Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  As a successful barrister, Gandhi had chosen to live not in the Indian ghetto in central Durban but in Beach Grove, on the city’s outskirts. His ‘well-furnished English villa’ (to use Younghusband’s phrase) was one of several in the locality, the others occupied by men who were English by blood as well as in spirit. Gandhi’s desire to mark his social status by acquiring a house away from where his compatriots lived posed serious problems for his wife. She did not know English, and tradition forbade her from talking to white people anyway. The social distance separating her from her neighbours was even greater than the physical distance between the suburbs and the city. She could not go to meet the Gujarati women in Grey Street unescorted. Her husband was unavailable (and perhaps also unwilling) to take her there. So she retreated further into her home, where her children provided her with both company and consolation.

  It was in this house in Beach Grove that Gandhi and Kasturba had a disagreement that he wrote about in his autobiography. Living with the Gandhis were a Gujarati cook and a Tamil-speaking clerk, Vincent Lawrence. Before their conversion to Christianity, Lawrence’s family were regarded as Panchammas, a term, translating as the ‘fifth’ caste, denoting their Untouchable status. Kasturba refused to clean the clerk’s chamber pot, and thought her husband should also not pollute himself by doing so. Gandhi was enraged. ‘I will not stand this nonsense in my house,’ he remembers telling Kasturba in his autobiography, adding the further recollection that, in his fury, he dragged her down to the gate. His wife, weeping, asked if he had no shame, to push her out in a foreign country, with no parents or relatives to take her in. Gandhi pulled himself back in time, and returned with his wife to the house.44

  In May 1901, Gandhi learnt that his preceptor Raychandbhai had died, at just thirty-three. Gandhi read about Raychandbhai’s passing in his office, from a newspaper that arrived in the post. He set the paper aside and resumed his work, but, as he wrote to a friend, ‘I can’t put it out of my mind … [W]henever there is a little leisure, the mind reverts to it. Rightly or wrongly, I was greatly attracted to him and I loved him deeply too. All that is over now.’45

  From that first meeting in July 1891, Gandhi had accepted Raychandbhai as his mentor. Gandhi’s father died when he was in his teens. His elder brothers were incapable of giving him moral (or intellectual) instruction. It was into this vacuum that the jeweller-thinker stepped. He had helped Gandhi come through the loss of his beloved mother. When he was a briefless barrister in Bombay in 1892, Gandhi would leave the court to go to Raychand’s shop and speak with him. In South Africa some years later, torn between religions, Raychand once more helped sort out his confusions.

  What did Raychandbhai mean to Gandhi? What did he learn from him? Contemporary accounts or letters are scarce, so we must answer these questions with the aid of later reflections. Speaking at Raychand’s birth anniversary in 1915, Gandhi said ‘he followed no narrow creed. He was a universalist and had no quarrel with any religion in the world.’46

  Nine years later, Gandhi wrote a long preface to a Gujarati book on his teacher. This recalled that even when Raychand was in his shop,

  some book on a religious subject would always be lying by his side, and, as soon as he had finished dealing with a customer, he would open it, or would open the note-book in which he used to note down the thoughts which occurred to him. Every day he had men like me, in search of knowledge, coming to him. He would not hesitate to discuss religious matters with them. The Poet did not follow the general … rule of doing business and discussing dharma each at its proper time, of attending to one thing at a time.

  Gandhi took heart from this plurality of vocations, becoming both a hardworking lawyer and a curious seeker himself. While Raychand could teach Gandhi little about the law, he encouraged him to see his faith in broader terms. Dharma, said the seer, did not ‘mean reading or learning by rote books known as Shastras or even believing all that they say’. It was a combination of theoretical learning and practical knowledge. After a certain level of religious instruction, the scriptures could help no further; but one’s own experience certainly could.

  There were, argued Raychand, parallels in the teachings of all great religions. All preached against falsehood and against violence. Human beings, following the texts of their faiths dogmatically, had ‘erected veritable prison-houses’ in which they were, in a spiritual sense, confined. Gandhi, following Raychand, came to the conclusion that ‘every religion is perfect from the point of its followers and imperfect from that of the followers of other faiths. Examined from an independent point of view, every religion is both perfect and imperfect’.

  When his Christian friends in Johannesburg and Durban were pressing Gandhi to convert, Raychand advised him to stay within the Hindu fold, yet remain open to the teachings of other religions. The seer liked to say that ‘the different faiths were like so many walled enclosures in which men and women were confined’. Gandhi, following Raychand, lived in the enclosure he was born into, but breached its walls by frequently travelling into other similarly well demarcated terrains. He never permanently abandoned his compartment for another, yet by visiting other compartments came to see more clearly what united as well as divided them all.47

  A few months after Raychand’s death, Gandhi decided to return home to India. This, on the face of it, was a puzzling move: his legal practice was well established, and he was a figure of some renown in Natal. In his autobiography he writes that he wished to ‘be of more service in India’, where the movement for political rights was gathering ground.48 But surely there were other reasons, among them the desire to give his children a decent education. The eldest child, Harilal, was now entering his teens. There was no suitable school for him or his brothers in Durban. In Rajkot, however, they could attend their father’s old school, follow him in taking the Bombay Matriculation, and in time build up professions and careers of their own.

  That there was now a second Indian lawyer in Natal made it easier for Gandhi to think of going back. This was Rahim Karim Khan, a barrister from Lincoln’s Inn who had come out to South Africa in 1899. He joined Gandhi’s office and later established his own network of clients. As a Muslim himself, he was trusted by the mainly Muslim merchants in Durban. With Khan’s arrival, Gandhi was free to travel to the Transvaal, to more actively pursue his religious interests, and now, in 1901, to return for good to India.49

  Kasturba may have been even keener than her husband to return. When she married Mohandas in 1883 she had hoped, like her mother and grandmother before her, to raise a family somewhere in her native Kathiawar. She moved to join her husband in Rajkot; a few years later, he left her and their infant son to go to London. He came back, to make her pregnant once more. In May 1893 he left again, this time for South Africa. Three years later the family was reunited. Kasturba’s first exposure to South Africa was by way of the mob that attacked (in word and deed) her husband. After this she could scarcely trust the whites; but, confined to her home in Durban, she had few Indian friends either.

  In Rajkot, the language that Kasturba spoke at home was also the language of the bazaar. There she had friends and relatives, who would be her children’s friends and relatives too. In Durban, on the other hand, she and they had spent four and a half years feeling alien and out of place in a land they could never call their own.

  And so the Gandhis decided to return to their homeland. On 12 October, Parsee Rustomjee threw a farewell party for ‘the champion of the Indian cause in Natal’. The party was ‘the grandest ever attempted or achieved by any Indian’: tapestry on the walls, electric lights specially installed, a profusion of flowers and a band of musicians. The substance matched the show; thus, as one grateful journalist wrote, ‘the guests were regaled with the most delicate preparations of an Eastern culinary department.’ After the food had been eaten, Rustomjee ‘placed a thick gold chain round Mr Gandhi’s neck, and presented him with a valuable gold locket and a large gold medal suitably inscribed. He was also given a b
ouquet of white roses, and was garlanded amid deafening cheers.’ The lawyer’s children were then given gold medals.50

  The next week, the Gandhis were chief guests at a party hosted by the Natal Indian Congress at their hall in Grey Street. This was likewise a gay occasion, with the staircase festooned with garlands, and Chinese lanterns everywhere. The merchant Abdul Cadir gave the first speech, saying of Gandhi that ‘in every sphere of our life, political, social and moral, he has been our guiding star, and his name will be ever enshrined in every Indian heart.’ The English lawyer F. A. Laughton, speaking next, said that ‘it was a matter of wonderment to him that Mr Gandhi was going at this time, as he had a prominent position at the Bar, and a great influence over the Indian community. He would always be ready to welcome Mr Gandhi’s return.’

  At this meeting, too, Gandhi was given an array of jewels. These included a diamond ring presented on behalf of the community as a whole, a gold necklace subscribed for by Gujarati Hindus, a diamond pin from Abdul Cadir, and a gold watch offered by Dada Abdulla and Company.51 Gandhi accepted the presents (and the compliments), but three days later he wrote to Parsee Rustomjee saying he was returning the gifts. He wished to make them over to the Natal Indian Congress, to form an emergency fund for times of crisis.52

  The decision to return the presents caused a terrific row in the Gandhi household. ‘You may not need the [jewels]’, said Kasturba. ‘Your children may not need them. Cajoled, they will dance to your tune. I can understand your not permitting me to wear them. But what about my daughters-in-law? They will be sure to need them. And who knows what will happen tomorrow? I would be the last person to part with gifts lovingly given.’

  Gandhi answered that it was not for her to decide what to do with gifts presented to him. Kasturba offered this telling rebuke: ‘But service rendered by you is as good as rendered by me. I have toiled and moiled for you day and night. Is that no service?’

  His wife’s opposition was neutralized by the support of his two elder sons. Harilal, aged thirteen, and Manilal, aged nine, agreed that the presents must be returned. With the assistance of his sons, Gandhi ‘somehow succeeded in extorting a consent’ from his wife.53

  Now Parsee Rustomjee begged Gandhi to reconsider his decision. The presents conveyed the community’s love for their ‘great and honoured’ leader. Gandhi’s impulsive gesture might now lead to the ‘disorganization of a great achievement’ – the building of the Natal Indian Congress – ‘the credit of which achievement is primarily due to yourself’. The return of the gifts, said Rustomjee, would lead to the ‘misconstruction of motives in the donor as in the recipient’.54

  Gandhi was unyielding. The presents were sent back to the Congress, while their leader prepared to set sail for his homeland.

  The Gandhis left Durban in the third week of October 1901. They took a ship that went via Mauritius; this may have been because it was the first vessel they had bookings on. On the other hand, perhaps Gandhi wanted to make his acquaintance with a colony that had once been French before it was British and which, like Natal, had a substantial population of Indians brought out to work on the sugar plantations.

  When Gandhi landed in Mauritius, his reputation had preceded him. A local newspaper spoke of how ‘he had brilliantly defended the cause of his compatriots in Natal.’ The Muslims, who in this island were from northern India rather than from Gujarat, hosted a garden party for him. Flags and buntings fluttered in the wind, while children and adults gathered to pay their respects. Gandhi ‘advised the Muslim community to send its children to college, as it was only through education that they would make a mark in life’. He asked the Indian community to take an increasing part in politics, ‘not the politics of fight[ing] against the government, but the fight for its rights and a place in the sun under the pavilion of liberty’. When Gandhi heard that the son of his host was standing for election as a municipal councillor, he praised him for taking up a ‘beautiful and good’ cause.

  Gandhi’s remarks sparked an angry response from one of the colony’s leading intellectuals, the poet and librarian Leoville L’Homme. The Asian way of life, said the French colon, was ‘absolutely hostile to ours’. If an Indian became a councillor, the mayor of Port Louis would be shaking hands with men who had ‘lice in their hair’. The Europeans who had settled Mauritius were bearers of a great military and political tradition. To share power with Indians would reduce these traditions ‘to the proportions of a sale register of bales of tamarind’; and to make of the colonists themselves ‘cadavers for the non-Christian communities’.

  Gandhi was used to being abused by white colonists in Natal. But this piece of invective he did not see, since it was delivered in French. The memories he carried back from Mauritius were of the generosity of the Indians. At a farewell reception, the main speaker, a Muslim merchant, compared Gandhi to a modern-day Pharaoh who guided his countrymen ‘in the rough sea far away from the rock-under-water where there may be every chance of being dashed’.55

  The Gandhi family reached Bombay in the last week of November 1901. After settling Kasturba and the children in Rajkot, Gandhi took a train across the subcontinent to attend the seventeenth session of the Indian National Congress, held that year in Calcutta.

  The 1901 Congress had 896 delegates in all. More than half came from the host province, Bengal. Gandhi was one of forty-three delegates from the Bombay Presidency. He stayed at the India Club, on Strand Road, and commuted by rickshaw to Beadon Square, where the Congress was held in a great open-air pavilion. The meeting began with a song composed by Sarola Devi Ghosal, a niece of the poet Rabindranath Tagore. It was sung by a choir of fifty-eight men and boys, with ‘the nearly 400 volunteers joining the chorus for good effect’.

  The President of the Calcutta Congress was D. E. Wacha, he who had read Gandhi’s speech for him in Bombay in 1896. Wacha’s presidential address was temperate in tone: speaking of the slow pace of economic development, he said that ‘no doubt we have a good Government, but it is not unmixed with many an evil. The desire is that the evil may be purged away, and in the course of time we may have a better Government.’ Other speakers were more forthright. ‘Is the life function of the Indian ryot [peasant] to live and die merely like a brute?’ asked G. Subramania Iyer of Madras: ‘Is he not a “human being, endowed with reason, sentiment, and latent capacity”?’ Under British rule the standard of living had sunk further, such that there were now some 200 million Indians ‘grim and silent in their suffering, without zest in life, without comfort or enjoyment, without hope or ambition, living because they were born into the world, and dying because life could no longer be kept in the body.’56

  In his own speech, Gandhi pointed out that were the president of the Congress, a civilized Parsi, to visit the Transvaal, he might be classified as belonging to the ‘coolie’ class. The Indians in South Africa were deeply attached to the homeland; when asked to help famine victims in Bombay, they had raised £2,000. Gandhi urged reciprocity. ‘If some of the distinguished Indians I see before me tonight were to go to South Africa, inspired with that noble spirit,’ he remarked, ‘our grievances must be removed.’57

  When he had visited Calcutta in 1896, Gandhi had been cold-shouldered by the local leaders. Five years later he got a warmer reception. His work in South Africa was now more widely known; besides, he had an influential patron, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who had taken him under his wing. Gokhale was only three years older than Gandhi, but vastly more experienced in public affairs. Teacher, writer, social reformer and Member of the Viceroy’s Council, he was one of the best-known Indians in India.

  Born in a village on the west coast of India, the son of a policeman, Gokhale had willed himself out of obscurity by hard work and self-learning. Moving to the ancient Maratha capital, Poona, he joined the faculty of Ferguson College, a pioneering centre of modern education. He taught the works of John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith, yet rooted his liberalism in an Indian context, by promoting Hindu–Muslim harmony and an e
nd to caste discrimination. A featured speaker at the annual meetings of the Indian National Congress, he also visited England often, lobbying the Imperial Government to be more sensitive to Indian needs and aspirations. Hearing him speak at Cambridge, a young John Maynard Keynes was impressed, telling a friend that Gokhale ‘has feeling, but feeling guided and controlled by thought, and there is nothing in him which reminds us of the usual type of political agitator’.58

  When the Congress meeting ended, Gandhi moved into Gokhale’s house on Upper Circular Road. Over meals and while taking walks, Gokhale told Gandhi of the debt he owed the social reformer Mahadev Govind Ranade, who had died a few months previously. Gandhi observed that Gokhale’s ‘reverence for Ranade could be seen every moment. Ranade‘s authority was final in every matter, and he would cite it at every step.’ Gandhi was beginning to view his new mentor in the same light, for, as he observed, ‘to see Gokhale at work was as much a joy as an education. He never wasted a minute. His private relations and friendships were all for [the] public good.’

  Gandhi’s spiritual preceptor, Raychand, had recently died; into the void stepped a scholar who would guide him along the path of public service. There remained reservations. One was Gokhale’s lifestyle: why, asked Gandhi, did the Poona man travel in a private carriage rather than in a public tramcar? The Imperial Councillor answered that the choice was not out of a love for comfort, but a need for privacy. ‘I envy your liberty to go about in tramcars,’ Gokhale told Gandhi: ‘But I am sorry, I cannot do likewise. When you are the victim of as wide a publicity as I am, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for you to go about in a tramcar.’59