Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  A celebrated Irish historian, on hearing I was working on this book, hoped that I would write at length on ‘Gandhi’s gay lover’. Would that I could. Alas, the relationship between Gandhi and Kallenbach was that between brothers. And, as the later chapters of this book show, Gandhi continued to have a close, continuous and deeply intimate (if also occasionally contentious) relationship with his wife Kasturba.

  58. Hermann Kallenbach to Simon Kallenbach, 10/14 June 1908, KP (the letter was originally written in German; the translation is by Kallenbach’s niece Hannah Lazar).

  59. Meyer, A Winter in South Africa, p. 72.

  60. There is a useful and (so far as I can tell) reliable discussion in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrotherapy.

  61. CWMG, VIII, pp. 328–30.

  62. Gandhi to Albert Cartwright, 14 July 1908, CWMG, VIII, pp. 361–3.

  63. Speech of 18 May 1908, in CWMG, VIII, pp. 242–6.

  64. CWMG, VIII, pp. 379, 382, 384–6.

  65. These paragraphs are based on a forthcoming pamphlet by E. S. Reddy entitled Thambi Naidoo and His Family: The Story of Thambi Naidoo, a Lieutenant of Gandhi in the Satyagraha in South Africa, and of his Family which Sacrificed for Five Generations in the Struggle for a Free South Africa.

  66. Report in IO, 1 August 1908.

  67. ‘No Quarter’, IO, 15 August 1908.

  68. Reports in the Johannesburg Star of 8, 9, 10 and 20 July 1908, in Further Correspondence Relating to Legislation Affecting Asiatics.

  69. Gandhi to Chamney, 4 August 1908, in File No. E 26/8, vol. 215, ‘ND’, NASA (this letter is not in CWMG).

  70. Jail form, dated 23 June 1910, ibid.

  71. ‘Resolutions Passed by the Hamidia Islamia Society, Johannesburg, 28 July 1908’, in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 4, Accession No. 2177, NMML.

  72. Letter in IO, 8 August 1908, in CWMG, VIII, pp. 432–3.

  14 PRISONER OF CONSCIENCE

  1. See press reports in CWMG, VIII, pp. 443, 447.

  2. Cf. illustrations in CWMG, VIII, opposite pp. 32, 33, 81, etc.

  3. CWMG, VIII, p. 451.

  4. ‘Joh’burg Mass Meeting’, IO, 22 August 1908.

  5. CWMG, VIII, pp. 457–60.

  6. Transvaal Leader, quoted in CWMG, VIII, p. 463

  7. See the report on this meeting of 18 August 1908 in Further Correspondence Relating to Legislation Affecting Asiatics in the Transvaal (Cd. 4327 – in continuation of Cd. 3892) (London: HMSO, 1908).

  8. See report in File 3722, L/P&J/6/894, APAC/BL.

  9. Excerpt from Transvaal Leader, 22 August 1908, ibid.

  10. Excerpt of debate in Transvaal Parliament, in File 3722, L/P&J/6/894, APAC/BL.

  11. Governor of the Transvaal to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 5 September 1908, in Further Correspondence Relating to Legislation Affecting Asiatics.

  12. To invoke, I hope not too anachronistically, the title of a book by the Anglo-American philosopher Alasdair Macintyre.

  13. CWMG, VIII, pp. 473–7.

  14. CWMG, VIII, pp. 481: IX, pp. 3, 8, 13, 29, etc.

  15. CWMG, IX, p. 4; Bhawani Dayal, Dakshin Africa ké Satyagraha ka Itihas (Indore: Saraswati Sadan, 1916), p. 24.

  16. Interview in the Star, 9 September 1908, CWMG, IX, pp. 30–31.

  17. Extract from Transvaal Weekly Illustrated, 12 September 1908, in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 4, Accession No. 2177, NMML.

  18. Doke to Gandhi, 11 September 1908, S. N. 4874, NGM (emphases in original).

  19. CWMG, VIII, pp. 16, 41.

  20. On Gandhi’s ideas for the Phoenix school, see CWMG, VIII, p. 85; IX, pp. 135–9.

  21. Interview in Natal Mercury, in CWMG, IX, pp. 77–9.

  22. Doke to Gandhi, 30 September 1908, CWMG, IX, Appendix VI, pp. 556–7.

  23. Message dated 13 October 1908, CWMG, IX, pp. 96–7.

  24. See Deputy Governor of the Transvaal to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 30 September 1908, in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 4, Accession No. 2177, NMML; ‘Volksrust Again: Mr Gandhi Sentenced’, IO, 17 October 1908.

  25. See reports in IO, 24 October and 21 November 1908. British friends of Gandhi also rallied to his defence. Three days after his arrest, the Rev. F. B. Meyer sent a stirring letter to the Daily News (quoted in IO, 21 November 1908). Meyer wrote that he could:

  hardly believe the evidence of my senses, when I read the announcement that my friend, Mr Gandhi, has been sentenced to two months’ hard labout and to breaking stones and doing scavenger work. But I wish I were in Johannesburg that I might help him! I would count it an honour to suffer with this pure and holy soul, whom I hope to introduce to my choicest friends when he comes to this country. He is not a Christian in one sense of the word, but the face of Christ hangs over his desk, and we have talked together for hours of the deepest themes that can engage the human heart. He contends only for what he holds to be the rights of the Indians who have been settled in Johannesburg, many of them from before the war. His contention is retrospective for those who have entered the Transvaal and been its subjects and citizens for years.

  Even if he contravened the law there was no need to expose him to degrading labour. Yet what can degrade a pure soul? Christ made the Cross the honoured symbol of Christendom. Truth is still on the scaffold, while prejudice, fear, and selfish interests are on the throne, but there is One that keepeth watch.’

  26. ‘The Mass Meeting’, IO, 24 October 1908.

  27. Quoted in IO, 24 October 1908.

  28. See Doke to Albert Cartwright, 26 October 1908, in J. J. Doke Papers.

  29. Cf. M. K. Gandhi, ‘My Second Experience in Gaol’, five-part series in IO, CWMG, IX, pp. 120–22, 140–42, 145–9, 161–6, 179–80. Quotes not sourced in the rest of this section are based on this series. A maund is an Indian unit of weight, roughly equivalent to 37 kilos.

  30. As recalled in H. S. L. Polak, ‘M. K. Gandhi: A Sketch’, in Speeches and Writings of M. K. Gandhi, with an Introduction by Mr C. F. Andrews, a Tribute by Mr G. A. Natesan, and a Biographical Sketch by Mr H. S. L. Polak (Madras: G. A. Natesan and Co., 1918), pp. i–iii.

  31. CWMG, IX, Appendix VIII, pp. 560–61.

  32. Secretary of State for the Colonies to Governor of Transvaal, 29 October 1908; Deputy Governor of Transvaal to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 3 November 1908; both in Further Correspondence Relating to Legislation Affecting Asiatics in the Transvaal (Cd. 4584 – in continuation of Cd. 4327) (London: HMSO, 1909).

  33. Gandhi to West, 9 September 1908, CWMG, IX, pp. 105–6.

  34. CWMG, IX, pp. 108–9, 111, 115.

  35. ‘Mr Gandhi’s Arrival’, IO, 26 December 1908.

  36. Report in Transvaal Leader, 30 November 1908.

  37. AC, 4 July, 11 July, 25 July, 15 August and 17 October 1908, 18 December 1909.

  38. Quoted in John Marlowe, Milner: Apostle of Empire (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976), p. 146.

  39. See Sir Edgar Walton, The Inner History of the National Convention of South Africa (1912; reprint, Westport, Connecticut: Negro Universities Press, 1970), pp. 117ff; L. M. Thompson, The Unification of South Africa, 1902–1910 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), pp. 212–26.

  40. Selbourne’s scheme is reproduced in Arthur Percival Newton, ed., Select Documents Relating to the Unification of South Africa (1924; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1968), vol. II, pp. 250–51.

  41. Schreiner to Smuts, 2 August 1908, in W. K. Hancock and Jean van der Poel, eds, Selections from the Smuts Papers, II: June 1902– May 1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), vol. II, p. 450 (emphasis in original).

  42. See Thompson, Unification of South Africa, pp. 341, 35, 404, etc.

  43. The standard life is Ruth First and Ann Smith, Olive Schreiner (New York: Schocken Books, 1980).

  44. ‘Olive Schreiner on Colour’, IO, 2 January 1909.

  45. Editorial in IO, 2 January 1909.

  46. CWMG, IX, pp. 112–13.

  47. CWMG, IX, pp.
130, 159–60, 180, 184, 187, 193–4.

  48. Gandhi to Olive Doke, dated ‘Tuesday’ (almost certainly 5 January 1909), in Doke Papers (this letter is not in CWMG).

  49. Devadas Gandhi, ‘My Brother Harilal’, Hindustan Times, 23 July 1948.

  50. Gandhi to Chanchalbehn Gandhi, letters of 16 and 28 January 1909; Gandhi to Harilal, 27 January 1909, CWMG, IX, pp. 150, 173–5.

  51. The Times, 6 January 1909.

  52. See Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi, III: The Birth of Satyagraha – From Petitioning to Passive Resistance (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1986), pp. 182–3.

  53. Curzon to Gandhi, 26 January 1909, S. N. 4915, SAAA.

  54. CWMG, IX, p. 175.

  55. Gandhi, An Autobiography, Part IV, Chapter XXVIII.

  56. Gandhi to Kallenbach, 5 February 1909, in Gillian Berning, ed., Gandhi Letters: From Upper House to Lower House, 1906–1914 (Durban: Local History Museum, 1994), pp. 12–13. (This letter is not in CWMG.) Millie Polak, who was at Phoenix at the time, was both surprised and impressed by how well Kasturba responded to her husband’s unorthodox treatment. For pernicious anaemia was then ‘still looked upon as one of the fatal diseases, and very few cases indeed of recovery were on record’. And certainly no previous case had been successfully ‘treated by lemon-juice, aided by what we to-day call mental healing. It was a great puzzle to the few medical men who knew or heard of it.’ (Mr Gandhi the Man, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931, pp. 132–3.)

  57. Curzon to Honorary Secretary, British Indian Association, Johannesburg (i. e., Gandhi), 2 February 1909, S. N. 4920, SAAA.

  58. Sunday Times (Johannesburg) quoted in IO, 13 February 1909.

  59. CWMG, IX, pp. 197–9.

  60. Gandhi to Chanchalbehn Gandhi, 26 February 1909, CWMG, IX, pp. 200–201.

  61. Gandhi wrote about his third jail term in two articles, and in a letter to the press issued afterwards: see CWMG, IX, pp. 221–4, 228–34, 238–43.

  62. Gandhi to West, 4 March 1909, CWMG, IX, pp. 202–3.

  63. H. S. L. Polak to David Pollock, dated Johannesburg, 27 March 1909, in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 4, Accession No. 2177, NMML. Polak says here that Gandhi had refused the Chief Justiceship of Porbandar – there is no independent confirmation of when and how that happened. The only evidence that may tangentially bear on this claim is an entry in Gandhi’s office logbook for the 1890s, noting the receipt of a letter from the Chief Judge of Porbandar (see S. N. 2711, SAAA).

  64. David Pollock to Lord Selborne, 29 March 1909; D. C. Malcolm, Government House, Pretoria, to David Pollock, 31 March 1909, both in Natal Government Records (on microfilm), Reel 4, Accession No. 2177, NMML.

  65. Minute dated 28 April 1909, ibid.

  66. CWMG, IX, pp. 238–9. Unfortunately, we do not know the titles or authors of the books given to Gandhi by Smuts.

  67. J. C. Smuts, Jan Christian Smuts (London: Cassell and Company, 1952), p. 107.

  68. Speech of 24 March 1909, in Fourth Session of the Twenty-Eighth Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, I; 16 February 1909 to 26 May 1909 (London: HMSO, 1909).

  69. W. K. Hancock: Smuts, I: The Sanguine Years, 1870–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 44.

  70. Wolstenholme to Smuts, 14 May 1909, in Hancock and van der Poel, Smuts Paper s, vol. II, pp. 568–73.

  71. These poems are available in Gujarati and in English translations in Surendra Bhana and Neelima Shukla-Bhatt, A Fire that Blazed in the Ocean: Gandhi and the Poems of Satyagraha in South Africa, 1909–1911 (New Delhi: Promilla and Co., 2011), pp. 18–19, 26, 71–3, 87–8, 112–13, etc.

  72. Letter dated 28 December 1908, CWMG, IX, p. 118.

  73. AC, 17 July 1909. On Shankeranand, see also Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, Inside Indenture: A South African Story, 1860–1914 (Durban: Madiba Publishers, 2007), pp. 240–48.

  74. Gandhi to Manilal, 25 March 1909, CWMG, IX, pp. 205–9.

  75. Gandhi to Polak, 26 April 1909, CWMG, IX, pp. 205–9, 212–13.

  76. Gandhi, An Autobiography, Part IV, Chapter XII.

  77. George Paxton, Gandhi’s South African Secretary: Sonja Schlesin (Glasgow: Pax Books, 2006), pp. 14–15, 100–101.

  78. See IO, 29 May 1909.

  79. CWMG, IX, pp. 215–19.

  80. CWMG, IX, pp. 243–4.

  81. Cf. S. N. 4938, SAAA.

  82. Clipping, c. June 1909, from Springfield Daily Republican, S. N. 5022, SAAA. It is appropriate (cf. Chapter 5 above) that The Nation ran what seems to have been the first article on Gandhi in the American press; and that another newspaper active in the movement against slavery, the Springfield Daily Republican, carried what most likely was the first account of Gandhian satyagraha to appear in America.

  83. Gandhi to Polak, dated ‘Monday’ and ‘Tuesday’ (i.e. 21 and 22 June 1909), in Mss Eur. B. 272, APAC/BL. These handwritten letters, which lie in the British Library, are not in CWMG; this writer may be the first to have read them since Polak himself.

  84. CWMG, IX, pp. 267–8.

  85. CWMG, IX, pp. 270, 286–7.

  86. See ‘A Suggestive Letter’, IO, 10 July 1909.

  15 BIG LITTLE CHIEF

  1. Letter to Olive Doke dated 5 July 1909 (not in CWMG), Doke Papers, UNISA.

  2. CWMG, IX, pp. 269–74, 276–9, 281–3.

  3. CWMG, IX, pp. 284–8.

  4. Memorandum dated Brixton Prison, 22 July 1909, by S. R. Dyer, Medical Officer, in CRIM/1/113/5, NAUK.

  5. Statement by Madan Lal Dhingra dated 10 July 1909, ibid.

  6. David Garnett, quoted in Lesley Chamberlain, ‘Bloomsbury’s Teenage Terrorist’, Standpoint, July/August 2011.

  7. Cf. V. N. Datta, Madan Lal Dhingra and the Revolutionary Movement (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978), pp. 38–41. The references to Rama, Krishna and Mother India do not appear in the archival record of the trial.

  8. Cited in James D. Hunt, Gandhi in London (revised edn, New Delhi: Promilla and Co, 1993), pp. 106–7.

  9. IO, 14 August 1909, CWMG, IX, pp. 302–3.

  10. Gandhi to Polak, letters of 20 August, 26 August, 2 September and 29 September 1909, CWMG, IX, pp. 363, 368–9, 382–3, 438–40.

  11. Letter of 8 September, CWMG, IX, p. 395.

  12. Gandhi to Kallenbach, letters of 21 June, 3 July, 20 August, 30 August and 10 September 1909, CWMG, XCVI, pp. 9–10, 13, 23, 25. In one letter, Gandhi wrote that he had kept a bottle of Vaseline on his mantelpiece in London to remind him of Kallenbach. This prompted a speculative paragraph by Joseph Lelyveld on what the Vaseline was for (Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi’s Struggle with India, New York: Alfred Knopf, Jr., 2008, p. 89). He concluded that it was mostly likely for enemas. One of his reviewers, however, felt that ‘there could be less generous explanations’, meaning that it was to remind Gandhi of the (homo)sexual intercourse he was presumed (by the reviewer) to practise with Kallenbach. (Andrew Roberts, ‘Among the Hagiographers’, Wall Street Journal, 26 March 2011.) In fact, Lelyveld had missed a reference in the letter to Gandhi suffering from corns. That was what the Vaseline was for; to treat the blisters under his feet caused by long walks in London. The walks that Gandhi undertook in Johannesburg were often in the company of Kallenbach; hence the reference to corns and Vaseline.

  13. Gandhi to Olive Doke, 18 August 1909 (not in CWMG), C. M. Doke Papers, UNISA.

  14. See www.oxforddnb.com/view/printable/35874 (accessed 17 February 2012).

  15. See Ampthill to L. W. Ritch, 28 July 1909, S. N. 4964, SAAA.

  16. CWMG, IX, pp. 318–21, 576–8.

  17. Gandhi to Merriman, letters of 15 and 16 July 1909, copies in E. S. Reddy Papers, New York. (These letters were sourced by Mr Reddy from the Merriman papers in Cape Town and are not in CWMG.)

  18. General Smuts to Lord Crewe, 26 August 1909, in Further Correspondence Relating to Legislation Affecting Asiatics in the Transvaal (Cd. 5363 – in continuation of Cd. 4854; London: HMSO, 1910).

  19. Ampthill to Smuts, 10
August 1909; Ampthill to Gandhi, 31 August 1909, CWMG, IX, pp. 583–4, 587–8.

  20. Doke to Kallenbach, 12 August 1909, in KP.

  21. IO, 21 August 1909, CWMG, IX, p. 313.

  22. Cf. Florence Winterbottom to M. K. Gandhi, 16 August 1909, S. N. 4945, NGM.

  23. CWMG, IX, pp. 368–9, 502.

  24. See ‘Gandhi, Tolstoy, and the Tolstoyans’, in James D. Hunt, An American Looks at Gandhi: Essays in Satyagraha, Civil Rights and Peace (New Delhi: Promilla and Co., 2005).

  25. On Tolstoy’s correspondence with Indians other than Gandhi, see Alexander Shifman, Tolstoy and India, trans. A. V. Esualov (2nd edn, New Delhi: Sahtiya Akademi, 1978); D. V. Gundappa, Tolstoy and India (Bangalore: The Swadeshi Library, 1909). On Taraknath Das, see Tapan K. Mukherjee, Taraknath Das: Life and Letters of a Revolutionary in Exile (Calcutta: National Council of Education, 1997).

  26. CWMG, XI, pp. 444–6, 448–50.

  27. The ‘Letter to a Hindu’ and Gandhi’s introduction to it are available at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7176 (accessed 14 February 2010).

  28. Joseph J. Doke, M. K. Gandhi: An Indian Patriot in South Africa (London: The London Indian Chronicle, 1909), pp. 7, 8, 23, 84, 92–3, etc.

  29. In a letter written at about the same time to the Madras editor G. A. Natesan, Gandhi said the forthcoming meeting of the Indian National Congress should concentrate its attention on the South African struggle, for it might then ‘per-chance find out that for the many ills we suffer from in India it is an infallible panacea’. He was ‘sure it will be found that it is the only weapon suited to the genius of our people and our land’. See CWMG, IX, pp. 506–7.

  To the Indian patriot, Gandhi wrote that passive resistance would solve their country’s problems; to the great Russian writer, he argued that the method was actually of universal significance.

  30. This discussion of the correspondence between Tolstoy and Gandhi is based on CWMG, IX, pp. 444–6, 448–50, 483, 528–9, 593.