Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  The imminent revival of passive resistance worried Gokhale’s close friend William Wedderburn. A former member of the Indian Civil Service, Wedderburn had played a key role in starting the Indian National Congress. After serving two terms as Congress president, he had returned to England, where he became a Liberal Member of Parliament. Gokhale spent much time with Wedderburn on his visits to England, discussing imperial policies and India. When Gokhale arrived in London in May 1913, he was suffering from diabetes and its complications. His ears were painful and he could not sleep. The doctors had advised three months’ rest. Wedderburn wrote to Gandhi that ‘unfortunately the sad crisis in S. Africa … has got upon his nerves.’ Gokhale now planned to return to India in August, place the South African question before the Imperial Council, and raise money for the cause, but his friends felt that his health would not stand the strain of the sea journey – the Red Sea would be boiling in August – or the burden of organizing a campaign in India in the heat and humidity of September and October.

  Given the ‘vital importance to India of [Gokhale’s] life and health’, Gandhi was asked to request him to delay his journey. And perhaps the struggle itself could be postponed. ‘My (private) suggestion,’ wrote Wedderburn to Gandhi,

  is that if passive resistance is resolved on, it should not commence before the end of the year, the interval being employed in negotiations, with an ultimatum that it will begin on the 1st of January. Passive resistance, including women and children, is a serious matter, and should not be undertaken hastily, nor until all means of compromise have been tried.33

  Gandhi was sensible of the importance of Gokhale’s health. He recognized the enormous suffering that a fresh bout of satyagraha would entail. And so he explored the last remaining avenues for a settlement. Having failed with the new Interior Minister, he tried his luck with General Smuts. Smuts was now Defence Minister, but had a long connection with Indian affairs, and with Gandhi himself. In the last week of June, Gandhi went down from Natal to Transvaal and sought an interview with the General. The changes that would satisfy them, he said, would be those permitting Indians born in South Africa to enter the Cape as before; allowing ex-indentures who had lived three years in Natal as free men to re-enter the province even if they had gone back to India; legalizing all monogamous Indian marriages celebrated within the Union; and allowing in one wife of an Indian ‘so long as she is the only one in South Africa, irrespective of the number of wives he might have in India’. He was waiting for the summons in Kallenbach’s home in Johannesburg. ‘If you require me at the telephone,’ Gandhi told the Minister, ‘you have only to ring up 1635, and I shall be at the telephone from wherever I may be.’34

  At the same time, Gandhi deputed Polak to London for a last-ditch effort to lobby the Imperial Government. Gokhale was already in the United Kingdom. They both – the one courteously, the other insistently – wrote to and met various officials of the Colonial and India Offices.35 The South African Interior Minister, Abraham Fischer, was in London too, and met Gokhale. He said ‘further legislation was out of the question’; however, he was prepared to see that the law would not be implemented harshly. Gokhale pointed out that ‘Indian sentiment attached great importance’ to the marriage question. The Minister answered that ‘South Africa could not alter her marriage law’; Indians would have to register their marriages if they wished them to be legal.36

  While in London, Henry Polak gave an interview to the Jewish Chronicle, in which he said Indians in South Africa had been ‘fighting the Jewish fight’. For ‘not a single argument that was advanced against Indians but had already been urged against Jews in one or other European country’. They were accused of unfair competition, of being an insanitary nuisance, of being strange, different, an inferior race. Out of an ‘unworthy fear’ of being classed with dark-skinned Indians, many Jews in South Africa had taken the British side. But some would not – Polak here singled out Ritch, Kallenbach, and the Cape politician Morris Alexander. Honourable Jews everywhere had to stand with Gandhi and company, insisted Polak, for ‘the Indian problem in South Africa is, at bottom, neither political nor economic. It is ethical, and I feel justified in asking for the hearty co-operation of our coreligionists in endeavouring to seek an ethical solution of it.’37

  In early July, there was a major strike in the mines around Johannesburg, provoked by managers extracting extra work for the same pay. Militants went from mine to mine, asking men to stop work. Some 20,000 white workers laid down tools, and when the owners called in the police, turned violent. They burnt the offices of the Star newspaper, looted shops, and attacked railway stations, pulling staff off trains. They then marched on the Rand Club, the watering-hole of the mine managers and owners. They were met by armed police; in the ensuing battle, a dozen miners died. They were buried the next day after a funeral procession in which more than 30,000 people participated.38

  On the day of the Rand Club affray, Gandhi and Kallenbach were in downtown Johannesburg. The Indian wanted to help nurse the wounded, but his friend said they’d better stay out of the trouble. They then walked the five miles to Kallenbach’s home in Mountain View. On the way, Gandhi ‘proposed that we should in the face of so much suffering, which we had just witnessed, have only one meal [a day]’. Kallenbach dissuaded him, saying that they should stick to the diet that was the norm at Phoenix. That was austere enough: two scant meals with no rice, no bread, no salt, no spices and no sweets.39

  As Defence Minister, General Smuts was in the thick of the battle between the Government and the miners. Gandhi recognized this, but still pressed his case for an appointment. ‘It is cruel to worry General Smuts whilst his attention is engrossed in the all-important strike matter,’ he wrote to the Minister’s secretary on 11 July. ‘But politics are a cruel game, and I am afraid I must be a party to it so long as I must to obtain all I want through that channel, rather than Passive Resistance.’ He still hoped for a compromise which would satisfy the concerns of the Government as well as the honour and prestige of the Indians.40

  Smuts’ secretary wired back to say that owing to the crisis caused by the miners’ strike he had no time to go into the settlement proposed by Gandhi. As it turned out, Gandhi’s own attentions now emphatically turned from the political to the personal. On 12 July – the day after he wrote to Smuts – a letter arrived from Phoenix which has not survived, but whose explosive contents are hinted at in Kallenbach’s diary:

  Rose at 6.45 a.m. Got letter from Manilal with enclosed for Mr G[andhi] in which he makes serious confession. Mr G. came to my office and [I] broke the news to him and gave him the letter. He felt it most keenly. We both wired to Manilal. I decided to accompany Mr Gandhi to Phoenix.41

  Manilal’s ‘confession’ was with regard to his affair with a girl at Phoenix. But this was no ordinary girl; she was Jeki, daughter of Pranjivan Mehta. In any event, his son’s violation of brahmacharya before marriage would have angered Gandhi; that he had done so with the married daughter of his closest friend and oldest patron made the transgression even harder to forgive.

  The only traces of this incident in Gandhi’s Collected Works are a brief reference in the Autobiography to ‘the moral fall of two of the inmates of the ashram’. The fallen folk are not named, nor is their sin specified.42 The details of the incident have however been painstakingly pieced together by Manilal’s biographer, Uma Meshtrie.43 There is also an account in the memoir of Millie Polak, who was a witness, if not to the actual event, to its painful aftermath. Millie does not refer to the couple by name: Jeki is called ‘Lila’ and Manilal referred to, equally misleadingly, as ‘N.’, and without his relationship to Gandhi being mentioned. Since Jeki was both married and older than Manilal, Millie thought it was ‘a case of deliberate seduction on her part’.44

  This may have been unfair. Phoenix was unusual in that it brought under one roof boys and girls who were not related together. This would not have happened in an Indian home in Gujarat (or Durban, or Johannesburg). Alth
ough Gandhi does not seem to have realized it, the risk of sexual attraction was inherent in this experiment in communal living. Manilal had seen, at first hand, the loving and even passionate relationship between his brother Harilal and his wife Chanchal. At the age of twenty it was entirely natural that he would be open to such a relationship himself. At Phoenix, he and Jeki were thrown together in the house, in the fields, in the school, on trips to the city.

  On Jeki’s side, she had stayed on at Phoenix to be mentored by her father’s friend. Living apart from her husband Manilal Doctor (who was now back in Mauritius), she probably welcomed the attentions and company of Gandhi’s son Manilal. That they developed a mutual attraction does not, in retrospect, appear to be so surprising or shocking. In fact, from an essay written by Manilal forty years later – by which time he was a father of grown-up children himself – it appears that Gandhi had for some time harboured suspicions about his son’s feelings for Jeki. In this recollection, Manilal wrote cryptically that

  I must confess to my utter shame that I was the cause of father having to undergo a fast for seven days in 1912 [sic]. I had tried to deceive him. He wanted an admission from me but I persisted in denying until at last I received a letter from him which was signed ‘Blessings from your father in Agony’. I could no longer bear it. I wanted to confess but I had not the courage to approach him direct. I, therefore, enclosed the letter in a letter to Mr Kallenbach who was to us like a member of a family. I asked father to forgive me in the letter. I received a telegram from him: ‘I forgive you. Ask God to forgive you.’45

  On receving Manilal’s letter (via Kallenbach) Gandhi rushed back to Phoenix. He spoke to the boys in the settlement, who – to shield their comrades – told first one story, then another. After evening prayers, Gandhi told the gathering that he was upset with them for ‘keeping the truth from me’. From Manilal, Gandhi ‘extracted a solemn vow that he should not marry for some years and that he would live a strictly celibate life, until such time as he, Mr Gandhi, should release him from his vow’. Jeki, apparently of her own volition, chose to repent by cutting her beautiful long hair, dressing in white (traditionally widow’s garb), and taking to a saltless diet. 46

  For several years now, Gandhi had sensed that his eldest son, Harilal, was taking a path somewhat different to that marked out for him by his father. Disenchanted with one son, Gandhi had pinned his hopes on the others. He had great expectations of Manilal especially, training him to be a brahmachari, to work with his hands, to turn his back on the rewards and comforts of a conventional career. His exhortations had had, it now appeared, limited effect. Although Manilal worked hard on the farm and at the press, although he had come forward to court arrest, he had failed the true and ultimate test by succumbing to ‘basal’ passions and having an affair with Jeki.

  Manilal’s transgression was in some ways even harder to take than his brother’s rebellion. Gandhi’s response was to fast for a whole week; after it ended, he would have only one meal a day for a year. That latter vow he had wanted to take after witnessing the violence against the miners; dissuaded by Kallenbach, he now took it as a mark of his pain at being let down by his son and his ward, and also as atonement for what he felt was his inadequate and incomplete supervision.

  Against this backdrop of political turmoil and personal strife, the series on health published by Gandhi in Indian Opinion continued serenely on. Later parts dealt with water treatments and earth cures, with fruits that could cure constipation and with ‘the husband’s duty not to agitate the wife by starting quarrels with her’ during pregnancy. The thirty-fourth instalment carried the definitive title, ‘Conclusion’. Gandhi once more clarified that he was not a trained doctor; yet, he thought, he had written this guide ‘from a worthy motive. The intention is not to recommend what medicines to take after the onset of a disease. The more immediate purpose, rather, has been to show how sickness may be averted.’47

  Even as he wrote this, Gandhi was augmenting his already considerable experience of nature cures and naturopathy. Living at Phoenix was a young Gujarati who suffered from acute rheumatism, to control which he took ‘large doses of oral medication’. Gandhi took him off the tablets and put him on a diet of fruit and tomatoes. The patient was given a series of steam-baths, one every other day. He sat, covered with blankets, on a chair beneath which was a pot of boiling water. When the water had boiled over, his sweating body was wiped clean. After several weeks of this treatment, recalled Gandhi’s young patient, ‘the pain got reduced but became mobile and began circulating in my system – one day in the knees, the other day in the wrists, and the next day either the back or the finger joints would be stiff.’ With the pain having ‘lessened comparatively’, he could now participate in the activities of the ashram.48

  The last two instalments of the series on health had appeared in the same issue of Indian Opinion: that dated 16 August 1913. Gandhi wrote that if he got time later, he would tell readers of the ‘qualities and uses of a number of simple materials’.49 For now, the author, and his periodical, would have to focus on other, though not necessarily more important questions. A fresh satyagraha loomed, and the leader had to prepare for it.

  Among the letters of solidarity received by Gandhi at this time, the most curious (and perhaps also the most charming) came from John Cordes, his somewhat errant disciple who was still in thrall to Theosophy. Cordes had recently been in India, where he met both Annie Besant and the boy she had chosen as the Representative of God on Earth, Jiddu Krishnamurti. ‘I have not met your equal regarding outward virtues,’ wrote Cordes to Gandhi. ‘You are a mystic. But in neatness J. Krishnamurti surpasses you.’50 From India, Cordes proceeded to Vienna, to see his mother. He now hoped Gandhi would ‘find money to carry on [your] next campaign’. The Theosophist had been ‘mentally arguing with friend Smuts imagining myself in possession of £100,000 which I tendered him as bribe to try to be honest for once but he said it was foreign to his nature and quite impossible, so I handed this fund to you for P[assive] R[esistance].’51

  In the middle of August, the Baptist minister Joseph Doke died. Gandhi wrote tributes to him in both English and Gujarati, and also travelled to Johannesburg to speak at a memorial service. The minister was ‘a great and altruistic man’ with no trace of class or colour prejudice, in whose house ‘every Indian, whether rich or poor, was given the same consideration’. Gandhi remembered Doke’s efforts to convert him to his faith. The Indian had answered that the ‘fullness of Christianity could only be found in its interpretation of the light and by the aid of Hinduism. But Mr Doke was not satisfied. He missed no occasion to bring home to him (the speaker) the truth as he (Mr Doke) knew it and which brought him and his so much inward peace.’52

  The memorial service for Joseph Doke was held in Johannesburg’s Baptist Church on 24 August. Two weeks later, Gandhi informed the Government that due to the continuance of the £3 tax, the racial bar in the Immigration Law, and the uncertain status of their married women, the Indians had ‘most reluctantly and with the utmost regret decided to revive passive resistance’.53 They had waited long enough in any case.

  20

  Breaking Boundaries

  In 1913, it was twenty years since Mohandas Gandhi had first come out to South Africa. In that time the Indian community had become larger and more varied in its composition. The population in Natal had tripled, from just over 40,000 in the early 1890s to about 135,000 now. A large number were indentured labourers, working in sugar plantations and coal mines. In the year 1911 the import of labour was stopped; well before that, Indians had moved out of the fields into other trades and professions. They were a visible component of the population of Natal, present in the tens of thousands in the main city, Durban, streets and sections of which were dominated by them. Indian families were also scattered through the countryside, working as farmers and traders in the towns and villages of the province.

  There were roughly 10,000 Indians in the Transvaal. These included some pros
perous merchants, a larger number of petty traders and hawkers, and a significant sector of clerks, hotel workers and other members of the salariat. The Cape had about 6,500 Indians, among them some successful traders and professionals. There were, according to the 1911 census, a mere 106 Indians in the Orange Free State. Of the main provinces of South Africa, only the Free State had no real ‘Indian problem’ at all.1

  A key difference from the time of Gandhi’s first arrival was that many more Indians were now born and raised in South Africa. There was even a ‘Colonial-Born’ Indian Association in Natal. This was their home and, increasingly, their homeland. Their connections to the Indian subcontinent now were more sentimental than substantial. It was in South Africa that they would raise families and make their future. Younger Indians especially were keen to move out of the working class into more secure and highly regarded professions such as medicine, the law and government service.

  Despite his own extended stay in South Africa, Gandhi still considered himself Indian. Yet he recognized the profound change in the orientation of the community he worked with. He would return to India, but the others would stay on, to live and labour under a government – and ruling race – that was often strongly prejudiced against their interests. This is why Gandhi was so keen to arrive at a settlement with General Smuts, whereby the rights to work and residence of Indians in all provinces of the Union were safeguarded, existing policies that bore down unfairly on them (such as the £3 tax in Natal) removed, and proposed policies that threatened the integrity of the community (such as the marriage restrictions implied by the Searle judgment) withdrawn.

  Ever the incrementalist, Gandhi had appealed to Smuts and his colleagues to have these changes in the laws made. Through 1912 and much of 1913 he had written hundreds of letters, printed dozens of appeals, sought audiences with Smuts, and lobbied MPs. By September 1913, this series of preliminary steps had got nowhere. With the government still disinclined to concede their claims, the Indians now prepared, under Gandhi’s leadership, to use their final recourse and reserve weapon, that of satyagraha.