Gandhi Before India (43 page)

The differences between the two men were of perception and of policy. Smuts thought that as many as 15,000 Indians had Boer certificates and hence claims to re-enter the Transvaal; Gandhi insisted that the number did not exceed 1,000. Of ‘paramount importance’, however, were the rights of educated Indians. Gandhi told Cartwright that he

should deserve severest condemnation even from General Smuts and all my European friends, if I, a barrister having received a liberal education, were to say that my fellow-barristers should not enter the Transvaal or any other Colony, because they were Indians. Let the education test be as severe as General Smuts chooses to make it … [B]ut a racial test I shall never accept.

The result of these differences, said Gandhi, would ‘be a petition to [the Transvaal] Parliament against the clause [prohibiting the entry of educated Indians], a petition to the Imperial Government, and, if I can carry my countrymen with me, undoubtedly passive resistance.’
⁶²

Gandhi’s position was consistent with his broader view of the past and future of race relations in South Africa. He was, so to speak, a ‘non-racial incrementalist’. While recognizing the technological, political, economic and social superiority of Europeans, he saw no reason why it must necessarily be maintained into the future. Individuals from other cultures were capable, under the right conditions and in the fullness of time, of achieving parity (in all senses) with the ruling race.

These views find expression in a fascinating (and neglected) speech delivered by Gandhi at the Johannesburg YMCA in May 1908. With the recent satyagraha in mind, the Association had organized a debate on the topic: ‘Are Asiatics and the Coloured races a menace to the Empire?’

Gandhi may have been the only non-white present; he was certainly the only non-white speaker. Opposing the motion, he pointed out that the labour of Africans and Asians had made the Empire what it was. ‘Who can think of the British Empire without India?’ he asked, adding, ‘South Africa would probably be a howling wilderness without the Africans.’

Gandhi then contrasted western civilization, which was restless, energetic and centrifugal, with eastern civilization, which was contemplative and centripetal. These tended at present to be opposing tendencies, ‘but perhaps in the economy of nature both are necessary.’ He welcomed their meeting, whereby eastern civilization would be ‘quickened with the western spirit’, and the latter, presently directionless, would be infused
with a purpose. Gandhi believed – or hoped – that as the encounter proceeded, ‘the eastern civilization will become predominant, because it has a goal.’

Some Europeans wanted the Indians to be thrown out of South Africa. Gandhi answered these extremists by contrasting different parts of the imperial capital, London.

There are many complaints against the people living in the East End of London by the people living in the West End, but no one has suggested that, therefore, the people in the East End should be swept away. Sweep away the rack-rent and the conditions prevailing in the East End, and its inhabitants shall be as good as those in the West End.

Gandhi used this comparison to urge the colonists to raise the standing and status of the Indians, their fellow immigrants; allowing them to ‘live freely without being restricted, move freely without being restricted, own land, and trade honestly.’ He acknowledged that to speak of political rights for Indians and Africans was premature, but insisted these too would come, that, in fact, it was ‘the mission of the English race, even when there are subject races, to raise them, to equality with themselves, to give them absolutely free institutions and make them absolutely free men.’ If ‘we look into the future,’ he daringly asked, ‘is it not a heritage we had to leave to posterity that all the different races commingle and produce a civilisation that perhaps the world has not yet seen?’
⁶³

Gandhi was now the leading coloured resident of Johannesburg. His speech bore marks of his elevated status, and the responsibilities that went with it. For perhaps the first time in public, he used the neutral ‘Africans’ instead of the pejorative ‘Kaffirs’. The change in language reflected a deeper change in his way of thinking about the world. When he first came to South Africa, Gandhi had pleaded for Indians to be distinguished from Africans, whom he then considered ‘uncivilized’. Now, fifteen years later, he brought all races within a single ambit. They all had similar hopes, and would one day have the same rights. In the future, Indians and Africans would be absolutely free men, mingling with Boers and Britons in a nation where one’s citizenship did not depend on the colour of one’s skin.

With no possibility of a settlement, the protests resumed. From July 1908, Indians began courting arrest by hawking without a licence. They
carried baskets of fruit on their heads, went from door to door, and waited for the police to arrest them. Gandhi defended these resisters in court. He asked the accused to make it clear that this was not their normal profession, and that they had taken to hawking to protest against the Government’s policies. If Gandhi was busy elsewhere, his colleague Henry Polak defended the violators.
⁶⁴

The sentence for hawking without a licence was normally one week in prison. Some satyagrahis became serial offenders, among them Thambi Naidoo. Back in July 1907, when the Indians were resisting registration, the Tamil activist had led the picketing of the Permit Office. When they decided to court arrest, he was one of the first to enter jail. When Gandhi forged a compromise with Smuts, he threw the weight of his fellow Tamils behind the settlement. When Smuts dishonoured the pact, he led the satyagrahis into jail once more.

Thambi Naidoo was born and raised in Mauritius, a British colony where Indians were free to live and trade as they wished. He chafed at the restrictions in the Transvaal, which brought to the fore his natural combativeness and militancy. A carrier by profession, when the satyagraha began he was happy to do any task assigned to him. Posting letters, carrying loads, arranging seats or chairing a meeting himself – all these he did till the time came to go to jail. With the Gujaratis wavering, Gandhi had come to depend on Thambi more and more. He was now Gandhi’s chief lieutenant, his position consolidated by the fact that he had, with the adroit use of that umbrella, warded off the lawyer’s potential assassins.

Gandhi was suitably grateful to Thambi Naidoo for his support. He called him a satyagrahi ‘with few equals’, and ‘perhaps the bravest and staunchest’ of all the Indians in prison. Although he had never been to India, ‘his love for the homeland knew no bounds’. Meanwhile,
Indian Opinion
wrote that

before the movement commenced Mr Thambi Naidoo was a self-satisfied trolley contractor earning a fat living, and was a happy family man. Today, he is a proud pauper, a true patriot, and one of the most desirable of citizens of the Transvaal, indeed of South Africa. His one concern, whether in jail or outside it, is to behave like a true passive resister, and that is to suffer unmurmuringly.

With Thambi in prison, his wife Veerammal had to take care of their brood of children. She had neither the time nor the expertise to man
age his business, and so to keep the debtors away she began to sell off his horses and carts, one by one, living from week to week on the proceeds.
⁶⁵

In the last week of July 1908, after Thambi Naidoo had been sentenced for the third time within a month, Gandhi, accompanied by Polak, Doke and Maulvi Ahmed Mukhtiar of the Hamidia Islamia Society, called on Mrs Naidoo to ‘express their sympathy with her in her difficult position, and the admiration that they feel for her husband’s courage and fortitude’. Gandhi and Polak, Hindu and Jew, stood with the family while Doke, the Christian minister, ‘offered up a brief prayer asking for help, and Maulvi Sahib told Mrs. Naidoo that his co-religionists were all praying for her husband’s welfare.’
⁶⁶

Mrs Naidoo was heavily pregnant; the following week, when the child was delivered, it was still-born. Polak accompanied the grieving mother to the cemetery. Later, he composed an editorial suggesting that, in the court of Indian public opinion, ‘the murder of Mr Naidoo’s child has been attributed to General Smuts.’
⁶⁷

To further test the Government, the British Indian Association asked a literate Parsi named Sorabjee Shapurjee Adajania to enter the Transvaal. Adajania, who spoke fluent English, had matriculated from the Surat High School and now worked as a manager of a shop in the Natal town of Charleston. He was as well educated as most Europeans who wished to make a home in the colony. However, his qualifications were, in the eyes of the law, nullified by the fact that he was an ‘Asiatic’. He entered the Transvaal in the last week of June, claiming the right to reside as an educated immigrant. He was charged with violating the law, and defended in court by Gandhi. Told to leave the colony within a week, he refused to do so, and was summoned once more to court. The magistrate hearing the case was constrained to admit that Gandhi’s arguments were ‘very subtle and very able’. The law’s racial underpinnings stood nakedly exposed. But the judge was paid to adminster it, which meant that Adajania was sentenced to one month in jail with hard labour.
⁶⁸

On 28 July, Gandhi defended six Indians charged with hawking without a licence. Gandhi was now appearing in court two or three times a week for the same purpose. This case was somewhat different, however, for among the accused was Harilal, his eldest son. Harilal, who had just turned twenty, was living at Phoenix, with his mother, his
brothers and his wife Chanchal, who had recently joined him from India. He had been persuaded by his father to join the satyagraha. Entering Transvaal from Natal, he was detained at the town of Volksrust for not having a valid certificate, and told to apply for one in Pretoria. Instead, he proceeded to Johannesburg and immediately began to hawk fruit. Harilal was fined one pound or seven days hard labour; like the others, he opted for imprisonment.

The day Harilal was released, Gandhi wrote a letter to his old adversary Montford Chamney. The tone mixed truculence with triumph. The judge had given Harilal Gandhi another chance to register for a permit. ‘I have the honour to inform you,’ wrote Gandhi to Chamney, ‘that my son has no desire to do so, and that he will be prepared to answer any proceedings that might be instituted against him for breach of the Asiatic Act.’
⁶⁹

Shortly after 11 a.m. on 10 August, Harilal Gandhi was asked to produce a registration certificate by a policeman in Johannesburg. When he refused, he was arrested and his fingerprints forcibly taken. (These still exist in a file preserved in the National Archives of South Africa – black smudges of the right and left thumbs, and ‘the plain impressions of the Four Fingers [of each hand] taken simultaneously’.) His particulars were taken down – he was, said the record, five feet, four inches in height, of ‘stout’ build and ‘light’ complexion, with black hair and two scars on his forehead.
⁷⁰

The same afternoon, Harilal appeared in court before Mr Jordan, with ‘Gandhi, sen.’ appearing for the defence. The father asked that the accused be ordered to leave the colony within twenty-four hours, ‘as he wished to go to prison with his friends’. The judge refused to comply, instead giving Harilal a week to leave, or face the consequences. On the morning of the 18th, the grace period having elapsed, Harilal was arrested for refusing to comply with the court order. He appeared once more before Mr Jordan, who sentenced him to a month’s imprisonment with hard labour.

The conviction and incarceration of the younger Gandhi generated a wave of sympathy among the Indians of the Transvaal. The Hamidia Islamia Society met and passed several resolutions, the first of which ‘congratulate[d] Mr Harilal Gandhi for his courage in suffering for his community at any cost’; the second of which ‘sincerely sympathise[d] with and congratulate[d] Mr and Mrs Gandhi on account of the
sentence passed upon their son Harilal through the injustice of the Transvaal Government’.
⁷¹

The imprisonment of his teenage son provoked a complex set of emotions in Gandhi. ‘I want every Indian to do what Harilal has done,’ said Gandhi
père
in a letter to
Indian Opinion
. ‘It will be a part of Harilal’s education to go to gaol for the sake of the country.’ By going to prison the boy had, in a sense, substituted for the father. As Gandhi explained,

I have advised every Indian to take up hawking. I am afraid I cannot join myself since I am enrolled as an attorney. I therefore thought it right to advise my son to make his rounds as a hawker. I hesitate to ask others to do things which I cannot do myself. I think whatever my son does at my instance can be taken to have been done by me.
⁷²

There was, then, a sense of pride, and of vindication. But there appears also to have been a residual sense of guilt. ‘Harilal is only a child,’ said Gandhi in that same letter. ‘He may have deferred to his father’s wishes in acting in this manner. It is essential that every Indian should act on his own …’ Might it have been that while the boy was willing and the father willing him on, his mother and wife were not so keen on Harilal’s courting arrest?