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

by Robert Payne

  One of his most important tasks was to attempt to solve the problems of the Indians in South Africa. At Pretoria he met General Botha and General Smuts at a two-hour conference, which ranged over the entire field of government policy. Gandhi took no part in the conference, and deliberately avoided it on the grounds that he would inevitably be regarded as a controversial figure. Nor did Gokhale want him to attend the conference. But on the night before the conference was held Gokhale insisted that Gandhi should discuss with him all the outstanding issues, in massive detail, leaving nothing out, going over a huge pile of documents and memoranda, until at last he felt he was familiar with every aspect of the long struggle fought in the courts of four colonies over a period of eighteen years. Gandhi was terrified at the thought that Gokhale might make errors of fact or find himself in a position where from lack of knowledge he would be unable to answer a question raised by one of the ministers. Above all, he wanted to ensure that Gokhale would make no commitments which he himself would not have made. There came a moment when Gandhi felt the need to protest against the responsibility Gokhale had assumed. “I humbly suggested to him that there was no need to take all that trouble; we did not mind if we had to continue the struggle a little longer; and we did not want to sacrifice him to our convenience.” This was a polite way of saying that it would be better if no conference took place. But Gokhale was adamant, he was determined to carry out his mission, and he submitted Gandhi to a ruthless and exhausting cross-examination for the rest of the night. When the dawn came, he announced that he was well-satisfied, and was prepared to fight the dragons in their lair and to return with the emblems of victory.

  Gokhale was one of those calm, unhurried men who conceal their inflexible determination under a mask of compromise and gentle flexibility. Both Botha and Smuts were deeply impressed by him. Emerging from the conference with everything he wanted, he reported to Gandhi: “Everything has been settled. The Black Act will be repealed. The racial bar will be removed from the emigration law. The £3 tax will be abolished.”

  Gandhi was considerably less sanguine over the easy victory.

  “I doubt it very much,” he said. “You do not know the ministers as I do.”

  Gokhale brushed his fears away. Botha and Smuts were both honorable men; they had made promises they intended to keep; and as a result Gandhi’s usefulness in South Africa was nearly over.

  “You must return to India in a year’s time, and I will not have any of your excuses,” Gokhale continued, once more assuming the role of a headmaster confronted with a recalcitrant pupil.

  “I do not think I can return to India in a year,” Gandhi said, and he wondered how many Indians would have to go to jail before the promises were kept.

  There were more public dinners, more reception committees, more gifts and scrolls and addresses, and then at last Gokhale, Gandhi and Kallenbach took the train to Delagoa Bay and boarded the S.S. Kronprinz of the German East Africa Line, which would take Gokhale back to India by way of Beira, Mozambique, and Zanzibar, where Gandhi and Kallenbach would disembark and make their way back to South Africa.

  Wherever they landed there were festivities, so that it resembled a royal progress; and always Gokhale would play the quiet, fatherly statesman while Gandhi made the rousing speeches and Kallenbach kept in the shadows. At Zanzibar they said farewell, and once more Gokhale insisted that Gandhi should return to India within the year. Gandhi refused. They were at odds with one another, their imperious wills touching lightly, for they were too strong to permit themselves the luxury of battle. They quarreled, but remained firmly attached to one another, though Gandhi felt the need to apologize for his imperfections in a letter written from Dar-es-Salam just after Gokhale sailed away:

  Will you forgive me for all my imperfections? I want to be a worthy pupil of yours. This is not mock humility, but Indian seriousness. I want to realize in myself the conception I have of an Eastern pupil. We may have many differences of opinion, but you shall still be my pattern in political life.

  But if Gandhi thought he had found his guru in Gokhale, he was mistaken. All his life he had searched for a guru and never found one; nor

  The Armies on the March

  THERE WERE SOME who said that Gokhale’s visit was a disaster for the Indians in South Africa. For a few weeks, while Gokhale was among them, they lived in high hopes of a dramatic change in their lives, the Black Act would be repealed, the £3 tax would be withdrawn, and they would be permitted all the advantages and amenities of white men in South Africa. Gokhale had been welcomed by Indians and Europeans alike, and at the end of his stay he had been accorded the honor of a private conference with Botha and Smuts, the two most powerful men in South Africa. It seemed that a new era of Indian-European friendship had dawned. Instead the Indians found themselves in a worse plight than before.

  Some foretaste of what was about to happen was given to Gandhi when he reached Delagoa Bay after saying farewell to Gokhale. He was detained on the ship by an immigration officer, who refused to give him a landing permit. Gandhi had been watching a crowd of Greek immigrants being cross-examined, all of them being permitted to land on proof that they had £20 on their persons, and then it was the turn of Kallenbach to be cross-examined. The official asked him whether he had any papers on him, but he had none. He explained that he had accompanied Gokhale to Zanzibar and was now returning with his friend Mohandas Gandhi to Johannesburg. Since he was obviously a European, no further questions were asked and he was given a landing permit. Then it was Gandhis turn to be questioned.

  OFFICER: Are you an Indian?

  GANDHI: Yes.

  OFFICER: Were you born in India?

  GANDHI: Yes.

  OFFICER: Do you have any papers with you?

  GANDHI: No. I am a lawyer practicing in the Transvaal Court, and I have with me a return ticket to Johannesburg. And I intend to go there today.

  OFFICER: Don’t you worry about that! Sit there! Your case will be disposed of later.

  Gandhi was caught in a trap, at the mercy of an immigration officer who regarded the Indians as people to be hounded out of the Union. He was visibly shaken, in a fierce rage, sitting glued to a chair, while Kallenbach paced restlessly up and down, refusing to leave his friend, looking, wrote Gandhi later, “like a lion caught in a cage.” But it was Gandhi, not Kallenbach, who was caught in the cage. It was one of the comparatively rare occasions in his life when he gave way to a feeling of utter despair.

  The despair did not arise only from his own predicament. What troubled him, and infuriated him until he was almost in a state of frenzy, was the sight of the wretched Indians on the ship. They were deck-class passengers with their luggage strewn around them, living in filth and squalor, with no regard for sanitation, the poor downtrodden dregs of humanity. It was because they were so poor and so filthy that the immigration officer despised the Indians. He was ashamed of them, and at the same time he was ashamed of himself for traveling second class and for not being among them. A few days later, still shaking with anger and remorse, he described the emotions which overwhelmed him as he sat glued in the deck chair, waiting for the immigration officer to dispose of his case. He wrote:

  How despicable my countrymen are! But why blame the whites? What is there the official can do? I must share in the benefits of and pay the penalties for the impression created by my fellows in South Africa. Today I pay the penalty; tomorrow I must reap the benefit. Why blame even the South African Indians? We are after all like the Indians in India. What would be my duty in this case? To be angry with the official? Certainly not. Authority is blind. Shall I then hold my peace? No, where there is suffering, I must try to seek redress. And how does one try? I must do my duty. I must not become or remain selfish. My Indian co-passengers on the deck are living in filth; I must set them an example through my way of living. I must move about as a deck passenger and request them to think of their self-respect and to preserve it, to remove the causes of filth, etc. They should defer to th
e simple and reasonable laws of the whites and resist their perverse and unreasonable laws with courage and firmness.

  Gandhi rarely revealed the workings of his mind so nakedly. We see him turning and twisting in his rage, gazing now at the immigration officer, now at the Indians in South Africa, now at himself, now at the deck passengers, finding no comfort anywhere. At last there comes a small ray of light, a glimpse of absolution. Although his rage was originally caused by his own detention and helplessness in the hands of the immigration officer, he was able to sublimate it by calling upon his own duty to serve the Indians. He had always detested their insanitary habits, and he saw himself moving among the deck passengers exhorting them to cleanliness. At this point all his agitation ceased, and he quietly waited for the inevitable moment when the Indians at Delagoa Bay would have secured his release.

  There was very little he could do about the deck passengers. He wrote an article urging the steamship companies to offer better sanitary facilities to their passengers and urging the Indians to travel more decorously and to wash themselves more regularly. His thoughts turning on the subject of health, he wrote a series of articles in Indian Opinion emphasizing the necessity of cleanliness and the dangers of smoking tobacco. The problem of the deck passengers proved to be insoluble.

  More demanding problems soon presented themselves. On March 14, 1913, the Supreme Court handed down a judgment calculated to sow panic among the Indians. A Muhammadan, Hassan Esop, learned that his marriage to Bai Miriam, although celebrated according to the proper Islamic rites, was invalid, and therefore Bai Miriam was subject to deportation. In his judgment Mr. Justice Searle ruled that all marriages not celebrated according to Christian rites were similarly invalid. Overnight Hindu, Muslim, and Parsi marriages lost their official sanction, and Indians all over South Africa learned to their horror that their wives had become concubines and their children were illegitimate.

  It was an astute and clever move, for the Indians could now be persuaded to concentrate all their energies into a concerted effort to remove the new law from the statute book, thus preserving the government from the necessity of defending all the other oppressive laws instituted against the Indian community.

  Gandhi realized at once that nothing would be gained by appealing to the courts; there was not the least sign that the Supreme Court would reverse the judgment. The government was determined to insult and oppress the Indians, and would be happy if they went away, but since they apparently intended to stay, the government was determined to make their lives intolerable. Gandhi wrote to the secretary of General Smuts that the Searle judgment shook the existence of Indian society to its foundations, and if the Indian objections were not met, the revival of the “awful struggle” was inevitable.

  Yet he was prepared to move cautiously, hoping against hope that the government would change its ways if the Indians showed themselves to be moderate and sensible in their demands. Kasturbai offered another solution. When Gandhi told her about her changed status as a result of the Searle judgment, she asked: “Then I am not your wife according to the laws of this country?” Gandhi replied that this was true, and furthermore their children, being illegitimate, were not entitled to inherit their property. “Then let us go to India,” Kasturbai said. “No,” he answered, “that would be the cowardly way,” and he went on to tell her that they would have to wage non-violent war and go to prison for their beliefs and for their dignity. Kasturbai offered to go to prison, but she was unwell and he did not press her. He would let matters develop for a little while, relying on the influence of Lord Ampthill’s committee in London and the Viceregal Council in India and whatever help he could get from the British government before precipitating a crisis.

  Gokhale, who had been in politics long enough to develop a certain cynicism, asked how many Indians would enroll in “the army of peace” he intended to throw against the Union government. Gandhi replied that he could rely on at least sixteen and at the most sixty-six Satyagrahis. Gokhale was somewhat amused by these statistics, but he would have been less amused if he could have penetrated Gandhi’s mind and learned what he really thought. Gandhi believed that if there was only one Satyagrahi of absolute faith and absolute determination, he would be able to change the mind of the government, and he said as much in one of the speeches he made later in the campaign. There was no limit to the powers of a pure man fighting for absolute truth.

  This time Gandhi wanted to conduct the campaign himself, without interference from abroad and with no dependence on Indian money. He told Gokhale that he was especially anxious that no funds should be raised in India, and once more there was a stem reply admonishing him not to exceed his proper limitations:

  We in India have some idea of our duty, even as you understand your obligations in South Africa. We will not permit you to tell us what is or is not proper for us to do. I only desired to know the position in South Africa, but did not seek your advice as to what we may do.

  Once more there was the sharp cutting edge, the well-ordered rebuke. Gandhi took care to be more humble in his later letters.

  By the end of the summer, with all his appeals unanswered, Gandhi realized that it was no longer possible to wait upon events. All the resources of the Satyagraha movement must be thrown into the confrontation with the government, if the indignity to Indian women was to be removed. There were many afflictions, but this was the worst, for it affected every Indian family in South Africa and there was not the least doubt that the government was wholly responsible for the judgment handed down by Mr. Justice Searle.

  The confrontation would take place in several stages, with Phoenix and Tolstoy Farm as the staging grounds. Since Phoenix was in Natal and Tolstoy Farm was in the Transvaal, he could send parties of Satyagrahis across the frontiers, for the police would be bound to arrest them. His first move was to send a group of sixteen, twelve men and four women with Kasturbai among them, from Phoenix into the Transvaal. As he hoped and expected, they were all arrested at the border and promptly sentenced to three months’ hard labor. A few days later eleven women set out from Tolstoy Farm to cross the frontier of Natal. For some reason the police refused to arrest them and they went on to Newcastle, a mining town not far from the border. The women immediately held meetings with the Indian miners and induced them to come out on strike. The strike was a form of non-violence which the mineowners regarded as intolerable, and some of the strikers had to pay in beatings and floggings for their imprudence.

  The eleven women from Tolstoy Farm were rounded up and thrown into prison and sentenced to three months’ hard labor. Since Newcastle was a company town, the mineowners could do as they pleased with the amenities provided for the miners: they cut off the light and water supply. They therefore marched out of the shanty town built for them and camped on some land belonging to a Tamil Christian called Lazarus, who had saved a little money and could feed them for a few days, his wife serving as cook for perhaps five hundred men, their numbers increasing daily.

  Gandhi rushed down to Newcastle in a state of elation, especially gratified because the strikers, who had no training in non-violence, were proving to be Satyagrahis of the finest kind. He had no experience of leading miners, and never before had he possessed so many willing followers. They camped out on Mr. Lazarus’s fields and on the whole behaved with astonishing decorum. Friendly merchants in Newcastle provided cooking pots and bags of dal (pigeon peas). Although it was October, and rains could be expected, there were sunny skies and calm, cloudless nights. The strikers refused to go back to work.

  Gandhi received an invitation from the mineowners to meet them in Durban. He told them that if they would secure the repeal of the £3 tax, the strike would be called off, and they asked him whether he was prepared to pay the wages of the men involved and whether he realized his responsibility to the mineowners. It was a fruitless journey, but he returned in high spirits to Newcastle, knowing that they were weak and the miners were firm. He had already made his plans for the next st
age in the battle against the movement. He had decided that the entire body of miners should march to the border of Transvaal and court arrest.

  By this time there were over two thousand men, women and children camped on Mr. Lazarus’s plot of land, waiting for his commands. Gandhi wrote that he did not know the exact number, but thought there were between five and six thousand. The actual figures were 2,037 men, 127 women and 57 children, and they marched on starvation rations consisting of a pound and a half of bread and an ounce of sugar a day to the Transvaal border. Just before the small army set out on November 6, 1913, Gandhi addressed his troops, explaining exactly what he expected of them—they must travel light, they must not touch the property of anyone on the way, and they must bear patiently all the abuse and all the indignities which Europeans would inflict on them. They were to allow themselves to be arrested without protest; indeed, the aim of the march was to fill the prisons of Natal or the Transvaal. Above all, they must be calm, well disciplined and proud 6f themselves.

  So the army marched out of Newcastle and made its way to Charlestown, a town closer to the Transvaal border, sleeping at night on the grass by the wayside, resembling nothing so much as a long, straggling array of gypsies. On the first day the police had orders to arrest 150 of them and convey them to Newcastle. Gandhi was overjoyed, because the police would now have the privilege of paying for their food, and since they were close to Charlestown and there were no conveyances ready to take them back to Newcastle, it meant simply that the men would continue on the march while the police provided for them.