Gandhi Before India Read online

  Gandhi dismissed the fear, widespread among whites, that if the Indian were allowed to vote he would soon dominate the European. Of nearly 10,000 registered voters in Natal, only 251 were Indians, mostly merchants. Gandhi believed that ‘the number of trading Indians in the Colony will remain almost the same for a long time. For, while many come every month, an equal number leaves for India,’ If the Government wished, they could introduce a more stringent property qualification. But ‘what the Indians do and would protest against is colour distinction – disqualification based on account of racial difference.’

  The pamphlet consolidated arguments and evidence presented by Gandhi in other forums and other writings. There was, however, one point that he was making for the first time. It had been said of the agitation led by the Natal Indian Congress that ‘a few Indians want political power and that these few are Mahomedan agitators and that the Hindus should learn from past experience that the Mahomedan rule will be ruinous for them.’ Gandhi said in response that ‘the first statement is without foundation and the last statement is most unfortunate and painful.’ This was a ‘most mischievous’ attempt ‘to set the Hindus against the Mahomedans’ in Natal, ‘where the two sects are living most amicably’.41

  Gandhi sent his pamphlet to a friend in England, the civil servant and author W. W. Hunter. Hunter, in turn, sought an interview with the Secretary of State for India. The claims of the Natal Indians, reported Hunter to Gandhi, had ‘unfortunately got mixed up in English opinion with the monotone of complaint made by the Indian Congress party.’ The Congress, founded in 1885, had been canvassing for the greater representation of Indians at all levels of government. The cause of Gandhi and his fellows, found Hunter, ‘suffers in England from being too prominently connected with the Congress platform’.42

  As it happened, Gandhi had also posted copies of his pamphlet to Congress leaders in India. A copy sent to the Poona radical Bal Gangadhar Tilak found its way instead to the office of S. M. Tilak and Company in Bombay. The packet was opened by the firm’s manager, who noting its contents, wrote back to the author in admiration. ‘I have been watching with the greatest zeal your movements in the foreign land,’ the parcel’s accidental recipient told Gandhi. Saluting his work ‘from heart and soul even at the cost of [your] precious life towards the welfare of [our] countrymen,’ he hoped that ‘the Almighty [would] crown you with success’. The manager gave Gandhi the correct address of B. G. Tilak (‘Editor, Kesari and Maratha, Poona City’), before ending with this apology: ‘Please excuse me from plying in trade’ (rather than national service).43

  Whether the original mistake was Gandhi’s or the postman’s one doesn’t know. But one should be grateful for the error. For it gave us this charming letter, written by an unknown Indian, the first unsolicited fan mail that we know Gandhi to have received.

  Gandhi’s pamphlet on ‘The Indian Franchise’ was widely distributed in Natal, where – among the whites – it attracted scepticism and, at times, outright hostility. One newspaper admitted that the lawyer’s tone had at least ‘the great merit of moderation’. But it worried that it would lead to greater demands for representation – for Indians to be judges, civil servants and newspaper editors in South Africa, as they were in India. Another paper dismissed the pamphlet as ‘specious’. ‘Mr Ghandi [sic] may plead his best,’ it said, ‘but he will never succeed in convincing South Africans that the immigrant Asiatic is a desirable fellow-citizen … He may mend his ways in time it is true, but he usually takes the task of amendment very leisurely.’44

  A third paper, the Natal Advertiser, chose to express its reservations in verse. The versifier was not particularly skilled. However, in so far as this was very likely the first poem about Gandhi ever written, and one which keenly captures the animosity against him among the Europeans of Natal, I think I must reproduce it in full:

  Goosie, Goosie, Gandhi, Oh!

  (An old song, re-sung with apologies.)

  Oh, I am a man of high degree,

  And seek a proud position,

  For I must become, what seems to me

  A proud politician.

  For my constituents I must stand

  In parliamentary traffic;

  So I sailed away from India’s strand

  In the pay of the Asiatic.

  Chorus: I’m a regular goosie Gandhi, oh

  With a talent that’s quite handy,

  And a pamphlet bash, that’s full

  For this sunny-landy, oh!

  I’ve a temper sweet as candy, oh

  And a book and pencil handy, oh

  You never saw such a social bore

  As Goosie, Goosie, Gandhi, oh!

  When the Press and people out of pique

  Behave like a set of ninnies,

  I write a book to show they’re weak

  And gather in the guineas.

  I’m here to fight for the coolie man,

  As I said in my earliest letter.

  They must have liberty on a novel plan,

  And I must have something better.

  Chorus: I’m a regular goosie Gandhi, oh

  With a talent that’s quite handy,

  And a pamphlet bash, that’s full

  For this sunny-landy, oh!

  I’ve a temper sweet as candy, oh

  And a book and pencil handy, oh

  You never saw such a social bore

  As Goosie, Goosie, Gandhi, oh!45

  Gandhi’s early political writings are in the Collected Works. The details of his early legal career rest in the Natal archives and in old newspaper records. What we do not have access to are letters written from Durban to his family. How often did he write to his wife in Rajkot, and to his brothers? How often did they write back? We cannot say. What we do know is that in May 1896, Gandhi decided to return to India for a few months. He could see that he was ‘in for a long stay’ in South Africa, where ‘people felt the need of my presence’. So ‘I made up my mind to go home, fetch my wife and children, and then return and settle out there.’46

  ‘There’ was South Africa, or, more specifically, Natal. Unable to establish a toehold in either his native Kathiawar or in Bombay, Gandhi was now the most important and influential Indian in this colony. Gujaratis and Tamils, Hindus and Muslims, all looked to him for legal and political advice. To merchant and labourer alike he was ‘Gandhi bhai’, Brother Gandhi, a term used with affection and respect. He had made a name in Natal, and now he would make his home here too. Like so many other migrants before and since, he had first come alone, so to say experimentally. His career established, and a cause found, he went back to India to bring Kasturba and the children to live with him in Durban.

  5

  Travelling Activist

  On 4 June 1896 ‘the Madrasi and Gujarati Indians of Durban’ threw a farewell party for Mohandas Gandhi. The lawyer was presented with a shawl and medal, and thanked for his work for the community. In a brief speech, Gandhi said the gathering ‘showed that whatever castes the Indians in Natal represented they were all in favour of being cemented in closer union’. His talk was translated into Tamil by his clerk, Vincent Lawrence. ‘Several songs and speeches followed the presentation, and the proceedings throughout were of a lively and enthusiastic character.’1

  The next day, Gandhi sailed for India on the Clan Mcleod. Some 500 Indians accompanied him to the port, cheering him as he walked on board.2 Their affection followed him across the ocean. When the ship stopped at Lourenço Marques, the principal port of Portuguese East Africa, the Indians there gave him a warm reception. They had been sent a telegram by Parsi Rustomjee which read: ‘Barrister Gandhi left for India via Delagoa Bay. Please go on board and respect him.’3

  The lawyer was by now an experienced traveller. This, his fourth intercontinental voyage in eight years, was spent chiefly in self-improvement. He played chess, took Urdu lessons from a fellow passenger, and tried to teach himself Tamil from a book.4

  After three weeks the Clan Mcleod r
eached Calcutta. Gandhi took a train westwards to join his family in Rajkot. He had not seen them since May 1893. His sons Harilal and Manilal were now eight and three respectively. His impressions of them are unrecorded. We do not know how he responded to their growing up, or what relations he resumed with their mother, his wife. He was preoccupied with printing a pamphlet for an Indian audience on the grievances of their countrymen in South Africa. This drew on his previous petitions, but added some fresh evidence based on personal experience. ‘Just picture a country,’ he told his compatriots, ‘where you never know you are safe from assaults, no matter who you are, where you have a nervous fear as to what would happen to you whenever accommodated in a hotel even for a night and you have a picture of the state we are living in Natal.’

  Gandhi complained that a law in Durban specified that natives and indentured labourers required passes to go about at night. This, said Gandhi, ‘presupposes that the Indian is a barbarian. There is a very good reason for requiring registration of a native in that he is yet being taught the dignity and necessity of labour. The Indian knows it and he is imported because he knows it’. Adding insult to injury, ‘lavatories are marked “natives and Asiatics” at the railway stations’.

  Gandhi’s struggle in Natal was based on a Tolstoyan interpretation of the Christian credo. ‘Our method in South Africa is to conquer this hatred by love,’ he said. ‘We do not attempt to have individuals punished but as a rule, patiently suffer wrongs at their hands. Generally, our prayers are not to demand compensation for past injuries, but to render a repetition of those injuries impossible and to remove the causes.’5

  Gandhi printed 10,000 copies of what quickly became known as the ‘Green Pamphlet’ (on account of the colour of its cover). He posted them to newspaper editors across the country, and carried copies with him to Bombay, where he spent much of August and September 1896, lobbying the leading public men of India. He met a Hindu reformer, M. G. Ranade, a Muslim reformer, Badruddin Tyabji, and a Parsi reformer, Pherozeshah Mehta.6 Ranade and Tyabji were judges; Mehta, a lawyer and legislator. But he met many lesser known people too, pressing his case and his pamphlet upon them. An entry from the account book he maintained for the Natal Indian Congress is proof of his hectic schedule. Dated 20 August, it reads: ‘Carriage – House to Fort; Fort to B. K. Road; House to Appolobunder [sic]; Apollobunder to Market; Market to House’. These five journeys cost him about two rupees. Thereafter he took the more prudent step of renting the same carriage and driver for the whole day.7

  The lobbying had an effect, the Times of India carrying a long leader based on ‘Mr Gandhi’s able and striking pamphlet’. The paper provided some examples of the ‘gratuitous oppression and persecution’ as documented by Gandhi: the exclusion of Indians from trams, the consignment of Indians to third-class railway carriages, the harassment of even ‘respectable Indians’ under a harsh vagrancy law.8

  On 26 September, a public meeting was convened at the Framji Cowasji Institute to discuss the Indian question in South Africa. Pherozeshah Mehta presided. Gandhi was too nervous to speak. His text was read out for him by the Parsi politician D. E. Wacha. Gandhi, in Wacha’s voice, contrasted the situation in India, where the ‘representative institutions … are slowly, but surely, being liberalized’, with that in Natal, where ‘such institutions are being gradually closed against us’. The British in India now permitted their subjects – admittedly, selectively – to become judges and municipal councillors; in Natal, however, they ‘desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with, and then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness … We are hemmed in on all sides in South Africa.’ In Natal they were under the ‘yoke of oppression’. ‘It is for you, our elder and freer brother, to remove it.’9

  Gandhi’s talk created a stir; many people were heard expressing themselves ‘in indignant terms about the treatment which our countrymen were receiving in South Africa’. Their indignation was tempered and put in context by the social reformer M. G. Ranade, who was also present at the Cowasji Institute that day. In a talk he delivered soon afterwards, Ranade asked Hindus to ‘turn the searchlight inwards’. Unlike some other nationalists, Ranade was keenly aware of the humiliations that Indians were prepared to heap on their own kind. ‘Was this sympathy with the oppressed and down-trodden Indians,’ he wondered, ‘to be confined to those of our countrymen only who had gone out of India?’ Or would it be extended to a condemnation of the shameful manner in which low castes were treated within India? Ranade asked ‘whether it was for those who tolerated such disgraceful oppression and injustice in their own country to indulge in all that denunciation of the people of South Africa’.10

  From Bombay, Gandhi proceeded to Poona. Here he met the two rising stars of nationalist politics, the liberal Gopal Krishna Gokhale and the radical Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Gokhale, a protégé of Ranade’s, thought social reform was as important as political emancipation; mindful of the sentiments of Muslims, he stayed away from a Hindu idiom in his speeches. Tilak, on the other hand, militantly opposed British rule; he also promoted festivals in celebration of the Hindu god Ganesh and the medieval Hindu warrior Shivaji.11 Gandhi met both men; both promised to help set up a public meeting.12

  From Poona, Gandhi took a train further south, to the city of Madras. He was now corresponding with a Bombay lawyer he wanted to come out to South Africa. The previous September, he had promised the Indians of Natal he would bring some barristers to help them. His first choice was F. S. Taleyarkhan, who had travelled with him on the boat back from London to Bombay in 1891. Gandhi told Taleyarkhan that if he came to Natal they could set up a partnership and divide the profits. He thought that they could earn as much as £150 a month. However, he warned Taleyarkhan that an Indian should not ‘go to South Africa with a view to pile money. You should go there with a spirit of self-sacrifice. You should keep riches at an arm’s length. They may then woo you. If you bestow your glances on them, they are such a coquette that you are sure to be slighted. That is my experience in South Africa.’

  Taleyarkhan was a Parsi who liked meat and fish. Gandhi said that if they lived together in Durban, he could offer him ‘most palatable’ vegetarian food, ‘cooked both in the English as well as the Indian style’. If the Parsi insisted on being carnivorous, he could engage a separate cook. Gandhi hoped Taleyarkhan would ‘not allow pecuniary considerations to come in your way. I am sure you will be able to do much in South Africa – more indeed than I may have been instrumental in doing.’13

  Gandhi arrived in Madras on 14 October. This was his first visit to the city, the capital of the Madras Presidency, and the commercial and political centre of a region to which many of the indentured labourers in Natal belonged. He stayed two weeks in Madras, at the Buckingham Hotel, where his bill came to some Rs 74. His other expenses included the sending of telegrams, carriage and tram fares, and the purchase of paper, pen, ink, envelopes, stamps, and ‘sulphur ointment’ (we know not what for).14

  From Madras, Gandhi wrote to Gokhale about the struggle in South Africa. He was encouraged that the older man had taken a ‘very warm interest in him when they met in Poona. They now ‘very badly need[ed] a committee of active, prominent workers in India for our cause’. Unless ‘our great men … without delay take up this question,’ insisted Gandhi, the South African example would be followed by other British colonies, who would likewise disenfranchise Indians and deny them their rights. If that happened, ‘within a short time there will be an end to Indian enterprise outside India’.15

  The highlight of Gandhi’s stay in Madras was a public meeting held at the Pachiappa’s Hall on the evening of 26 October. The posters advertising the meeting had the signatures of forty-one men, among them some of the city’s best-known lawyers, editors and businessmen. Those endorsing Gandhi’s cause included a fair sprinkling of Brahmins, but also some Chettiar merchants, a handful of Telugu speakers, two M
uslims, and at least one Christian. There was also one Knight of the Realm, Sir S. Ramaswamy Mudaliar.16

  As in Bombay, Gandhi’s speech rehearsed the themes of the ‘Green Pamphlet’. He tailored it to the audience, speaking of how a ‘very respectable firm of Madras traders’ in Durban were disparagingly referred to as ‘coolie’ shopkeepers, and how ‘a Madras gentleman, spotlessly dressed, always avoids the foot-paths of prominent streets in Durban for fear he should be insulted or pushed off’.17 In its report, the Madras Mail observed that the speaker ‘described accurately and without exaggeration the position of his fellow countrymen in that part of the world’. Wishing ‘speedy success to Mr Gandhi and his friends in bringing the Colonials to a better understanding of India’, the paper said the ‘British Government will be failing in its duty if it allows the strong racial feeling prevailing in the Colonies to be embodied in any Act of Legislature which concerns a British subject’.18

  There was such a rush at the meeting to buy pamphlets that the author’s stock was exhausted. Not that he minded; as he observed soon afterwards, while ordering a reprint, the clamour for copies in Madras was ‘a scene never to be forgotten’.19

  In the last week of October, Gandhi travelled up the Coromandel coast to Calcutta, this his third long train journey in as many months. He was being exposed to the ecological and social diversity of India. He passed by desert and farmland, coast and plateau, seeing a variety of architectural styles, hearing a variety of languages, and sampling different cuisines. From the train window, he would have seen peasants working in the fields. However, his conversations in the towns and cities he stopped in were with lawyers, editors and other members of a growing middle class.