Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  Swaminathan supervised the project as a whole, setting the texts in context by providing footnotes, cross-references and appendices. Much of the translation of Gandhi’s Gujarati letters and articles was done by Patel. The duo were helped, in these early volumes, by two others – Gandhi’s nephew Chhaganlal and his one-time alter ego Henry Polak. Chhagan passed on his large stock of Gandhi letters; with Polak, he also helped identify the authors of the usually unsigned articles in Indian Opinion. Both had been intimately involved in the production of this journal in South Africa; now, fifty years later, they assessed, as accurately as they could, which pieces could reliably be attributed to Gandhi himself.

  The first twelve volumes of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi have naturally been raided for this book. So has a supplementary volume of the Collected Works, which reproduces some letters written by Gandhi to Hermann Kallenbach, Henry and Millie Polak, and Albert West. However, almost as important to this biography have been the letters written by other people to Gandhi, a source strangely neglected in the past. In the library of the National Gandhi Museum in New Delhi, which is located across the road from his memorial in Rajghat, lie a series of large black-bound volumes containing Gandhi’s correspondence. They run chronologically, with the first ten volumes covering the period of this book. Here one finds the letters written to Gandhi by the closest associates of his South African years – Pranjivan Mehta, Henry Polak, Joseph Doke, G. K. Gokhale, C. F. Andrews, et al. These letters throw much light on Gandhi’s personality, familial relationships, religious beliefs, and social and political views.

  In the library of the Gandhi Museum, these volumes are housed in the bottom shelves of bookcases, behind sliding doors, so that they are not immediately visible, which may be one reason why they have been neglected. The letters are copies; the originals are housed in the National Archives, with copies and some additional materials also available in the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, where Gandhi lived from 1917 to 1930. Each carries a number, prefaced by the initials ‘S. N.’, for ‘Serial Number’.

  A third set of sources crucial to this work were the papers of Gandhi’s friends and associates. These contain letters about Gandhi, and reflections about Gandhi, that provide rich details and often striking insights about his multiple careers. This book has thus drawn extensively on the papers of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, housed at the National Archives of India in New Delhi; the papers of Henry Polak, split between the Rhodes House Library in Oxford and the Asian and African Collections of the British Library in London; the papers of Hermann Kallenbach, at the time this book was being researched in the Israeli town of Haifa (but at the time it is being finished in the process of being transferred to a public archive in India); and the papers of Joseph Doke, held in part in the South African Baptist Union archives in Johannesburg and in part in the papers of his son C. M. Doke, which are kept in the library of the University of South Africa (UNISA) in Pretoria. Among the other manuscript collections that have been helpful in my research are the Louis Fischer Papers, held at the New York Public Library; a diary of Kallenbach’s for 1912–13 that is in the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad; and the papers of the Servants of India Society, which are housed at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi (NMML). The NMML also has a vast cache of Gandhi papers; while these deal principally with the 1930s and 1940s, there is some material on South Africa, including a file of news clippings on the 1913–14 satyagraha apparently maintained by Henry Polak. I have also drawn abundantly on Gandhi-related materials collected over the years by E. S. Reddy. Some of Mr Reddy’s papers are housed at the Sterling Library in Yale University; some at the NMML; and some are retained by him in New York.

  A fourth major source were the archival records of the Indian, South African and British Governments. The racial policies of the South African state, and the reactions to them in London and India, are often best reconstructed through these records. They are particularly valuable in understanding how Gandhi’s political adversaries – from the lowly Protector of Asiatics to elevated Ministers, Prime Ministers and Governor Generals – wrote about and responded to him.

  Records pertaining to Gandhi’s years in Natal were photocopied at the public archives in Pietermaritzburg by E. S. Reddy; these copies now rest in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi. Even more valuable are a series of eight microfilms of records from Natal Government House. These are held at the NMML, which obtained them in the 1970s, when the Indian Government had no dealings with the apartheid regime. A visionary archivist persuaded an American scholar with a large budget to film these records and pass on a copy to New Delhi. Running to some 10,000 pages, these microfilms are an invaluable window into the lives and labours of Indians in South Africa, and of the role played therein by a certain M. K. Gandhi.

  The records of the Transvaal Government, and of the Union of South Africa itself, are kept in the National Archives of South Africa. These are housed in what may be the most unattractive building in Pretoria. However, the richness of the materials within compensate for the horror without. More attractive, at least from the outside, is the National Archives in New Delhi, where I consulted the records of the Foreign and Political Department (for Kathiawar), the Emigration Branch of the Department of Commerce and Industry (dealing with the Indian diaspora) and the Home Department (regarding the ban on Gandhi’s book, Hind Swaraj). Supplementary material was also located in the Maharashtra State Archives in Mumbai and the Tamil Nadu State archives in Chennai.

  A third set of state records are held in London, which, c. 1869–1914, was the capital of an Empire whose territories included all of India and most of South Africa. Particularly helpful to this project were the Colonial Office records, kept in the National Archives of the United Kingdom, at Kew; and the records of the old India Office, held by the British Library in St Pancras, both of which contain much valuable material on Gandhi and his struggles.

  Also useful were the papers of the proconsuls themselves. I consulted the papers of Lord Selborne at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and of Lord Ripon and Lord Gladstone in the British Library in London.

  Letters, manuscripts and government records are generally classified as ‘unpublished primary sources’. Turning next to ‘primary printed sources’, I have drawn on the rich series of Parliamentary Papers on South Africa (which reproduce many letters from the archives); on the published volumes of the Jan Christian Smuts correspondence, edited by Keith Hancock and Jean Van Der Poel; and on various government reports published between (roughly) 1890 and 1910.

  An absolutely critical source for this book – oddly overlooked by previous biographers – have been newspapers printed in the three countries Gandhi lived in and had dealings with. I have thus drawn extensively on relevant reports in the British press, and on newspaper comments on Gandhi and his activities published in Indian newspapers and, most importantly, in South Africa.

  Twelve bound volumes of news clippings are kept in a Godrej almirah in the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad. They cover the period 1894 to 1901, and deal principally with attitudes to Indians and Gandhi in Natal. While kept separately, in the ashram’s catalogue they are indexed chronologically with the letters by and to Gandhi. I have therefore cited them too by their ‘S. N.’, or ‘Serial Number’.

  Who maintained these clippings? I think it very likely that it was Gandhi himself. How did they get to Sabarmati? The veteran Gandhian activist Narayan Desai thinks that they were brought back from South Africa by Chhaganlal Gandhi. In that case, it may be that when Gandhi left for India in 1901, the clippings were left behind in Natal in the keeping of a friend (Parsee Rustomjee?), and later salvaged by Chhaganlal. This, of course, is speculation – what is hard fact is that the clippings are now at Sabarmati. They provide a fascinating perspective on how the young Gandhi was viewed by the white public of Natal.

  In 1903, on his return to South Africa, Gandhi started Indian Opinion. The newspaper regularly excerpted reports and commentary from other peri
odicals, which I have drawn upon in my narrative. Indian Opinion itself is indispensable for a fuller understanding of Gandhi, his community, his struggles and his time. The volumes from 1903 to 1914 (inclusive) have been put on CD-ROM by the National Gandhi Museum. I read these 500-odd issues on a large computer, consistently absorbed and fascinated by their content and tone, taking notes on a split screen as I read. (My notes ran to 40,000 words, only a fraction of which have found their way into the preceding pages).

  The news clippings at Sabarmati and the material in Indian Opinion (whether original to that journal or reproduced from elsewhere) were very revealing indeed. So were copies of African Chronicle, the newspaper of Gandhi’s rival P. S. Aiyar, microfilms of which are held in the British Library’s newspaper section, in the north London suburb of Collindale. For key incidents in Gandhi’s life and the satyagrahas he led, I also consulted copies of The Times of London; the Transvaal Leader, the Rand Daily Mail; the Star of Johannesburg; the Natal Advertiser; and the Madras Mail. Particularly valuable were the microfilms of the Natal Mercury for the period 1893–1914 housed at the NMML, and presumably brought there by a route as devious (and creative) as the microfilms of Natal Government House.

  The last set of sources consist of printed books and essays. I have, where necessary and relevant, used secondary works by specialists published in recent decades. However, I have also read many books and pamphlets published in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, to get a direct, unmediated flavour of how the debates in which Gandhi figured were understood and articulated at the time.

  As explained in the prologue, this book sought in the first instance to go beyond the Collected Works, and thus to provide an account that did not rely exclusively or even largely on what Gandhi said and wrote. The sources described above, which were consulted over many years in many different collections, have allowed me to paint what I trust is a portrait, from all angles, of Gandhi’s life before his departure from South Africa in July 1914. During the course of my research I also found many letters written by Gandhi that, for one reason or another, had not been published or known of before. These previously unknown or uncollected letters lie in the National Archives of India and of South Africa, in the British Library, in the C. M. Doke papers in Pretoria, in the Kallenbach Papers in Haifa, and in the papers of E. S. Reddy in New York and New Delhi. They reveal unexpected details of Gandhi’s motivations, of how, at various critical moments, he behaved towards the Natal, Transvaal and Indian Governments; towards his fellow passive resisters; and towards his eldest son.

  Notes

  ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES

  AC

  African Chronicle

  APAC/BL

  Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London

  BL

  British Library, London

  C. M. Doke Papers

  C. M. Doke Collection, Documentation Centre for African Studies, UNISA Library, Pretoria

  CO

  Colonial Office

  CWMG

  Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Government of India, 1958 onwards).

  Gandhi, An Autobiography

  M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography, or the Story of My Experiments with Truth, translated from the Gujarati by Mahadev Desai (first published in 1927; 2nd edn, 1940; reprint Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1995). There are many print editions of Gandhi’s autobiography in English, published in India, the United Kingdom, the United States and other countries. And there will be more. The book has also been translated into many languages. The pagination of these editions varies enormously. Therefore in my references to it I have cited Part and Chapter rather than page numbers. However, since the book originated in a series of newspaper articles, each chapter is merely a few pages long, so my citations will be relatively easy to track down by those who have editions other than mine, or in languages other than English.

  ILN

  Illustrated London News

  IO

  Indian Opinion

  IR

  Indian Review

  J. J. Doke Papers

  J. J. Doke Papers, South African Baptist Union Archives, Johannesburg

  KP

  Hermann Kallenbach papers, in the possession of Isa Sarid, Haifa, Israel

  Memorial

  Memorial to The Right Honourable Joseph Chamberlain, Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary for the Colonies, by the British Indians in Natal, re Anti-Indian Demonstration

  MSA

  Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai

  NA

  Natal Advertiser

  NAI

  National Archives of India, New Delhi

  NAUK

  National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew

  NASA

  National Archives of South Africa, Pretoria

  NGM

  National Gandhi Museum, Delhi

  NM

  Natal Mercury

  NMML

  Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi

  NYPL

  New York Public Library, New York

  S.N.

  Serial Number(s)

  SAAA

  Sabarmati Ashram Archives, Ahmedabad

  PROLOGUE: GANDHI FROM ALL ANGLES

  1 http://freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=70&275 (accessed 26 July 2011).

  2. Cf. reports in New York Times, 16 February 2011; and in New Yorker, 11 April 2011. These various affirmations, personal and political, have provoked vigorous denunciations from left-wing critics disenchanted – or even disgusted – by how widely Gandhi is admired across the world. In the London Review of Books, the political theorist Perry Anderson launched a three-part attack on Gandhi and his legacy, calling him an ‘autocrat’ and ‘Hindu revivalist’ whose thought contained ‘a battery of archaisms’, and whose ‘conception of himself as a vessel of divine intention allowed him to escape the trammels of human logic or coherence’. Anderson went on to suggest that Gandhi’s intellectual weaknesses were substantially responsible for the flawed nature of Indian democracy today. See London Review of Books, 5 July, 19 July and 2 August 2012. The length (the series ran to some 50,000 words in all), the (harsh, often angry) tone, and the fact that Anderson had never (in a five decade long career) previously written anything on Gandhi (or India) lends credence to the speculation that the series was provoked by Gandhi’s (to the Marxist) inexplicable popularity so long after his death.

  3. On Gandhi’s Gujarati and English prose styles, see, respectively, C. N. Patel, Mahatma Gandhi in his Gujarati Writings (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1981); Sunil Khilnani, ‘Gandhi and Nehru: The Uses of English’, in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, ed., An Illustrated History of English Literature in English (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003).

  4. The project of compiling all of Gandhi’s writings was launched in February 1956, eight years after his death. The first volume in the series was published in 1958; the ninetieth and last, in 1984. Seven supplementary volumes were then published, consisting of letters collected too late to include in the chronological volumes. A ‘subject index’ and an ‘index of persons’ followed. That made it ninety-nine; whereupon, to satisfy the Indian’s incurable love of symmetry, a book of ‘prefaces’ to the individual volumes was also brought out. The Collected Works have been published in three languages – English, Gujarati and Hindi.

  5. Two older books on Gandhi that deal specifically with his South African experience are Robert A. Huttenback, Gandhi in South Africa (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971); Maureen Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985). Written by scholars rather than journalists, both works were important and necessary – at the time at which they appeared. Focusing on Gandhi’s public career, neither dealt with his personal, familial or religious life. Neither scholar did any serious research on Indian sources; and of course many important sources outside India have come to light in the decades since their books were published
.

  6. H. S. L. Polak, ‘Passive Resistance Movement in South Africa’, typescript composed c. 1908–12, Mss. Afr. R. 125, Rhodes House Library, Oxford, p. 103.

  7. Bhawani Dayal, Dakshin Africa ké Satyagraha ka Itihas (Indore: Saraswati Sadan, 1916), p. 1 (my translation).

  1 MIDDLE CASTE, MIDDLE RANK

  1. The classical or scriptural name for this category of Hindus is ‘Vaishya’. However, the Vaishyas are more often referred to in everyday conversation as ‘Bania’ (or, in the plural, as ‘Banias’). The name is subject to regional variations and alternate spellings, among them ‘Vaniya’, ‘Baniya’ and even ‘Bunyan’.

  2. A lexicon in Gandhi’;s mother tongue, Gujarati, says of them that Vaniyani mochchh nichi (‘the Bania is always ready to compromise’; literally, ‘the Bania’s moustache is ready to droop downwards’); Vaniya Vaniya fervi tol (‘the Bania always changes according to circumstance’); Vaniya mugnu naam pade nahi (‘the Bania will not commit himself to anything’). To this a Gujarati–English dictionary adds, Jaate Vaniyabhai, etle todjod karvaman kushal (‘Being born a merchant, he was possessed of tact and was good in settling quarrels’). See Achyut Yagnik and Suchitra Sheth, The Shaping of Modern Gujarat: Plurality, Hinduism, and Beyond (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 34.

  3. See David Hardiman, Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), especially Chapter 4 (quotes from pp. 68–9, 71, 75).

  4. Harald Tambs-Lyche, Power, Profit and Poetry: Traditional Society in Kathiawar, Western India (Delhi: Manohar, 1997), Chapter IX (‘The Banias: The Merchant Estate’).

  5. Cf. Howard Spodek, Urban–Rural Integration in Regional Development: A Case Study of Saurashtra, India, 1800–1960 (University of Chicago Geography Research Papers, 1976), p. 11.

  6. Ibid., pp. 2–3.