Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  The accusations were unfair. Making money was scarcely Gandhi’s sole aim. Consider the case of Balasundaram, an indentured worker beaten up by his master. He spent several days in hospital recovering from his injuries, and then went to Gandhi seeking redress. The local magistrate had issued a summons against the employer. Gandhi, characteristically seeking a compromise, did not press the charges, but arranged for Balasundaram to be transferred to a less brutal employer.19

  Through 1895 and 1896, Gandhi fought cases on behalf of merchants seeking to recover dues, families seeking a share of a dead ancestor’s property, individuals harassed by constables or by plantation owners. One case was particularly resonant: he defended a Muslim who refused to remove his cap when ordered to do so in court by the magistrate. As a barrister Gandhi was obliged to go bare-headed, but he would still uphold the right of an ordinary citizen to dress according to the articles of his faith.20

  On another occasion, Gandhi was called in by a European colleague to advise on the disposal of the property of a Muslim merchant who had died intestate. The judge hearing the case, Walter Wragg, had previously opposed Gandhi’s application to the Natal Bar – ostensibly because Gandhi had produced a self-attested copy rather than an original certificate from the Inner Temple, but more likely because he could not abide the idea of a coloured lawyer. Justice Wragg now insisted that Gandhi was ‘as great a stranger to Mohammedan law as a Frenchman … Mr Ghandi [sic] is a Hindu and knows his own faith, of course, but he knows nothing of Mohammedan law’. Gandhi answered, spiritedly, that ‘were I a Mohammedan, I should be very sorry to be judged by a Mohammedan whose sole qualification is that he is born a Mohammedan. It is a revelation that … a non-Mohammedan never dare give an opinion on a point of Mohammedan law’.21

  A reporter who often covered Gandhi’s court appearances remarked that while he did his work well, his

  manner was not aggressive but pleading. He was no orator. When addressing the court he was not eloquent, but rather otherwise; and in his submissions he did not actually stammer, but prefaced his speeches and comments by repeated sibilants, for instance: ‘Ess-ess-ess your worship, ess-ess-ess this poor woman was attending an invalid sister and was on her way home after the curfew bell had gone when she was arrested. I ask ess-ess-ess that she should not be sent to gaol, but cautioned ess-ess-ess.’22

  His speaking deficiencies notwithstanding, Gandhi was soon a prominent member of the Natal Bar. That he had a captive clientele helped: he was the lawyer of all the Indians of Natal, regardless of caste, class, religion or profession. The lawyer who failed in Bombay and Rajkot had spectacularly succeeded in Durban. Gandhi welcomed the financial security, but it appears that he welcomed the social acclaim even more. He was happy to be the lawyer of the Indians, and their spokesman and representative, too.

  Durban, Gandhi’s fourth port city, was far newer than Porbandar or London or Bombay. In the 1850s it had just two two-storey buildings. As the port grew and the sugar plantations in the hinterland prospered, the city began to expand. A series of impressive stone buildings were constructed between the 1860s and 1880s, among them a court house, a town hall and a Royal Theatre, as well as banks, hotels, churches, and a whites-only club. Transport within the city was by horse-drawn trams and hand-pulled rickshaws.23

  The whites in Durban were, in proportionate terms, more numerous than in Bombay, yet more insecure in their position. Europeans in India knew they were a tiny minority in a well-populated land. They had come to rule but not to settle. On the other hand, like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Natal was a ‘neo-Europe’, whose climate, ecology and sparse population allowed the whites to recreate the conditions of life in the mother country. Sensing that this was a country they could make their own, the British set about ensuring their permanent ascendancy.24

  As Gandhi was making his career in Durban, the Governor of Natal addressed a London audience on the attractions of life in the new colony. Natal had fine scenery and a pleasant climate (‘there is no such thing as malaria’, noted the Governor), abundant natural resources, and a thriving plantation industry. As for Durban itself,

  its streets are straight, hard, smooth and wide; it possesses a good series of tramways; it is lighted throughout with electric light; it has an ample water supply … It possesses a beautiful and well-kept little park; a Town Hall which would be a credit to a town of six times the size and in that Town Hall an organ which costs £3,000. (Cheers.) It has an agricultural showground, cricket and athletic ground, race-course, golf-links, public baths, museum, public library, theatre, an excellent club, and so forth. And an esplanade is being constructed, and is now nearing completion, at a cost, I believe, of about £80,000, along the sea front in the inner harbour, which will add much to the attractiveness of the town.25

  By this account, Natal was not so much a neo-Europe as a Little England and – happily – without the fog, the smog and the snow. The facilities it provided were, unlike those in England, open to all classes of whites. The settlers in Natal came overwhelmingly from other than aristocratic backgrounds. As missionaries, soldiers, lawyers, mine owners, farmers, sailors and teachers, they made their name in the colony, acquiring a prosperity and social status beyond their reach had they stayed at home.26

  The Africans in Natal were uneducated and dispersed through the countryside. There was, however, an incipient threat to the political and economic dominance of the Europeans. This came from the Indians, and more particularly the ‘passenger’ Indians. Indeed, had it not been for the Indian merchants – their number, their wealth and their visibility – Durban could have passed for a European city on an African coastline. Unlike plantation labourers, Indian traders tended to be based in the towns, where they conducted their business and, increasingly, bought land and built houses. In 1870 there were 665 Indians in Durban, who between them ran two shops and owned property worth £500. By the end of the century, there were 15,000 Indians in Durban, who ran more than 400 shops and owned property worth more than £600,000. The British were alleged to be a nation of shopkeepers, but in this place at this time they were being given a run for their money.27

  The demographic challenge was as real as the economic one: whereas in 1870 there were five Europeans to every Indian living in Durban, by 1890 the ratio was closer to two to one. The pattern was similar in other towns of Natal, where, again, Europeans constituted about 40 per cent of the population and the Indians a threatening 20 per cent. As Robert Huttenback has written, this ‘increasing urban concentration of Indians particularly frightened and offended many European settlers to whom it connoted both domestic propinquity and increased commercial competition’.28

  To social proximity and economic rivalry was now added a third challenge – political competition. In 1891, following the decision to grant ‘responsible government’, the Governor of Natal had espied a very distant threat from the unenfranchised Africans. ‘The danger in the future,’ he wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, ‘would arise from the awakening of the Native mind – guided as it only too probably might be by unscrupulous political agitators – to the fact that its interests are not directly represented in the Colony: but this, I think, is a contingency that may fairly be left to be grappled with when it arises’.29 The Governor could scarcely have anticipated that it would be Indian minds that would be awakened first, their aspirations stoked and articulated by a political ‘agitator’ who – at the time this prediction was made – was a shy and diet-obsessed law student in London.

  This student was now the Secretary of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC). In August 1895, the NIC celebrated its first anniversary. Presenting a report on the first year of the organization, Gandhi noted its spread to other towns: apart from Durban, branches had been opened in Pietermaritzburg, Verulam, Newcastle and Charlestown. Subscriptions of £500 had been collected; Gandhi thought at least £2,000 were needed to ‘put the Congress on a sure footing’. Cash was supplemented by gifts in kind, with ‘Parsee Rustomjee sta
nd[ing] foremost in this respect’. Rustomjee was a spice and dry goods trader in Durban, who had supplied the Congress with lamps, paper, pens, a clock, and labour to clean the hall where it met. Other Gujaratis were also active in donations; however, as the Secretary noted, ‘the Tamil members have not shown much zeal in the Congress work’.30

  The energetic Rustomjee was born in Bombay in 1861. He came to Natal in his early twenties, and at first worked in an Indian store in Verulam. He then set up his own business, which expanded rapidly – by 1893 (when Gandhi arrived) he was one of Durban’s largest merchants. His full name was Jivanji Gorcoodoo Rustomjee. Although a Zoroastrian by faith, he worshipped often at the shrine in Durban of Datta Peer, a Tamil Muslim who had arrived in the colony as an indentured labourer before becoming a Sufi mystic. A story current in Indian circles claimed that Parsee Rustomjee was once charged with the import of saffron, then a white monopoly. He prayed at the shrine of Datta Peer, whereupon the saffron in his warehouse miraculously turned to cardamom, confounding the customs inspectors.31

  After Mohandas Gandhi established himself in Durban, Parsee Rustomjee became a devotee of the Hindu lawyer, and hence a steadfast supporter of the Natal Indian Congress. Congress meetings were often held in his shop in Field Street, the audience standing or sitting amidst the sacks of grain and bottles of pickle. On successive Sundays in September 1895, Gandhi – then just short of his twenty-sixth birthday – spoke to a mixed audience of Hindus and Muslims, outlining his plans for their future. A government spy, taking notes, reported Gandhi as saying:

  I may go [to India] for a while, in five or six months, but then there will be four or five advocates like me, who will come here to watch over your interests … and they will see that Indians are treated on the same footing as Europeans. If you unite and we work together we shall be very strong … I am sorry that the Indians in Johannesburg have not someone now with them as I am with you, but that will come before long.32

  Seeking to widen the Congress’s circle of patrons, Gandhi toured Natal in the company of other NIC workers. The police asked a plantation owner to monitor his movements. We know thus that in the first week of November, Gandhi and company crossed the Umgeni River, visited a couple of estates, and stopped at Verulam for the night. Here the collections were good – in the range of £50 – but the next day they met stiff resistance, when the Indians in the village of Victoria refused – perhaps out of fear of their white masters – to part with any money. Gandhi took out his turban and placed it at their feet. He and his colleagues refused to eat the dinner brought for them. The protests worked: one by one, the Indians reached into their pockets.

  Gandhi’s final stop was the Tongat plantation, where he addressed the indentured labourers. The verdict of the planter/police informant on the lawyer was less than complimentary. Gandhi ‘will cause some trouble I have no doubt,’ he wrote: ‘But he is not the man to lead a big movement. He has a weak face. He will certainly tamper with any funds he has the handling of. Such at any rate is my impression of the man – judging him by his face.’33

  With a weak face, hesitant in court, polite in print and courteous in conversation, Mohandas Gandhi yet represented the first challenge to European domination in Natal. By the 1890s, Africans in the Cape had discovered modern forms of political expression. A Native Educational Association was formed in 1879, its members educated by missionaries and proficient in English. A South African Native Association and the Transkei Mutual Improvement Society were started soon afterwards. There were influential African reformers in the Cape, such as the teacher J. T. Jabavu, who edited a newspaper detailing acts of discrimination while urging closer bonds between blacks and whites.

  The Cape also had some precociously liberal whites, who allowed people of colour on to the electoral rolls, so long as they passed a property and literacy test. In Natal, however, the whites were more reactionary, and the Africans less educated. When the Natal Indian Congress was formed, there was no comparable Native Association in the colony. In 1894 and 1895, there was no African Gandhi in Natal, no black lawyer who appeared in court or wrote regularly for the newspapers.34

  Despite their mildness and their moderation, Gandhi and his colleagues thus represented something quite radical in Natal’s modern history. The reaction they provoked is proof of this. A columnist in the Natal Mercury, signing himself as ‘H’, published periodic attacks on Gandhi and his work. In October 1895 he said Gandhi was ‘a paid agitator’ for the Indian merchants. ‘H’ called upon the Europeans to stand up and ‘capsize the little apple cart Messrs. Gandhi and Co. are wheeling along’. The attack prompted a rejoinder from Joseph Royeppen, a young clerk in Gandhi’s office. ‘Not a penny,’ said Royeppen, was ‘given Mr Gandhi in return for his valuable services to the [Natal Indian] Congress’. ‘H’ was unabashed. He had been told that ‘a list was made out and signed by certain Indian merchants and business men, whereby Mr Gandhi was guaranteed £300 (payable in advance) to remain there’. Noting that Royeppen was less than twenty years of age, the columnist said he ‘must decline, in future, to reply to all the Indian boys Mr Gandhi may select to write, the fraternity being too large, and my time too limited.’35

  In October and November 1895, the white colonists in Natal held many meetings in support of the Government’s Franchise Bill. The feeling against the Indians was particularly intense in the plantation and mining districts. At a meeting in Stanger, one speaker said that

  the Indians were of a low caste, and not fit for the vote … They did not benefit the country, they did not lay their money out here, but they got as much out of the country as possible, and then left it. He would make a difference between black and white. He would not allow the vote to even such a man as Mr Gandhi.36

  Some Natalians looked enviously across to the Boer-dominated Transvaal, which had ‘set its foot down from the first, and made the position of the Indian that ventured within its territories anything but an enviable one’. There, apart from being denied the franchise, Indians were also forbidden to own property and trade in their own names. In the Transvaal, the ‘steady and uncompromising firmness’ of the Boers had ‘overcome the obstinate fussiness of British negrophilists’. On the other hand, the ‘shilly-shally half-hearted action’ of the Natal colonists had generated ‘strength for the sentimental British faddist, and for the unscrupulous Indian agitator’.37

  Angry whites now called for the ‘complete disenfranchisement of the whole of our Indian population’. If this was not done, they warned, and if the ‘monstrous and unjust policy of the Home Government’ was forced upon them, then

  the early part of 1900 would probably, nay undoubtedly, see us with a Ministry composed somewhat after this fashion: –

  Prime Minister – Ali Bengharee

  Colonial Secretary – Dost Mahomed

  Attorney-General – Said Mahomed

  Treasurer – Ramasamy.

  In our Supreme and other courts we would have Chief Justice Ghandi [sic] and the other long and white robed gentry he is about to bring from India, and so on, in all public departments … What an attractive, pleasing picture! What an impetus to our European prestige and patriotism! What a reward for our struggles and ambitions! Why, a kafir Ministry would be infinitely more preferable than an Indian. The native is a gentleman compared to him. He is manly, brave, and straightforward, while the Indian is otherwise.38

  By the end of 1895, Mohandas Gandhi had been resident in Durban for more than a year. He was living in a house of his own, in the central locality of Beach Grove. The house was quite spacious, extending over two storeys, with a verandah and also a little garden. The furniture in the living room was sparse: a sofa and a few chairs, and a bookcase with pamphlets on vegetarianism mixed with the Koran, the Bible, Hindu texts, and the works of Tolstoy.

  Living with Gandhi in his house were a Gujarati-speaking cook – whose name has not come down to us – and Vincent Lawrence, a Tamil from Madras who served as his clerk. Every morning, Gandhi and Law
rence walked from Beach Grove to the lawyer’s office, which was at the corner of West and Field Streets. The streets they passed through had shops owned by both Indians and Europeans – the former hawking fruits, vegetables and groceries; the latter selling less essential commodities such as medicines and chocolates. Below Gandhi’s chambers was a shop selling cigars, owned by a former deputy mayor of Durban.39

  For a while, Gandhi’s home was also shared by his old schoolfriend Sheikh Mehtab, a recent migrant from Rajkot to Durban. Gandhi’s trust in Mehtab was, as before, misplaced; once, when he came home for lunch, he found his friend in bed with a prostitute. Angry words ensued; when Gandhi threatened to call the police, Mehtab quietly left the premises.40

  The clerk and cook, on the other hand, gave no trouble. Vincent Lawrence took dictation, typed letters and, when required, translated materials into Tamil (the mother tongue of many Indian labourers in Natal). As for the cook, by preparing his meals and generally keeping the house in order, he left his employer time to read and write.

  In the last weeks of 1895, Gandhi published a long pamphlet on ‘The Indian Franchise’, framed as ‘an appeal to every Briton in South Africa’. Extending over fifty printed pages, it provided a comprehensive overview of the Indian question in Natal. Gandhi argued that the ‘Indian’s fitness for an equality with the civilized races’ was demonstrated by the fact that, in British India, they had served as senior civil servants, High Court judges and vice-chancellors of universities. Indian soldiers had shed their blood for the defence of the realm. His countrymen were loyal and law-abiding; it was unfair to relegate them to second-class status in any part of the British Empire.