18 A SON DEPARTS, A MENTOR ARRIVES
1. Gandhi to Maganlal, 21 August 1910, CWMG, X, p. 273.
2. Gandhi to Harilal, 5 March 1911, CWMG, X, pp. 428–9.
3. Gandhi to Maganlal, 19 March 1911, CWMG, X, p. 476.
4. Chandulal Bhagubhai Dalal, Harilal Gandhi: A Life, edited and translated from the Gujarati by Tridip Suhrud (Chennai: Orient Longman, 2007), pp. 28–9.
5. Pragji Desai, ‘Satyagraha in South Africa’, in Chandrashanker Shukla, ed., Reminiscences of Gandhiji (Bombay: Vora and Co., 1951), p. 83. Desai was a resident of Phoenix, who had been arrested several times during the satyagraha campaigns.
6. Harilal to Gandhi, c. 8 May 1911, copy in E. S. Reddy Papers, NMML. This letter was not available to Harilal’s biographer C. B. Dalal. The original is lost, but a copy was retrieved by E. S. Reddy from the library of the University of Cape Town.
7. As recalled in Pragji Desai, ‘Satyagraha in South Africa’, pp. 82–3.
8. Cf. Gandhi to Pranjivan Mehta, 8 May 1911, CWMG, XI, p. 65.
9. Dalal, Harilal Gandhi, pp. 29–30.
10. Gandhi to Maganlal, 18 May 1911, CWMG, XI, pp. 77–8.
11. Dalal, Harilal Gandhi, Appendix I, p. 134 (from a letter written in 1915 or 1916).
12. Cf. appreciation by Millie Graham Polak, originally published in the Indian Review, reprinted in Mahatma Gandhi: An Enlarged and Up-to-date Edition of His Life and Teaching with an Account of His Activities in South Africa and India Down to His Great March, in Connection with ‘Salt Satyagraha’ (Madras: G. A. Natesan and Co., 1930), pp. 13f.
13. Cf. Tridip Suhrud, Reading Gandhi in Two Tongues and Other Essays (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2012), pp. 24–5; Pragji Desai, ‘Satyagraha in South Africa’, in Chandrashanker Shukla, ed., Reminiscences of Gandhiji (Bombay: Vora and Co., 1951), pp. 82–3.
14. Desai, ‘Satyagraha in South Africa’, p. 84.
15. Gandhi to Harilal, 27 May 1911, CWMG, XI, pp. 94–5.
16. See CWMG, XI, pp. 165–7, 312–13, 315–16, 333–4.
17. CWMG, XI, pp. 129–31, 149–50, 154, 157.
18. Nalini Ranjan Chakravarti, The Indian Minority in Burma: The Rise and Decline of an Immigrant Community (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 98–9.
19. Regrettably, while no biography of Marx can be written without taking full account of Engels’s contribution, and while there have been several excellent biographies of Engels himself, this may be the first book on Gandhi to attempt to give Pranjivan Mehta something like his due. The historian S. R. Mehrotra is now completing a biography of Mehta.
20. P. J. Mehta, M. K. Gandhi and the South African Indian Problem (Madras: G. A. Natesan and Co., 1912), pp. 21–2, 26–32, 74, 87, 96.
21. CWMG, XI, pp. 138–9.
22. Gandhi to Mehta, 25 August 1911, CWMG, XI, pp. 130–33.
23. Cf. Polak to Mehta, 22 August 1911, copy in E. S. Reddy Papers, NMML.
24. CWMG, XCVI (Supplementary Volume Six: Gandhi–Kallenbach Correspondence), pp. 62–3; Ramadas Gandhi, Sansmaran, translated from Gujarati to Hindi by Shankar Joshi (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1970), p. 48.
25. See entry for 11 September 1911, Kallenbach Diary, KP.
26. Gandhi to Kallenbach, 7 October 1911, KP (not in CWMG).
27. Gandhi to Mehta, 24 September 1911, CWMG, XI, pp. 160–61. ‘Ivan the Fool’ is a fable of three brothers, one brilliant and warlike, the second smart and acquisitive, the third foolish yet upright, in which the honesty and hard work of the last is rewarded by the love of his family and his community. See ‘The Story of Ivan the Fool’ in More Tales from Tolstoi, trans. R. Nisbet Bain (1902; reprint, New York: Core Collection Books, 1979).
28. Gandhi to Mehta, 10 October 1911, CWMG, XI, pp. 165–7.
29. CWMG, XI, pp. 168–71, 296–7. Gandhi and Manilal Doctor first met in London in 1906, when the young man was qualifying to be a barrister. At Gandhi’s suggestion, he went to Mauritius to work with the Indians there. It may, or may not, have been Gandhi who suggested to Pranjivan Mehta that Doctor would be a suitable husband for his daughter Jeki.
30. Kallenbach to Mehta, 18 October 1912, copy in KP.
31. AC, 23 June 1910.
32. AC, 11 March 1911.
33. AC, issues of 23 September, 7 and 14 October 1911.
34. See L/P&J/6/1017, APAC/BL.
35. P. Subramania Aiyar, An Unjust Tax on Indian Immigrants: Appeal to the Empire (Durban: African Chronicle Printing Works, 1911), in File 3810, L/P&J/1113, APAC/BL.
36. Minute dated 6 February 1912, ibid.
37. Gandhi to West, 27 November 1911, CWMG, XCVI, pp. 93–4.
38. Gandhi to Tata, 1 April 1912, CWMG, XI, pp. 248–53.
39. Memorial dated 1 August 1912, in L/P&J/6/1226, APAC/BL.
40. ‘A Native Union: The Lessons of the Passive Resistance Movement’, IO, 29 July 1911.
41. I am grateful to the Gandhi scholar Anil Nauriya for sharing this information with me. The memoirist, a Russian Jew named Pauline Podlashuk, may incidentally have helped in translating Tolstoy’s letter to Gandhi.
42. Quoted in 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), p. 110.
43. See André Odendaal, Black Protest Politics in South Africa to 1912 (Towota, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1984), Chapter 11.
44. ‘The Awakening of the Natives: Mr Dube’s Address’, IO, 10 February 1912. Cf. also A. P. Walshe, ‘The Origins of African Political Consciousness in South Africa’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 7:4 (1969), pp. 595f.
45. CWMG, XI, pp. 213–17, 227–8, 231, 241, 254, 264, 275, 556–8.
46. Assembly Debates of the Union of South Africa, 30 May and 14 June 1912, in Natal Government House Records, Reel 7, Accession No. 2180, NMML.
47. See S. N. 5662, SAAA.
48. Cf. enclosures in Governor-General of South Africa to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 13 April 1912, in CD 879/111/2, NAUK.
49. S. N. 5658, SAAA (emphasis in original).
50. Mehta to Gandhi, c. September 1911 (written from Hotel Genève, Marseille), S. N. 5588, SAAA.
51. Gokhale to Union Castle Company, letters dated 24 and 29 July 1912, copies in File No. 242, Part I, Gokhale Papers, NAI.
52. See Gokhale to Gandhi, 7 July 1912, S. N. 5672, SAAA. There are two letters extant from this period by Maud Polak to Gandhi. At his suggestion – or command – she had begun to call him Bapu, ‘Father’. Still, it appears that her love for him remained deep, and even obsessive. One letter begs him to allow her to continue lobbying for the Indians in London; it goes on to claim that her work was as important as Gokhale’s in stopping the export of indentured labour from India. A second letter, fourteen handwritten pages in length, presents a rambling, somewhat incoherent account of what she had got from Gandhi’s book Hind Swaraj. See Maud Polak to Gandhi, letters of 6 December 1911 and 23 December 1912, S. N. 5594 and 5600, SAAA. There are no replies by Gandhi on record. Perhaps there were none, since her own brother told Gandhi that ‘Maud is quite unbalanced. She much disappoints me. I shall not reply to her letter.’ (Henry Polak to Gandhi, 19 January 1911, S. N. 5204, SAAA.)
53. Dr Maitland Park, editor Cape Times, to General Louis Botha, 13 August 1912; Botha to Park, 23 August 1912, both in Natal Government House Records, Reel 5, Accession No. 2178, NMML. Another Cape liberal, the politician J. X. Merriman, wrote to Smuts on similar liness, urging that the Government treat him with respect, and not ‘as a mere kleurling [Coloured person]’. Merriman to Smuts, 3 October 1912, in W. K. Hancock and Jean van der Poel, Selections from the Smuts Papers, III: June 1910 – November 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 115–16.
54. Mehta to Gokhale, 28 August 1912, in File No. 242, Part II, Gokhale Papers, NAI.
55. CWMG, XI, pp. 320–25.
56. IO, 14 September 1912.
57. Gandhi to Maganlal, 27 January 1910
, CWMG, X, pp. 138–9.
58. Kasturba was commanded to find a turban from one of the boxes at Phoenix, iron it and send it by post to Johannesburg. See Prabhudas Gandhi, My Childhood with Gandhiji (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1957), pp. 95–6.
59. Entry for 22 October 1912, in Kallenbach Diary, SAAA.
60. Anon., Hon. Mr G. K. Gokhale’s Visit to South Africa, 1912 (Durban: Indian Opinion, 1912), pp. 4–7.
61. Merriman to Smuts, 25 October 1912, in Hancock and van der Poel, Selections from the Smuts Papers, vol. III, p. 119. In other letters written at around the same time, Merriman compared Gokhale to John Dube. Both were ‘moderate and civilized’, both ‘spoke extraordinary good English’, both had an intense sense of ‘national feeling’. Quoted in Shula Marks, ‘The Ambiguities of Dependence: John L. Dube of Natal’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 1:2 (1975), p. 164.
62. Entry for 25 October 1912, in Kallenbach Diary, SAAA.
63. Anon., Mr Gokhale’s Visit, pp. 8–9.
64. See report in IO, 23 November 1912.
65. Anon., Mr Gokhale’s Visit, pp. 13, 16–17, 201.
66. CWMG, XI, pp. 343–4.
67. IO, 9 November 1912.
68. Anon., Mr Gokhale’s Visit, pp. 34–5.
69. IO, 23 November 1912.
70. Letter dated 11 November 1912, in Add Mss. 46006, BL.
71. Cf. Secretary of Interior to G. K. Gokhale, 11 November 1912, in File No. 242, Part I, Gokhale Papers, NAI.
72. Governor-General of South Africa to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 16 November 1912, in CD 879/111/2, NAUK.
73. As recalled in 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), pp. 81–2.
74. Anon., Mr Gokhale’s Visit, p. 4.
75. See reports in IO, 19 October, 2 and 30 November, and 28 December 1912.
76. Quoted in Gandhi, An Autobiography, Part IV, Chapter XII.
77. Clipping from the Lourenço Marques Guardian, 21 November 1912, in File 1398, L/P&J/6/1235, APAC/BL.
78. CWMG, XI, p. 414.
79. Entry for 27 November 1912, in Kallenbach Diary, SAAA.
80. Entry for 3 December 1912, ibid.
81. Gandhi to Gokhale, 4 December 1912, CWMG, XI, pp. 351–2.
82. This account of Gokhale’s speech in Bombay is based on two news reports: that in the Times of India (mail edition), 21 December 1912, in Natal Government House Records, Reel 5, Accession No. 2178, NMML; and that in The Leader, 19 December 1912, in File No. 242, Part I, Gokhale Papers, NAI.
83. AC, 15 June 1912.
84. ‘A Puzzling Problem’, AC, 30 November 1912.
85. AC, 28 December 1912.
86. AC, 28 December 1912 and 8 February 1913.
19 A PHYSICIAN AT PHOENIX
1. Prabhudas Gandhi, My Childhood with Gandhiji (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1957), pp. 44–5.
2. Millie Graham Polak, Mr Gandhi: The Man (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931), pp. 137–41.
3. CWMG, XI, pp. 428–30, 434–6, 441–3, 447–9, 453–5, etc.
4. See Gandhi to Harilal, 26 January 1913, CWMG, XI, pp. 449–50.
5. Gandhi to Gokhale, 14 February 1914, CWMG, 14 February 1913.
6. Clipping from Cape Times, 21 March 1913, in A Proceedings 25–49 for September 1913, Department of Commerce and Industry (Emigration Branch), NAI; CWMG, XI, pp. 568–9.
7. Indian Opinion, 22 March 1913, CWMG, XI, pp. 497.
8. See copies of resolutions enclosed with A. M. Cachalia, Chairman, British Indian Association, to Governor-General of South Africa, 10 April 1913, in A Proceedings 25–49 for September 1913, Department of Commerce and Industry (Emigration Branch), NAI. Cf. also ‘Mass Meeting in Johannesburg’, IO, 5 April 1913.
9. Indian Opinion, 19 April 1913; Gandhi to Gokhale, 19 April 1913, CWMG, XII, pp. 31, 41.
10. Cf. IO, 10 November and 9 December 1911.
11. Cf. Further Correspondence Relating to a Bill to Regulate Immigration into the Union of South Africa: With Special Reference to Asiatics (In continuation of Cd. 6283) (London: HMSO, 1913).
12. Telegram dated Durban, 22 April 1913, in Natal Government House Records, Reel 7, Accession No. 2180, NMML.
13. Report in Rand Daily Mail, 23 April 1913.
14. Speech of 30 April 1913, ibid.
15. See Union of South Africa: House of Assembly: Debates of the Third Session of the First Parliament (Cape Town: Union Parliament of South Africa, 1913), cols. 2050ff, 2235f; Union of South Africa, Debates of the Senate: Third Session of the First Parliament (Cape Town: Union Parliament of South Africa, 1913), col. 336.
16. Secretary for the Interior to Gandhi, letters of 4 and 10 April 1913, S. N. 5750 and 5761, SAAA.
17. Back in 1910, Lord Selborne had proposed that Indian women in South Africa be given a cash inducement to return to their homeland. ‘It need not require a very large sum to be an inducement to the coolie woman to earn a dowry in this way’, he wrote to the Prime Minister, General Botha, adding, ‘And of course once in India, I take it, she would have no right to return.’ Selborne thought that with these bribes to women ‘the [Indian] question would in time resolve itself.’ (Lord Selborne to General Louis Botha, 3 May 1910, in Box 60, Selborne Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.) Selborne’s suggestion was not acted upon; three years later, the Searle judgment outlined another way of reducing the numbers of Indians in South Africa – by not allowing their women to come in from India, rather than bribing those already in South Africa to go back.
18. Extract from Rand Daily Mail, 28 April 1914, in File No. 242, Part I, Gokhale Papers, NAI; CWMG, XII, pp. 52–3, 59.
19. Cf. H. S. L. Polak to W. Clark, Member, Commerce and Industry, Government of India, letter of 17 April and telegram of 23 April 1913, in A Proceedings nos. 25–49 for September 1913, Department of Commerce and Industry (Emigration Branch), NAI. Copies of these communications were also sent to the Colonial Office in London.
20. A. Fischer, Interior Minister, to Lord Gladstone, Governor-General, 22 April 1913, in File 15/388, vol. 895, GG, NASA.
21. ‘Indian Women as Passive Resisters’, IO, 10 May 1913; also CWMG, XII, p. 65.
22. ‘From the Editor’s Chair’, IO, 10 May 1913.
23. The letters that follow are all from the Kallenbach Papers in the possession of Isa Sarid, Haifa, Israel.
24. ‘Why Mr Gandhi is a Failure’, AC, 19 April 1913.
25. AC, 24 May 1913. While working-class Tamils in Natal were largely on Gandhi’s side, among educated members of the community Aiyar was not alone in having reservations about his leadership. In June 1913 one Leo R. Gopaul wrote to Kallenbach complaining that despite applying several times, he had not been chosen as one of the six educated Indians allowed into the Transvaal as a result of the provisional settlement of 1911. He thought it was because he had once criticized Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. Kallenbach wrote back that while Gandhi played no part in the decision, preference would naturally be given to those who had courted arrest in past satyagrahas. This Gopaul (like Aiyar) had conspicuously failed to do. Kallenbach told the complainant that a revival of the struggle was imminent, and he might consider courting arrest this time around. Gopaul to Kallenbach, 10 June 1913; Kallenbach to Gopaul, 19 June 1913, both in KP.
26. CWMG, XII, pp. 4–7, 45–52.
27. See CWMG, XII, pp. 87–8, 90–91, 101, 574–5.
28. Governor-General to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 16 June 1913, in CO 879/112/4, NAUK.
29. Polak to Gokhale, 1 and 22 June, in File No. 242, Part I, Gokhale Papers, NAI.
30. Gokhale to Legislative Secretary, Government of India, letters of 13 June and 11 July 1913, File 4104, L/P&J/6/1278, APAC/BL.
31. See Maud Polak to Under Secretary of State, Colonial Office, 27 February 1913 (with enclosures); Official report of debate in House of Lords, 30 July, 1913, both in File 1398, L/P&J/6/1235, APAC/BL.
33. Wedderburn to Gandhi, letters of 19 and 26 June 1913, S. N. 5813 and 5817a, SAAA.
34. Letter of 2 July 1913, CWMG, XII, pp. 122–4.
35. See the correspondence in CO 879/112/4, NAUK.
36. See File 15/462, vol. 896, GG, NASA.
37. ‘A South African Problem’, Jewish Chronicle, 5 September 1913.
38. See IO, 12 July 1913; Jack and Ray Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850–1950 (Lusaka: International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, 1983), pp. 156–9.
39. Kallenbach to Isabella Fyvie Mayo, 18 August 1913, KP.
40. Gandhi to E. F. C. Lane, 11 July 1913, copy in KP.
41. Entry for 12 July 1913, in Hermann Kallenbach’s Diary for 1912–13, S. N. 33996, SAAA.
42. Gandhi, An Autobiography, Part IV, Chapter XXVI.
43. Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Gandhi’s Prisoner? The Life of Gandhi’s Son Manilal (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2004), pp. 106–11.
44. Millie Polak, Mr Gandhi: The Man, pp. 142–8.
45. See Manilal Gandhi, ‘Memories of Gandhiji’, Indian Review, March 1952. Manilal had – understandably – got the year slightly wrong. It was 1913, not 1912.
46. Prabhudas Gandhi, My Childhood with Gandhiji, pp. 116–17; Millie Polak, Mr Gandhi: The Man, p. 148; Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Gandhi’s Prisoner?, p. 110.
47. CWMG, XII, pp. 79–81, 102–4, 137, 164–5, etc.
48. See Ravjibhai Patel, The Making of the Mahatma, trans. Abid Shamshi (Ahmedabad: Ravindra R. Patel, 1990), Chapter IX (‘The Affectionate Healer’).
49. CWMG, XII, p. 164.
50. Cordes to Gandhi, 11 December 1911, S. N. 5592, SAAA.
51. Cordes to Gandhi, c. July or August 1913, S. N. 5819, SAAA.
52. CWMG, XII, pp. 167–75.
53. Cf. CWMG, XII, pp. 183–6, 192–5.
20 BREAKING BOUNDARIES
1. The detailed figures are available in Surendra Bhana and Joy Brain, Settling Down Roots: Indian Migrants in South Africa, 1860–1911 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1990).
2. Millie G. Polak to V. S. Srinivasa Sastri, 22 July 1912, in V. S. Srinivasa Sastri Papers, 2nd instalment, NMML.
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