Gandhi Before India (40 page)

This report, from the
Natal Mercury
, needs to be supplemented by one from
Indian Opinion
, from which it appears that Thambi Naidoo may have saved Gandhi’s life. The Tamil was carrying an umbrella, and used it to engage the main attacker, Meer Allam Khan, pitting his instrument against the iron rod used by the Pathan. The umbrella finally broke, but by then the commotion had attracted the police as well as the employees of Arnott and Gibson, a law firm which had its offices nearby.
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When Gandhi recovered consciousness, he was taken to the private office of J. C. Gibson, a partner in the firm that bore his name. He was bleeding from the lips and the forehead, and two of his front teeth were loose. A doctor was called in to treat the wounds. The Baptist minister Joseph Doke, hearing of the attack, had reached the scene. When someone suggested that Gandhi be removed to hospital, the clergyman offered to take him to his house in Smith Street instead. Doke’s son Clement vacated his room for the unexpected guest. Clement’s sister Olive watched as the patient was patched up. In her vivid recollection, ‘he would not have any chloroform or anything, he just sat on the bed while Mother held him up and the doctors stitched up his wounds. Two
stitches were put in his cheek and two on his lip and two on his eyebrow. The last one was almost too much for him; he nearly fainted.’
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During the day, Mrs Doke made tea for the stream of Indians who came in to visit their wounded leader. At night, Doke sat by Gandhi’s bedside and prayed. For two days after the attack, Gandhi ran a high fever. This, and the injuries to his face and lips, made it very hard for him to eat or drink. Slowly, he began taking liquids and also fruit, and, in time, bread dipped in milk. The wounds were healing, thanks to earth poultices, applied despite the doctor’s objection.
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Telegrams of support for Gandhi and of thanks to the Dokes began pouring in from all parts of Transvaal and Natal. The Christian couple received money and jewels from individuals and community groups, thanking them ‘for their kindly and charitable assistance to our fellow-countryman and leader Mr Gandhi in his time of physical need’. Joseph Doke said he would create a trust fund from the gifts, to fund the education of Indian boys.
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Back in 1897, when Gandhi had been attacked by a white mob in Durban, it was a European superintendent of police who, with Parsee Rustomjee, had helped spirit him to safety. Now, when savaged by a group of angry Indians, it was a family of British Baptists who nursed him back to health. In the course of his convalescence, Gandhi became very attached to the Dokes, to the father and daughter in particular. After he had left their household, he would, from time to time, send Olive playful notes, enclosing Indian women’s magazines for her to read and demanding that she send chocolates to his law office in exchange. These letters reveal an unexpected tenderness in a man whose missives to his own sons were far more censorious and prescriptive.
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For Gandhi, the support given by Albert Cartwright, and then by the Dokes, confirmed that this conflict should not be seen through a purely racial lens. The Indian community, he wrote, should ‘give up its anger against the whites. We are often thoughtless enough to say that the whites can have nothing good in them. But this is patent folly. Mankind is one, and even if a few whites make the mistake of considering themselves different from us, we must not follow them in that error.’
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Two days after the attack on Gandhi, a group of Pathans met in a hall in Vrededorp. The principal speaker was Nawab Khan, ex-Bengal Lancers,
dressed, as ever, in military uniform. He ‘urged on his audience that, now Mr Gandhi had forsaken the right path, they should follow him no longer, and refuse to submit to the indignity of having impressions of their 10 digits taken’. Khan ‘worked the audience up to such a pitch’ that they followed him in taking an oath not to register.
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The Pathans were in a minority. When one newspaper sought to represent it as a Hindu versus Muslim question, a group of leading merchants pointed out that ‘the very first men to register on Monday were Mahomedans. So far as South Africa is concerned, happily, on non-religious matters there are no differences between the two communities.’
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The ‘general opinion among the Asiatics,’ commented one reporter, ‘is that the assault on Mr Gandhi was a cowardly one. It is remarkable how true the Asiatics are to their leader.’
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The events of recent weeks and months had enormously enhanced Gandhi’s standing in the community. Once, he was admired for his professional qualifications and skills – for being the only British-educated English-speaking Indian lawyer in Natal and the Transvaal. His arrest, and the attack on him, gave him an altogether different glow. He was now admired not so much for his education and privilege, as for his courage and conviction. The dignity with which he bore imprisonment, and with which he faced his tormentors, greatly impressed Tamils and Gujaratis, Hindus as well as Muslims.

In the week after the assault on Gandhi, a steady stream of merchants and hawkers got themselves registered. There was now ‘a crowd of excited Indians outside the Registration Office’, registering under the guidance of Thambi Naidoo, who was sporting a bandaged hand. Those who could sign their names were not asked to provide fingerprints. Gandhi himself registered from his sick-bed, the papers and other equipment being brought to him by the Registrar of Asiatics, Montford Chamney.
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In its issue of 15 February,
Indian Opinion
carried an essay of over 4,000 words, the longest single piece it had published thus far. Written while Gandhi was recovering at the Dokes’, it sought to still the unease among some Indians about the settlement. The essay was couched as a dialogue between a ‘Reader’ asking questions and the ‘Editor’ seeking to answer them.

The issue that most concerned the Reader was the giving of fingerprints. He wondered how these, so ‘objectionable before, have suddenly
become acceptable’. Could it be that ‘the educated and the rich have had their interests protected at the expense of the poor?’ The Editor (Gandhi) answered by saying that now that the law was to be repealed, Indians should not stand on ‘false pride’. Even whites who entered Transvaal under the new immigration law had to give fingerprints. If Indians gave them out of ‘our own free choice’ there should be no objection. Besides, these prints were required only on the application, not on the certificate. To further calm the waters, Gandhi proposed that despite the exemption for those who could sign, men of learning and standing must not avail themselves of it. The ‘important thing’ was that ‘well-educated persons should regard themselves as trustees of the poor.’ ‘A person like Mr Essop Mia will rise in stature by giving his ten finger-impressions.’
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Gandhi’s attackers were tried on 19 February. They pleaded not guilty. The victim was not present, but Essop Mia and Thambi Naidoo gave evidence as to the nature of the attack. The defence claimed that when the Pathans stopped to talk with Gandhi, the lawyer abused them in English (this is represented in the court record by a series of dashes), while Thambi Naidoo prodded the Pathans with a stick. It was then that they retaliated. One attacker, Meer Allam Khan, said he ‘was sorry when he found that he had hurt [Gandhi]. It was all done in hot blood.’

In his summing up, the magistrate, H. H. Jordan, said that he was

perfectly sure that Mr Gandhi did not use the words alleged against him. He did not think that anyone could be brought forward to say that Mr Gandhi had used bad language. It was from his personal knowledge of the man that he could say that he (Mr Gandhi) was not a man to use words of that description.

The verdict was of an unprovoked assault, and the sentence was three months in jail with hard labour.
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Having lost the argument in the Transvaal, Gandhi’s critics now sought to renew it in Natal. On 5 March, while he was addressing a large gathering in Durban, some men with sticks rushed towards the platform. The crowd surrounded Gandhi and guarded him. The chairman declared the meeting closed, and Gandhi was taken in a carriage to Parsee Rustomjee’s house.
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These attacks spoke of a certain desperation. The majority of Indians were solidly behind Gandhi, and the pace of registration steadily picked
up. In its issue of 7 March,
Indian Opinion
observed that ‘the Permit Office does not have a moment’s respite’ (in striking contrast to the situation a bare six months previously, when, as the same paper had reported, it was desolate and lifeless). By now, more than 4,000 Indians had already registered, among them some previously recalcitrant Pathans.
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On 14 March the British Indian Association gave a dinner for the Europeans who had stood by them. The event was held in the Masonic Lodge, the reservation being made on Gandhi’s behalf by Hermann Kallenbach. Forty Indians, paying two guineas each, entertained some twenty-five whites, these being journalists, legislators and lawyers sympathetic to their struggle. The dinner consisted of twenty-four vegetarian items, washed down with lime juice and soda water. The menu card carried the line: ‘This dinner is arranged as an expression of gratitude to those whites who fought for truth and justice during the satyagraha campaign.’

Furthering this spirit of inter-racial solidarity, the Chinese gave a dinner on 20 March for their Indian
and
European friends. Our source does not tell us what food was served, but we may presume that it did not exclude fish and meat (nor whisky and wine either). We do know that a Chinese band was in attendance. The band fell silent to allow an oak desk to be presented to Joseph Doke for looking after Gandhi, and a gold watch to be given to Albert Cartwright for his part in arranging the compromise. Henry and Millie Polak also received gifts. Gandhi was presented with an address which praised his ‘political acumen’. In a report for his newspaper, Gandhi admitted the Chinese had surpassed the Indians in ‘culture and generosity’.
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Absent from these dinners was one very early, and very steadfast, European supporter of the Indians – L. W. Ritch. He was now based in London, lobbying the Imperial Government. When a Jewish newspaper took notice of his contribution, Ritch wrote in to say that ‘it cannot, of course, be a matter of surprise that the Jew should figure prominently in any movement directed against persecution and intolerance, whether of race or religion.’ Speaking of the work in the Transvaal of ‘my friends Polak and others’, Ritch asked: ‘What Jew dare coquette with the demons of racial prejudice, religious intolerance, or the jealousies engendered by superior business acumen, thrift, sobriety and general self-discipline?’
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In the first week of April 1908, Henry Polak enrolled as an attorney of the Supreme Court of Transvaal. He had completed three years as a clerk in Gandhi’s office, and also passed the necessary examinations. As for Gandhi himself, he continued to draft petitions on behalf of clients travelling to India, who wished to have the paperwork in place to allow them re-entry. His clients included Muslims, Hindus, Parsis, Christians and – significantly – some Chinese. Gandhi complained to Montford Chamney of excessive delays in granting exit permits, and of the ‘latent feeling of suspicion’ in the minds of many Indians that they were being singled out for special harassment.
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In the last week of April, three new bills were introduced in the Natal Legislature. The first sought to stop the import of indentured Indian labour after June 1911; the second to suspend the issuing of new trading licences to Indians after August 1908; the third to terminate existing Indian licences after ten years, subject to the payment of compensation equivalent to three years’ profit. The bills were clearly meant to protect the interests of European traders against their hardworking Indian counterparts. Even so, they were extremely severe. As a liberal white newspaper pointedly asked:

Is an Indian not to be allowed to keep a barber’s shop to shave and cut the hair of his own countrymen? Is he not to be allowed to hawk the vegetables he grows on the little garden he has, or to sell the fish he may have caught in the Bay or on the open sea? Is he not to be allowed to supply the special wants of his own countrymen in the peculiar articles, some of them connected with religious observances, which no European could very well deal in?
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Gandhi welcomed the first bill, for he too wished to see the ending of the harsh, dehumanizing system of indentured labour. But, he wrote, ‘the other two Bills are as ignorant as they are tyrannical.’ If not rescinded, they might have to be fought ‘with the sword of satyagraha’.
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In the Transvaal, the compromise between the Indians and the Government was coming under strain. In early May, Smuts decided that the window of voluntary registration would be open for three months altogether. Former residents coming back to the colony after 9 August would have their cases examined under the notorious (and still unrepealed) act of 1907. Gandhi wrote to the Government to reconsider. He had very nearly lost his life as a result of the compromise on
the fingerprint question. Now, if he was seen as having acquiesced in closing the door to late-comers, he would be ‘totally unworthy of the trust reposed in me by my countrymen’.
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On 17 May, the President of the British Indian Association, Essop Mia, was set upon by a Pathan in the street, and badly injured. He was targeted because of his closeness to Gandhi. Gandhi wrote to Smuts, warning that ‘many more may be assaulted in [the] near future’. He ‘daily receive[d] indignant letters saying that I have entirely misled the people as to the compromise and that the law is not going to be repealed at all’. He asked the Colonial Secretary, ‘for the sake of those who have helped the Government’, to announce that the Asiatic Act of 1907 would be rescinded, and that new arrivals could register themselves voluntarily.
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