Gandhi Before India (25 page)

While a student, Henry Polak began writing for a Jewish weekly on political matters. He fell in love with a girl named Millie Graham, who was both a Christian and, as an ‘ardent social reformer’, a supporter of women’s suffrage. His family were distressed by the romance, so – in an attempt to break it – they dispatched Henry to join an uncle in South Africa. However, before he left he insisted on formalizing his engagement to Millie.
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Polak worked at first in his uncle’s business in Cape Town. He soon moved to Johannesburg, where he joined the staff of a local weekly, the
Transvaal Critic
. He had begun reading the works of Leo Tolstoy, and it was a fellow Tolstoyan, a painter and stage actor, who took him to the vegetarian restaurant patronized by an Indian who also admired the Russian writer. As they entered the eatery one day in 1904, the painter pointed Gandhi out to his friend. Polak then took

a swift glance at the quiet, slender, pleasant-looking man sitting at a table alone. Apart from his black professional turban and his dark complexion, there was nothing specially to mark out the already well-known East Indian leader. I was disappointed. I suppose I had expected to see a big, aggressive fellow, who had been the sergeant-major of an East Indian Ambulance Corps during the Boer War … I could not guess that, at the moment, I was gazing at the man who was to become the greatest Asiatic of his time.

The two men were introduced, and found that they shared an admiration not just of Tolstoy, but of more obscure authors, such as Adolf Just, author of
Return to Nature
. Polak visited Gandhi at his law chambers, and as the friendship developed, ‘we met almost daily and discussed vigorously every problem and subject which interested either of us.’ These conversations usually took place over dinner at the vegetarian restaurant, where they ate salads so dominated by a particular pungent bulb that Polak joked that they should start an ‘Amalgamated Society of Onion–Eaters’.
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Just before or after he met Polak, Gandhi came into contact with Hermann Kallenbach, also a Jew, albeit of a different background and temperament. Born two years after Gandhi, and originally from Lithuania, Kallenbach grew up in Prussia and qualified as an architect. Wiry, strong and extremely athletic, he enjoyed the outdoors, spending his winters skating and his summers swimming and fishing. Body-building was another passion. In about 1896 he moved to South Africa. He was a beneficiary of the construction boom in Johannesburg, designing large buildings that went up in the heart of the city. Like Ritch and Polak, he was part of a substantial wave of Jewish emigration to South Africa, with the population of Jews multiplying tenfold between 1880 and 1904. Many came, like Kallenbach himself, from towns in Russia and Eastern Europe that were home to a rising tide of anti-Semitism.
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Kallenbach’s office was very close to Gandhi’s law chambers. They first met through an Indian merchant who was a client of both lawyer and architect. The friendship with Kallenbach was an inversion of Gandhi’s earlier friendship with Sheikh Mehtab. As an athlete who was deft with his hands, Kallenbach was a sort of mature Sheikh Mehtab; except that rather than being looked up to, it was he who admired Gandhi – whose interest in matters of the spirit and steadiness of purpose were in contrast to the architect’s restlessness and conflicted sexual desires (he was a bachelor, and at this stage apparently a virgin).
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It is striking that of Gandhi’s four closest friends in Johannesburg, three were Jews. White-skinned, but not Boer or Briton, and certainly not Christian, the Jews came from families that had been subject to prejudice and persecution. They were quicker than other Europeans to deplore the unreasoning racism of rulers in the Transvaal; quicker, too, to warm to an Indian who was alive, intelligent, and less than orthodox in his own religious (or dietary) beliefs.
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It is also striking that none of these friends were Gujarati or even Indian. In London, there had been Indian students with whom Gandhi could converse. In Johannesburg, however, he was the only professional in the community. There were no other Indian lawyers, nor any Indian doctors, teachers, editors, or managers in the Transvaal. To be sure, Gandhi was connected to his compatriots by ties of sentiment and culture, but books and ideas were not part of their diet; nor, really, were fruit and vegetables. The Gujaratis in Johannesburg were, as Muslims, hard-core meat-eaters, as were the working-class Tamils and Telugu-speakers who represented, so to speak, the ‘other half’ of the community. These people were his clients and also his compatriots. He identified with their sufferings. His working day was spent advancing their individual and collective causes. However, for conversation and cuisine he looked elsewhere.

In his ‘Guide to London’, written in Pretoria in 1893, Gandhi had said that the Indian student abroad was ‘master of his time’, with ‘no wife to tease or flatter him, no parents to indulge, no children to look after’. Ten years later, living alone once more, Gandhi used his freedom from family obligations to explore the dissenting sub-cultures of Johannesburg. Most professionals in the town were likewise single or living apart from their wife and children. They used their time outside work to play and party. Rugby, cricket and horse-racing held no attractions for Gandhi; nor did club life and hunting expeditions. But experiments in diet and inter-faith living did. These interests or obsessions, first visible in London, were now more vigorously pursued amidst Jews, Theosophists, Nonconformists and vegetarians in this new city on a reef.

Outside South Africa, Gandhi’s most steadfast supporters were two Parsis in London: the former MP Dadabhai Naoroji and the serving MP M. M. Bhownaggree. He sent them a regular stream of letters on Indian problems in South Africa; they, in turn, passed on his concerns to His Majesty’s Government. In 1903 alone, Naoroji sent as many as nineteen letters to the India Office on Gandhi’s behalf – this a mark both of the younger man’s persistence and the older man’s patriotism.
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Bhownaggree was scarcely less energetic. He asked many questions in Parliament, where he termed the anti-Indian legislation in India a ‘scandal’, and in September 1903 posted a letter of twenty printed pages to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain. Drawing
on memoranda sent by Gandhi, this detailed the ‘disabilities and indignities’ suffered by British Indians in the Transvaal.’ Bhownaggree warned that ‘the affection of the Indian people for King and Empire is undermined by the continuance of the state of affairs in South Africa.’

Soon afterwards, Chamberlain resigned. Bhownaggree now sent the letter to his successor, Alfred Lyttelton, who passed it on to the Governor of the Transvaal, Lord Milner, noting that he could ‘not but feel much sympathy for the views expressed in it, and I fear it will be difficult to meet his representations with a fully satisfactory answer.’

When Lyttelton forwarded Bhownaggree’s note to him, Lord Milner asked his Lieutenant-Governor, Alfred Lawley, to prepare a rebuttal. On 13 April 1904, Lawley sent his boss a closely argued defence of the policy towards Indians. ‘There is not in this country one man in a hundred,’ he remarked, ‘who would agree to recognise the coloured man as capable of admission to the same social standard as the white.’ Then he added: ‘I do not seek to justify the prejudices which exist; I merely desire to set them forth. They cannot be ignored. They have got to be reckoned with.’

Like Milner, Lawley thought that while Indians were acceptable as labourers, as traders they posed a serious threat to European interests in the Transvaal. There was a further danger, that if their children educated themselves they might seek a foothold in the professional class. The Asiatic question in South Africa thus drew one ‘face to face with a most difficult problem of modern civilisation’. The British Empire included territories of all climatic and vegetative types. Tropical regions like India and arid areas like central Africa were both incapable of ‘becoming the permanent home of a white nation’. On the other hand,

South Africa is one of the countries inhabitable alike by Europeans and Asiatics, and it is difficult to conceive any question at the present moment more momentous than the struggle between East and West for the inheritance of these semi-vacant territories. Promises have been made without knowledge or perception of the consequence involved in their fulfilment.

If the redemption of the pledges upon which Sir M. Bhownaggree depends both in letter and spirit means that in fifty or a hundred years this country will have fallen to the inheritance of the Eastern instead of Western populations, then from the point of view of civilisation they must be numbered among promises which it is a greater crime to keep than to break.

Lawley therefore concluded that ‘the first duty of statesmen in this country is to multiply homes for white men.’

On 18 April, Milner wrote to the Imperial Government endorsing Lawley’s views. The challenge, on the one side, was to prevent ‘an indiscriminate influx of Asiatics’, and on the other, to facilitate ‘a great increase in the white population’. As for Indians already in the territory, Milner thought that ‘the attempt to place coloured people on an equality with whites in South Africa is wholly impracticable, and that, moreover, it is in principle wrong.’
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Faced with Milner’s intransigence, M. M. Bhownaggree turned once more to the British Parliament. Between February and August 1904, he asked as many as twelve questions about the treatment of Indians in South Africa.
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He also took the debate to the press, telling the
Daily Graphic
that in the Transvaal, ‘the Indian subjects of the King are being actually worse treated than they were under Boer rule.’ When asked ‘why this reactionary course has been taken’, Bhownaggree replied: ‘I can only put it down to the influence of the White League, a militant body that … seems to have obtained a commanding influence over the Transvaal Government.’
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Gandhi, meanwhile, was busy writing for
Indian Opinion
, shoring up the sagging spirit of his countrymen. In November 1903 he saluted Dadabhai Naoroji on his seventy-eighth birthday; the Parsi veteran, he said, was ‘loved from the Hindukush to Cape Comorin and from Karachi to Calcutta as no other living man in India is loved’. Two months later, he wrote that the lives of Christ and Joan of Arc demonstrated that ‘individuals have to sacrifice so that the community may gain a great deal’. Gandhi thought the situation did not call for ‘heroic sacrifice’ by Indians; rather, ‘well-sustained, continuous and temperate constitutional effort is the main thing needed.’ For ‘if the British machinery is slow to move, the genius of the nation being conservative, it is also quick to perceive and recognise earnestness and unity.’
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In February 1904, seeking to get the machinery to move, Gandhi wrote several letters to the Chief Medical Officer complaining that the Indian Location in north-west Johannesburg was ‘over-crowded beyond description’. Since Indians had only tenancy rights, they had no incentive to keep the place clean. Gandhi warned that ‘if the present state of
things is continued, the outbreak of some epidemic disease is merely a question of time.’
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Sure enough, bubonic plague broke out in the bazaar in March. Gandhi led the attempts to nurse the victims. A temporary hospital was formed in an abandoned warehouse, where the sick were treated with wet-earth poultices. Many were saved, but at least twenty-one died.
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Having failed to provide proper sanitation, the municipality now decided to raze the bazaar to the ground. A contingent of troops evacuated the area and set fire to six whole blocks, containing at least 1,600 buildings. The residents watched in stony silence. The next day, the Indians were taken to a new location, in Klipstruit, ten miles outside the city. The site had previously served as a camp for Boer prisoners-of-war: with tents as houses and no sewage, the place was unfit to live in and to trade – who, whether white, coloured or black, would come and shop there? The Indians who had been dumped at Klipstruit made their way back to Johannesburg in dribs and drabs, living and working at the margins of the city itself.
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In May, a trader named Habib Motan appealed to the Supreme Court against the Government’s decision to deny him a general licence. He had traded freely before the Anglo-Boer War, and questioned why he had now to be confined to a location. The judge, bravely and perhaps surprisingly, concurred. Gandhi congratulated the merchant for winning his case, but warned ‘against being too much elated by this success. Probably it means only the beginning of another struggle. Opposition will be raised up against them throughout the country, and the Government may bring in a bill to counteract the effects of the Supreme Court.’ He also drew attention to the problems of Chinese traders, who, in small towns across the province, were being harassed by whites who wanted the custom of Chinese mine workers for themselves. This reminded him ‘very much of similar agitation in Durban in 1896’ (conducted against the Indians, and against himself).
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As Gandhi had predicted, sections of the white public were outraged by the Motan judgment. A deputation of white traders met the Colonial Secretary to complain that ‘the Asiatics are getting hold of the native trade, which represents a very large part of the country’s wealth’. A hardline group, the East Rand Vigilance Association, urged the Government to ‘formulate a new and comprehensive Ordinance, with all
possible despatch, such Ordinance to be retrospective and to provide that no Asiatic trading or residence of any kind be allowed in the Transvaal save in bazaars set aside for the exclusive use of Asiatics’.
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The East Rand Vigilantes were led by an Anglican clergyman named C. E. Greenfield, of whom Gandhi’s weekly wrote that he ‘believed justice to be absent from Heaven itself if it contained a British Indian’.
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The priest represented a wide spectrum of white opinion. At a meeting of European farmers in Pietersburg, one speaker described Indians as