Gandhi Before India (22 page)

That there was now a second Indian lawyer in Natal made it easier for Gandhi to think of going back. This was Rahim Karim Khan, a barrister from Lincoln’s Inn who had come out to South Africa in 1899. He joined Gandhi’s office and later established his own network of clients. As a Muslim himself, he was trusted by the mainly Muslim merchants in Durban. With Khan’s arrival, Gandhi was free to travel to the Transvaal, to more actively pursue his religious interests, and now, in 1901, to return for good to India.
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Kasturba may have been even keener than her husband to return. When she married Mohandas in 1883 she had hoped, like her mother and grandmother before her, to raise a family somewhere in her native Kathiawar. She moved to join her husband in Rajkot; a few years later, he left her and their infant son to go to London. He came back, to make her pregnant once more. In May 1893 he left again, this time for South Africa. Three years later the family was reunited. Kasturba’s first exposure to South Africa was by way of the mob that attacked (in word and deed) her husband. After this she could scarcely trust the whites; but, confined to her home in Durban, she had few Indian friends either.

In Rajkot, the language that Kasturba spoke at home was also the
language of the bazaar. There she had friends and relatives, who would be her children’s friends and relatives too. In Durban, on the other hand, she and they had spent four and a half years feeling alien and out of place in a land they could never call their own.

And so the Gandhis decided to return to their homeland. On 12 October, Parsee Rustomjee threw a farewell party for ‘the champion of the Indian cause in Natal’. The party was ‘the grandest ever attempted or achieved by any Indian’: tapestry on the walls, electric lights specially installed, a profusion of flowers and a band of musicians. The substance matched the show; thus, as one grateful journalist wrote, ‘the guests were regaled with the most delicate preparations of an Eastern culinary department.’ After the food had been eaten, Rustomjee ‘placed a thick gold chain round Mr Gandhi’s neck, and presented him with a valuable gold locket and a large gold medal suitably inscribed. He was also given a bouquet of white roses, and was garlanded amid deafening cheers.’ The lawyer’s children were then given gold medals.
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The next week, the Gandhis were chief guests at a party hosted by the Natal Indian Congress at their hall in Grey Street. This was likewise a gay occasion, with the staircase festooned with garlands, and Chinese lanterns everywhere. The merchant Abdul Cadir gave the first speech, saying of Gandhi that ‘in every sphere of our life, political, social and moral, he has been our guiding star, and his name will be ever enshrined in every Indian heart.’ The English lawyer F. A. Laughton, speaking next, said that ‘it was a matter of wonderment to him that Mr Gandhi was going at this time, as he had a prominent position at the Bar, and a great influence over the Indian community. He would always be ready to welcome Mr Gandhi’s return.’

At this meeting, too, Gandhi was given an array of jewels. These included a diamond ring presented on behalf of the community as a whole, a gold necklace subscribed for by Gujarati Hindus, a diamond pin from Abdul Cadir, and a gold watch offered by Dada Abdulla and Company.
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Gandhi accepted the presents (and the compliments), but three days later he wrote to Parsee Rustomjee saying he was returning the gifts. He wished to make them over to the Natal Indian Congress, to form an emergency fund for times of crisis.
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The decision to return the presents caused a terrific row in the Gandhi household. ‘You may not need the [jewels]’, said Kasturba. ‘Your children may not need them. Cajoled, they will dance to your tune. I can
understand your not permitting me to wear them. But what about my daughters-in-law? They will be sure to need them. And who knows what will happen tomorrow? I would be the last person to part with gifts lovingly given.’

Gandhi answered that it was not for her to decide what to do with gifts presented to him. Kasturba offered this telling rebuke: ‘But service rendered by you is as good as rendered by me. I have toiled and moiled for you day and night. Is that no service?’

His wife’s opposition was neutralized by the support of his two elder sons. Harilal, aged thirteen, and Manilal, aged nine, agreed that the presents must be returned. With the assistance of his sons, Gandhi ‘somehow succeeded in extorting a consent’ from his wife.
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Now Parsee Rustomjee begged Gandhi to reconsider his decision. The presents conveyed the community’s love for their ‘great and honoured’ leader. Gandhi’s impulsive gesture might now lead to the ‘disorganization of a great achievement’ – the building of the Natal Indian Congress – ‘the credit of which achievement is primarily due to yourself’. The return of the gifts, said Rustomjee, would lead to the ‘misconstruction of motives in the donor as in the recipient’.
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Gandhi was unyielding. The presents were sent back to the Congress, while their leader prepared to set sail for his homeland.

The Gandhis left Durban in the third week of October 1901. They took a ship that went via Mauritius; this may have been because it was the first vessel they had bookings on. On the other hand, perhaps Gandhi wanted to make his acquaintance with a colony that had once been French before it was British and which, like Natal, had a substantial population of Indians brought out to work on the sugar plantations.

When Gandhi landed in Mauritius, his reputation had preceded him. A local newspaper spoke of how ‘he had brilliantly defended the cause of his compatriots in Natal.’ The Muslims, who in this island were from northern India rather than from Gujarat, hosted a garden party for him. Flags and buntings fluttered in the wind, while children and adults gathered to pay their respects. Gandhi ‘advised the Muslim community to send its children to college, as it was only through education that they would make a mark in life’. He asked the Indian community to take an increasing part in politics, ‘not the politics of fight[ing] against the
government, but the fight for its rights and a place in the sun under the pavilion of liberty’. When Gandhi heard that the son of his host was standing for election as a municipal councillor, he praised him for taking up a ‘beautiful and good’ cause.

Gandhi’s remarks sparked an angry response from one of the colony’s leading intellectuals, the poet and librarian Leoville L’Homme. The Asian way of life, said the French
colon
, was ‘absolutely hostile to ours’. If an Indian became a councillor, the mayor of Port Louis would be shaking hands with men who had ‘lice in their hair’. The Europeans who had settled Mauritius were bearers of a great military and political tradition. To share power with Indians would reduce these traditions ‘to the proportions of a sale register of bales of tamarind’; and to make of the colonists themselves ‘cadavers for the non-Christian communities’.

Gandhi was used to being abused by white colonists in Natal. But this piece of invective he did not see, since it was delivered in French. The memories he carried back from Mauritius were of the generosity of the Indians. At a farewell reception, the main speaker, a Muslim merchant, compared Gandhi to a modern-day Pharaoh who guided his countrymen ‘in the rough sea far away from the rock-under-water where there may be every chance of being dashed’.
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The Gandhi family reached Bombay in the last week of November 1901. After settling Kasturba and the children in Rajkot, Gandhi took a train across the subcontinent to attend the seventeenth session of the Indian National Congress, held that year in Calcutta.

The 1901 Congress had 896 delegates in all. More than half came from the host province, Bengal. Gandhi was one of forty-three delegates from the Bombay Presidency. He stayed at the India Club, on Strand Road, and commuted by rickshaw to Beadon Square, where the Congress was held in a great open-air pavilion. The meeting began with a song composed by Sarola Devi Ghosal, a niece of the poet Rabindranath Tagore. It was sung by a choir of fifty-eight men and boys, with ‘the nearly 400 volunteers joining the chorus for good effect’.

The President of the Calcutta Congress was D. E. Wacha, he who had read Gandhi’s speech for him in Bombay in 1896. Wacha’s presidential address was temperate in tone: speaking of the slow pace of economic
development, he said that ‘no doubt we have a good Government, but it is not unmixed with many an evil. The desire is that the evil may be purged away, and in the course of time we may have a better Government.’ Other speakers were more forthright. ‘Is the life function of the Indian
ryot
[peasant] to live and die merely like a brute?’ asked G. Subramania Iyer of Madras: ‘Is he not a “human being, endowed with reason, sentiment, and latent capacity”?’ Under British rule the standard of living had sunk further, such that there were now some 200 million Indians ‘grim and silent in their suffering, without zest in life, without comfort or enjoyment, without hope or ambition, living because they were born into the world, and dying because life could no longer be kept in the body.’
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In his own speech, Gandhi pointed out that were the president of the Congress, a civilized Parsi, to visit the Transvaal, he might be classified as belonging to the ‘coolie’ class. The Indians in South Africa were deeply attached to the homeland; when asked to help famine victims in Bombay, they had raised £2,000. Gandhi urged reciprocity. ‘If some of the distinguished Indians I see before me tonight were to go to South Africa, inspired with that noble spirit,’ he remarked, ‘our grievances must be removed.’
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When he had visited Calcutta in 1896, Gandhi had been cold-shouldered by the local leaders. Five years later he got a warmer reception. His work in South Africa was now more widely known; besides, he had an influential patron, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who had taken him under his wing. Gokhale was only three years older than Gandhi, but vastly more experienced in public affairs. Teacher, writer, social reformer and Member of the Viceroy’s Council, he was one of the best-known Indians in India.

Born in a village on the west coast of India, the son of a policeman, Gokhale had willed himself out of obscurity by hard work and self-learning. Moving to the ancient Maratha capital, Poona, he joined the faculty of Ferguson College, a pioneering centre of modern education. He taught the works of John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith, yet rooted his liberalism in an Indian context, by promoting Hindu–Muslim harmony and an end to caste discrimination. A featured speaker at the annual meetings of the Indian National Congress, he also visited England often, lobbying the Imperial Government to be more sensitive
to Indian needs and aspirations. Hearing him speak at Cambridge, a young John Maynard Keynes was impressed, telling a friend that Gokhale ‘has feeling, but feeling guided and controlled by thought, and there is nothing in him which reminds us of the usual type of political agitator’.
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When the Congress meeting ended, Gandhi moved into Gokhale’s house on Upper Circular Road. Over meals and while taking walks, Gokhale told Gandhi of the debt he owed the social reformer Mahadev Govind Ranade, who had died a few months previously. Gandhi observed that Gokhale’s ‘reverence for Ranade could be seen every moment. Ranade‘s authority was final in every matter, and he would cite it at every step.’ Gandhi was beginning to view his new mentor in the same light, for, as he observed, ‘to see Gokhale at work was as much a joy as an education. He never wasted a minute. His private relations and friendships were all for [the] public good.’

Gandhi’s spiritual preceptor, Raychand, had recently died; into the void stepped a scholar who would guide him along the path of public service. There remained reservations. One was Gokhale’s lifestyle: why, asked Gandhi, did the Poona man travel in a private carriage rather than in a public tramcar? The Imperial Councillor answered that the choice was not out of a love for comfort, but a need for privacy. ‘I envy your liberty to go about in tramcars,’ Gokhale told Gandhi: ‘But I am sorry, I cannot do likewise. When you are the victim of as wide a publicity as I am, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for you to go about in a tramcar.’
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On 19 January 1902, Gandhi was the main speaker at a meeting in the Albert Hall, off College Street in north Calcutta. He was introduced by Gokhale, who praised his ‘ability, earnestness and tact’, and professed a ‘profound admiration’ for his work in South Africa. He said that ‘Mr Gandhi was a man made of the stuff of which heroes are made.’ If ‘Mr Gandhi settled down in this country, it was the duty of all earnest workers to place him where he deserved to be, namely, at their head’.
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Gandhi spoke on successive weeks at the Albert Hall. One talk focused on the handicaps of Indians in South Africa. Another spoke of the Anglo-Boer War and of the Indian contribution to it. In peacetime the colonist was rude and hostile, but while at war, recalled Gandhi, the
British soldier was ‘altogether loveable. He mixed with us and the men freely. He often shared with us his luxuries whenever there were any to be had.’ From his time on the battlefield Gandhi had arrived at this intriguing, complicated, conclusion: ‘As a Hindu, I do not believe in war, but if anything can even partially reconcile me to it, it was the rich experience we gained at the front.’
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In the last week of January, Gandhi took a ship from Calcutta to Rangoon. On board he wrote a letter of thanks to Gokhale. ‘I cannot easily forget how anxious you were to wipe out the distance that should exist between you and me,’ he remarked. Then he apologized for raising the question of Gokhale’s mode of transport. He had ‘no right to question your taste on Monday evening … Had I known that I would cause you thereby the pain I did cause, I should certainly have never taken the liberty.’ He added a further healing touch, by saying that ‘your great work in the cause of education has admirers even on board this little vessel.’
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