Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  Racial politics in the Transvaal were more complicated than in Natal. The Boers had come here to carve a space separate and independent from the British. For many decades their Utopia lay safe, until the discovery of gold near Johannesburg in 1886 prompted a massive and mad rush of immigrants. By the time Gandhi first visited the city in 1893, English-speaking migrants outnumbered the Afrikaans-speaking Boers by two to one. The workers in the mines were mostly African, but the managers, supervisors and owners were largely English. And as Johannesburg boomed, it was the English, rather than the Boers, who ran the new hotels, restaurants, hospitals, clubs, theatres and other accoutrements of a bustling modern city.

  Known as Uitlanders (Afrikaans for ‘outsider’) the English had the numbers; they had the money; what they wanted was a share of political power. The Boers, however, claimed that the Transvaal was their homeland, whereas the Uitlanders were greedy foreigners. The franchise was therefore restricted to those resident in the Republic for more than fourteen years. This was resented by the Uitlanders, who also had other complaints; for instance, that the state enjoyed a monopoly over the production and sale of dynamite, a commodity of vital importance to the mining industry.

  In the 1890s, the main question of Transvaal politics was the conflict between Boer and Briton. But there was a secondary problem, namely the contamination of the Boer dreamland by an even less wanted group of immigrants, the Indians. With the mining boom in the Rand their numbers rapidly increased. They set up shops in the main towns, and also opened stores in the countryside. Hawkers with less capital at their disposal sold goods on the streets.

  When Gandhi first visited Johannesburg, there were already more than a hundred Gujarati traders in town. Some firms were very large – with assets in the tens of thousands of pounds and branches in Durban, the Cape and Bombay. There was also an emerging Indian working class, composed of labourers, domestic servants and hawkers. In Johannesburg’s leading hotels, Indians were ‘much preferred [by their employers] to white waiters, owing to their civility, sobriety, and to their being more amenable to discipline.’22

  A few Indians entered the Orange Free State as well. Before their numbers could increase, the Volksraad, or parliament, expelled them from the province. With special permission, Indians could work in the Free State in strictly menial jobs, such as servants on farms. But more respectable and profitable trades were closed to them.

  Encouraged by the Free Staters, in 1885 the Transvaal’s Volksraad passed a law making it impossible for ‘so-called Coolies, Arabs, Malays and Mohammedan subjects of the Turkish Empire’ to buy property. The law also empowered the Government to specify particular streets and localities where Asians would live and trade.

  For a decade after the law was passed it lay sleeping on the statute books. But in 1894 Boer politicians, worried that the numbers of Indians were now in the thousands rather than dozens, sought to implement it. Notices were issued that traders who were not white would be sent to designated areas known as ‘Locations’, within which they had to conduct their businesses.23

  In desperation, the Indians sought an interview with the President of the Transvaal, the crusty and dogmatic old general, Paul Kruger. Kruger came out to meet them with a Bible in hand. The Indians set out their grievances. The Christian warrior, consulting his Book, answered that they were descendants of Esau and Ishmael, and hence bound by God to slavery. Kruger and his Bible went back to their house, while the Indians retreated, bewildered.24

  The Indians now approached the British to intervene. An agreement signed in London in 1884 guaranteed the rights of Her Majesty’s subjects to trade and live where they pleased in the South African Republic. Indian traders asked only that this clause be honoured. In 1895, pressed by the British, the SAR appointed an arbitrator, a former Chief Justice of the Free State. He heard the two sides and came out strongly in favour of his fellow Boers, noting that

  the constitution of the South African Republic, the terms of which could not have been unknown to the British Government, lays down that no equality between the white and coloured races shall be tolerated … every European nation or nation of European origin has an absolute and indefeasible right to exclude alien elements which it considers to be dangerous to its development and existence, and more especially Asiatic elements, from settling within its territory.’25

  The arbitrator had left a window open – the Indians, he said, could ‘test’ their case in the High Court in Pretoria. A Gujarati merchant now appealed against the law under which he was to be sent to a Location. (This was Tayob Khan, whose dispute with Dada Abdulla had brought Gandhi to South Africa in the first place.) Brought in on the case, Gandhi argued that Indians were of ‘Indo-Germanic’ stock, and hence exempt from the racial laws of the Transvaal Volksraad.

  One judge on the bench was persuaded by Gandhi’s arguments; the other two were not. In August 1898, the Court finally ruled against Tayob Khan. The threat of eviction loomed large. On 31 December 1898, a group of thirty merchants wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in alarm. If implemented, the court’s judgment ‘would mean practical ruin to the Indian traders in the Transvaal’. They faced a ‘constant dread of having their stores shut up at any moment, and being removed on sufferance tenure to locations unfit for comfortable habitation, devoid of sanitary arrangement, situated in a locality unsuitable for trade, and all this for no fault of theirs’.26

  By 1898, more than a quarter of the world’s supply of gold came from the Transvaal. Uitlander mine-owners made extraordinary profits. But the Boer-controlled state did not do too badly either. In 1886, state revenue was £196,000; ten years later, it had jumped to £400,000. The capitalists whose firms had contributed to the growing coffers wanted a greater say in how to spend the government’s revenue. On the other hand, those in charge of the state were loath to cede control.27

  Egged on by the imperial adventurer Cecil Rhodes – who had vast business interests in South Africa – a group of conspirators planned to overthrow Kruger’s regime by force. An officer named Jameson was to cross the border into Transvaal with a force of 1,000 men; meanwhile, the English residents in Johannesburg would start an insurrection. In the event, Jameson’s force was surrounded and made to surrender by the Boers; and the uprising within never happened.

  The collapse of the ‘Jameson Raid’ of 1895 intensified the rift between Boer and Briton. The pro-imperial party was led by the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, and the High Commissioner in Cape Town, Lord Milner. Both believed that control of the Transvaal was central to Great Britain’s mission in Africa and the world. In February 1898, Milner wrote to Chamberlain that ‘there is no way out of the political troubles of South Africa except reform in the Transvaal or war. And at present the chances of reform in the Transvaal are worse than ever.’ Eighteen months later, Chamberlain wrote a memo to the British Cabinet complaining that the Boers were ‘flouting successfully British control and interference’, and that what happened next depended on ‘whether the supremacy which we have so long claimed and so seldom exerted, is to be finally established and recognised or for ever abandoned’.28

  By this time, the British were shipping large numbers of troops to South Africa. Ten thousand soldiers came from India and the Mediterranean; several thousand more from England itself. The bellicosity was unmistakable. In October 1899 the Boers asked that troops sent since July of that year be withdrawn. When the British refused, they crossed into Natal, and the war had begun.

  One consequence of the war between Boer and Briton was the flight of Indians from the South African Republic. As British subjects, they were identified with the enemy. The Indians streamed into Natal, seeking refuge among their compatriots in the colony. Gandhi and the Natal Indian Congress helped raise money and find homes for them.

  The Indians in Natal were merchants and labourers. Few had any military experience. However, Gandhi thought that as subjects of the British Empire they should show support for their s
ide. He had been volunteering with a hospital in Durban, run by a Reverend Dr Booth. Now, with Dr Booth’s encouragement, he offered to raise a corps of Indian ambulance workers to care for the sick and the wounded.

  On 17 October 1899, days after the beginning of hostilities, Gandhi convened a meeting in Durban to discuss his proposal. Some Indians were opposed to helping the British. Did they not oppress them as much as the Boers? And what if the other side won? Would not the Boers then wreak vengeance on them? Gandhi answered that they lived in South Africa as subjects of the British Empire. To help the rulers now would refute the charge that Indians were interested only in ‘money-grubbing and were merely a deadweight upon the British’. Here was a ‘golden opportunity’ to prove these charges were baseless.29

  Gandhi’s arguments prevailed. The next day he wrote to the Natal Government, ‘unreservedly and unconditionally’ offering assistance. The Indians did not know how to handle arms, but they still ‘might render some service in connection with the field hospitals or the commissariat’, thus showing that, in common with other subjects of the Queen, they were ‘ready to do duty for their Sovereign on the battlefield’.30

  By the first week of January, 1900, 500 Indians had agreed to serve in the ambulance corps. A list of volunteers reveals that the Gujarati merchants had prudently stayed away. A large number of Indian Christians had come forward to serve their Sovereign. Others who joined included working-class Hindus, mostly of Tamil extraction.31

  The Indians were sent into the field, where they followed the soldiers from camp to camp, taking care of the stragglers. The conditions were hard; they had to march up to twenty-five miles a day, go many hours without food and water, and sleep out in the open. They were dangerously close to the action, carrying the wounded to safety as shells fell around them. Some volunteers were asked to dismantle Boer telegraph lines. Others were told to gather up rifles and cartridges abandoned by the enemy.32

  An English journalist left a vivid account of the ambulance corps at work. Following the reversals at Spion Kop, he saw ‘the Indian mule-train move up the slopes of the Kop carrying water to the distressed soldiers who had lain powerless on the plain’. After a night’s work which would have ‘shattered men with much bigger frames’, the reporter ‘came across Gandhi in the early morning sitting by the roadside – eating a regulation army biscuit’. While the British soldiers were ‘dull and depressed’, Gandhi ‘was stoical in his bearing, cheerful and confident in his conversation, and had a kindly eye’.33

  Gandhi had asked an English friend, Herbert Kitchin, an electrician with an interest in Indian philosophy, to help with the raising of the ambulance corps. Gandhi managed one unit, Kitchin another. While the lawyer was in Spion Kop, the Englishman was at Elandslaagte, from where he sent this account of their ‘busy and exciting time’ at the front:

  I was away with a party of eight Indians, a corporal and a sapper, taking down a portion of the Boer telegraph line around Ladysmith. We passed three of the Boer laagers. All of them are filthy, and are noticeable for … the quantity of cartridges scattered about, and the number of bottles and English biscuit tins. We could have picked up a sackful of cartridges. A party of our men … dropped across a party of Boers who put a shell on the midst of them. Luckily no one was hurt. I came across a stray horse, which I suppose was left behind by the Boers, but it was too wild and I could not catch it. Had I been able to, I could have sold it for a decent sum.34

  Even as a non-combatant, the Englishman was enjoying the battle, taking pleasure in the discomfiture of the hated Boers and the scattering of their possessions. Gandhi had joined the British in their fight out of loyalty and duty. His reactions to this letter are unrecorded. But one thinks the vegetarian Bania could scarcely have seen the fight as his English friend did, as a thrilling and utterly pleasurable chase after a quarry in flight.

  At the start of the war the British suffered serious reverses. The Boers were agile fighters, who knew the terrain well. However, over time the greater numbers and superior firepower of the British began to prevail. By the summer of 1900 the war had been largely won, although bands of Boer guerrilla fighters continued to resist capture for many months afterwards.

  The Indian ambulance workers had played a modest part in the British victory. To mark this, a meeting was held in the Congress Hall in Durban. This, wrote a Natal newspaper, was ‘the first occasion upon which Europeans and Indians in this Colony have met on a common platform for a common purpose’.35 In the chair was the former prime minister of Natal, Sir John Robinson. In the ‘struggle for supremacy between Boer and Briton,’ said Robinson, the Indians had done ‘excellent work’. ‘I cannot too warmly compliment your able countryman, Mr Gandhi,’ the Natal leader told the Indians, ‘upon his timely, unselfish, and most useful action in voluntarily organising a corps of bearers for ambulance work.’36

  The volunteers came out of regard for Gandhi, and he solicited them out of regard for the British Empire, of which he was a loyal subject, his criticisms of the Natal Government notwithstanding. Indeed, those criticisms often made the case that discriminatory laws were at odds with British tradition. His ‘Open Letter’ of December 1894 contrasted the colonists with their compatriots at home – ‘I have … to remind you,’ said Gandhi, ‘that the English in England have shown by their writings, speeches and deeds that they mean to unify the hearts of the two peoples, that they do not believe in colour distinctions, and that they will raise India with them rather than rise upon its ruins.’ A petition protesting against the £3 tax in default of re-indenture insisted it was ‘in direct opposition to the fundamental principles upon which the British Constitution is based’. A memorial of 1895 to the Secretary of State for the Colonies said the policies in Natal were ‘entirely repugnant to the British notions of justice’. The Governor of Natal was told in July 1899 that the Dealers’ Licence Act was ‘really bad and un-British’.37

  That telling term, ‘un-British’, was to be made famous in a book published by Dadabhai Naoroji in 1901, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India. This argued that the spread of famine, the drain of wealth and the stifling of Indian manufactures were the result of policies that departed from the ideals of the rulers. Gandhi knew and respected Naoroji; like the Parsi veteran, he was an admirer of the British liberal tradition and its powers, real or fictive, of self-criticism and ameliorative action.

  Another Indian leader Gandhi admired, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, distinguished between a ‘narrower imperialism’ which regarded ‘the world as though it was made for one race only’, and a ‘nobler imperialism’ that enabled ‘all who are included in the Empire to share equally in all its blessings’.38 Gandhi’s work during the War was done to evoke or re-activate these ‘nobler’ instincts of the rulers. As he later wrote, ‘I felt that, if I demanded rights as a British citizen, it was also my duty, as such, to participate in the defence of the British Empire. I held then that India could achieve her complete emancipation only within and through the British Empire.’39

  The Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 is usually seen as a ‘white man’s war’. This is not strictly true. In every major battle of the war, non-Europeans played a part. While a handful of Indians served as ambulance workers, many black Africans – Zulus, Xhosas and others – participated as armed combatants. One historian estimates that perhaps as many as 30,000 blacks fought on the British side. Others worked as scouts, spies, servants and messengers. Like Gandhi, these African volunteers believed – or hoped – that ‘a British victory would bring about an extension of political, educational and commercial opportunities for black people’.40

  What Gandhi wrote in these years is printed in his Collected Works; samples of what was written to him lie in cupboards in the Gandhi Museum in Delhi and the Gandhi Ashram in Sabarmati. These writings focus very largely on his career as a lawyer and community organizer. What the biographer lacks are contemporary accounts of his personal, familial situation. We know that in 1898 Kasturba gave birth to a third son
, Ramdas; and two years later to a fourth, Devadas. But to sense what life was like in the Gandhi household, we have to rely largely on the patriarch’s recollections and our own speculations.

  Many years later, while writing of their life in Durban, Gandhi said the central challenge he faced was where and how to educate his children. There were a few schools for children of indentured labourers, run by missionaries. For reasons of class Gandhi would not have wanted his sons admitted there. ‘I could have sent them to the schools for European children,’ he remarks, ‘but only as a matter of favour and exception. No other Indian children were allowed to attend them.’41 This is confirmed by documents in the Natal archives, which tell us that in the last week of February 1897, Gandhi sent a petition requesting that James Godfrey, the son of one of his (Tamil Christian) clients, be admitted to the whites-only Durban High School. The request was denied, the Superintendent of Schools claiming that if the Godfrey child was allowed in, ‘a majority of the parents would remove their boys, and the boys who were left would make the Indian’s life unsupportable by practical joking.’42

  If a Christian boy was subject to racist taunts, a Hindu boy would find it even harder. So Gandhi would have reasoned, which is why he chose to educate his sons Harilal and Manilal and his nephew Gokuldas at home. He taught them the alphabet of their mother tongue, Gujarati, himself. An English governess was engaged to teach other subjects. Meanwhile, their mother acquainted them with the myths and morals of their native Hinduism.43

  The boys could play with one another, but it is hard to see how or with whom Kasturba found companionship. There were no other women in the household. The shopping was in the hands of a manservant; both social custom and personal inhibition prevented Gandhi’s wife from going out alone on the streets of Durban. Most of her husband’s clients were Gujarati Muslims. Despite a common language, divergent faiths made it hard for Kasturba to break bread with their wives. Even had she sought friendship with them, she would not – with four sons, a nephew and a husband to look after – have had the time.