Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  On 29 January, Gandhi wrote a remarkable letter to his nephew Maganlal. Some Gujarati merchants were turning away from the struggle, and the Pathans had been sceptical of Gandhi in any case. With earlier attempts on his life in mind, he told Maganlal that

  I may have to meet death in South Africa at the hands of my countrymen. If that happens you should rejoice. It will unite the Hindus and Mussalmans … The enemies of the community are constantly making efforts against such a unity. In such a great endeavour, someone will have to sacrifice his life. If I make that sacrifice, I shall regard myself, as well as you, my colleagues, fortunate.54

  The letter was posted from Natal, where Gandhi had come again to spend time with his wife. Dr Nanji had diagnosed her as suffering from pernicious anaemia, for which the textbook treatment included a healthy dose of beef extract. When Gandhi discovered what Kasturba had been given, he decided to take her back to Phoenix and treat her by his own, naturopathic methods. The doctor remonstrated; he was a man of science, as well as a Parsi, for whom there were no taboos as regards beef. He argued that Kasturba was too sick to be moved. Besides, it was raining heavily. Gandhi was unmoved; he sent a message to Phoenix to make preparations for their arrival. Albert West met them at the station with hot milk, umbrellas, and six men to carry Kasturba home in a hammock.55

  ‘Dr and Mrs Nanji were much grieved’ by his removing Kasturba from their care, wrote Gandhi to Kallenbach. ‘They do not believe in water treatment. They consider me to be a brutal husband and Dr Nanji certainly considers me to be either mad or over conceited. I have risked friendships for the sake of a principle.’

  At Phoenix, Gandhi gave Kasturba a series of cold baths. He also put her on a diet of fruit. ‘She appears to be none the worse for it,’ he reported to Kallenbach:

  She is probably better. But she has lost heart. She cannot bear the idea of my leaving her bedside for a single minute. Like a baby she clings to me and hugs me. I fear that my departure next week will send her to her grave. It is a great conflict of duty for me. Yet there is no doubt in my mind that I must leave her next week and accept the King’s hospitality.

  It was a curious sequence of phrases and sentiments: recognizing that he faced, yet again, a serious conflict between family duties and societal obligations, Gandhi had ‘no doubt’ that (yet again) he would choose to go to prison rather than stay with his ailing wife.56

  On 2 February, Curzon wrote to Gandhi reporting on his meeting with the Boer soldier-politicians. Botha and Smuts had promised ‘to treat the British Indians in the Transvaal in a spirit of liberality and justice’. But no specific promises were made with regard to, for example, the repeal of the 1907 Act or the admittance of educated Indians. Curzon’s own view was that ‘a final and satisfactory settlement of the vexed problem’ would have to await the creation of a single, unified government of all the South African colonies.57

  The letter was posted to the Johannesburg address of the British Indian Association, who sent it on to Phoenix. Its non-committal, even unhelpful, contents made Gandhi decide to renew the struggle. He may also have been provoked by derisive comments in the Transvaal press, suggesting that passive resistance was on its last legs. ‘Mr Gandhi has been beaten,’ wrote one paper, ‘and the sooner he admits it and tells his deluded fellow-countrymen frankly that they have not the ghost of a chance of altering the opinions of the people of this Colony, so much the better for all concerned.’58

  In the second week of February, Gandhi dispatched Harilal across the border from Natal, to seek (and obtain) his third term of imprisonment. The father followed ten days later. Like his eldest son, he was arrested for refusing to produce a valid registration certificate, and remanded in police custody.

  On 25 February Gandhi was brought to trial before a magistrate in Volksrust. He told the court that he would ‘continue to incur the penalties so long as justice, as I conceive it, has not been rendered by the State to a portion of its citizens’. Sentenced to pay a £50 fine or accept three months in prison with hard labour, he opted for the latter. Afterwards, he released two letters that he had composed before going to court. The first, in Gujarati, was addressed to the weak-kneed who had succumbed to the Government’s demands. It reflected a certain resignation; where once the blacklegs were fiercely chastised, now they were asked to do what they could. ‘Those who are fallen can rise again,’ said Gandhi. ‘They can still go to gaol … Even if they cannot, they can offer monetary help, and send statements to newspapers to say that, though they have surrendered, they are in favour of the fight and wish it success.’ The second letter, in English, was addressed to his ‘Tamil brethren’, whom he praised for having discharged their duties ‘brilliantly’ and borne ‘the brunt of the battle’.59

  To his ‘great pleasure’, in Volksrust prison Gandhi was placed in the company of some fifty fellow satyagrahis. They included Harilal, and his old and valued friend Parsee Rustomjee. The food this time was ‘nice and clean’ and included large helpings of ghee. The ‘hard labour’ they were put to involved repairing roads and weeding fields.

  A day after he was sentenced, Gandhi wrote to Chanchal asking her to read ‘good writing and poems’ to Kasturba, to take care of her own health, and to breastfeed her child for some more time. Then he added: ‘Harilal and I are quite well [in Volksrust jail]. Be sure that we are happier here than you.’ (He spoke for himself, but perhaps not for Harilal.)60

  After a week in Volksrust, Gandhi was shifted to Pretoria. He travelled with escort, and at night, shivering under a blanket. His cell in this jail was marked ‘isolated’; the bed was hard, there was no pillow, and ghee was served only twice a week (but the dreadful mealie pap every day). The other prisoners were all Africans; one asked Gandhi whether his crime was theft, another if it was the illegal sale of alcohol.

  The work he was put to in Pretoria was dreary, namely, polishing the floor of his cell and the corridor. He was also denied permission to write letters in Gujarati. He pleaded that his wife was recovering from a serious illness, and that his letters ‘served as medicine to her’, but the authorities were unyielding.61

  Since he could not communicate directly with his wife, Gandhi sent her a message via Albert West. ‘Please tell Mrs G. that I am all right,’ he wrote to West.

  She knows that my happiness depends more upon my mental state than upon physical surroundings. Let her cherish this thought and not worry about me. For the sake of the children, she should help herself get better. She should have the bandages regularly and add hip-baths if necessary. She should adhere to the diet I used to give. She ought not to start walking till she is quite restored.62

  It was brave and unselfish of Gandhi not to draw attention to his own condition. For this, without question, was his harshest prison term yet. He could write only one letter a month, and there were strict curbs on visitors. Henry Polak applied three times to see him, but was refused permission. However, Gandhi’s agent in Pretoria was allowed to visit. This was M. Lichtenstein, the man who, back in September 1906, had offered the vote of thanks at the Empire Theatre meeting which first proposed passive resistance. Now, visiting the leader of the satyagraha in jail, he was dismayed to find him in solitary confinement, where his warders ‘regularly abuse and humiliate him’, while giving him ‘a worse diet than that of a Kaffir prisoner’.

  Lichtenstein communicated what he saw to Polak, adding as his own view that he thought Gandhi ‘was very near a break-down’. Polak then wrote an anguished letter of complaint to David Pollock, a Justice of the Peace and a well respected resident of Johannesburg. He found it ‘heart-breaking’ that ‘this high-minded gentleman, who has all along conducted a campaign with clean hands and a lofty spirit, is being tortured in this way’. Knowing the prisoner as he did, Polak was certain that

  what is in Mr Gandhi’s mind today, in the midst of these degrading circumstances by which he finds himself surrounded, is no thought for himself and his own personal sufferings, but the feeling that, if this treatment is
meted out to him, a cultured man, a barrister, a member of a noble Indian family, a man who has refused the Chief Justiceship of his native State, what must be the attitude of the Authorities to his less highly-equipped brethren in the Transvaal who are voiceless …

  In a postscript whose tone matched that of the letter itself, Polak said he dared not communicate these things to Gandhi’s wife Kasturba. For ‘the poor lady’s life is sufficient of a tragedy as it is, with her husband in gaol and her eldest son in gaol … She is now just managing to drag herself about after a long and painful illness, and it will almost certainly mean a relapse for her, if I so much as whisper what is going on.’63

  David Pollock passed on this letter to the Governor of the Transvaal, with a note marking his own dismay that Gandhi, ‘of all people in South Africa’, was marched in handcuffs ‘like a common felon through the streets of the Capital’ when conveyed from the prison to the courts to testify in a case. He urged Lord Selborne to institute an enquiry ‘into the specific allegation that the considerate treatment accorded to political prisoners in civilized territories has not been extended to Mr Gandhi’. Pollock received a brusque reply, stating that ‘Mr Gandhi, when he voluntarily sought imprisonment, did [so] of course knowing that he could not expect treatment in any way different from other prisoners.’64

  This suggests that whereas the Transvaal Government thought Gandhi to be a common criminal, in the eyes of his friends and supporters he was (as Henry Polak put it) ‘a political prisoner, fighting for conscience’s sake and the self-respect of his people.’ Their complaints reached London, and from London were re-directed to Pretoria. This had some effect, for the Transvaal Prime Minister sent David Pollock a terse note saying that ‘Prisoner M. K. Gandhi is confined at Pretoria Gaol, where he has been shown special consideration. He was offered ghee but declined. He has however accepted the sleeping outfit reserved for Europeans and is well supplied with books.’65

  That conditions markedly improved after the interventions of Polak and Pollock is confirmed by Gandhi’s own account. The prison director now allowed him the use of a notebook and pencil, and substituted the stitching and mending of clothes for the scrubbing of floors. As a gesture of goodwill, General Smuts also sent him two books on religion.66 Gandhi answered in kind, asking the boys at Phoenix to make his adversary what the General’s son described as a ‘stout pair of leather sandals’.67

  Smuts’ gesture, and the more lenient treatment Gandhi was now getting in jail, may have been influenced by the fact that he had recently been issued with a glowing testimonial in the House of Lords. Speaking on 24 March, a former Governor of Madras, Lord Ampthill, drew the attention of his fellow peers to the plight of Indians in the Transvaal. A previous speaker had spoken of Gandhi as a mere ‘agitator’ and of the protests as ‘simply sentimental’. Ampthill vigorously disagreed. The laws the Indians had opposed were, he said, ‘humiliating and offensive and unnecessary’. Their leader, ‘the son of an Indian gentleman of good birth and high position’, and a London-trained barrister himself, had undergone three terms of imprisonment with hard labour ‘for the sake of his opinions and because he is defending what he regards as the honour of his community’. Despite his privileged birth and professional qualifications, Gandhi

  devotes all his means and most of his time and energy to public service and to the purest philanthrophy … This is the man who is leading this movement, and with him there are several hundreds of others who, I can assure your Lordships from the knowledge I possess, will protest to the bitter end, whatever be the extremity of ruin or misery it brings upon them. In these circumstances it is simply fatuous to say that they have no good reason for undergoing sufferings of this kind.68

  This was an impressive speech; even more impressive, perhaps, was a private letter that Smuts received from his Cambridge friend H. J. Wolstenholme, a don at Christ’s College described (by Smuts’ biographer) as ‘a lapsed Christian who retained his Christian conscience’.69 The two had been close from their days at university – exchanging notes on works of philosophy and literature, and commenting on each other’s manuscripts. Now, reading about the protests by, and the arrests of, Indians in the Transvaal, Wolstenholme reminded Smuts that those he had jailed

  belong to a race, or complex of races, with an ancient civilization behind them, and a mental capacity not inferior to that of the highest Western people, who are developing rapidly a feeling of nationality and a capacity for the more active and practical life of the more materialized West … [The] Indians with whom you have to deal may have little share in this civilization of their race, through lack of education, and this through national poverty, but they are championed by leaders who identify themselves with them, and resent keenly what they regard as unjust and insulting treatment of their people, the more keenly because it is directed against them as a race, a race marked out as ‘inferior’, like the ‘niggers’ of America and the ‘heathen Chinese’, as coloured.

  The Cambridge scholar saw an ‘epoch-making’ change taking place in relations between East and West, whereby the Japanese, the Chinese and the Indians would no longer accept exclusion and disability on the grounds of race. It was increasingly clear that those whom Europeans had dismissed as ‘inferior peoples’ were not inferior in capacity; they claimed, demanded, and deserved equal rights. Wolstenholme told Smuts that ‘it would surely be wise statesmanship, as well as good human fellowship, to concede in time and with a good grace what is sure eventually to be won by struggle.’70

  These were radical ideas, even by the standards of the Cambridge of the 1900s. In the Transvaal of the day they were completely heretical. Smuts’ answer to this letter is unavailable; perhaps he had none.

  In the last months of 1908, as a steady stream of satyagrahis entered prison, Indian Opinion began carrying poems written in Gujarati paying tribute to them. A prolific writer of these salutary verses was Sheikh Mehtab, Gandhi’s former schoolfriend and housemate. A poem of January 1909 said Parsee Rustomjee was as brave as (the sixth-century) Arab poet Hatem and (the eleventh-century) Hindu monarch Raja Bhoja. M. C. Anglia and Sorabji Shapoorji were also praised, while Thambi Naidoo was described as ‘the lamp of India, the real fighter!’. ‘If you remain united like this,’ Mehtab urged the satyagrahis, ‘you will see Smuts’ resignation.’

  In another poem, he said ‘we lost India [to the British] due to disunity and quarrels’. He recalled an older and more hallowed epoch, when, ‘with unity Ram and Laxman got Sita back’. In yet another, he wrote,

  If the whole community is brave

  Eid and Diwali can be celebrated

  Otherwise [the] Union Jack will tear us apart

  And fire will be ablaze.

  Here the Muslim poet invoked a Hindu idiom; meanwhile, from the other side, a versifier named Jayshanker Govindji saluted the heroism of the trader A. M. Cachalia, who had seen his business tumble by going to jail. Cachalia was ‘the light of his family’, ‘a true gem of India’. His sacrifice had ‘drenched [him] in many colours’.71

  Gandhi’s own stoicism in jail is manifest in the monthly letter he was permitted to write. In the last week of March he wrote to his son Manilal enquiring about Kasturba’s health. ‘Does she now walk about freely?’ he asked: ‘I hope she and all of you would continue to take sago and milk in the morning.’

  A Hindu swami, Shankeranand, was then touring Natal. The swami was from the Arya Samaj, a brand of militant, adversarial Hinduism which was at odds with Gandhi’s more plural and accommodating faith. When he first heard of Shankeranand’s militant proselytizing, Gandhi wrote to Maganlal, ‘it is very regrettable. It is because of such results that the venerable Kavi [Raychand] used to say that in modern times we should beware of religious teachers.’72

  The Natal Mercury thought that Shankeranand was ‘flattening out Mr Gandhi’ in the colony, winning the lawyer’s followers over to his side. The African Chronicle disagreed: ‘The responsible section of the Tamil and Hindoostani people,’ it insi
sted, ‘stand by Mr Gandhi to one man despite what Swami Shankeranand may say.’73

  The Swami now decided to carry the battle into the enemy camp. Visiting Phoenix while Gandhi was in jail, he told Manilal that, as a boy of high caste, he should wear a sacred thread. Gandhi wrote to his son that he ‘respectfully disagree[d] with the Swamiji in his propaganda … As it is, we have too much of the false division between the shudras [lower castes] and others. The sacred thread is therefore today rather a hindrance than a help.’74

  The next month it was Polak’s turn to receive the one sanctioned letter. Gandhi was worried about their financial situation: ‘I hate the idea about Phoenix being in debt,’ he wrote. He suggested the debt be cleared by selling jewellery and their law books. Turning to the education of the children at Phoenix, he advised them to read Tolstoy’s Life and Confessions and the works of Raychandbhai. ‘The more I consider his life and his writings, the more I consider him to be the best Indian of his times,’ remarked Gandhi of his late mentor. ‘Indeed, I put him much higher than Tolstoy in religious perception.’ Then, turning to personal matters, he asked: ‘Is Chanchi cheerful? Or does she brood over her separation from Harilal? Does Mrs. G now take part in household work?’75

  In February 1909, when Gandhi was in between prison terms, his secretary Sonja Schlesin had articled herself as a clerk in his office. Miss Schlesin’s application was witnessed by Gandhi, Polak and her father. Normally, after three years as a clerk one could qualify for the Bar. This Miss Schlesin was very keen to do – she wished to become the first woman lawyer in South Africa, just as her employer had been the first coloured lawyer. She was extremely intelligent and well read, and after five years in Gandhi’s office had become closely acquainted with the law, especially as it applied to Indians.