Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  4

  A Barrister in Durban

  As a London-trained lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi was the only Indian in Durban who bridged the gap between the races. Alone, without his family, he kept a diary, which tells how he passed the time. During the week, he drafted contracts and partnership agreements for his Indian clients, and lobbied for their rights. A lawyer-legislator he came to know well was a man named Harry Escombe. Escombe ‘admitted the justice’ of their claim for the franchise but said he ‘could not help’. By way of compensation, and consolation, he sponsored Gandhi for admittance to the Natal Bar.

  Gandhi also befriended a couple named the Askews, Methodists by faith, a ‘very kind gentleman’ married to ‘an extremely kind lady’. The friendship prospered, till the Hindu’s earnestness grated on his hosts. A diary entry for Sunday, 16 September 1894 says it all:

  Saw Askews at their house. Mrs A. did not like me to chat on vegetarianism or Buddhism [for] fear that her children may become contaminated. She questioned my sincerity. Said I should not go to their house if I was insincere and not seeking the truth. I said it was not within my power to make her believe that I was sincere and that I had [no] wish to thrust myself on her as a companion. I told her also that I did not go to [her] place as a spy to convert her children.1

  That Gandhi placed the Buddha on a par with Christ irritated Mrs Askew. His vegetarianism was an even greater problem. The hostess’s young son, seeing that Gandhi preferred an apple to a hunk of animal flesh, asked why. The Indian lawyer reproduced the ethical arguments he had first learnt at the feet of Henry Salt. The next day the boy begged his mother not to serve him meat. Convinced (like all good Christians) that eating meat made children strong, she told Gandhi to henceforth speak only to her husband. Gandhi said in that case it was best he stopped visiting them altogether.2

  In court and out of it, Gandhi was meeting Europeans who were also Christians. They discussed their respective creeds. Gandhi told a friend he wished to attend service at his church. The friend passed on the request to his vicar. To allow Gandhi to sit alongside white worshippers was impossible. The vicar’s wife, out of solidarity and sympathy, offered to sit with him in the church’s vestibule, from where they heard the service.3

  Gandhi’s religious pluralism was precocious. The late nineteenth century saw the rise, on the one side, of atheistic sentiments among intellectuals, and on the other, of an aggressive proselytizing by missionaries. Even as Gandhi was meeting Christians in Durban, his fellow Kathiawari Dayananda Saraswati was travelling through north India, warning Hindus against the seductions of Christianity.4

  Like his mother, Gandhi cared deeply about his faith without being dogmatic about it. Pran Nath, the founder of Putlibai’s sect, quoted from the Koran; she herself entertained Jain monks. In his open-mindedness, Mohandas was following his mother; yet, as a man, with a freedom to travel denied her, he could take this ecumenism further and deeper, through meeting people of different faiths, and by reading their texts as well.

  In his early years in South Africa, Gandhi read two books by heterodox Christians that made a great impression on him. One was The Perfect Way, by Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland. Kingsford was the first Englishwoman to get a medical degree, studying in Paris, where she persuaded her teachers that she could qualify to be a doctor without cutting up a single animal. On returning home, she became active in the Vegetarian Society. Maitland was a religious dissenter: the son of a priest, himself trained to take holy orders, he instead became a Theosophist.

  Among Kingsford’s other books was The Perfect Way in Diet, which argued that the shape of the human face and jaw, and the structure and functioning of the stomach, showed that man was meant to be a herbivore and frugivore, not a meat-eater. She noted that the Hindus, among whom ‘a pure vegetarian diet is regarded as the first essential of sanctity’, were among ‘the first civilised communities’, possessing ‘a cultus, a literature, and a religious system which many authors deem to be of higher antiquity than those even of Egypt’.

  The vegetarian doctor thought that carnivorous tendencies produced many illnesses and disorders. Tuberculosis, gout and epilepsy were a product of eating too much meat. ‘In his highest development,’ she wrote, ‘man is not a hunter, but a gardener. The spirit of the Garden is incompatible with that of the Chase, and the inevitable tendency of moral, intellectual, and aesthetic progress is to eradicate in man the desire to kill and to torment’.5

  After Kingsford died in 1886, Maitland devoted himself to promoting her memory and furthering her ideas. In 1891 he formed an Esoteric Christian Union, which asked humans to renew themselves according to their inner urges rather than follow priests or creeds. The approach was ecumenical. The Perfect Way, which was subtitled ‘Or the Finding of Christ’, spoke appreciatively of Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi and Greek thought. Scorning officials of the Church and authorized (or self-appointed) interpreters, it insisted that ‘in the momentous drama of the soul’, there were only two people involved, ‘the individual himself and God’.6

  The Kingsford–Maitland view of Christianity appealed to Gandhi because it asked not for exaltation of a personal Saviour, but fidelity to one’s conscience. That the principal author was a convinced vegetarian, and that it had nice things to say about his ancestral faith, added to its appeal. The second book that impressed him, Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You (1893), likewise put salvation in the hands of the individual believer – rather than bishops or Churches – while emphasizing suffering and the simple life.

  From the 1880s, Tolstoy had increasingly turned his back on fiction, seeking to express himself via pamphlets and religious tracts. The change in emphasis mirrored a change in lifestyle, whereby a landlord turned to working with his hands, a warmonger converted to pacifism, and a once-devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church began leaning towards other religions.7 Gandhi was attracted to the moralist rather than the novelist. He does not seem to have read Anna Karenina or War and Peace, but he read – and reread – The Kingdom of God is Within You. It is a rambling, repetitive book, with one central, powerful message – that a good Christian follows his conscience rather than the laws imposed by tsars, bishops and generals. The book’s title comes from a remark made by Jesus, who, when asked how one would recognize the Kingdom of God when it arrived, said that this Kingdom was not something outward and visible, but lay within you.

  Tolstoy contrasted the teachings of Christ with the practices of the established Church. Christ abhorred violence, while the Church promoted war and capital punishment. Christ’s essence was to be found in the Sermon on the Mount, which exalted the poor, the meek, the righteous and the peace-makers, mandated that ‘thou shalt not kill’, and urged one to love one’s enemies and pray for them. The bishops, on the other hand, followed the Nicene Creed, which represented Christ as judgemental and made the Church infallible, insisting on absolute obedience from its members.

  Tolstoy had little time for the Church, or indeed for secular intellectuals who exalted violence. He quoted Émile Zola, ‘the most popular novelist in Europe’, who had written that ‘only an armed nation is powerful and great’, that ‘the warlike nations have always been strong and flourishing’, that ‘a general disarmament throughout the world [would] involve something like a moral decadence which would show itself in general debility and would hinder the progress of humanity’. Tolstoy, on the other hand, saluted the conscientious objector, who seeks ‘the preservation of his human dignity, the respect of good men and above all the certainty that he is doing God’s work’.

  Towards the end of the book, Tolstoy saw hope in the redemption of those who held power, in the conscience-stricken official who refused to collect taxes and who released prisoners, in the rich man who built hospitals, schools and homes for the poor. But true liberation would come only when ‘each man according to the strength that is in him [will] profess the truth he knows and practise [it] in his own life’.8

  When he first read The Kingd
om of God is Within You, recalled Gandhi years later, he was ‘overwhelmed’ by the ‘independent thinking, profound morality and the truthfulness of this book’.9 Tolstoy’s book reinforced his own heterodoxy, his stubborn insistence on forging a spiritual path for himself regardless of Churches and Creeds whether Hindu or Christian. Meanwhile, Gandhi was also rereading the Gita, which he saw less as a celebration of a ‘just war’ and more as a manifesto for ethical conduct, advocating indifference to love and hate, attachment and possession.10

  In November 1894, Mohandas Gandhi placed an advertisement in the Natal newspapers, stating that he was an agent for both the ‘Esoteric Christian Union’ and the ‘London Vegetarian Society’, whose literature he stocked and sold. The ad prompted a reader to comment:

  ‘Whence come we, what are we, whither go we?’ This is not part of an advertisement of Eno’s Fruit Salt; they are the three supreme questions which, we are told, humanity has asked itself, and which, Mr Gandhi assures us, find an answer complete and satisfactory in one or two little philosophical works in which he is interested.11

  Meeting orthodox Christians like the Askews and reading heterodox Christians such as Kingsford and Tolstoy invigorated Gandhi but also perplexed him. Sometime in the late summer of 1894 he wrote a series of letters to his friend and mentor Raychandbhai in India, outlining his confusions. He posed more than two dozen questions, asking, among other things, about the functions of the soul, the existence of God, the antiquity of the Vedas, the divinity of Christ and the treatment of animals.

  Raychandbhai answered with patience and at length. Spiritual equanimity was the essence of self-realization. Anger, conceit, deceit and greed were its adversaries. God was not a physical being, he ‘had no abode outside the self’. God was emphatically ‘not the creator of the universe. All the elements of nature such as atom, space, etc., are eternal and uncreated. They cannot be created from substances other than themselves.’ Raychandbhai also believed that ‘we may make thousands of combinations and permutations of material objects, but it is impossible to create consciousness.’

  The Jain scholar refused to accept the claim of Hindu dogmatists that all religions originated from the Vedas. True, these were very old, older than Buddhist or Jain texts. However, ‘there is no logic in saying that whatever is antique is perfect and whatever is new is imperfect and true.’ Like the Vedas, the Bible could not be said to contain a perfect or singular truth. ‘Allegorically, of course, Jesus can be taken to be a son of God, but rationally such a belief is impossible.’

  A question Gandhi asked, emanating from his experiences in Natal, was: ‘Will there ever develop an equitable order out of the inequities of today?’ The Jain’s answer upheld a reformist anti-Utopianism. It was ‘most desirable that we should try to adopt equity and give up immoral and unjust ways of life’. At the same time, it was ‘inconceivable that all living beings will give up their inequities one day and equity will prevail everywhere’.

  Raychandbhai said the ‘best thing’ would have been for the two of them to ‘meet together and have a personal talk about these questions’. Since – with one in India and the other in South Africa – they could not meet, he instructed Gandhi to cultivate ‘a detached mind and if you have any doubts please [write again] to me. It is the detached mind which gives strength for abstinence and control and ultimately leads the soul to Nirvana’.12

  Gandhi’s theological explorations continued. In April 1895, he visited a Trappist monastery in the Natal highlands, writing about his trip for The Vegetarian. The monks ate no fish, flesh or fowl, although an exception was made for the sisters in their midst, who were allowed meat four days a week because they were ‘more delicate than the brothers’. The monastery hummed with artisanal activity, its inmates making shoes, tables and kitchen utensils. What really impressed the Indian visitor was the lack of racial feeling. Whereas elsewhere in Natal, there was ‘a very strong prejudice against the Indian population’, the Trappists ‘believe in no colour distinctions. The Natives are accorded the same treatment as the whites…. They get the same food as the brothers, and are dressed as well as they themselves are.’ The contrast with other white Christians was stark. ‘It proves conclusively,’ wrote Gandhi, ‘that a religion appears divine or devilish, according as its professors choose to make it appear.’13

  In June 1895, the non-monastic Christians of Natal brought in a new bill aimed at Gandhi’s compatriots. This proposed that labourers who stayed on after the expiry of their contract pay an annual tax of £3, then a substantial sum. The supporters of the tax hoped it would force Indians to re-indenture, or else go back to India.

  Over the next few weeks, three memorials were drafted and dispatched by Gandhi. One was to the Natal Legislative Council; a second to the Secretary of State for the Colonies; the third to the Viceroy of India. The Natalians were asked why it was necessary ‘to make a man pay heavily for being allowed to remain free in the Colony after he has already lived under bondage for 10 years’. The Secretary of State was reminded that it was ‘against the spirit of the British Constitution to countenance measures that tend to keep men under perpetual bondage’. The Viceroy was told that the ‘special, obnoxious poll-tax’ was designed to ensure that the Indian in Natal

  must for ever remain without freedom, without any prospect of ever bettering his condition, without ever even thinking of changing his hut, his meagre allowance and his ragged clothes, for a better house, enjoyable food and respectable clothing. He must not even think of educating his children according to his own taste or comforting his wife with any pleasure or recreation.14

  A coalition known as the ‘Unionists’ was in power in the United Kingdom, which brought together the Conservatives with Liberals who had left their party over the question of Home Rule for Ireland. In the elections of 1895, Dadabhai Naoroji had failed to win re-election, but an Indian standing as a Unionist, Mancherjee Bhownaggree, was successful in his bid to become an MP. The Birmingham businessman and former Liberal, Joseph Chamberlain, was now Secretary of State for the Colonies. In September 1895, Chamberlain wrote to the Natal Government about the Franchise Bill still awaiting approval. The bill, he said, did not distinguish between the ‘most ignorant and the most enlightened of the Natives of India’. The ‘position and attainments’ of the latter class, he thought, ‘fully qualify them for all the duties and privileges of citizenship’. The Natalians were surely ‘aware that in two cases within the last few years the electors of important constituencies in this country have considered Indian gentlemen worthy not merely to exercise the franchise, but to represent them in the House of Commons’.

  Chamberlain accepted that the ‘destinies of the Colony of Natal shall continue to be shaped by the Anglo-Saxon race, and that the possibility of any preponderant influx of Asiatic voters should be avoided’. Still, like his predecessor, Lord Ripon, he worried about overtly racist legislation. Like Ripon, he sat on the government benches with an Indian colleague – yet in a colony for which he was responsible, Indians were being denied the vote altogether. A bill which ‘involves in a common disability all natives of India without any exception,’ he argued, and which ‘provides no machinery by which an Indian can free himself from this disability, whatever his intelligence, his education, or his stake in the country … would be an affront upon the people of India such as no British Government could be a party to’.

  In Britain it was assumed that, with guidance and patronage, a select group of Indians could come to keep the company of white men. The rise of Naoroji and Bhownaggree was proof of the success of this kind of liberal paternalism. Such mobility was harder to imagine or achieve in the Colonies. Especially in South Africa, where it was assumed by the ruling race that all Coloured people would for all time be fixed in a position of cultural and political inferiority.

  Seeking a middle way between the hardliners in the colony and the liberals in London, the Governor of Natal had a clause introduced stating that only those who had representative instituti
ons in their own country would be eligible for the franchise. This ruled out Indians, while enfranchising Englishmen and other Europeans from countries with their own parliaments. Thus was a racial bill formally saved from ‘the naked disenfranchisement’ from which it had previously been marked. The amended draft was sent to Chamberlain in November 1895, and he indicated that if legislation based on this principle was passed by the Natal Legislature, he would advise Her Majesty to assent to it.15

  While seeking spiritual truths in private, and pursuing racial parity in public, Gandhi had not forgotten his main professional duty, which was to establish a legal practice. Here his clients were all Indians. The judges he appeared before and the lawyers he argued against were all Europeans. Socially or professionally, Gandhi had no dealings with the Africans who constituted the vast majority of the population of Natal.

  Gandhi continued to represent his first patron, Dada Abdulla, on whose behalf he sued a ship’s captain who, without his employer’s knowledge, had transferred passengers from second to first class and pocketed the difference.16 In another case, he represented ‘two well-dressed respectable-looking young Indians, one a clerk and the other a teacher’, charged with ‘vagrancy’ for being out at night without passes. ‘Mr Gandhi contended that the men had a perfect right to be out, because they gave a good account of themselves. They were thoroughly respectable lads.’ The judge agreed, and dismissed the case against them.17

  Gandhi defended the rich, the middle-class and the working poor. An indentured labourer was tried for attacking a policeman; the Indian lawyer said his client had been provoked and humiliated. A newspaper now accused Gandhi of violating the codes of the Inns of Court – ‘the idea of his having anything to do with defying justice,’ it wrote, ‘even in the most remote fashion, is simply intolerable.’ The ‘sooner this gentleman gets the money he wants from the Indian community,’ said the paper, ‘and clears for his native country, Guam or Britain, the better it will be for himself and the Colony.’18