Gandhi Before India (26 page)

an evil-smelling race, and an eyesore on this, one of the most beautiful countries in the world. Are we to allow them here? (no). Are we to allow these human parasites to overrun a land which is the heritage of white people and for which they have fought and bled? (no). Then let us take measures before it is too late or they will gain such a foothold as they have already secured in Natal (loud applause).
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At another meeting, in Pretoria, a speaker named A. H. Green drew upon thirty years spent as a tea-planter in South India to warn the audience against any ‘sentimentalism’. The Hindu was ‘a very wily fellow’. If ‘you have the Indian with you and do not confine him to living and trading in bazaars,’ warned Green, then ‘he will enter upon the various spheres of work throughout the Transvaal’. He spoke of an Indian he knew, who married an English lady while studying in England, and then took her home, where she had to cover her head and eat separately from him. Who was to say that if more Indians were allowed into the Transvaal, they would not first take their land, then their jobs, and, finally, their women? ‘Have you a daughter, Sir?’ asked the rabble-rouser of his excited and fearful audience: ‘Would you like to see your daughter wedded to an Indian?’
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The Transvaal Government now sought to annul the judgment in favour of Habib Motan. Lord Milner was worried that if the verdict was not reversed, ‘some thousands of British Indians will be able to demand as of right a privilege from which they had been excluded prior to the recent finding of the Supreme Court.’
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Sensing a hardening of the white attitude, Gandhi sought a compromise. He outlined its terms in a proposal sent to Lord Milner in September 1904; this has disappeared from the records, but a letter that accompanied it exists. It throws new light on Gandhi’s motivations at
this point in time. The letter’s tone and contents are extremely conciliatory. Gandhi said his proposals

meet every reasonable objection of the Colonists in that:

(1) They are intended entirely to prohibit the immigration of all but the fewest Indians of education such as may be allowed to enter the Colony for the assistance of those who are already settled in the country.

(2) They place the issue of new dealers’ licences absolutely under the control of the Government or the local bodies if thereto authorised subject to review by the Supreme Court in extreme cases.

(3) Under them compulsory segregation would not be necessary because in Johannesburg and Pretoria, which contain the largest population, there are already locations existing, and in the other places they are totally unnecessary as the present Indian population is too small. There would be very little addition in future and few, if any, new licences would be issued.

Gandhi said of his proposals that they do ‘give the right to the Indians of owning fixed property, but, if necessary, certain portions – for instance, farms – may be reserved for exclusive European ownership. In towns it is submitted that there should be no opposition to Indian ownership.’ He ended his letter with a plea:

Throughout my eleven years’ connection with the question, my earnest endeavour has been to look at the question from the European standpoint also and to advise my countrymen so far as possible to avoid an appeal to the Home Government. It is the same desire that prompts me to approach His Excellency in the present instance. Should my attendance be required, I would wait on His Excellency.

I beg to repeat that this is written in my private capacity but should His Excellency be pleased to approve of my suggestions, I do not anticipate any difficulty in securing the acceptance of the proposals by my countrymen in so far as such may be deemed necessary.
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Even without access to Gandhi’s original proposal, we can, with the aid of this fascinating and forgotten letter, divine its contents. The lawyer asked that Indians be permitted to own property and reside in towns alongside white populations
where they already did so
. This would allow them to protect their livelihoods, and their dignity. What he did not
ask for was the upholding of their right, as British Indians, to migrate freely to any part of the Empire. Hence the call to limit further immigration to a few educated Indians. The concession re farm ownership was perhaps due to the fact that Boers disliked Indians even more than the British. A new party named ‘Het Volk’ was campaigning in the Transvaal countryside against ‘the free influx of Asiatics’, its leaders making what the white press was obliged to refer to as ‘violent speeches’.
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Gandhi’s proposal represented a significant softening of his views. Back in 1894 and 1895, he had asked that educated Indians be granted the franchise in Natal. He now saw more clearly that whites in South Africa (as distinct from whites in England) would not concede the right to vote. So he asked for something more modest – namely, confirmation of their rights of residence, work, travel and trade. Indians could not become equal citizens, but they might yet be treated as honourable subjects, allowed to live at peace and with dignity under the British flag in South Africa.

One motivation for Gandhi’s proposal was certainly political. He understood that, in the context of the profound asymmetry of power (and of numbers), Indians could not overcome white prejudice in the Transvaal. However, with the help of sympathetic British administrators, they might moderate or placate it. Hence the compromise suggested by him – virtually no fresh immigration, but no seizures of property or forced relocations either.

Another motivation was very likely personal. Although, as he reminded Milner, he had first come to South Africa eleven years ago, this country was no more ‘home’ to him than London had been. Gandhi had gone to one place to study, to the other to help fight a legal battle. For all his commitment to the Indians living there, South Africa (like the United Kingdom) remained for him a foreign land. In October 1901 he had sailed from Durban for India, in his eyes for good. In November 1902 he sailed back to Durban, but – in a sign of how temporary he saw this stay would be – left Kasturba and the children behind in Bombay.

For some sixteen years now, Mohandas Gandhi had been a journeyman between continents. Born and raised in Kathiawar, he had braved convention and community to study in England. When he boarded the SS
Clyde
in September 1888, he saw the voyage as his first, but also his last, journey overseas. Having burnished his credentials, he would return to make a career and name in his native Kathiawar; as his
mother’s spiritual guide had advised her, with a barrister’s certificate from London a diwanship should be her son’s for the asking. His brother Laxmidas’s misdeeds rendered that plan unfruitful, and life became more complicated. Having tried, and failed, to establish himself in Rajkot and Bombay, on his third try Gandhi became a successful lawyer in Durban. Three years there alone; three more years with his family; and then, to educate his children and overcome his wife’s loneliness, in 1901 Gandhi returned to India.

A year later he was back in South Africa. This time, the community desired that he be based in Johannesburg. Here he lived the life of an expatriate: working with his Indian clients during the day, and spending the evenings with (white) professionals likewise single or separated from their families. Life in Johannesburg was interesting and intriguing, for a while. But once the Indian question in the Transvaal was settled, he would make one final transcontinental journey and go back home.

Kasturba very much wanted her husband to return to India. And he wished to go back himself. There may have been a lingering ambition to try – for the third time – to establish a practice in the Bombay High Court. There were also options outside the law, in the sphere of politics and social work. For an ambitious patriot, the motherland offered a far larger theatre of action than the diaspora. The experience and credibility that he had acquired in South Africa could be parleyed to great effect back home in India.

There were thus compelling reasons for Gandhi to return finally – after sixteen years on the move, shuttling between three continents – to establish himself as a lawyer and/or social activist in his homeland. Hence the compromise offered to Milner. If Gandhi could secure a settlement which struck a middle ground between the desires of the colonists (the wholesale expulsion of Indians) and the hopes of the more radical of his countrymen (the right of free entry and settlement), he could leave South Africa with his honour intact.

Gandhi’s note and letter were passed on to the Governor. Milner does not appear to have called Gandhi for a meeting, or indeed to have taken his proposals very seriously. Gandhi was now losing faith in the intentions of this particular Englishman. As he wrote to Gokhale:

Contrary to all expectations, Lord Milner, who on the eve of the war, was the champion of the oppressed including the British Indians, has completely
turned round and … is quite prepared to deprive the Indians of even what little rights they possessed in the Transvaal before [the] war.’
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An Englishwoman who got to know Lord Milner during the Anglo-Boer War found him ‘clear-headed and narrow’, adding, ‘Everyone says he has no heart, but I think I hit on the atrophied remains of one.’
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To his compatriots Milner might sometimes show emotion, but to everyone (and for everything) else he was always hard-headed. As Saul Dubow has written, notwithstanding Milner’s own low opinion of Boer culture, the proconsul now understood that ‘securing a prosperous and loyal Transvaal was key to establishing and maintaining British political supremacy in South Africa’.
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In rejecting Gandhi’s proposals, Milner was merely recognizing that European sentiment, Boer as well as Briton, was overwhelmingly against the Indians.

Mohandas Gandhi was city-born and city-bred. Born in Porbandar, raised in Rajkot, educated in London; a practising professional in Bombay, Durban and Johannesburg – he had spent all his years in urban centres small, large and massive. In 1904, now thirty-five, he had not spent a night in a village, nor perhaps an entire day either. And yet he had long had a yearning for the rustic life. It was first expressed in London, in the meetings of the Vegetarian Society, where he met Henry Salt and read his friend Edward Carpenter, a Cambridge scholar who had settled in the Yorkshire hills, from where he sermonized against the ills of industrialism. In his own first writings, Gandhi had spoken admiringly of the simple life of the shepherds of Kathiawar. Later he had read Tolstoy, and learnt of the Russian’s experiments on the land.

In the latter half of 1904, Gandhi travelled to Durban for work, being seen off at Johannesburg’s Park Station by Henry Polak. As the train pulled out, his friend gave him a copy of John Ruskin’s
Unto this Last
. This was a polemic against the then very influential science of political economy. Ruskin deplored the tendency of Ricardo, Mill,
et al.
to make money the unit of all exchange and value. A science that regarded air, light and cleanliness, or peace, trust and love as worthless, was in conflict with the teachings of the great religions, and antithetical to the deeper interests of humanity itself. Whereas Ricardo and company rigorously separated economics from morality, Ruskin thought that affection and trust must govern relations between master and servant,
capitalist and worker. A moral economics would be one ‘which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings’, not which promoted the greatest monetary wealth or produced the greatest number of rich people.
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The lawyer read
Unto this Last
at once, right through, and was so moved that he could not sleep that night. The impact was so immense that, as Gandhi later recalled, ‘I determined to change my life in accordance with the ideals of the book.’ The core teaching of
Unto this Last
, as understood by him, was that the work of farmers and labourers was as valuable as the work of lawyers and factory managers. To work with one’s hands, and on the land, was more honourable than working with one’s brains or with the aid of machines.
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Reading Ruskin on the train from Johannesburg to Durban consolidated Gandhi’s romantically rural orientation. It prompted him to move
Indian Opinion
from Durban’s Grey Street to a new home in the countryside. He bought a farm near the station of Phoenix, on the North Coast Line, some fourteen miles from town. In its issue of 24 December 1904 the journal announced the shift in location. Both printing press and operating staff would be housed in the farm, where ‘the workers could live a more simple and natural life, and the ideas of Ruskin and Tolstoy combined with strict business principles’. Those who worked on the press, whether Englishman or Indian – or neither – would be paid a modest monthly allowance (of £3) and allotted plots of land to grow their food. The scheme’s promoter described it as ‘a bold experiment and fraught with momentous consequences. We know of no non-religious organisation that is or has been managed on the principles above laid down.’
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One of the first recruits to the new experiment was Albert West. Gandhi had persuaded him to leave his job in Johannesburg and take charge of the press. When West reached the farm he found it to be a pleasant enough place, with fruit trees and date-palms, and a river running through the property. A plot of twenty acres was bought in the first instance; with another eighty acres added on soon afterwards. On this land the workers built homes of wood and corrugated iron. Meanwhile, the press was dismantled and transported from Durban to Phoenix in four large wagons, each pulled by sixteen bullocks. The machinery was then reassembled. Gandhi wanted to work the press by hand, but West insisted on the purchase of a petrol engine (there was no electricity in
the neighbourhood). As a concession to his friend, the Englishman designed a hand-operated machine with a wheel mounted on a wooden frame, which could be used when the oil ran out.
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