next day, Gandhi’s third arrest on the march was less courteous. Walking at the head of the marchers ‘in a practically uninhabited tract of country’ towards Greylingstad (about fifty miles south-east of Johannesburg), Gandhi was talking with Polak when a Cape cart drove up. From it alighted Gandhi’s old friend Chamney, the principal immigration officer of the Transvaal, and a police officer, who asked Gandhi to move to one side and then said, ‘I arrest you.’
Having instructed Polak to take charge of the marchers, Gandhi was urging them to keep the peace when the police officer sharply interrupted him and said he could not make a speech. Gandhi was bundled into the police vehicle, and the officer told the driver to ‘drive away at full speed’. ‘In a moment the pilgrims passed out of [Gandhi’s] sight’ (S 280).27
Gandhi would retain in his mind the police officer’s ‘exercise of his brief authority’. ‘The officer knew,’ Gandhi would write, ‘that for the time being I was master of the situation, for trusting to our nonviolence he was alone in this desolate veldt confronted by 2,000 Indians’ (S 280). ‘It was easy enough,’ he would say, ‘for [the marchers] to cut to pieces those who arrested me,’ but they were pledged to nonviolence. Gandhi saw himself as a general battling General Smuts, and did not forget the insolence of a junior officer towards an adversary general in the latter’s nonviolent camp.
But he would remember, too, his pride that, counting on the Indians’ nonviolence, the rulers of South Africa could afford to send only a couple of officers to arrest the leader of a 2,000-strong army. ‘It was the greatest testimony of merit the government of South Africa gave to the movement,’ he would claim (24: 46).
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 24