The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (The Robert Payne Library)

by Robert Payne

  A crowd had formed, cursing and shouting, and Gandhi was in danger of his life. Stones, bricks, mud, rotten fish were being thrown at him. Someone struck him with a riding whip; someone else knocked off his turban. Mr. Laughton could no longer protect him; he had been spirited away from the line of battle. Gandhi was gripping the railings of a house, almost unconscious, blood streaming from a wound at his neck, in danger of being beaten to death. At that moment Mrs. Alexander, the wife of the police superintendent, saw what was happening and advanced into the fray with an open umbrella, and a few moments later some constables arrived from the local police station. An Indian boy had gone running to the station, shouting that Gandhi was being murdered. With the help of Mrs. Alexander and the constables Gandhi was remove4 to the comparative safety of Parsi Rustomji’s house.

  When night fell, a crowd gathered round the house. They wanted Gandhi’s blood and threatened to bum down the house unless Gandhi surrendered. Superintendent Alexander addressed the crowd, attempting to humor them, but with little success. They were chanting:

  “Hang old Gandhi

  On the sour apple tree.”

  Superintendent Alexander was a good-humored, kindly man, and he joined in the singing, while sending a message to Gandhi that he should escape in disguise. Gandhi was perturbed. He had serious moral objections to disguise, and he had refused to wear disguise when landing from the S.S. Courland. Was he expected to wear disguise now that he was safely in his friend’s home? But the possibility that the rioters would bum down the house was a very real one, and Gandhi bowed to the inevitable. A constable, sent into the house, exchanged clothes with him, and he slipped away wearing the uniform of an Indian constable, with a metal saucer under his turban, in the company of a white detective. They jumped fences, squeezed through railings, crept down a narrow alleyway, entered a warehouse where they clambered over gunny sacks, and finally jumped into a waiting carriage, which took them to the police station.

  For two days Gandhi remained in hiding in the police station, pondering the fate of the Indians in South Africa and his own fate as a willing prisoner of the police.

  The End of an Era

  WHEN THE STORM blew over and Gandhi was at last able to settle down in Durban with his wife and sons, he discovered that in many subtle ways his position had changed. If he asked himself exactly why he had returned, he could find no simple reasons. To a correspondent of The Natal Advertiser who interviewed him on board the S.S. Courland, he said: “I do not return here with the intention of making money, but of acting as a humble interpreter between the two communities.” This was true, but it was only part of the truth. He had come to South Africa with a mandate from well-known Indian leaders, and he was therefore regarded by Indians and Europeans alike as a political representative. Previously he had acted in his own name; now he acted in the name of India. And this change in his position, though never openly expressed, was to affect his relations with nearly everyone he met. His tone became authoritative and more unyielding. He was a political figure first, and all his other work-ins law office, his work for social reform within the Indian community, his religious searchings—all these would have to yield precedence to the politician whose purposes were far more complex than he perhaps acknowledged. The iron of ambition had entered into him.

  Although he had been invited to prosecute the people who attacked him, he was dubious about the advantages of a public trial. He had religious objections to punishment of any kind, and there was no satisfaction in seeing his attackers sentenced to terms of imprisonment. The trial would inflame the Europeans against the Indians, who would gain nothing from it.

  Gandhi was still debating what should be done when Joseph Chamber-lain, Secretary of State for the Colonies, sent an urgent cable to the Natal government asking for an explanation of the incident which had been reported in the newspapers. Gandhi was summoned to Harry Escombe’s office and told about the telegram. An immediate reply was expected. What did Gandhi propose to do? Gandhi answered that he did not propose to prosecute his assailants in court because he did not regard them as guilty. The guilt lay with the Natal government, and more especially with Harry Escombe, the attorney general, for permitting the Colonial Patriotic Union to incite the Europeans against the Indians. “You took such steps as seemed advisable to you for safeguarding the interests of the Europeans in Natal,” Gandhi said bluntly. “This is a political matter, and it remains for me to fight you in the political field.”

  It was a voice speaking with grave authority: the weight of India against the weight of the Natal government. Harry Escombe was properly impressed, but still wondered how he should reply to Chamberlain’s peremptory cable. Gandhi offered to write a personal note saying that he declined on his own responsibility to prosecute the assailants, and Harry Escombe gratefully accepted it. The note was a very mild one. “I beg to state that I do not wish that any notice should be taken of the behaviour of some people towards me last Wednesday, which I have no doubt was due to misapprehension on their part as to what I did in India in reference to the Asiatic question.” With this note, written on a sheet of the attorney general’s notepaper, Gandhi won a moral victory over the Natal government.

  For the moment he had to be content with moral victories. The Natal government was determined to restrict immigration and to reduce the financial power of the Indian merchants, and possessed powerful weapons to enforce its will. Gandhi would continue to fight them “in the political field,” but it was an unequal struggle which he rarely won and often lost. More often than he liked he learned that the fame or notoriety he had received at the time of the Courland incident worked to his disadvantage. The Indians however flocked to his law office, which had been kept open during his absence, with the result that he was soon making more money than he needed. To his disgust he was becoming a successful lawyer and spending most of his time in his office.

  The house at Beach Grove Villas was now filled to bursting, for some of his law clerks still lived with him and in addition there were Kasturbai and his two sons, Harilal and Manilal, with another on the way, for Ram-das was born in May. In addition there was the ten-year-old son of his widowed sister—Gandhi had spent a week in Bombay nursing her husband on his deathbed—and he liked and admired the boy more than his own sons. Altogether there were eight or nine people regularly sharing the five bedrooms in the house. One day a leper appeared at the door, and Gandhi invited him into the house, dressed his wounds, and attempted to nurse him back to health. The experiment was unsuccessful, and some days later the leper was sent away to a government hospital. What Kasturbhai thought of the presence of the leper is not recorded. What is certain is that she objected very strongly to Gandhi’s habit of filling the house with his law clerks, and one day she rebelled.

  The house at Beach Grove Villas was a sturdy, well-built house facing Durban Bay, with a small garden in front and a larger one in the back. There was a verandah in front and a side entrance for the tradesmen, and while there was a staircase inside the house there were also outside stairs leading to the first story. The only bathroom was downstairs, and accordingly chamber pots were provided in each of the upstairs bedrooms. The clerks who stayed at the house cleaned their own chamber pots. In 1898 a new clerk, a Christian, came to stay in the house. He did not know the prevailing practice with regard to chamber pots, and Gandhi did not enlighten him. Kasturbai was ordered to clean his chamber pot.

  She came down the outside stairs with the pot in her hand, crushed and miserable, her eyes inflamed with anger, tears streaming down her cheeks. Gandhi was in no mood to tolerate her resentment, and shouted: “I will not stand this nonsense in my house!” In his view she should have come down the steps smiling in the pure joy of performing a useful act.

  All her accumulated despair, her rage at being treated like a servant, broke out, and she shouted back: “Keep your house to yourself, and let me go!”

  He took her at her word, caught her by the hand and dragged her to the gate,
and was about to open it with the intention of pushing her into the street when she cried: “Have you no sense of shame? Must you so far forget yourself? Where am I to go? I have no parents or relatives here to harbour me. Being your wife, you think I must put up with your cuffs and kicks? For Heaven’s sake behave yourself, and shut the gate. Let us not be found making scenes like this!”

  Gandhi, who records the incident in great detail in his autobiography, appears to have been deeply shocked and puzzled by her behavior. An Indian demands implicit obedience from his wife; he will not tolerate recriminations. He closed the gate and permitted her to return to the house, only too well aware that there had been a sudden change in their relationship. In all their sixteen years of marriage there had never been an incident like this and he was determined that there would never be another.

  He usually left the house early and returned late; Kasturbai saw very little of him. When he returned to the house, she saw a man who was overworked, harassed by insoluble problems, determined to have his own way, with an acid temper. She longed for India, the calm and leisurely life she had known in Rajkot, where there were no law clerks to be served hand and foot and no lepers. She had very little affection for South Africa.

  Gandhi explained the incident away. “It was a time,” he observed, “when I thought that the wife was the object of her husband’s lust, born to do her husband’s behest, rather than a helpmate, a comrade and a partner in the husband’s joys and sorrows.”

  About this time he decided that he should simplify his life, and characteristically he solved the problem by assuming still more burdens. His friend Parsi Rustomji had opened a small charitable hospital for Indians, and Gandhi worked at the hospital for two hours every morning as a male nurse. He dispensed prescriptions, ascertained the patients’ complaints and reported them to the doctor in charge. He had always wanted to be a nurse, and those hours spent among suffering Indians provided relief from pressing legal and political problems. “This work brought me some peace,” he wrote. It also brought him into close physical contact with the poor Tamil and Telugu laborers, so that he came to know their problems as though they were his own. In the law office he saw the rich; in the hospital he saw the poor.

  He also wanted to be a teacher, and he did some teaching at home. The problem of educating his sons and his nephew was very nearly insoluble. He could, of course, have sent them to a Christian mission school, where the medium of instruction was English. This he refused to do. What he wanted and could well afford was a good Gujarati tutor who would live in the house and teach them according to his instructions, but no such Gujarati tutor was available. In despair he hired an English governess at £7 a month, but the experiment lasted only a few weeks. Kasturbai was illiterate and could teach them nothing. The result was that the children had no formal schooling, and though Gandhi often defended himself for not putting them to school he was obscurely aware that he had caused them a profound injury; and all his sons felt that they had been ill-treated by him.

  The quest for a simple life sometimes leads to extraordinary complications, and soon Gandhi found himself “simplifying” his household expenses. In such a large household the laundry bill was bound to be expensive. He decided to become a washerman, bought a book on washing, studied the art carefully, and taught it to his wife. The first fruits of his experiment in washing were disastrous, for he found himself in court wearing a collar dripping starch to the amusement of his fellow barristers. He explained to a friend: “The charge for washing a collar is almost as much as its price, and even then there is the eternal dependence on the washerman. I prefer by far to wash my things myself.” It was not a very satisfactory solution, and he was scarcely more successful when he decided to throw off his dependence on the barber. When an English barber con-temptuously refused to cut his hair, he immediately bought a pair of clippers and proceeded to cut his own hair with the help of a mirror. The result was disastrous, for though he succeeded moderately well in clipping the front of his head he failed dismally with the back. His friends at court wondered aloud whether rats had been nibbling at it. Gandhi had no animus against the English barber; he remembered that in India barbers refused to serve the untouchables.

  When the Boer War broke out in October 1899, Gandhi at once offered his services to the Natal government. There were many reasons for this action: he felt a great sense of loyalty to the empire, and he was profoundly convinced that the Indians who claimed the right to be regarded as British subjects must accept the responsibility of fighting in time of war. The Indians were despised in Natal; if they showed they were capable of sacrificing themselves, then they would be regarded more highly. The Europeans often said: “When danger threatens the colony, the Indians will run away.” Gandhi wanted to show that this notion was erroneous.

  He called on one of the members of the Legislative Assembly to discuss the Indian contribution to the war effort. Natal was in mortal danger, with the Boers driving across the frontier and threatening the entire colony. Gandhi specifically wanted to know whether the government would accept the services of Indians in the army for active service on the battlefield.

  “You Indians know nothing of war,” he was told. “You would only be a drag on the army. You would have to be taken care of, instead of being a help to us.”

  But Gandhi was insistent. Surely there was some place for Indians in the war? They could work as hospital orderlies or simply as laborers doing the menial work in hospitals. He was told that all this would need training, for which the government had no facilities. The best thing the Indians could do would be to contribute financially to the war effort.

  Gandhi went away and within a few days collected from the Indian merchants a substantial contribution to the Durban Womens Patriotic League Fund, himself contributing three guineas. Still smarting from the interview with the member of the Legislative Assembly, he consulted his friend Mr. Laughton, the legal counselor to Dada Abdulla and the man who had escorted him to shore from the S.S. Courland. He proposed to raise an Indian Ambulance Corps, and when Mr. Laughton received the suggestion with enthusiasm Gandhi wrote a formal letter to the Natal government offering his services. The government rejected them, and nothing more was heard of the idea until the beginning of December. The war was going badly for Natal, and the government needed all the help it could get.

  Dr. Booth, the doctor who superintended Parsi Rustomji’s charitable hospital, helped to train the Indian volunteers, who numbered about a thousand men. They were to act as stretcher-bearers and were paid £1 a week, the government stipulating that they would not be called upon to work under fire.

  A photograph taken while they were under training shows Gandhi in khaki and wearing a slouch hat sitting next to Dr. Booth. He has grown his mustache long, so that it curls round his lips. He does not look like an eminently successful lawyer but like a man who has spent his life in the Red Cross and is heavily burdened with responsibilities. The eyes are watchful, and he is clearly anxious that his men should give a good account of themselves.

  On December 15 a battle broke out at Colenso, a small village on the Tugela River sixteen miles south of Ladysmith. General Redvers Buller with a force of about 20,000 men was marching to the relief of Ladysmith when he was surprised by a force led by General Louis Botha. The Indian Ambulance Corps arrived on the scene just as the battle ended, the British troops withdrawing after being mangled by the Boers. The stretcher-bearers were set to work carrying the wounded to the field hospital until eleven o’clock at night and they were working again at the first dawn. Among those who were carried away from the battlefield was a mortally wounded young officer called Lieutenant Roberts, and Gandhi remembered with a peculiar poignancy that he was the only son of Field Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar, the conqueror of Afghanistan and former commander in chief in India. Five days before his son’s death Lord Roberts arrived in Cape Town from England to assume command of the British forces in South Africa.

  Gandhi was full of admirat
ion for the discipline and fortitude of the British soldiers in retreat, as they marched in the broiling sun across the waterless and treeless veldt. They retired in such good order with their heavy artillery and transports that they gave the impression of being victorious warriors rather than a defeated rabble. He had sorrow for his own men who were left to shift for themselves at Chieveley station. Tired, hungry and thirsty, the Indian volunteers had to forage for themselves. On the next day they were packed into open baggage wagons and sent to Estcourt.

  What Gandhi chiefly remembered of that long-drawn-out day at Chieveley was the good fellowship between the Indians and the British Tommies, who shared their rations with their newfound friends. The soldiers, going quietly and effortlessly about their duties at Chieveley, reminded him of the Trappist monks he had seen at Mariann Hill, and two years later in Calcutta he extolled the British soldier as he has rarely been extolled by Indians:

  I would not be true to myself if I did not give you an idea of the impression that was created in the minds of many of us about the life of the British soldier when at work, and especially under temporary reverses. I ventured last Sunday week to give you a description of the Trappist monastery and the holy stillness that pervaded it. Strange though it may appear to some of us, the same impression was created in those vast camps. Although the energy put forth was the greatest—not a minute was passed idly by anybody in those stirring times —there was perfect order, perfect stillness.

  Tommy was then altogether lovable. He mixed with us and the men freely. He often shared with us his luxuries whenever there were any to be had. A never-to-be-forgotten scene happened in Chieveley. It was a sultry day. Water was very scarce. There was only one well. An officer was doling out tinfuls to the thirsty. Some of the bearers were returning after leaving their charge. The soldiers, who were helping themselves to the water, at once cheerfully shared their portion with our bearers. There was, shall I say, a spirit of brotherhood irrespective of colour or creed. The Red Cross badge or the Khaki uniform was a sufficient badge whether the bearer had a white skin or brown.