Gandhi Before India (39 page)

When he walked into Gandhi’s chambers on New Year’s Day, Doke found a crowd of Indians already there. Later, he sketched the scene from memory: men in turbans, standing; women in saris, squatting, some with children in their arms. In the ante-room a flaxen-haired woman could be seen taking down a client’s particulars.
²⁷
This was Gandhi’s young secretary, Sonja Schlesin, a Lithuanian Jew who had arrived in Johannesburg via Moscow and Cape Town. Hermann Kallenbach had recommended her to Gandhi, who became greatly dependent on her shorthand and typing skills.
²⁸
By his own admission, Gandhi knew ‘very few whose writing is worse than mine’;
²⁹
it fell now to Miss Schlesin to decipher his drafts and render them in legible English.

Doke went past the secretary’s room into the lawyer’s office, which, he found, was ‘meagrely furnished and dusty’. As for the man himself, the minister had expected to find ‘a tall and stately figure, and a bold, masterful face, in harmony with the influence he seemed to exert in Johannesburg.’ To his surprise, Gandhi turned out to be ‘small, lithe, spare’, with a dark skin and dark eyes. His hair was black, with a sprinkling of grey.

Seeing the white minister enter, the Indians who were already there silently left the room. Doke immediately asked Gandhi a direct question: ‘How far are you prepared to make a martyr of yourself for the good of the cause?’ and received an equally direct answer: ‘It is a matter with me of complete surrender … I am willing to die at any time, or to do anything for the cause.’
³⁰

Gandhi met the Reverend Joseph Doke on the morning of 1 January 1908; the same afternoon, he participated in a meeting held in the Fordsburg Mosque. He spoke for himself, but also for his secretary, Sonja Schlesin, who had written a speech but was too shy to read it
herself. Gandhi, stepping in, conveyed the European lady’s advice that the Indians should ‘continue steadfast in your heroic resolve to give up all, aye life itself, for the noble cause of country and religion’. She, and he, reminded them of the struggle of suffragettes in England, who, ‘for the sake of a principle’, had ‘to brave innumerable trials’, including imprisonment.
³¹

On 3 January, Gandhi defended two passive resisters in court. They were former soldiers of the Indian Army, both Pathans, who had seen action and suffered wounds in the Anglo-Boer War. These facts their lawyer successfully impressed on the magistrate sentencing them. A few days later, Gandhi told the
Star
newspaper that Indians were actually worse off now than under the Boer regime. In another interview, with the
Transvaal Leader
, he complained that Smuts had referred to Indians as ‘coolies’. So long as the General ‘holds British Indians so cheap and denies them the full status of British subjects’, he insisted, ‘so long must Indians rest content with imprisonment or deportation’. However, he was still open to a compromise, telling a correspondent from Reuters that if the Act was suspended, he would undertake that every Indian in Transvaal would register himself within a month, ‘in accordance with a form to be mutually agreed upon’.
³²

Composing that week’s ‘Johannesburg Letter’ for
Indian Opinion
, Gandhi noted that of the several suggestions for an Indian equivalent to ‘passive resistance’, one was described as ‘not bad’. This was
sadagraha
, which roughly translated as ‘firmness in a good cause’. The suggestion came from Maganlal Gandhi. His uncle, and leader, took the liberty of refining it further, to
satyagraha
, or the ‘force of truth in a good cause’. ‘Though the phrase does not exhaust the connotations of the word “passive”’, remarked Gandhi, ‘we shall use
satyagraha
till a word is available which deserves the prize.’
³³

On 10 January, this particular passive resister – or
satyagrahi
 – was called to appear before a judge for not complying with the sentence to leave the colony. Gandhi reached the court by 10 a.m., with many supporters in tow. The hearing had however been postponed to the afternoon. The Indians then repaired to the Fordsburg Mosque, where, in an impromptu meeting, their leader told them to refute Smuts’ claim that ‘the whole of this agitation depended upon a few Indians.’ If they now demonstrated to the General that ‘the majority of Indians were not going to accept the Act, but would rather suffer imprisonment and
degradation, [and] forfeiture of all their goods’, then Smuts would come to appreciate their qualities and himself say, ‘these are the people whom I shall prize as fellow-citizens’.

After lunch, the accused and his associates proceeded to court. It had begun to rain, so an admirer held an umbrella for Gandhi to walk under. A rush of Indians entered the courtroom, before the police barred the rest. Inside, Gandhi pleaded guilty to the charge of disobeying the order to leave the Colony within forty-eight hours. He asked for the ‘heaviest penalty’ under the law, which was six months in prison with hard labour and a fine of £500. The judge, the same H. H. Jordan, declined to meet his request, instead sentencing him to two months without hard labour.
³⁴

Gandhi was taken to the Fort Prison, sited on Hospital Hill, a great mound of earth overlooking the cricket and rugby grounds known as ‘The Wanderers’. Built in the 1890s, the prison had separate quarters for whites and natives. As an Indian, Gandhi could not be placed with the former, so he had perforce to be put in with the latter. As a free man, he had lived pretty austerely. Although his forefathers had served kings, his own homes were modest. Even so, his new place of residence must have seemed confining, a narrow, dark, ‘native block’ that contained some seventy-two prisoners.
³⁵

The arrest of Gandhi, and the course of the passive resistance movement in the Transvaal generally, attracted attention in the neighbouring colony of Natal. Militant whites thought Natal should emulate Transvaal by framing laws ‘that will force the Asiatic to leave with disgust’.
³⁶
Less short-sighted whites were not so sanguine; a ‘perplexing inter-Colonial situation’ might develop should, as some suspected, General Smuts attempt to push the offenders out of the Transvaal. The ‘deportation of recalcitrants’ would result in an ‘unseemly state of things upon the Natal border’. As the
Natal Mercury
put it, ‘in this Colony we have our own Asiatic problem, and we do not wish it to be aggravated by the conversion of Natal into a dumping ground for the people of whom the Transvaal wants to rid itself.’

Natal was smaller in size than the Transvaal, yet already had ten times as many Asians. Besides, unlike the Boers, the British had a sentimental and imperial connection to India. The growing movement for national independence there worried them. These fears underlay the somewhat critical coverage given by the
Mercury
to the speeches of
General Smuts. It warned that his tactics of intimidation would only make martyrs of Gandhi and his colleagues, and ‘produce quite unforeseen results, both here and in India.’
³⁷

The Natal Indians, for their part, threw their numbers and their funds behind the passive resistance movement. Hindu and Muslim merchants competed with one another to offer support for the wives and children of those sent to prison in the Transvaal. The ever-generous Parsi Rustomjee pledged to ‘stake every penny I had in the world to free South African Indians from the degradation of the Asiatic Act’. Pietermaritzburg alone contributed £3,700 to a fund for the resisters.
³⁸

The day after Gandhi was incarcerated, a large meeting was convened by the Natal Indian Congress, held in the market adjoining the mosque off West Street in Durban. Here Parsee Rustomjee said the arrests would further test India’s loyalty to the Empire, already under strain due to food scarcity and the drain of wealth to England. A second speaker, Hassim Jooma, was reported as saying that all

Mr Gandhi asked was that no odious class legislation be inflicted indiscriminately upon high and low, educated and illiterate, bonafide pre-war residents and unauthorised entrants into the country. Their blood boiled when they remembered that the Indian ex-soldiers, who, after the war, had made the Transvaal their home, had been given rigorous imprisonment … although they fought for the land on behalf of Britain, suffered all the horrors of war, sustained physical wounds and indescribable misery, and now, after the conquest, they were not allowed a peaceful residence in the very land they fought to acquire.

A third speaker, a Dr Nanji, said that there was no need to pity Gandhi, for by his sacrifice ‘he had made a name for himself and was known all over the world. But it was Mrs. Gandhi who was grieving over her loss, and they must sympathise with her (Applause).’
³⁹
The meeting sent a collective telegram to Phoenix offering ‘their sincere sympathy to Mrs. Gandhi and family during their trouble for the splendid self-sacrifice made by Mr Gandhi in the Indian cause. May India produce many more Gandhis.’ This was one of forty-eight telegrams received by Kasturba in the first day after Gandhi’s arrest, in which (as
Indian Opinion
reported) ‘the prevailing tone was one of congratulation rather than commiseration.’
⁴⁰

That the whites of Natal would be ambivalent about the struggle in
the Transvaal, and that the Indians of the colony
would be supportive, was to be expected. More surprising was the endorsement of Gandhi’s movement by the African educator John L. Dube. Writing anonymously in his newspaper
Ilanga lase Natal
, Dube praised ‘the courageous manner in which the Indians are acting in the Transvaal.’ ‘It is common for the Bantu to admire “pluck”,’ said the reformer, ‘especially when the plucky contender has a fair claim for justice.’ He sagaciously added that ‘slaves never yet made a nation or an Empire; meanness and hopelessness of life are the factors that weaken the Empire, no matter how strong it may have been at first.’ In Dube’s view, the conflict in the Transvaal was ‘the outcome of vanity and inability to guide the differing influences into their respective and proper channels’.
⁴¹

The assessment was wise, and the sentiments uncommonly generous. Dube’s own Inanda settlement lay in close proximity to Gandhi’s Phoenix farm. This, and his own big-heartedness, may have led him to forgive or forget the Indians’ characteristic tendency to distinguish their cause from that of the ‘Kaffirs’, whom they thought less civilized than themselves.

In going to jail for a political principle, Gandhi chose to follow people he had previously praised in the pages of
Indian Opinion
 – such as the Indian nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the American radical Henry David Thoreau, the Russian pacifists, and the British suffragettes. Even so, the experience was novel for the London-trained barrister, a venture into the unfamiliar, and the unknown.

When, on 10 January 1908, Gandhi reached Johannesburg’s Fort Prison, he was undressed and weighed, and his fingerprints were taken. He was given a set of prison clothes, consisting of trousers, shirt, jumper, cap, socks and sandals. Then, since it was already evening, he was sent off to his cell with 8 ounces of bread for his evening meal. The cell was labelled ‘For Coloured Debtors’, and Gandhi had to share it with a dozen others. They slept on wooden planks, with ‘an apology for a pillow’. The meals were dominated by what was known locally as ‘mealie pap’, a porridge made of maize, which he found difficult to digest. When he protested (in writing), he was given an extra helping of vegetables.

The next morning, the prisoners were taken to a small yard, where they could walk about. The latrines and bathing area were also located here. Gandhi was relieved to see that the cells were washed and disinfected daily. However, with no combs or towels to hand, he worried that he might get scabies. He got permission to call in a barber and have his moustache shaved, and also his head.

At half-past five in the evening the prisoners were taken back to their cells. There was a single light bulb, by which one could read until eight, when this too was switched off. On 14 January, Gandhi was happy to welcome into jail his friends Thambi Naidoo and Leung Quinn, president of the Chinese Association. During the course of the week more
passive resisters joined them. They included Tamils, Gujarati Hindus and Muslims. They had now been permitted to receive rice rations, and to prepare their own meals. Thambi Naidoo took charge of the cooking, while Gandhi supervised the serving and washing-up. They found the jail staff quite helpful, except for a stern warder who was nicknamed, inevitably, ‘General Smuts’.

The prison authorities had agreed to place a table in Gandhi’s cell, and to provide pens and an ink-pot. Gandhi alternated between reading and writing. He had brought the Bhagavad-Gita with him, as well as some books by or about Tolstoy, Socrates and Ruskin. From the prison library he borrowed the works of Thomas Carlyle and a copy of the Bible, whose contents he discussed with a Chinese prisoner.

As more Indians came pouring in, the warders were compelled to erect tents in the yard. Gandhi, out of solidarity, joined his compatriots in sleeping in the open, but worried that their habit of spitting everywhere would lead to the place becoming dirty and infected. Another complaint was directed at the authorities – whereas the prison had a chapel for the Christian inmates, why did they not allow Hindu priests or Muslim imams to visit their co-religionists?
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The day after Gandhi’s arrest, many Indian stores in Natal and the Transvaal closed in honour of their leader. The lawyer’s European friends were also speaking out in support of his movement. Addressing his congregation on 12 January, the Reverend Joseph Doke called Gandhi’s campaign ‘a heroic struggle for conscience’s sake’. He marvelled that ‘a little handful of Indians and Chinese should have so imbibed the teaching of Christ in regard to the inherent nobility of man that they should become teachers of a mercenary age, while Christians stand by and smile or are silent as they suffer’. Two days later, Henry Polak told a crowded and enthusiastic meeting of the Chinese residents of Johannesburg that ‘the 15,000 Asiatics in the Transvaal were fighting a race fight which was of the utmost importance for the whole world, and that struggle was whether the Asiatic peoples were eternally to be kept in subjection or treated on terms of equality, regarded as fellow-men, as fellow human beings, to be treated as men to men, and not as men to slaves.’
²

Doke and Polak stressed the principle, while Hermann Kallenbach, just as characteristically, spoke of the personality. Protesting the ‘insinuating remarks’ in the press attributing ‘material and dishonourable
motives’ to Gandhi’s conduct, the architect said that he had not met ‘a more conscientious, more honourable or better man’. For ‘if Mr Gandhi, after the most thorough test and self-investigation, considers the course to be adopted by him to be the right one, he will not be hindered by any results, however disastrous they may be to himself from a material point of view, or, as we have seen now, from the point of view of his personal freedom.’ Kallenbach appealed to his ‘fellow-colonists not to be unjust to a man whose motives are of the highest, and who has proved this to us by action’.
³

Doke, Polak and Kallenbach were all friends of Gandhi. More striking was the support that came from the other side of the colour bar, from Africans whom Gandhi did not know at all. In an article entitled ‘A Lesson in True Manliness’, the
Basutoland Star
marvelled that the Transvaal Government, ‘known all over the world as being very harsh and inconsiderate in its treatment of all persons of colour’, was ‘almost driven to climb down from its high pedestal by the exhibition of manly qualities by the Indians’. The paper approved of the movement’s ends and, as crucially, of the means. ‘Man has two ways of resenting or resisting,’ said the
Basutoland Star
:

The one is by active resistance, and the other is by passive resistance. The former is not commendable, as it leads to bloodshed, which should be avoided, and the latter is commendable, as it avoids bloodshed and usually ends in a bloodless and amicable settlement of the point at issue. It is the latter mode of resistance, which the Asiatics have adopted, which we commend our people the natives of South Africa to emulate. Gandhi and his compatriots are truly martyrs, and, come what may, true martyrs have before today never suffered in vain … Our sympathies go out to our oppressed fellow-subjects, who are made to suffer for the same cause that we suffer – viz., our slight pigment of the skin. Truly, the Transvaal has tarnished the fair name of our mighty Empire by its blind colour prejudice.
⁴

This statement of solidarity is made more remarkable by the fact that it was unprompted, unsolicited, and – so far as we can tell – unrequited.

In the third week of January, Gandhi was visited by Albert Cartwright, editor of the
Transvaal Leader
, a liberal-minded Englishman who had experienced terms of imprisonment himself (for opposing the way the
war against the Boers had been conducted). Cartwright was in touch with Smuts about a negotiated settlement between the Government and the Indians. The General was now worried about the pressure on the jails. As he told a meeting of whites, he had ‘sent every leader to prison, and hundreds more, and it had had no impression.’ There were not enough jails to house all the Indians in the Transvaal. To ‘take 10,000 men by the collar’ and put them in prison was ‘not only physically but morally impossible’.
⁵

Pressure was also being exerted on the Colonial Office by the India Office, who had been alerted by the Viceroy of ‘the existence of a very strong and bitter sentiment amongst the educated and articulate sections of the native community throughout India on the subject of the disabilities imposed on their countrymen resident in South Africa.’
⁶
The Viceroy had been forwarded an anguished, breathless telegram received by the Anglican Church in India, which read:

Barrister merchants traders hawkers agents clerks interpreters government officials colonial born married South African children born here [all] arrested … many families left mercy community some merchants twenty years standing including greybeards others gaoled include youths tender years 2 old soldiers bearing medals several campaigns also leaders ambulance corps boer war stretcher corps Natal rebellion …
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With his ambivalent feelings about British imperialists, Smuts might not have been swayed by these protests had they not been endorsed by his old friend, the Cape liberal J. X. Merriman. The treatment of educated Asiatics like Gandhi, said Merriman to Smuts, ‘savour[ed] of the yellow cap of the Jew, or the harrying of the Moriscoes of Spain’. He urged Smuts to follow the principle:
Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos
(to spare the humble and subdue the proud).
⁸

Gandhi was likewise amenable to a compromise. Before starting the satyagraha he had worked hard to avoid it. He was now prepared once more to try the path of dialogue and reconciliation. The resisters were all first-time satyagrahis, and doubtless keen to get out of jail as early as possible.

Cartwright and Gandhi had two meetings, after which the editor drafted a document wherein the resisters offered voluntary registration in exchange for the dropping of cases, the release of prisoners, the reinstatement of Government employees who had become satyagrahis, and
a discussion about the repeal of the Asiatic act. The paper was signed by Gandhi, Thambi Naidoo (on behalf of the Tamils) and Leung Quinn (representing the Chinese).
⁹

On 30 January, Gandhi was taken by a posse of policemen to meet Smuts in Pretoria. They discussed the terms of the compromise, with Smuts asking that those Indians who had been loyal to the Government not be harassed. Later, Gandhi wrote to a friend that he and the General

met as though we had been old chums. He spoke most familiarly and allowed me to do likewise. He began by saying that he had no ill-feeling against me or the Asiatics, that his best friends were Indians at the time he was studying for the Bar, and that he wanted to give every assistance … He then said that I should see that the Indians did not crow over their victory and that demonstration was avoided. This was, of course, in our interests, because the Law was yet to be repealed, which he has promised to do, and the repeal of the Law will cost him a great deal of anxiety and trouble … [He] came to the door to receive me and we shook hands. There was heartiness on his part in the handshake.
¹⁰

That same evening Gandhi was released. A reporter who met him at Johannesburg station said he ‘seemed keenly pleased that a settlement had been come to by which neither side had suffered in honour, integrity or prestige’.
¹¹
The next day, the other passive resisters (about 220 in all) were also set at liberty. Those freed went at once to Gandhi’s law chambers. The first to arrive was an ex-soldier named Nawab Khan, ‘conspicuous in the uniform of the Bengal Lancers’. Gandhi came soon afterwards, riding a bicycle. A large crowd of Indians had assembled to greet the satyagrahis. A reporter on the spot noted that

a certain amount of mutual gratification seemed to be going on, but the perfect orderliness which has marked the agitation was maintained … [I]n deference to Mr Gandhi’s understood wish – that there was to be no demonstration of any kind – they departed quietly after hearing news and exchanging their views.
¹²

Gandhi’s political style was oriented towards reconciliation and compromise. Petitions, letters, meetings – it was only when these methods had not proven successful that he had chosen to court arrest. But
how long could he, and the Indians, sustain the path of struggle and sacrifice? Sensible of the compulsions of his followers, their need to earn a livelihood and not be separated from their families, Gandhi was now amenable to a settlement with Government.

The more militant Pathans, however, were not. They had played their part, as soldiers on the British side, in the war against the Boers. That they were now subjected to humiliating laws by those they had once militarily defeated enraged them. Gandhi had mobilized them for the struggle; now, they would rather fight to the finish. They believed the lawyer had backed down too easily. At a meeting in Johannesburg, they raised objections to the giving of fingerprints, which Pathans such as Nawab Khan thought was humiliating. Back in India, only criminals were asked to provide them, and to submit one’s body to such (symbolic) subjection was anathema to their sense of masculinity and tribal pride.

The Pathans were not persuaded by Gandhi’s claim that he had himself had his fingerprints taken in prison. Seeking a compromise within the compromise, Gandhi wrote to Smuts asking if thumb impressions alone were acceptable. While to him, ‘personally, it is immaterial whether thumb-prints or digit-impressions be given, there are many among the Asiatics to whom the latter presents an impassable difficulty’.
¹³
Gandhi suggested that educated Indians waive the right to give signatures and offer fingerprints instead.
¹⁴

Extremists on the European side were also unhappy with the compromise. Gandhi should have been exiled from the province, they argued. A meeting of the White League, held in Johannesburg on 1 February, asked its members to ‘passively resist the Asiatics by securing pledges from the white people not to deal with the Orientals’. A co-operative society of whites to replace the trade of Indian hawkers was proposed. These colonists ‘want[ed] the Asiatics out of the country, and will have nothing to do with them.’
¹⁵

As mandated by the agreement, voluntary registration was scheduled to begin at ten a.m. on Monday 10 February 1908. An office was opened at Von Brandis Square, in the heart of Johannesburg. Hoping to be the first to register, Gandhi left his chambers at a quarter to ten, accompanied by Thambi Naidoo and Essop Mia. The subsequent events are described in a contemporary newspaper report:

On the way, a party of Indians stopped the party [led by Gandhi] and asked what they were going to do.

Mr Gandhi replied that they were going to register, and others endeavoured to explain that, if finger impressions were objected to, the registration officers would not insist.

One of the party raised a stick and hit Mr Gandhi on the back of the head, knocking him to the ground. One of Mr Gandhi’s party tried to save their leader, but he also was knocked down with a severe blow on the side of the head.

Mr Mia, the chairman of the British Indian Association, also interfered, and he was put out of action with a blow to the head.

The assailants hit Mr Gandhi several blows with sticks on the head.

The police on point duty saw the disturbance, and their appearance caused the assailants to decamp. Two, however, were arrested. The assailants are Punjabis and Pathans, and they allege that Mr Gandhi has not, in coming to the agreement, guarded their interests.

Considerable excitement prevails, judging by the number of Indians waiting to be registered. The great majority are on Mr Gandhi’s side.
¹⁶