Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  As the Indians went in and out of jail in the Transvaal, there was a significant development among their compatriots in Natal. They now had a second weekly newspaper, complementing Gandhi’s Indian Opinion. Named African Chronicle, this was edited by a Tamil named P. S. Aiyar, who had come out to Durban in 1898 and married a local girl. Despite its name the new paper, like Gandhi’s own, gave little coverage to ‘African’ issues. Rather, it was a vehicle for the Tamils of Natal, who did not feel wholly represented in or by Indian Opinion, which now carried articles in English and Gujarati only.

  African Chronicle made its first appearance in June 1908. It ran to sixteen pages: four in English, eight in Tamil, with a final four pages containing advertisements taken out by Tamil traders and shopkeepers. It carried news of indentured labourers on plantations, and of merchants in towns. Sport was a passion, with football and boxing matches being extensively reported. The editor was particularly preoccupied with the £3 tax on freed labourers, and regularly wrote asking for its abolition. The paper also keenly followed developments in the Transvaal. Early issues praised Gandhi for his ‘steadfastness of purpose’ and ‘deadly earnestness’. His arrest in October 1908 had ‘cast a gloom over the Indian community’. Gandhi was ‘our esteemed leader’ – esteemed for, among other things, his ‘characteristic plain and straightforward manner’. The ‘meritorious struggle’ he led was ‘fighting for the honour and freedom of the nation’. The paper endorsed ‘Mr M. K. Gandhi’s known intense desire to effect a union between these great sections of the Indian population’ (namely, Hindus and Muslims). African Chronicle shared Gandhi’s dislike of Montford Chamney – whom it called ‘a little tin-god’ – as well as his admiration of Thambi Naidoo. When Naidoo was arrested for the third time, the paper ‘congratulate[d] the Indians in South Africa for possessing such a man’.37

  The conflict between the Indians and the Transvaal Government was played out against the backdrop of a growing movement for the union of the South African colonies. The architects of the war against the Boers, Joseph Chamberlain and Alfred Milner, had always hoped that victory would be followed by a creation of a single integrated state, forming part of the British Empire. In his farewell speech in February 1903, Chamberlain told his audience to ‘make preparation for the ultimate federation of South Africa which is destined, I hope in the near future, to establish a new nation under the British flag, who shall be “daughter in her mother’s house and mistress in her own”.’38

  In 1906 Transvaal became a ‘self-governing colony’ on the model of Natal and the Cape. Orange Free State followed two years later. In May 1908, white politicians from the four territories met in an ‘intercolonial’ conference to discuss the prospects of a united federation. This was followed by a full-fledged ‘National Convention’, which first met in Durban in October 1908, followed by meetings in other towns of South Africa.

  The motivations of those seeking union were partly economic. The standardization of customs duties, taxes and railway lines would make business much easier. Whites in South Africa were impressed by the example of Canada and Australia, where once discrete territories had come together as single federations. However, they faced a problem largely absent in those other British dominions – a very large native population. Some Africans and some Indians were voters in the Cape. While a few liberals sought an extension of the Cape franchise, most people at the Convention thought that people of colour should not be granted the vote. The Transvaal politician Percy Fitzpatrick insisted that the ‘black man was incapable of civilization’. Abraham Fischer of the Orange Free State remarked that since ‘self-preservation was the first law of nature’, whites should keep the vote to themselves. Another Free Stater, C. R. De Wet, said that ‘Providence had drawn the line between black and white and we must make that clear to the Natives [and] not instil into their minds false ideas of equality.’

  The delegates from the Afrikaner-controlled colonies prevailed. The Transvaal Prime Minister, Louis Botha, persuaded his Cape colleagues that their priority must be to bring about a ‘union of the white races in South Africa’. Complications about the native franchise would imperil this union. It was agreed that while the coloured voters in the Cape would not immediately be disenfranchised, in other colonies only whites would vote; and whites alone would sit in the Union Parliament.39

  In December 1908, as Gandhi was leaving jail, the Governor of the Transvaal, Lord Selborne, circulated to the members of the Convention some ‘informal suggestions on the question of the Native Franchise’. This proposed a ‘civilization qualification’, whereby to be eligible for the franchise, a man had to (a) commit to monogamy; (b) speak a European language; (c) meet a certain property or income qualification; and (d) be ‘habitually wearing clothes and living in a house as distinct from a hut’.

  European males who fulfilled these criteria would each have a full vote. On the other hand, ‘every non-European who proves the possession of the civilisation qualification before an impartial tribunal’ would be given ‘a vote equal in value to one tenth the vote of a European’. The son of this civilized native voter, if he likewise met those four criteria, would be awarded one ninth of a vote, his son one eighth, and so on. Selborne’s scheme allowed for the possibility of miscegenation. The son of a European father and a non-European mother would – provided he enjoyed the ‘civilizational qualification’ – have one-fifth of a vote, his son a quarter of a vote, and so on. Finally, there was also an age stipulation. Whereas qualified European males voted at the age of twenty-one, a civilized native or Asian would be allowed to vote only at thirty-one, his son at thirty, his grandson at twenty-nine. The offspring of mixed unions would be granted the franchise at twenty-six.

  Selborne’s proposals were surely influenced by the ongoing protests of the Indians in the Transvaal. As an Englishman, he knew also of precedents in the home country, where some Indians had been granted the vote and two of them had even entered Parliament. Gandhi himself believed that, given the chance and the freedom, all Indians could prove themselves to be as worthy as all Europeans. To be sure, he thought this might take some time. But his incrementalism was positively radical in comparison to the ideas of colonialists like Lord Selborne. Unlike Gandhi, the Governor thought that only individuals, and not whole communities, could ever ascend upwards on the civilizational ladder. His horizons were also far more extended. Whereas Gandhi hoped for racial parity in his own lifetime, the Governor thought that in ten generations, or perhaps two hundred years’ time, a particular man of colour might – always assuming he or his forebears did not slip backwards into polygamy, ignorance of a European language, etc. – come to enjoy the same political rights as a white man.

  To be fair to Selborne, his mind at least admitted the odd shade of grey. Most members of the National Convention, on the other hand, thought only in black and white. They wished to deny the vote, any vote, even a fraction of a vote, to non-whites altogether. His Lordship’s proposals were rejected immediately.40

  To this chorus in favour of white supremacy in South Africa, there were two dissenting voices – the brother and sister duo of W. P. Schreiner and Olive Schreiner. W. P. Schreiner was a former prime minister of Cape Colony, a liberal by instinct and a humanist by conviction. At the National Convention he urged that members of non-European descent be allowed at least to sit in the Senate, or upper house, of the Union Parliament. Writing to General Smuts, he said that ‘to my mind the fundamental question is that of our policy regarding “colour”.’ To embody in the Union Constitution ‘a vertical line or barrier separating its people upon the grounds of colour into a privileged class or caste and an unprivileged, inferior proletariat is, as I see the problem, as imprudent as it would be to build a grand building upon unsound and sinking foundations’.41

  When he failed to move his colleagues in South Africa, Schreiner travelled to England, to lobby British opinion. The Act of Union being prepared, said Schreiner, was better viewed as ‘an Act of Separation between the
minority and the majority of the people of South Africa’. Under it, ‘the coloured inhabitants are barred from the opportunity to rise and evolve naturally, which is the right of every free man in a free country’.42

  On this question, the writer Olive Schreiner was even more radical than her brother. Raised in the Cape countryside, she was an autodidact, who read Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill and Darwin, while also (like Gandhi) being inspired by the Sermon on the Mount. Writing stories from an early age, Olive was best known for The Story of an African Farm (1883), a novel set in the Karoo featuring a brutal overseer named Bonaparte and, to counter him, a woman who sought freedom outside marriage, later described as ‘the first wholly feminist’ character in the English novel. Olive had lived in London for several years in the 1880s, where she befriended left-wing thinkers such as George Bernard Shaw and Eleanor Marx. This experience informed her book, Dreams, published in 1890, which presented a series of allegories excoriating the rich and advocating an ethical socialism.43

  In December 1908, Olive Schreiner was asked this question by a Transvaal newspaper: ‘What form of Closer Union do you favour – Federation or Unification; and for what reasons?’ She answered that ‘all persons born in the country or permanently resident here should be one in the eye of the State’, and all should enjoy the Franchise, regardless of race or colour. She then offered this arresting vision of the future:

  The problems of the twentieth century will not be a repetition of those of the nineteenth or those which went before it. The walls dividing continents are breaking down: everywhere European, Asiatic and African will inter-lard. The world on which the twenty-first century will open its eyes, will be one widely different from that which the twentieth sees at its awakening. And the problem which this century will have to solve, is the accomplishment of this interaction of distinct human varieties on the largest and most beneficent lines, making for the development of humanity as a whole, and carried out in a manner consonant with modern ideals and modern social wants. It will not always be the European who forms the upper layer.

  The South Africa that Olive Schreiner strove for would draw democratically on all its constituent elements. She spoke thus of the special characteristics of the Europeans – who, ‘at least for themselves, have always loved freedom and justice’; of the natives of the country, the Bantu as she called them following contemporary usage – ‘one of the finest breeds of the African stock’; and of the Asiatics – ‘a section of people sober, industrious, and intelligent’. She argued that ‘it is out of this great, heterogeneous mass of humans that the South African nation will be built’. Mindful of the divisions within, she pointedly and prophetically asked: ‘As long as nine-tenths of our community have no permanent stake in the land, and no right or share in our government, can we ever feel safe? Can we ever know peace?’44

  The previous May, speaking to the YMCA in Johannesburg, Gandhi put forward the idea that South Africa should be a nation for more than whites alone. Olive Schreiner now provided a sharper, more passionate statement of that point of view. One does not know whether she had read Gandhi’s speech, but her own reflections were reprinted in Indian Opinion, where the editor (Henry Polak) said the journal agreed ‘entirely’ that ‘a people kept in a state of political helotage are a source of danger to the State, sooner or later’. Women such as Olive Schreiner, wrote Polak, ‘are of greater permanent value to the world than a continent of Napoleons’.45

  Within a week of his release, Gandhi was back in court defending passive resisters. Once the new, amended Act came into force, some Indians had begun queueing up for certificates. They were picketed by a group of satyagrahis led by Thambi Naidoo. On 18 December, appearing for a group charged with ‘causing trouble among Asiatics who are desirous of complying with the law’, Gandhi told the judge that his clients ‘only want to let those who forget their manhood know that there is such a thing as ostracism’. (The judge answered that it was not ostracism but ‘a wholesale fear of incurring grievous bodily harm’.)46

  The fact that picketing had to be recommenced spoke of a real rift in the community. Exhausted by the struggle, hoping to get on with their lives, many Indians were reluctant to go to jail again or to live without certificates of residence. Noting the rush to register under the new Act, Gandhi said ‘this need not depress us’. For ‘the great Thoreau said that one sincere man is [worth] more than a hundred thousand insincere men.’

  The cleavages within the movement were of class and of ethnicity. Hawkers, and Tamils, were now more likely to become satyagrahis than traders or Gujaratis. ‘The Tamils have surpassed all expectations,’ wrote Gandhi in Indian Opinion: ‘All their leaders are now in gaol.’ Also worthy of praise were the Parsees who, despite their small numbers, had made a huge contribution to the political field in India. In South Africa too, ‘we do not find a Parsee who has complied with the Government’s senseless law.’ Gandhi thought that ‘Muslims and Gujarati Hindus should hang their heads in shame before the Tamils and the Parsees.’47

  In the last week of December, Gandhi went to Durban to be with Kasturba. He stayed three weeks in all, with one eye on the health of his wife, and the other on the future of the struggle. On 5 January he wrote to Olive Doke that he had ‘not come to Natal to rest and am having none. You wish you were in Phoenix. So do I. You would then have assisted me in nursing Mrs. Gandhi. Now that you may say is very selfish. But self plays a very important part in our lives.’48

  Gandhi moved Kasturba from Phoenix to Durban, where she stayed with and was attended by a Dr Nanji. He was the best Indian doctor in Natal, and also a close friend who had supported the satyagraha struggle and spoken out in public on its behalf.

  On 16 January Gandhi left for the Transvaal. That night he wrote a letter to Chanchal Gandhi asking her to ‘give up the idea of staying with Harilal for the present’. ‘It will do good for both of you’, said the patriarch. ‘Harilal will grow by staying apart and will perform his other duties. Love for you does not consist only in staying with you.’

  As the letter suggests, it appeared that Gandhi’s son Harilal was facing a conflict between the needs of his self and the claims of his society. By January 1909, the twenty-year-old had been to jail twice already. He now prepared to court arrest for a third time. In between jail terms he was based in Johannesburg, assisting in the campaign. His wife Chanchal, at Phoenix, missed him terribly. They now had a baby girl who – if things went on the same way – would grow up with an absent father, much as Harilal himself had done.

  In a vivid memoir, Harilal’s youngest brother recalled the competing claims on the first of Gandhi’s sons. Devadas was some thirteen years younger than Harilal, and just a little older than his brother’s child. He adored Harilal, with his cheery manner and his handsome face, his hair parted in the middle ‘with beautiful curls over the forehead’. Before one of his departures from Phoenix to court arrest, Harilal told the boy, ‘Yes, Devadas, I will send you your top from Durban.’ ‘I forget the top,’ wrote the boy, decades later. ‘But I remember sharing sweets with my niece the next day, while my sister-in-law shed tears over a letter.’49

  Harilal was torn between his wife, whom he loved dearly, and with whom he had (by all accounts) a companionable marriage, and his obligations to his father and the movement he led. At this time, Harilal was briefly back at Phoenix with Chanchal. How long he would stay there was not certain, since he might at any moment be asked to re-enter the Transvaal and seek arrest. He communicated his confusions to his father, who answered that he could

  see that you are unhappy. I have got to accept your opinion as to whether you would be unhappy or not on account of separation. However, I see that you will have to undergo imprisonment for a long period … The struggle is likely to be a prolonged one. There are some indications of its being a short one also. There is a likelihood of Lord Curzon interceding. Let me know what arrangement should be made in regard to Chanchal during your absence.

  The letter ends with t
his intriguing line: ‘I have not been able to follow what you say about taking a stone in exchange for a pie. In what context have you written that?’ It seems reasonable to assume that Harilal was contrasting the pie of marital bliss with the stone of physical separation.50

  In the first week of the New Year, The Times printed a letter signed by twenty-six Europeans living in the Transvaal. The first signatory was W. Hosken. The others included seven clergymen (among them Joseph Doke and Charles Phillips), several accountants, the jeweller Gabriel Isaacs, the draper W. M. Vogl, and the missionary-turned-advocate A. W. Baker, all old friends of Gandhi. The letter reminded the British public that ‘there is an important body of sympathizers in the European section of the community who are grieved and hurt at the treatment being meted out to the Asiatics [in the Transvaal] for no apparent purpose at all.’ The signatories saluted the ‘courage and self-sacrifice’ of a movement in which ‘all faiths and castes are represented’. Morality and the Imperial interest mandated that their demands be conceded. For passive resisters deported to India from the Transvaal would ‘not be slow to ventilate [their grievances] amidst the sympathetic surroundings of their native land’.51

  At this time, Gandhi himself was unsure as to whether the struggle would be long or short. He had, as he indicated to Harilal, some hope that the former Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, would help bring about a settlement. As Viceroy, Curzon had written with feeling about the ‘invidious’ and ‘odious’ handicaps facing Indians in the Transvaal.52 He was now in South Africa, on a private visit. Gandhi asked to meet him when he passed through Johannesburg; Curzon said this would not be possible since he had ‘so short a time here’. However, he asked the Indians to ‘give me as full a statement of their case as they can’; he would read this on the train to Cape Town, where he was due to meet Generals Botha and Smuts.53