Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  Had Gandhi always lived or worked in India, he would never have met dissident Jews or Nonconformist Christians. Life in the diaspora also exposed him more keenly to the hetereogeneity of his own homeland. Had he followed the family tradition and worked in a princely state in Kathiawar he would never have met Tamils or North Indians. Had he practised law in Bombay he could not have counted plantation workers or roadside hawkers among his clients.

  For most people, South Africa in the early 1900s was a crucible of social inequality, where individuals of one race or class learned very quickly to separate themselves from people of other races and classes. For this Indian, however, South Africa became a crucible of human togetherness, allowing him to forge bonds of affiliation with compatriots with whom, had he remained at home, he would have had absolutely no contact whatsoever.

  In this dissolving of social distinctions so prevalent (and so confining) at home, Gandhi subsumed and embodied the experience of Indians in South Africa more generally. The lives of Indians in India were circumscribed by caste, kin and religion. Even in cities such as Bombay and Calcutta, migrants tended to live with those with whom they shared a language or caste. But here in South Africa, inspired by Gandhi, the Indians came together in an inclusive social movement. This happened over a twenty-year period: first in Natal, then in the Transvaal, and finally in the massive strikes and epic march of 1913. During these satyagrahas, and in between them, Tamils, Gujaratis, Hindi-speakers; Parsis, Hindus, Muslims, Christians; high, middle, and low castes; labourers, merchants, priests ate together, talked together and struggled together.

  An intriguing manifestation of Gandhi’s cosmopolitanism was his relations with the Chinese in the Transvaal. Now, in the twenty-first century, China and India have begun increasingly to be coupled together. Both were ancient civilizations that are now assertive new nations, both have experienced a sharp spurt in economic growth. Their rise has been made more noteworthy by their size and population – together, they account for a little less than 40 per cent of all human beings on earth.

  In the context of this rise – variously viewed as alarming, admirable, and premature – these previously obscure connections between the greatest of Indian nationalists and his Chinese comrades in South Africa acquire a curious contemporary resonance. That some Chinese men were among the audience in that epochal meeting in the Empire Theatre on 11 September 1906; that these Chinese men willingly courted arrest when the satyagraha actually started; that in prison Gandhi discussed the multiple paths to God with his Chinese comrades; that the Chinese (as Gandhi acknowledged) surpassed the Indians in generosity towards their European supporters – these facts, interesting in their own right, acquire perhaps a fresh relevance now.

  When, in January 1908, the passive resisters signed a pact with the Transvaal Government, there were three signatories from their side: a Gujarati, Gandhi; a Tamil, Thambi Naidoo; and a Chinese, Leung Quinn. This implied a certain parity, each man speaking for his own particular community. Over time, Gandhi emerged as the main leader of the Asians in the Transvaal. But the support of the Tamils, and the Chinese, remained crucial to him, and his movement.

  In these years, Gandhi himself did not speak specifically of a pan-Asian solidarity. But Leung Quinn did, saying in a speech in Madras (after he was deported there) that the satyagraha in the Transvaal was for ‘the honour of Asia’. In the same manner, Smuts’ English friend H. J. Wolstenholme thought that Gandhi’s movement reflected an ‘epoch-making’ change between East and West, whereby Indians and Chinese were ‘developing rapidly a sense of nationality’ with which to challenge their European rulers.

  After he came back to India in 1915, Gandhi lost touch with his Chinese colleagues. Now, as he applied his techniques of satyagraha to win political freedom for India, nationalists in China were fighting Western (and Japanese) imperialism by other methods, namely, armed struggle. In the 1930s, the American journalist Edgar Snow went to meet Mao Zedong after the latter’s Long March. Snow was coming from India, where he had met and come to admire Gandhi. The Mahatma was by this time a figure of great world renown, especially in America, where he figured often in the New York Times and had been chosen by Time Magazine as their Man of the Year (in 1930, after his own Long March to break the salt laws). The Chinese revolutionary and the American journalist discussed the Indian path to political freedom. Mao was dismissive, since, unlike the Chinese Communists, Gandhi had not undertaken an agrarian revolution by forcibly dispossessing large landlords.12

  In the 1930s and 1940s there were few takers for Gandhian methods in China. In the China of today, however, there is an increasing interest in Gandhi and what he stood for. A prominent Chinese blogger has a portrait of Gandhi on his profile. Another admirer is the Nobel Laureate Liu Xiabao. A recent collection of his essays has many references to Mao, all hostile or pejorative, and several references to Gandhi, all appreciative. In January 2000 he wrote:

  Compared to people in other nations that have lived under the dreary pall of Communism, we resisters in China have not measured up very well. Even after so many years of tremendous tragedies, we still don’t have a moral leader like Václav Havel. It seems ironic that in order to win the right of ordinary people to pursue self-interest, a society needs a moral giant to make a selfless sacrifice. In order to secure ‘passive freedom’ – freedom from state oppression – there needs to be a will to do active resistance. History is not fated. The appearance of a single martyr can fundamentally turn the spirit of a nation and strengthen its moral fibre. Gandhi was such a figure.13

  What Liu Xiabao did not know – but we may hope one day will know – is that the ‘moral giant’ and ‘martyr’ Gandhi was supported, at an early and crucial stage of his political career, by Chinese activists such as Leung Quinn.

  The relationships that Gandhi pursued were at once personal and instrumental. He had enormous affection for his sons (or at least three of them), for his nephews, and for his Indian and European friends. But that they aided him in his social and political work was of more than incidental importance. They assisted him with his journal and his law practice; they canvassed support for his cause among the community and among the ruling race; they helped, if they had the means, to fund his public and social activities; they went, if they had the will, to jail with him.

  These ‘secondary’ characters were considerable figures in their own right. They were men and women of intelligence and commitment. And it is through them that we get to know Gandhi more fully as an individual and as an historical actor. It is through his relations with Henry Polak, Thambi Naidoo, A. M. Cachalia, Sonja Schlesin and Parsee Rustomjee that we can more properly appreciate Gandhi’s political campaigns; through his experiments with Hermann Kallenbach that we get a deeper insight into his interactions with Tolstoy and Tolstoyans and his intense desire for self-improvement (and also self-abasement); through his conversations with Raychandbhai, Joseph Doke and C. F. Andrews that we see how he arrived at his own brand of religious pluralism; through his lifelong friendship and correspondence with Pranjivan Mehta that we understand his larger ambitions for himself and his homeland; through his relations with (and misrecognitions of) Kasturba, Harilal and Manilal that we arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the man, juxtaposing his familial failures with his social and spiritual successes.

  As it happens, we can come to know Gandhi better through his South African adversaries as well. The parochial Montford Chamney, the proud General Smuts, the paranoid East Rand Vigilantes and the perfervid white mob in Natal – they shaped Gandhi’s world and world-view too. So did the militant Pathans and the jealous Durban editor P. S. Aiyar. As much as his friends and followers, his critics and enemies helped convert the earnest, naïve lawyer who arrived in Durban in 1893 into the smart, sagacious and focused thinker-activist who sailed from Cape Town in 1914.

  The two most powerful of these adversaries were the imperial pro-consul Alfred Milner and the scholar-warrior Jan Christian Smuts. History has alread
y placed Gandhi substantially above Smuts and massively above Milner. But in the South Africa of Gandhi’s day they were far more substantial figures than he. It was this perceived aysmmetry of status that led both men to treat the lawyer’s modest demands with contempt. Had either bent slightly, and taken some account of the Indian point of view, who knows what history’s verdict on Gandhi now would be? If, in 1904, Milner had agreed to legalize the existing rights of Indian traders in the Transvaal, Gandhi would have returned home without ever having thought of civil disobedience. If, three years later, Smuts had repealed the Asiatic Act and agreed to the return of about a thousand Indians who claimed pre-Boer War rights of residence, Gandhi would have returned home with no knowledge of how long he could sustain the morale of his followers.

  In 1903, the Johannesburg correspondent of the Daily Telegraph said of Lord Milner’s sanctioning of ‘locations’ that ‘the controversy it will arouse will not be confined to the Transvaal, but will extend to England and India.’ In 1907, the Natal Mercury wrote of General Smuts’ intransigence that it would ‘produce quite unforeseen results, both here and in India’. Both statements were prescient. Had either Milner or Smuts compromised early with Gandhi, he might never have had the chance to develop the technique of satyagraha, nor the confidence to think it might work in a country so large and so divided as India. In the event, the arrogance of British imperialist and Boer racist gave Gandhi the opportunity to emerge as a mass leader in South Africa and, in time, in his homeland as well.

  It was in South Africa that Gandhi achieved proficiency as a writer and editor. To be sure, he got a start in England, where his fellow vegetarians allowed him a free run of their journal. In his early years in Natal, a stream of letters to newspapers and petitions to Government poured from his pen. In 1903 he chose to start his own periodical, Indian Opinion. Its purpose was at once documentary and political: it was a journal meant to advance not Gandhi’s interests, but the interests of Indians in Natal and the Transvaal. Gandhi wrote many essays for it, in Gujarati and in English. He also supervised its production from week to week, and was chiefly responsible for its financing.

  Gandhi’s skills as writer and editor were considerable. He was, however, an indifferent, if not disastrous, public speaker. His friend and admirer Joseph Doke noted that, in Johannesburg itself, there were ‘several of his countrymen whose elocution, natural and unaffected, is far superior to his’. Gandhi spoke in a low voice, and in a monotonous tone. He ‘never waves his arms’, remarked Doke, ‘seldom move[s] a finger’.14

  And yet the Indians who heard him listened, because even if the tone was unvaried the words carried conviction. Gandhi inspired devotion not so much by his articles or speeches as by the exemplary nature of his life and conduct. His austerity, his hard work, his courage, were impressive enough to attract followers from very different backgrounds – be they Muslims or Jews or Christians or Tamils, merchants or hawkers or priests or indentured labourers. By influencing individuals of different backgrounds, he created a moral and in time political community, whose members were willing, under his leadership and direction, to embrace poverty and court imprisonment.

  The commitment of his friends to Gandhi was striking indeed. To L. W. Ritch he was always the ‘big little chief’. Henry Polak chose to travel for months in a strange land, to separate himself from his beloved wife and children, out of regard for Gandhi and his cause. Thambi Naidoo was happy to court arrest time and again, and to risk his own life to save Gandhi’s. For another serial satyagrahi, P. K. Naidoo, every time he was released the one person he ‘naturally’ most wanted to meet was Gandhi. The spirited Sonja Schlesin worked all day to keep Gandhi’s office going, while finding the time – and energy – to comfort Tamil women and carry food to their husbands in jail. And then there was Hermann Kallenbach, whose devotion was the most complete and unquestioning of them all.

  The reverence for Gandhi of his inner circle is manifest in a letter Kallenbach wrote to Chhaganlal in July 1911. The architect was leaving to see his family in Europe; in his absence, he asked Chhagan ‘to remain and continue to be the right hand of the man, whose life has given us all such a wonderful life, that we all wish to cling closer to him’. As Gandhi ‘dauntlessly pushes ahead,’ remarked Kallenbach, his disciples were sometimes unable to keep pace. Yet ‘in our sane and quiet moments, we all cannot help but rejoice about the brilliant fire burning in him, in order to re-light again and again the candle which so often loses his lustre. May we all fully recognize our good fortune to be with him and work with him.’15

  Those who spent less time with Gandhi were stirred by his example too. Among the most striking of Gandhi’s achievements is the fact that during the satyagrahas in the Transvaal in 1907–10, some 3,000 Indians courted arrest. They constituted an astonishing 35 per cent of the Indians in the colony. In September 1906, Gandhi’s friend, the Pretoria lawyer R. Gregorowski, had advised against passive resistance, as ‘not a great number of people are made of the stuff that seek martyrdom and Asiatics are no exception to the rule.’ As it turned out, however, thousands of Indians were inspired by Gandhi’s call to defy the law and go to jail.

  Notably, many of these satyagrahis were merchants. Merchants are known to be the most cautious, conservative of men – perhaps Indian merchants especially so (some would say – and Gujarati merchants most especially so). Singly or collectively, merchants are loth to take political risks or confront established authority.16

  Gandhi was mobilizing merchants in a colonial context who were living away from their homeland, in circumstances where one would expect them to be even more timid. And yet they followed their leader into prison. As did, in time, the hawkers, workers and professionals whose diasporic status would likewise have made them reluctant to throw away their livelihood by embracing a struggle so uncertain of success.

  In acting as they did, the Indians knew that their leader was not just prepared to court arrest for the cause, but to be killed for it as well. After Gandhi was attacked and nearly murdered in Durban in January 1897, he received a stirring letter of support from a Gujarati fish curer in Cape Town. This praised his ‘single-hearted efforts and fearless representations of grievances under which the unfortunate Indians suffer’. His correspondent, ‘deeply grieved’ that Gandhi ‘should have been subjected to the cruel treatments reported in the papers here … at the hands of a mad mob’, assured him ‘that the eyes of thousands [of Indians in the Cape] are on you and are watching with sympathetic appreciation on all you have done’.17

  Those who set upon Gandhi in Durban in 1897 were working-class whites. Eleven years later, he was attacked once more, this time in Johannesburg, and by a group of Pathans. Once more, his calmness and determination brought around Indians otherwise unimpressed by him and his movement. These two attempts on Gandhi’s life, and his resolution in the face of both, confirmed his standing in the community.

  Gandhi met later threats with equanimity. Thus, when stories spread in 1909 that some Pathans in Johannesburg were planning to attack him once more, he told his nephew Maganlal that he did not fear, and even welcomed, the prospect of death at the hands of his countrymen, since it would ‘unite the Hindus and Mussalmans’.18

  Gandhi, his fellow Indians knew, was ‘so frail a figure [but] so vigorous a character’, in the description of a meat-eating and whisky-guzzling Johannesburg journalist who marvelled at the unexpected or at any rate counter-intutitive courage shown by a teetotal vegetarian. Relevant here is a remark of the Gujarati headmaster who, in the 1960s, found the young Mohandas’ school records in Rajkot, which brought to light the erratic attendance and indifferent academic performance of a now most venerated figure. ‘Gandhiji, it has been well said’, wrote this teacher-archivist, ‘could fashion heroes out of common clay. His first and, undoubtedly, his most successful experiment was with himself.’19

  In his years outside India, Gandhi came gradually, and in time decisively, to turn his back on his profession. Had he not found it
hard to get briefs in Rajkot and Bombay he might never have left for Durban. In South Africa he met with considerable professional success. Slowly, however, his legal work was conducted less for monetary gain and more to aid his fellow Indians. Moving further away from the career for which he had been trained, he eventually handed over his practice to his colleagues L. W. Ritch and Henry Polak. At the same time, he began simplifying his life and his needs, exchanging a home in the city for a place on the land. Over the years, he elaborated an ascetic, workaholic regime, disregarding pleasure and leisure: no alcohol or meat, of course; no sugar or spices: and – lest it be forgotten – no sports or pastimes either.

  Gandhi’s abiding interest in the simple life in general, and in a vegetarian diet, natural methods of healing, and celibacy, in particular, are to the modern eye difficult to appreciate. Why be so fussy about what to eat and what not to eat? Why not be rational and scientific, and embrace the allopathic regimen of pills and surgeries, rather than treat illnesses with natural methods learnt from untrained quacks or of one’s own concoction? And why the obsession with brahmacharya? Is not sex one of the joys and pleasures of life? And is not sex with one’s wife in particular the very enactment and embodiment of true, enduring love?