Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  Another motivation was very likely personal. Although, as he reminded Milner, he had first come to South Africa eleven years ago, this country was no more ‘home’ to him than London had been. Gandhi had gone to one place to study, to the other to help fight a legal battle. For all his commitment to the Indians living there, South Africa (like the United Kingdom) remained for him a foreign land. In October 1901 he had sailed from Durban for India, in his eyes for good. In November 1902 he sailed back to Durban, but – in a sign of how temporary he saw this stay would be – left Kasturba and the children behind in Bombay.

  For some sixteen years now, Mohandas Gandhi had been a journeyman between continents. Born and raised in Kathiawar, he had braved convention and community to study in England. When he boarded the SS Clyde in September 1888, he saw the voyage as his first, but also his last, journey overseas. Having burnished his credentials, he would return to make a career and name in his native Kathiawar; as his mother’s spiritual guide had advised her, with a barrister’s certificate from London a diwanship should be her son’s for the asking. His brother Laxmidas’s misdeeds rendered that plan unfruitful, and life became more complicated. Having tried, and failed, to establish himself in Rajkot and Bombay, on his third try Gandhi became a successful lawyer in Durban. Three years there alone; three more years with his family; and then, to educate his children and overcome his wife’s loneliness, in 1901 Gandhi returned to India.

  A year later he was back in South Africa. This time, the community desired that he be based in Johannesburg. Here he lived the life of an expatriate: working with his Indian clients during the day, and spending the evenings with (white) professionals likewise single or separated from their families. Life in Johannesburg was interesting and intriguing, for a while. But once the Indian question in the Transvaal was settled, he would make one final transcontinental journey and go back home.

  Kasturba very much wanted her husband to return to India. And he wished to go back himself. There may have been a lingering ambition to try – for the third time – to establish a practice in the Bombay High Court. There were also options outside the law, in the sphere of politics and social work. For an ambitious patriot, the motherland offered a far larger theatre of action than the diaspora. The experience and credibility that he had acquired in South Africa could be parleyed to great effect back home in India.

  There were thus compelling reasons for Gandhi to return finally – after sixteen years on the move, shuttling between three continents – to establish himself as a lawyer and/or social activist in his homeland. Hence the compromise offered to Milner. If Gandhi could secure a settlement which struck a middle ground between the desires of the colonists (the wholesale expulsion of Indians) and the hopes of the more radical of his countrymen (the right of free entry and settlement), he could leave South Africa with his honour intact.

  Gandhi’s note and letter were passed on to the Governor. Milner does not appear to have called Gandhi for a meeting, or indeed to have taken his proposals very seriously. Gandhi was now losing faith in the intentions of this particular Englishman. As he wrote to Gokhale:

  Contrary to all expectations, Lord Milner, who on the eve of the war, was the champion of the oppressed including the British Indians, has completely turned round and … is quite prepared to deprive the Indians of even what little rights they possessed in the Transvaal before [the] war.’55

  An Englishwoman who got to know Lord Milner during the Anglo-Boer War found him ‘clear-headed and narrow’, adding, ‘Everyone says he has no heart, but I think I hit on the atrophied remains of one.’56 To his compatriots Milner might sometimes show emotion, but to everyone (and for everything) else he was always hard-headed. As Saul Dubow has written, notwithstanding Milner’s own low opinion of Boer culture, the proconsul now understood that ‘securing a prosperous and loyal Transvaal was key to establishing and maintaining British political supremacy in South Africa’.57 In rejecting Gandhi’s proposals, Milner was merely recognizing that European sentiment, Boer as well as Briton, was overwhelmingly against the Indians.

  Mohandas Gandhi was city-born and city-bred. Born in Porbandar, raised in Rajkot, educated in London; a practising professional in Bombay, Durban and Johannesburg – he had spent all his years in urban centres small, large and massive. In 1904, now thirty-five, he had not spent a night in a village, nor perhaps an entire day either. And yet he had long had a yearning for the rustic life. It was first expressed in London, in the meetings of the Vegetarian Society, where he met Henry Salt and read his friend Edward Carpenter, a Cambridge scholar who had settled in the Yorkshire hills, from where he sermonized against the ills of industrialism. In his own first writings, Gandhi had spoken admiringly of the simple life of the shepherds of Kathiawar. Later he had read Tolstoy, and learnt of the Russian’s experiments on the land.

  In the latter half of 1904, Gandhi travelled to Durban for work, being seen off at Johannesburg’s Park Station by Henry Polak. As the train pulled out, his friend gave him a copy of John Ruskin’s Unto this Last. This was a polemic against the then very influential science of political economy. Ruskin deplored the tendency of Ricardo, Mill, et al. to make money the unit of all exchange and value. A science that regarded air, light and cleanliness, or peace, trust and love as worthless, was in conflict with the teachings of the great religions, and antithetical to the deeper interests of humanity itself. Whereas Ricardo and company rigorously separated economics from morality, Ruskin thought that affection and trust must govern relations between master and servant, capitalist and worker. A moral economics would be one ‘which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings’, not which promoted the greatest monetary wealth or produced the greatest number of rich people.58

  The lawyer read Unto this Last at once, right through, and was so moved that he could not sleep that night. The impact was so immense that, as Gandhi later recalled, ‘I determined to change my life in accordance with the ideals of the book.’ The core teaching of Unto this Last, as understood by him, was that the work of farmers and labourers was as valuable as the work of lawyers and factory managers. To work with one’s hands, and on the land, was more honourable than working with one’s brains or with the aid of machines.59

  Reading Ruskin on the train from Johannesburg to Durban consolidated Gandhi’s romantically rural orientation. It prompted him to move Indian Opinion from Durban’s Grey Street to a new home in the countryside. He bought a farm near the station of Phoenix, on the North Coast Line, some fourteen miles from town. In its issue of 24 December 1904 the journal announced the shift in location. Both printing press and operating staff would be housed in the farm, where ‘the workers could live a more simple and natural life, and the ideas of Ruskin and Tolstoy combined with strict business principles’. Those who worked on the press, whether Englishman or Indian – or neither – would be paid a modest monthly allowance (of £3) and allotted plots of land to grow their food. The scheme’s promoter described it as ‘a bold experiment and fraught with momentous consequences. We know of no non-religious organisation that is or has been managed on the principles above laid down.’60

  One of the first recruits to the new experiment was Albert West. Gandhi had persuaded him to leave his job in Johannesburg and take charge of the press. When West reached the farm he found it to be a pleasant enough place, with fruit trees and date-palms, and a river running through the property. A plot of twenty acres was bought in the first instance; with another eighty acres added on soon afterwards. On this land the workers built homes of wood and corrugated iron. Meanwhile, the press was dismantled and transported from Durban to Phoenix in four large wagons, each pulled by sixteen bullocks. The machinery was then reassembled. Gandhi wanted to work the press by hand, but West insisted on the purchase of a petrol engine (there was no electricity in the neighbourhood). As a concession to his friend, the Englishman designed a hand-operated machine with a wheel mounted on a wooden frame, which could be used when the oil ran out.6
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  The land, the building materials and the workers’ stipends were paid for principally by two men. Gandhi supplied the substantial sum of £3,500 from his own savings. (Clearly, the ‘decent practice’ he had spoken of to his Rajkot friend was very decent indeed.) The Durban merchant Parsee Rustomjee contributed in cash and in kind – apart from writing cheques, he also donated a large number of sheets of corrugated iron.

  By the first week of January 1905, issues printed on the farm had begun reaching the journal’s subscribers. Gandhi wrote to Gokhale that he now hoped to establish a school at Phoenix ‘which would be second to none in South Africa’. He asked his mentor to recommend an Indian teacher with ‘a blameless character’, and to send a letter of encouragement for printing in Indian Opinion.62

  Back in 1899, when the two sets of white colonists in South Africa went to war, Gandhi was an Empire loyalist, a believer in Imperial citizenship who thought that flattery and persuasion would end discrimination against Indians in South Africa. Thus he signed up to support the British in their campaign against the Boers. Thus, too, his repeated petititions to London, made in the belief that even if the colonists were sometimes bigoted and narrow-minded, they would be brought around by sagacious Imperial statesmen.

  Gandhi took heart from the fact that British officials in India tended to side with his people in South Africa. A leading member of the Indian Civil Service had chastised the Transvaal Government for placing members of an ‘ancient and orderly civilization’ on a par with ‘uncivilized African labourers’.63 A second ICS man told a delegation from Natal that ‘the Indian is not on a level with the kafir; he belongs to a higher class. The Indian trader is almost as advanced as ourselves.’64

  These views on the hierarchy of civilizations were conventional – Gandhi shared them too (at the time). They placed Indians almost adjacent to Europeans, from which perspective the discriminatory laws in South Africa were clearly misguided, if not actively malevolent. The Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, thus criticized Lord Milner for ‘justifying the vexatious regulations’ on Indians in the Transvaal. Curzon thought it ‘much more important to conciliate the unanimous sentiment of 300,000,000 of our subjects in Asia than to defer to the prejudices of a small colony of white men in South Africa.’65

  When Gandhi sailed for Durban in November 1902, his hopes in British justice were largely intact. Two years later he was less naïve. He had once hoped to unite the Indians with the British against the Boers; now, after the war, the British were uniting with the Boers against them. South Africa was not England, where brown men could be elected to Parliament; or even India, where they could become judges and Imperial Councillors. Here, the bonds of race would always trump Imperial loyalties and obligations. The Indian situation in the Transvaal was now uncertain, fraught with difficulties. When, in September 1904, Lord Milner rejected the compromise Gandhi offered him, Gandhi felt he had to stay on. So he asked his wife and children to join him in Johannesburg.

  Kasturba arrived in South Africa towards the end of 1904. The eldest son, Harilal, now sixteen, had stayed back in India. He was keen to sit the Bombay Matriculation that his father had taken back in 1887. However, the other sons came out with their mother, as did two nephews, Gokuldas and Chhaganlal.

  8

  Pluralist and Puritan

  Gandhi rented a house in Albemarle Street, in the east Johannesburg district of Troyeville, to accommodate the whole family. As in Durban, theirs was the only Indian home in a white neighbourhood. The two-storey house was spacious, with eight rooms, balconies and a garden.1

  Gandhi had warned Kasturba that he would spend little time with her in Johannesburg, and so it turned out. He rose early, helped his wife grind flour for the day’s meals, then walked the five miles to his office in Rissik Street, carrying a packed lunch of wholemeal bread with peanut butter and a selection of seasonal fruits. His days were spent taking cases, drafting petitions to government, and writing for and supervising, long-distance, the production of Indian Opinion. He walked home in the evenings, where, after dinner, he taught his sons the elements of Gujarati grammar and composition.2

  Hermann Kallenbach was a frequent visitor to the Gandhi household. The boys liked him, not least because he brought gifts of chocolates and toys. They were also impressed by stories of his elegant lifestyle; apparently he had a barber come in every morning to shave him in bed.3

  While the children were being home-schooled, the adult nephew, Chhaganlal, was sent to join the community at Phoenix. His younger brother Maganlal was already working there as a compositor. Chhagan and Magan served as Gandhi’s eyes and ears in a community he had founded and funded, but at this stage rarely visited. The uncle wrote to his nephews at least once a week, asking for reports on the staff and the state of the finances. The young men were advised on how to set Gujarati type and where to look for subscribers.

  Indian Opinion had now expanded from eight pages to thirty-six. The text was printed in three columns instead of six. The end pages were taken up with advertisements – of, for instance, a ‘German East African Fortnightly Steamer for BOMBAY, Direct’. A Calcutta bookseller took space to publicize his wares, which included a volume entitled Helps to the Study of English, and another containing Select Speeches of the Great Orators. Most advertisements, however, were (as before) for shops and enterprises in Natal selling cloth, cigars, sweets, rice, ghee and real estate.

  The reports in the expanded Indian Opinion covered a wide range of topics. The rise of other Asian nations was noted and appreciated. After the fall of Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War, the journal wrote that ‘the Japanese, by sheer force of character, have brought themselves into the forefront of the nations of the world. They have shown unity, self-sacrifice, fixity of purpose, nobility of character, steel[y] courage, and generosity to the enemy.’ An article in Hindi spoke of a national renewal in China, with moves to create officer corps and military academies on Japanese and Western models. The journal recalled General Gordon’s old prediction that when China awoke, the world would watch with fear and admiration.4

  Indian difficulties in Natal and the Transvaal were written about, but so also was the situation of the other communities in South Africa. A report of April 1905 spoke of a ‘monster native petition’ signed by 33,000 people, addressed to the Imperial Government in London, which asked that when full autonomy was granted to Transvaal, the interests of Africans be kept in mind, and no class legislation introduced which would ‘degrade and suppress all coloured races’. The petition urged the abolition of the death penalty, an end to the practice of whipping Africans, and the granting of permission to ‘respectable natives’ to travel in ‘superior classes’ on railways and to vote in municipal elections.5

  Gandhi’s weekly also carried reports on society and politics in India. A report from early January 1905 summarized the presidential address at the Bombay Congress of the liberal imperialist Sir Henry Cotton. Despite their promises, said Cotton, the British had been harsher on Indians than the Boers. ‘Their little finger had been thicker than Mr Kruger’s loins. Where he chastised with whips, they chastised with scorpions.’6

  Gandhi’s newspaper ran several reports on the opening of an ‘India House’ in London, promoted by a Gujarati radical named Shyamaji Krishnavarma. The chief guest at the opening was the British Marxist, H. M. Hyndman. As Indian Opinion reported, Krishnavarma said it ‘gave him much pleasure to see his veteran friend Dadabhai Naoroji who, tied down as he was by certain political views, had the catholicity and generosity of mind to give encouragement by his presence that afternoon.’ In a later speech, Krishnavarma remarked ‘that while under the Mahommedan rule they were hit on the back, under the English rule they were hit in the stomach’.7

  Mohandas Gandhi’s own contributions to Indian Opinion included a series of sketches of famous men. In the first week of July 1905 the paper printed a tribute to the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, singling out his criticisms of tyranny and his spirit of public serv
ice. In the last week of July it saluted Mazzini, the unifier of Italy, who was yet ‘so broad-minded that he could be regarded a citizen of every country’. In August it carried a homage to Abraham Lincoln which stressed his humble origins, his commitment to the poor, his selflessness and his patriotism. September saw the spotlight being turned on Tolstoy, who, born into a rich family, voluntarily embraced poverty, and bravely criticized the Tsar and his policies. The next week a woman was profiled for the first time. This was Florence Nightingale, whose life’s story prompted the moral: ‘No wonder that a country where such women are born is prosperous. That England rules over a wide empire is due not to the country’s military strength, but to the meritorious deeds of such men and women.’8

  This global-minded Gujarati also wrote of Indians he admired. On the first anniversary of the death of industrialist J. N. Tata, Gandhi observed that Tata ‘never looked to self-interest … nor did he ever take distinctions of caste or race into consideration … [T]he Parsis, the Muslims, the Hindus – all were equal to him.’ An assessment of the Bengali social reformer Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar emphasized his work for the education of girls and the emancipation of widows. Vidyasagar’s career, wrote Gandhi, made clear ‘how Bengal provides an example for the other parts of India to follow.’9

  With these sketches Gandhi was providing role models for his compatriots. As noteworthy, perhaps, was his appreciation of the African reformer John Dube, who, Gandhi informed his readers, had acquired 300 acres of land quite close to Phoenix, where he ‘imparts education to his brethren, teaching them various trades and crafts and preparing them for the battle of life’. When a progressive planter took Dube to meet a group of visiting British scientists, the African told them that the contempt with which his people were regarded was unjustified, since ‘they worked hard and without them the whites could not carry on for a moment.’