Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  ‘What is your object in coming back?’, the reporter asked. Gandhi replied,

  I do not return here with the intention of making money, but of acting as a humble interpreter between the two communities [of Europeans and Indians]. There is a great misunderstanding between the two communities, and I shall endeavour to fulfill the office of interpreter so long as both the communities do not object to my presence.’43

  Durban has a superb natural harbour, a stretch of sheltered water nestling between a strip of land known as the ‘Point’ and a wooded hill known as the ‘Bluff’. There was a bar of moving sand at the harbour’s entrance; this was an impediment to big ships, but in other ways contributed to the safety of the harbour. When the port was first established, the depth of water over the sandbar was only four feet at low tide. Over the decades, dredging had increased the depth, but in 1897 it was still impossible for ocean liners to enter with ease. So they dropped anchor out at sea, transferring their passengers and cargo on to smaller vessels that then negotiated the bar to enter the harbour within.44

  On 12 January 1897, the authorities finally allowed the ships from India to send their passengers ashore. The captains of the Naderi and Courland were asked to commence landing operations the next morning. The decision was prompted by appeals by the Viceroy in India and the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London, who warned that the agitation in Natal had put a question mark on imperial harmony in the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria’s reign.45

  Word of the compromise – or capitulation – reached the white protesters in Durban. On the morning of the 13th, they began streaming down from the town to the Point, marching in groups defined by trade – the railwaymen together, then the blacksmiths, the carpenters, the mechanics, the shop assistants, the tailors, the bricklayers, and finally a number of unaffiliated whites referred to in the newspaper reports as the ‘general public’. More than 5,000 Europeans had responded to the call. There was also a ‘native section’ of about 500 Africans; a dwarf was appointed to lead them, who (to the whites’ delight) ‘marched up and down in front of their ranks officering them, while they went through a number of exercises with their sticks, and danced and whooped.’46

  Hearing of the demonstration, the Attorney-General of Natal, Harry Escombe, rushed down to the Point. Escombe was a little man; to make himself heard, he climbed on top of a heap of logs and sought to pacify an increasingly angry crowd. The passengers on the two ships, he said, were innocent men (and women and children) who did not know of the strong feelings in Natal. He urged the crowd to be ‘quiet, manly and resolute’, to abjure ‘haste and hysterics’, and to have trust in their Government. Natal was and would remain a white colony. An early session of Parliament would be convened, to pass legislation keeping out Asiatics. Escombe’s pleas were answered with shouts of ‘Send the Indians back!’ and ‘Bring Gandhi ashore, let him come here for all the tar and feathers!’

  Escombe again urged the crowd to disperse peacefully. This was the sixtieth year of Queen Victoria’s reign and ‘in the autumn of her life it should never be said that anything which took place in Natal caused the least sorrow or sadness in the heart of that great Sovereign.’ The appeal to Imperial honour had some effect, for the crowd began to quieten down, and slowly, to melt away.47

  Through the day, boats carrying passengers from the Naderi and Courland came over the sandbar into the harbour. As a gesture of appeasement, the owners had run the Union Jack up at the head of the ships. The passengers quietly disembarked and made their way into the Indian areas of the city. Kasturba and the children were now safely ashore, but Gandhi was still on the Naderi, where he had been joined by his friend, the Durban solicitor F. A. Laughton. The Attorney-General had sent word that it might be better for Gandhi to come ashore after dusk, but Laughton did not like the idea of his ‘entering the city like a thief in the night’. In any case, things appeared to have quietened down on the Point; the whites were said to have dispersed, and it seemed safe for them to land.48

  The boat carrying Gandhi and Laughton came ashore shortly before five in the afternoon. As it crossed the sandbar, the passengers would have seen, on the right, the city of Durban; and on the left, the long, low, wooded hill known as the Bluff. Behind them lay the mighty ocean. This was a striking landscape, which at other times might have been savoured for pleasure. But now, with the Bluff on one side and a hostile city on the other, and the ocean and his homeland receding further into the distance, Gandhi may well have had the feeling of being hemmed in.

  As their boat was landing, some white boys loitering about recognized the Indian barrister. They sent word to the remnants of the retreating crowd, who hurried back to the Point. Laughton and Gandhi hailed a rickshaw and were about to step into it, when the boys laid hold of the wheels. The barristers tried to get into another rickshaw, but, sensing the mood, the driver was unwilling to take them. Gandhi and Laughton decided to walk on with their luggage. From the Victoria Embankment they walked northwards on Stanger Street, with a crowd of ever greater numbers following them, hissing and jeering. Then they took a turn towards West Street. When they neared the Ship’s Hotel – as its name suggests, a place favoured by seamen – Gandhi and Laughton were surrounded, and the former set upon. The Indian became ‘the object of kicks and cuffs, while mud and stale fish were thrown at him. One person also produced a riding-whip, and gave him a stroke, while another plucked away at his peculiar hat.’

  Gandhi was beaten, but not bowed. Blood was flowing down his neck, but ‘eye-witnesses state that he bore himself stolidly and pluckily through the trying ordeal.’ He was rescued from the mob by a white lady, who used her parasol to keep away the attackers. She was the wife of the long-serving Superintendent of Police, R. C. Alexander. Alerted by some Indians, a posse of constables arrived to relieve Gandhi – and Mrs Alexander. Superintendent Alexander himself followed soon after.

  The policemen safely conveyed Gandhi to Parsee Rustomjee’s store in Field Street, locking the doors from the inside as they entered. Outside, the crowd continued to bay for (more of) Gandhi’s blood. Superintendent Alexander, now joined by the deputy mayor, urged them to disperse. But more and more whites began to gather around the store; they constituted ‘a compact mass of anti-Gandhites’.

  According to a reporter on the spot, the crowd ‘told the Superintendent what a fine fellow he was, and also exactly their modus operandi of dealing with Gandhi. They had a barrel of treacle quite close, and if the Superintendent would only confide Gandhi to their care, they would undertake that he should be handed back safe and sound, if treacled and sticky.’ Then they began to sing a song beginning with the words, ‘We’ll hang old Gandhi on a sour apple tree.’

  Alexander, thinking on his feet, devised a plan to spirit Gandhi to safety. He went into the store and made Gandhi exchange his clothes for the uniform of a government peon. Gandhi’s face was blackened and covered with a muffler. Then, escorted by two detectives, Gandhi took a side door out of the house, which led into Parsee Rustomjee’s godown, from which the trio escaped into the street and hopped into a carriage that conveyed them to the police station.

  A little later, Alexander himself emerged, to tell the crowd that Gandhi was not inside. He invited a deputation to go in and check. Three members of the mob went into Rustomjee’s store, and ‘reappeared with the intelligence that wherever Gandhi was he could not be found in that building.’

  By now it was late evening. It had begun to rain. As the shower intensified, ‘the ardent desire of the crowd to see Mr Gandhi began to wane, and in its place a desire arose to find a more comfortable place to discuss the situation than in the middle of a somewhat sloppy road in front of an Indian store in the rain.’ So the crowd finally dispersed. Where they went the reports do not tell us. It was probably a place which served refreshments other than tea.49

  On 15 January, the Natal Mercury carried an editorial entitled ‘After the Demonstration’. This accepted that the attack on Gandhi was ‘an un
dignified and unmanly act’. It then proceeded to lay the blame on the victim:

  Mr Gandhi has himself been very largely at fault. He has raised the passions of the people, and knowing this he ought to have been better advised than to attempt to come through the very centre of the town immediately in the rear of a demonstration he had been largely instrumental in creating.50

  This editorial brought forth a long defence of Gandhi and his motives by F. A. Laughton. When the Naderi and the Courland lay marooned at sea, noted the barrister, the white press and public of Natal had accused Gandhi of many horrible things. They claimed that ‘he had dragged our reputations through the gutters of India, and had painted them as black and filthy as his own face’. They claimed ‘he was engaging himself on board the quarantined ships in getting briefs from passengers against the Government’. It was alleged that he was in a funk, too afraid to come ashore; according to one rumour, he was ‘sitting on the deck of the Courland in a most dejected mood’; according to another, ‘he was stowed away in the lowest hold.’

  In the time he had known Gandhi, Laughton had ‘formed a very high opinion of him’. He found Gandhi to be ‘both in legal matters and on the Asiatic question, a fair and honourable opponent’. He was well qualified to ‘hold the position of leader in a great political question in which his countrymen take as much interest as we do, and who are as much entitled to ventilate their political views as we are’. Now, when he had been repeatedly represented as a ‘cowardly calumniator’, Gandhi decided to come ashore, so as to ‘vindicate himself before the public’, so that ‘he should not give his enemies an opportunity of saying that he was “funking it”.’ Instead of waiting till nightfall, Gandhi chose to ‘face the music like a man and like a political leader, and – give me leave to say – right nobly did he do it’. As a fellow barrister, Laughton decided to accompany the Indian, and ‘to testify by doing so that Mr Gandhi was a honourable member of a honourable profession’. Laughton acted as he did ‘in protest against the way in which he [Gandhi] had been treated, and in the hope that my presence might save him from insult’.

  Laughton ended his remarkable letter by asking his city and race to tender an apology. ‘Durban has grossly insulted this man,’ he insisted:

  I say Durban, because Durban raised the storm and is answerable for the result. We are all humiliated at the treatment [of Gandhi]. Our traditions concerning fair play appear to be in the dust. Let us act, like gentlemen, and, however much against the grain it may be, express regret handsomely and generously.’51

  Laughton was among the few Europeans in Durban whose sympathies lay with Gandhi rather than with the mob that sought to lynch him. Others included the Superintendent of Police, R. C. Alexander, and his wife, Jane. A week after the couple had saved his skin, Gandhi sent them a note of thanks, with a present. The letter is not available, nor do we know what Gandhi’s gift was. What survives are the couple’s replies. Mrs Alexander said that her preventing further injury with her parasol ‘in no way atone[s] for the gross injustice done you by my countrymen’. She would have liked to return the gift, but felt that ‘would be but adding another insult, to the many you have had to endure since your return’.

  As for the police chief, he thought that he had not done enough to protect Gandhi. ‘I am very sorry indeed,’ he wrote, ‘that I had not sufficient force at my back, to do that duty without inflicting upon you and yours, further degradation, by compelling you to escape the mob, in the disguise of one so very far beneath you.’ He trusted that Gandhi, ‘like our own Prophet, when placed under a similar trial, will forgive your accusers, for they know not what they did’.52

  Gandhi was deeply touched by the support of Laughton and the Alexanders. Meanwhile, another European resident of Durban, whom we know only by his initials (‘D. B.’), wrote sympathetically of Gandhi’s predicament in an essay for the radical New York weekly, The Nation. This used the mob rage in Durban to probe the question – who were more reactionary in racial matters, the British or the Americans?

  In the middle of the nineteenth century, said ‘D. B.’, the British were seen as progressive imperialists, who had abolished slavery and promoted free trade. Their empire was ‘free to every nationality, and within its confines was known no distinction, Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free’. But soon things changed. ‘Under the stress of the Indian mutiny [of 1857] and the Jamaican rebellion [of 1865], we developed a brutality as great as was ever shown by a civilized people, and which men of the highest culture tried to justify’. Colony after colony adopted protectionist policies, suppressing native peoples and keeping out Coloured immigrants, erecting racial barriers as sharp as in the American South.

  British hypocrisy was manifest most strongly in South Africa, where the treatment of Indians was ‘flagrantly in contravention of the theory of an empire guaranteeing equal rights and immunities to all subjects’. ‘D. B.’ summarized the pamphlets written by ‘M. K. Gandhi, a Hindu barrister’, which had ‘strikingly forced upon public attention’ the disabilities of Indian subjects of the Empire. Gandhi was rewarded with mob fury and an attempt on his life. The attack and its wider implications were outlined by ‘D. B.’ in two resonant paragraphs:

  In the treatment meted out to [Gandhi] on his return to Natal, at the hands of the people whose conduct towards his countrymen he had exposed, we are reminded of early abolition days in the United States. When his steamer was signaled a crowd of indignant whites collected, who mobbed him, upon his landing, with stones and beating. At length, rescued and taken to a friend’s house, stones and missiles were thrown against it, while several stump speeches were made.

  Neither great branch of the English-speaking family can, in truth, plume itself upon its peculiar innate virtues or immunity from failings. At the same time, the Constitution of the United States, with equal laws (broken or outraged, it is true, by sectional prejudices) would appear likely more rapidly to tend towards equal liberty and equal rights than the Constitution of the British Empire, under which imperial prejudices and differences of rights and immunities are sanctioned by unequal laws.

  This was almost certainly the first mention of Gandhi in the American press, presaging the extensive coverage of his activities as an iconic nationalist leader in the 1920s and 1930s. Gandhi was accustomed to having his name smeared and muddied in the newspapers of Natal. The occasional positive references in the Indian press provided some consolation. Had he seen this piece in The Nation he would surely have been more cheered still.53

  F. A. Laughton, the Alexanders and ‘D. B.’ were voices at once lonely and brave. More characteristic of the white mood was a comment in the Times of Natal, which thought Gandhi ‘showed immense folly in landing during daylight while the town was still boiling with excitement’. The newspaper was of the view that the city of Durban, instead of being chastised or condemned, was rather ‘to be congratulated. Her citizens have most effectively demonstrated that they are averse to the big influx of Indians … Durban, by her agitation against the invasion, has drawn special attention to the subject, and for doing so deserves the thanks of all colonists.’54

  On 17 February 1897, four weeks after Gandhi finally landed in Durban, the butcher Harry Sparks (the prime instigator of the mob that attacked the lawyer) convened a fresh meeting of hostile Europeans in the Town Hall. This pressed for a bill prohibiting the immigration of Indians not under indenture. Sparks said ‘he was perfectly willing to lay down his life for his home’. Another speaker demanded the Imperial Government not treat Natal as ‘a dumping ground for the refuse of India’. A third speaker said

  a great deal has been made of Mr Gandhi in the matter. They would find that Gandhi was supported by only 50 or 60 people in Durban, and there had been no meeting of more than 150 Asiatics in Durban. For Mr Gandhi and his committee to say they represented the 50,000 Indians in the Colony was utter bosh.55

  Three and a half years before the attack on him at the Point in Dur
ban, Mohandas Gandhi had been thrown out of a first-class carriage at Pietermaritzburg Railway Station. The latter episode is well known – perhaps too well known. If there is one thing anyone anywhere knows about Gandhi in South Africa, it is this incident. One book and one film largely account for this. In 1951, Louis Fischer published The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, which drew on the author’s acquaintance with his subject in the last decade of his life. This personal intimacy and the evocative prose make for a compelling narrative, and the book has always been in print since its first publication.

  Fischer termed Gandhi’s ejection from the first-class carriage the most ‘creative’ experience in his life; ‘that bitter night in Maritzburg,’ he claimed, ‘the germ of social protest was born in Gandhi.’ Gandhi’s account, in his own autobiography, was embellished in one intensely charged paragraph, where, imaginatively putting himself in the shoes of the victim, Fischer writes:

  Should he return to India? This episode reflected a much larger situation. Should he address himself to it or merely seek redress of his personal grievance, finish the case, and go home to India? He had encountered the dread disease of colour prejudice. To flee, leaving his countrymen in their predicament, would be cowardice. The frail lawyer began to see himself in the role of a David assailing the Goliath of racial discrimination.56