Gandhi Before India
Page 73
59. Gandhi, An Autobiography, Part IV, Chapter XVIII. Cf. also M. L. Dantwala, ‘Gandhiji and Ruskin’s Unto This Last’, Economic and Political Weekly, 4 November 1995.
60. CWMG, IV, pp. 319–21.
61. West, ‘In the Early Days with Gandhi – 1’.
62. Letter of 13 January 1905, CWMG, IV, pp. 332–3.
63. Sir William Wedderburn to Colonial Office, 13 January 1899, in Natal Government House Records, Reel 2 (Accession No. 2175), NMML.
64. ‘Notes taken at interview with Sir Denzil Ibbetson on the 5 February 1903’, in Natal Government House Records, Reel 1 (Accession No. 2174), NMML.
65. Note dated 23 May 1904, in Mss. Eur. F 111/258, APAC/BL.
8 PLURALIST AND PURITAN
1. Eric Itzkin, Gandhi’s Johannesburg: Birthplace of Satyagraha (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2000), pp. 61–3.
2. H. S. L. Polak, ‘Early Years (1869–1914)’, in H. S. L. Polak, H. N. Brailsford and Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Mahatma Gandhi (London: Oldhams Press Limited, 1949), p. 49.
3. Ramadas Gandhi, Sansmaran, translated from Gujarati to Hindi by Shankar Joshi (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1970), pp. 12–13, 47–8.
4. See IO, 7 January and 13 May 1905.
5. Reports in IO, 22 and 29 April 1905.
6. Reports in IO, 7 January and 18 February 1905.
7. Reports in IO, 27 May, 3 June, 5 August and 2 September 1905.
8. CWMG, V, pp. 5, 27–8, 50–52, 56–7, 61–2.
9. CWMG, IV, p. 441; V, pp. 65–8.
10. CWMG, V, p. 55; IV, p. 347.
11. This account of Gandhi’s lectures and their aftermath draws on CWMG, IV, pp. 368–70, 375–7, 405–9, 430–1, 454, 458–9, 468–9; V, pp. 42, 49–50; and on letters in the Gujarati section of Indian Opinion, issues of 20 May, 3 and 17 June 1905.
12. IO, issues of 4 and 11 November 1905, CWMG, V, pp. 121–2, 131–2.
13. Gandhi to Revashankar Jhaveri, 18 July 1905, in CWMG, V, p. 21.
14. See Chandulal Bhagubhai Dalal, Harilal Gandhi: A Life, edited and translated from the Gujarati by Tridip Suhrud (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007), pp. 6–7.
15. Gandhi to Chhaganlal, 27 September 1905, CWMG, V, p. 78.
16. Millie Graham Polak, Mr Gandhi: The Man (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931), pp. 17–18.
17. Gandhi to Millie Graham, 3 July 1905, CWMG, XCVI, pp. 1–2.
18. Gandhi, An Autobiography, Part IV, Chapter XXII.
19. Millie Polak, Mr Gandhi, pp. 21–7, 29–35, 43–5, 62–3.
20. H. S. L. Polak, ‘Mahatma Gandhi: Some Early Reminscences’, typescript probably from the early 1930s, in Mss Eur D.1238/1, APAC/BL.
21. Millie Polak, Mr Gandhi, pp. 25–6.
22. Report in IO, 27 January 1906.
23. Editorial in IO, 16 June 1906.
24. Cf. Isaac Deutscher, ‘The Non-Jewish Jew’ (based on a lecture to the World Jewish Congress, February 1958), in Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (1968; reprint, London: Merlin Press, 1981).
25. See Richard Mendelsohn, Sammy Marks: ‘The Uncrowned King of the Transvaal’ (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991), especially Chapter 11.
26. Gandhi to Kallenbach, undated, c. 1904–5, handwritten, in KP. This letter is not in CWMG.
27. See Prabhudas Gandhi, My Childhood with Gandhiji (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1957), pp. 59–60.
28. IO, 24 March 1906, CWMG, V, p 243. On Gandhi’s friendship with Dr Abdurahman, see also Gavin Lewis, Between the Wire and the Wall: A History of South African ‘Coloured’ Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), pp. 54, 63, 78, etc.; and James D. Hunt, ‘Gandhi and the Black People of South Africa’, Gandhi Marg, April–June 1989.
29. Joseph J. Doke, M. K. Gandhi: An Indian Patriot in South Africa (London: The London Indian Chronicle, 1909), pp. 1–2. For more on Doke, see Chapters 11 to 14 below.
30. J. H. Balfour Browne, South Africa: A Glance at Current Conditions and Politics (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1905), pp. 200–202.
31. See Saul Dubow, ‘Colonial Nationalism, the Milner Kindergarten, and the Rise of “South Africanism”, 1902–10, History Workshop Journal, 43 (Spring 1997).
32. Letter of 21 September 1905, A Proceedings, no. 11, April 1906, Department of Commerce and Industry (Emigration), NAI.
33. Letter of 21 May 1906, ibid., no. 3, May 1906.
34. CWMG, V, pp. 142–52, 236–8.
35. See reports in IO, 3 March, 17 March, 26 May and 9 June 1906; Charles DiSalvio, The Man Before the Mahatma: M. K. Gandhi, Attorney-at-Law (NOIDA, UP: Random House India, 2012), pp. 209–13.
36. Montford Chamney, ‘Mahatma Ghandi [sic] in the Transvaal’, typescript dated c. 1935, Mss Eur. C. 859, APAC/BL, pp. 6, 16–17.
37. Gandhi to M. Chamney, letters of 9 March, 9 April and 19 May 1906 (not in CWMG); Chamney to Assistant Colonial Secretary, 9 April 1906, all in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 3, Accession No. 2176, NMML.
38. See Shula Marks, Reluctant Rebellion: The 1906–8 Disturbances in Natal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), Part IV.
39. IO, 28 April 1906.
40. IO, 16 and 23 June 1906.
41. CWMG, V, pp. 281–2, 348, 368–74.
42. Edward Roux, Time Longer than Rope: The Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa (first published 1948; 2nd edn, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), pp. 96, 104.
43. Padmanabh S. Jaini, The Jaina Path of Purification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 175–6, 183.
44. Quoted in James Laidlaw, Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 237.
45. Gandhi, ‘Preface to “Srimad Rajchandra”’, CWMG, XXXII, p. 6.
46. Cf. Gail Hinich Sutherland, Nonviolence, Comsumption and Community among Ancient Indian Ascetics (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1997), pp. 6–7 and passim.
47. Gandhi, An Autobiography, Part III, Chapters VII and VIII.
48. ‘The First Step’, in The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy, vol. XIX, translated and edited by Leo Wiener (Boston: Dana Estes and Company, 1905), pp. 391–2 and passim.
9 TROUBLE IN THE TRANSVAAL
1. Eric Itzkin, Gandhi’s Johannesburg: Birthplace of Satyagraha (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2000), pp. 68–9.
2. Millie Graham Polak, ‘My South African Days with Gandhiji’, Indian Review, October 1964.
3. Unlike in early modern Europe, wealthy Indian merchants were not often patrons of the arts or of artists. The patronage of art and music was more characteristic of Kshatriya and Muslim nobles; besides, Banias did not want to draw attention to great wealth if they had it. A third, enduring, Gandhi characteristic may also be a residue of his Bania upbringing – an indifference to, and a lack of ability in, modern sports such as cricket, football, and tennis.
4. These paragraphs on Gandhi’s life with the Polaks in Johannesburg in 1906 are based on Millie Graham Polak, Mr Gandhi: The Man (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931), pp. 70–87.
5. The letter is reproduced in Chandulal Bhagubhai Dalal, Harilal Gandhi: A Life, edited and translated from the Gujarati by Tridip Suhrud (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007), pp. 225–6.
6. Chanchal was also known as ‘Gulab’. Many girls in Saurashtra carried two names, one given by the mother’s family, the other by the father’s family. In this book however I have referred to her as ‘Chanchal’ throughout, or by its diminutive, ‘Chanchi’, by which she was also known.
7. Gandhi to Laxmidas, 27 May 1906, CWMG, V, p. 334–5.
8. Gandhi to Chamney, 13 August 1906, in File E 26/8, vol. 215, ‘ND’, NASA. This letter is not in CWMG.
9. Chamney to Gandhi, 15 September 1906; Gandhi to Chamney, 17 September 1906 (not in CWMG), both in File E 26/8, vol. 215, ‘ND’, NASA.
10. Letter of 27 September, in CWMG, V, pp. 408–9.
11. Bala Pillay, British Indians in the Transvaal: Trade, Politi
cs and Imperial Relations, 1885–1906 (London: Longman, 1976), pp. 210–12.
12. Statement to the press, 4 August 1906, in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 2, Accession No. 2175, NMML.
13. See Deborah Lavin, From Empire to Commonwealth: A Biography of Lionel Curtis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 59–60.
14. Lionel Curtis, quoted in Keith Breckenridge, ‘Gandhi’s Progressive Disillusionment: Thumbs, Fingers, and the Rejection of Scientific Modernism in Hind Swaraj’, Public Culture, 23:2 (2011), p. 339.
15. See Lionel Curtis, With Milner in South Africa (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1951), p. 348. Curtis probably meant Trinidad or Guyana rather than Jamaica. In a book published in 1908, he outlined his larger vision for South Africa:
The present population of white to coloured is one to six; and how far the future population is to be drawn from the higher and how far from the lower races of mankind is the issue which hangs on the native problem of to-day. The answer depends upon whether South Africa accommodates her industrial system to the habits of the whites or to those of the coloured races. If the system is one in which the lower races thrive better than the higher, the coloured element will grow at the expense of the European. South Africa will then sink to the level of States such as those of central and southern America – republics in name and not seldom tyrannies in fact, unequal to the task of their own internal government and too weak to exert an influence on the world’s affairs. If, on the other hand, the scheme of society offers the white population, instead of the coloured population, to be built up from outside as well as from its own natural increase, so that in the course of years the one gains upon the other, this country will gradually assume its place beside England, the United States, Canada, or Australia, as one of the powers of the world and share in the direction of its future.
To achieve this ideal, said Curtis, the ‘promotion and control of immigration is a matter of supreme importance’. The Asiatic Ordinance was therefore a natural outcome of this view of the world – and of South Africa in particular. See Anon., The Government of South Africa (2 vols) (South Africa: Central News Agency, Ltd., 1908), vol. 1, pp. 156–8. Although without an author (or place of publication), the All Souls copy of this book has ‘by L. G. Curtis’ written on it in pencil on the title page. It appears the book was compiled and edited by Curtis on the basis of reports on different subjects written by others, which he then wove into a single, coherent narrative.
16. CWMG, V, pp. 400–405, 409–12.
17. Gregorowski to Gandhi 6 September 1906, quoted in Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi, III: The Birth of Satyagraha – from Petitioning to Passive Resistance (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1986) pp. 492–3.
18. Quoted in IO, 22 September 1906.
19. This account of the 11 September meeting is based on reports in IO, 15 and 22 September 1906; in CWMG, V, pp. 419–23, 439–43; and in NM, 12 September 1906.
20. Charles DiSalvio has pointed out that the first time Gandhi advocated the courting of arrest was in fact in January 1904, when, in an editorial in Indian Opinion, he wrote that merchants seeking permanent licences ‘must make respectful representations to the Government’, but if these failed, should trade without a licence, refuse to pay a fine for doing so, and go to jail. (See Charles DiSalvio, The Man Before the Mahatma: M. K. Gandhi, Attorney-at-Law (NOIDA, UP: Random House India, 2012), pp. 195–6.) That early suggestion was then set aside for more than two years, in which time many respectful representations were made to Government. The proposal hesitantly offered in print in January 1904 was now, in September 1906, ringingly endorsed in a mass meeeting of several thousand Indians.
21. James D. Hunt, Gandhi and the Non-Conformists: Encounters in South Africa (New Delhi: Promilla and Co., 1986), Chapters 3 and 4.
22. Cf. J. G. James, ‘The Ethics of Passive Resistance’, International Journal of Ethics, 14:3 (1904).
23. IO, 6 October 1906, CWMG, V, p. 461.
24. See Howard Spodek, ‘On the Origins of Gandhi’s Political Methodology: The Heritage of Kathiawad and Gujarat’, Journal of Asian Studies, 30:2 (1971). It was not merely in Kathiawar that these methods of protest were used. In the early nineteenth century, when the British took over the holy city of Banaras, they imposed a new house tax on its residents. This led to a popular outcry, with petitions being sent to Government urging that there were too many taxes already, and that with the stagnation in trade the residents of Benares could not bear another one. A magistrate reported that ‘the people are extremely clamorous; they have shut up their shops, abandoned their usual occupations, and assemble in multitudes with a view to extort from me an immediate compliance with their demands, and to prevail with me to direct the Collector to withdraw the assessors.’
The resisters in Banaras called a mass assembly, sending emissaries to hamlets and localities for volunteers. In the event, some 20,000 people sat on protest, demanding that the tax be withdrawn. ‘At present open violence does not seem their aim,’ wrote the Collector of Benares to his superior, ‘they seem rather to vaunt their security in being unarmed in that a military force would not use deadly weapons against such inoffensive foes. And in this confidence they collect and increase, knowing that the civil power can not disperse them, and thinking that the military will not.’ See Dharampal, Civil Disobedience and Indian Tradition: With Some Early Nineteenth Century Documents (Varanasi: Sarva Seva Sangh Prakashan, 1971). Other pre-modern forms of customary rebellion that in some ways anticipate Gandhian satyagraha are also discussed in Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (first published in 1989; 3rd edn, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010), Chapter IV.
25. Chinese Consul-General to Governor of the Transvaal, 13 September 1906, in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 3, Accession No. 2176, NMML.
26. Letter of 17 September 1906, copy in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 2, Accession No. 2175, NMML.
10 A LOBBYIST IN LONDON
1. ‘Hajee Ojeer Ally’, IO, 6 October 1906, in CWMG, V, pp. 459–60.
2. H. S. L. Polak, ‘Passive Resistance Movement in South Africa’, typescript composed c. 1908–12, Mss. Afr. R. 125, Rhodes House Library, Oxford, pp. 221–4.
3. CWMG, VI, pp. 1–3.
4. Letter of 26 October 1906, in CWMG, VI, pp. 17–20.
5. Letter of 26 October 1906, in CWMG, VI, pp. 21–2.
6. Cf. James D. Hunt, Gandhi in London (revised edn, New Delhi: Promilla and Co, 1993), p. 62.
7. Letter of 21 September 1906, in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 3, Accession No. 2176, NMML.
8. ‘Petition of British Subjects, Natives of India, resident in the Transvaal and elsewhere’, in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 3, Accession No. 2176, NMML.
9. Letter in the Rand Daily Mail, 28 March 1904, reproduced in Correspondence Relating to the Position of British Indians in the Transvaal (in Continuation of Cd. 1684) (London: HMSO, 1904).
10. See correspondence in File 15/12/1906, vol. 951, GOV, NASA.
11. See correspondence in File GEN 1031/06, vol. 203, GOV, NASA.
12. Telegram dated 21 November 1906, in Correspondence Relating to Legislation Affecting Asiatics in the Transvaal (Cd. 3308 – in Continuation of Cd. 3251) (London: HMSO, 1907).
13. See ‘Lost Hospitals of London: Lady Margaret Hospital’, http://ezitis.myzen.co.uk/ladymargaret.xhtml (accessed 12 October 2011).
14. Letters to Dr J. Oldfield, 26 and 27 October 1906; letters to H. O. Ally, 26 and 27 October 1906, in CWMG, VI, pp. 23, 26, 32–3, 33–4.
15. See Indulal Yajnik, Shyamaji Krishnavarma: Life and Times of an Indian Revolutionary (Bombay: Lakshmi Publications, 1950); Harald Fischer-Tine, ‘Indian Nationalism and the “World Forces”: Transnational and Diasporic Dimensions of the Indian Freedom Movement on the Eve of the First World War’, Journal of Global History, 2:3 (2007).
16. Letter to J. H. L. Polak, 30 October 1906, CWMG, VI, pp. 40–
41.
17. IO, 1 December 1906, CWMG, VI, pp. 83–4.
18. Letter of 3 November 1906, CWMG, VI, pp. 78–80.
19. Sir Lepel may have been influenced by M. M. Bhownaggree’s view (as expressed in the House of Commons in June 1905) that ‘the real opposition’ to Indians in South Africa ‘did not proceed from British colonists from the better class, but was mainly led by a low class of aliens, Polish Jews and such like, who were permitted rights and liberties denied to the Indian subjects of the Crown’. In quoting this speech, John Mcleod (in his forthcoming book Indian Tory) notes that the Parsee politician saw world history as a great struggle between Aryans (among whom he included Indians) and Semites (especially Jews), hence this interpretation, certainly a mistaken one, with no credence in fact or in any materials Gandhi might have sent Bhownaggree from South Africa.
20. The proceedings of the meeting, from which this account draws, are reproduced in CWMG, VI, pp. 113–26.
21. Letter of 9 November 1906, CWMG, VI, p. 133.
22. Secretary of State for the Colonies to the Governor of the Transvaal, 29 November 1906, in Correspondence Relating to Legislation Affecting Asiatics.
23. The Times, 10 November 1906.
24. Letter of 16 November 1906, in CWMG, VI, pp. 168–9.
25. George Birdwood to M. K. Gandhi, 3 November 1906, S. N. 449, SAAA.
26. See File 827, L/P&J/6/752, APAC/BL.
27. CWMG, VI, pp. 224–6.
28. As reported in IO, 29 December 1906, CWMG, VI, pp. 257–60.
29. Letter of 27 November 1906, CWMG, VI, p. 237.
30. See report of meeting in IO, 29 December 1906.
31. CWMG, VI, pp. 244–6.
32. Letter dated 3 December 1906, A Progs No. 4, May 1907, in Department of Commerce and Industry (Emigration), NAI.
33. Governor of Transvaal to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 14 January 1907, in Correspondence Relating to Legislation Affecting Asiatics.