Gandhi Before India (61 page)

On 27 April 1911 a meeting of Indians was held in Johannesburg’s Hamidia Hall to discuss the correspondence between Gandhi and Smuts. Coovadia, Thambi Naidoo, Joseph Royeppen, Imran Kadir, Sodha, Adajania and Gandhi himself spoke in favour of accepting the settlement. However, ‘the greatest difficulty that the Indian leaders had to face [was] the almost ineradicable suspicion the rank and file entertain regarding the Government’s motives.’ There was ‘a very heated controversy’, but ‘calmness ultimately prevailed’, with the meeting deciding to accept the provisional settlement, only five members (of an estimated 500 present) dissenting.
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This, Gandhi told a reporter, ‘would simply mean that the British Indians, as also the Chinese, would cease to court arrest and imprisonment pending the forthcoming legislation’.
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Gandhi was hopeful that Smuts would see suitable legislation through the next session of Parliament. The
Star
of Johannesburg had likewise concluded that the Indian question in the Transvaal was now closed. The day after the meeting in the Hamidia Hall, it ran a long article rehearsing the history of the conflict. The rights of domicile of the Indians were, it recalled, rejected by ‘practically the whole white community’. In deference to their wishes, the Government passed Act 2 of 1907. Then

Mr Gandhi appeared on the scene. He took up a hostile attitude to this law, and his personality was so marked that from the start he secured practically the undivided support of the entire Indian community of the Transvaal, and material assurances of his countrymen in India and elsewhere. The controversy has gone through many phases since then, and through them all the authorities were confronted with an unflinching resoluteness and implacable passivity on the part of Gandhi and his followers. Rather small in stature and frail in constitution, Gandhi has bound the Indians together by his earnestness and his belief in the justice of his cause.
There was no rigorous pledge or blind obedience demanded, and the appeal to conscience has been sufficient to enable him to carry his campaign from the Commons to the Lords to the very foot of the Throne. The cry that a colour bar was enacted by the force of law in a British Colony against the people of the great Dependency of the East which acknowledges the King Emperor was sufficient to rouse deep feelings of animosity. The Indians in the Transvaal played their part in a remarkable manner. Like the religious valiants of Huguenot times, they embraced the hardships and tasks that were in the power of the authorities to enforce. Some three thousand five hundred have been imprisoned. Gandhi himself has been in jail three times, his son eight times, and most of the prominent Indian merchants have experienced the rigours of confinement.

The
Star
went on to say that ‘both parties to the struggle believed that they were in the right, and if the two central figures, General Smuts and Mr Gandhi, can now close an unpleasant chapter the relief that will be experienced will extend far beyond the limits of the Transvaal and South Africa.’

The Johannesburg
Star
was, by South African standards, a liberal paper. Still, its appreciation of Gandhi’s character and leadership was noteworthy. Gandhi would certainly have read the article, and may especially have liked the phrase ‘implacable passivity’, perhaps an unintended pun, but which finely captured the distinctive moral force of his practice of non-violent resistance.

Having offered its assessment of the present and the past, the
Star
then let Gandhi speak on how he saw the future. He told the newspaper that he was handing over his legal practice in Johannesburg to L. W. Ritch. He said ‘his immediate intention’ now was

to provide for the care and education of the children whose parents are now in necessitous circumstances, and then he intends to retire to his farm in Natal, and in the spells of leisure no doubt to come in closer touch with the philosophic musings of Tolstoy and to reap inspiration from the savants of his beloved India.
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Within a few weeks Gandhi was not so certain about his retirement. On 27 May – exactly a month after the meeting in the Hamidia Hall –
Indian Opinion
carried an editorial on the settlement, which had put Smuts ‘upon his honour’ to have the necessary laws passed in the next
session of Parliament. If he did not, then ‘the same stubborn, calm and dignified resistance that was offered to General Smuts could next year with equal certainty of success be offered, if need be, to the mighty Union Parliament.’
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The dilution of Gandhi’s optimism may have been a consequence of the pressure of the rank-and-file, who naturally and instinctively distrusted the Government. One supposes that he had also been talking to the ever-sceptical Henry Polak.

With the settlement between Gandhi and Smuts, the workload of Henry Polak was now lightened, and he left to see his family in England. He took with him three boxes of grapes given by the Indians of Johannesburg to sustain him during the voyage.
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By leaving for London, Polak missed a banquet held at the Masonic Lodge in honour of the whites who had crossed racial boundaries. There had been, since 1908, an active committee of Europeans who raised funds for the struggle. Its chairman was William Hosken, who had abandoned his initial scepticism to take up an ‘open, consistent and persistent advocacy of the cause of passive resistance’. This advocacy lost Hosken his parliamentary seat in the elections of 1910. Yet his support continued. So did that of other white dissenters. The party at the Masonic Lodge was a collective tribute to them all. There were some sixty Europeans present, among them the Dokes (father, mother and children), Kallenbach, Ritch, Sonja Schlesin, Hosken, the jeweller Gabriel Isaac, the draper William Vogl and his wife, David Pollock, and the critic of
Hind Swaraj
Edward Dallow. The cooking of the meal (vegetarian, naturally) was supervised by Gandhi.

Reporting the event,
Indian Opinion
said the committee chaired by Hosken represented

the effective individual support that hundreds of Europeans on the Rand gave to the passive resistance hawkers; the few warders and other gaol officials who, out of sympathy, made the lives of passive resisters in the Transvaal prisons as free from difficulty as possible, whilst the hand of perhaps the majority of them was against these prisoners. It represents Miss Schlesin, at the mention of whose name at the banquet an enthusiastic applause rang through the hall and who has been working for the cause as no other man or woman, European or Asiatic, has worked. It represents
an unknown railway refreshment waitress who was glad to serve bread
and cheese for a passive resister, who was being taken
under custody to Volksrust, for which she would not accept
payment. It represents Mrs. Vogl who, as a direct result of the struggle, has, as a labour of love, established a
sewing class for Indian women and girls.
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These words do not appear in the
Collected Works
, but they must surely have been written by Gandhi. The language is his, as are the sentiments, nurtured through twenty and more years of friendship with Europeans (from the vegetarians of London onwards), friendships that survived his social objections to their laws and his moral objections to their civilization.

In the last months of 1910, Gandhi’s relationship with his eldest son had once more come under strain. Harilal was now twenty-two, and had a daughter of his own. His wife Chanchi and their child were due to visit India, and Harilal wanted to accompany them, but Gandhi refused to give permission, saying, ‘We are poor and cannot spend money like that. Moreover, a man who has joined the struggle cannot go away like that for three months.’ Someone else would escort Chanchi home instead.
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Harilal stayed behind and courted arrest, but his resentment would not go away. In March 1911 he accused Gandhi of shifting Kasturba to Tolstoy Farm against her will. His mother, he claimed, wished to stay on at Phoenix. With the provisional settlement in place, Harilal wanted to return to India and take the matriculation examination. He keenly felt his lack of proficiency in mathematics and literature; besides, he wished to join his wife, who had just given birth to a baby boy.
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Harilal was at Phoenix, so Gandhi asked his nephew Maganlal to take the boy in hand. ‘The more defects you discover in Harilal, the more love you should have for him. One requires a great deal of water to put out a big fire. To overcome the baser elements in Harilal’s nature, you have to develop in yourself and pit against it a more powerful force of goodness.’
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Maganlal failed, as Gandhi had failed before him. In the first week of May, Harilal came to Johannesburg to attend a function in honour of his fellow satyagrahis. Then he collected his belongings – and apparently also a photograph of his father – and took a train to Delagoa Bay, from where he planned to take a ship to India. Before he left, he told Joseph Royeppen that when back in India he wished to live in the Punjab rather than in Ahmedabad. This may have been because the Punjab
was then the epicentre of Indian nationalism, or because his father knew no one in that province and could not monitor his movements or suppress his ambitions.
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When Harilal left home, two friends were deputed to find him. They scoured all of Johannesburg, in vain. A Parsi friend told Gandhi that Harilal had recently borrowed twenty pounds from him (presumably for the journey). As news of the boy’s disappearance spread, friends and clients rushed to Gandhi’s office in Rissik Street. Some Muslim merchants remonstrated with Gandhi: had he only told them of his son’s desires, they would have paid for Harilal to study law in London. That evening, a group including Gandhi left for Tolstoy Farm. On the train, Gandhi told the others not to tell Kasturba what had happened. He would wait till they were alone, and then tell her ‘in my own way’.
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Harilal had left behind a long letter explaining to his parents why he had left. To Gandhi he said,

I have done what my heart dictated. I have done nothing with evil motives. Please do not consider that I have fled away. I am still the same obedient Harilal. You may not think so, but you have and will always remain the same for me to respect. Please rest assured that I shall endeavour to follow your teachings and copy your actions … Please tell mother that I have gone for the sake of earning. I shall feel the separation from her but I have done this considering it to be my duty. There was no help for me but to do this without delay.

There was also a message for Kallenbach, to whom all the Gandhi boys were deeply attached, as an affectionate uncle or ‘Kaka’ (father’s brother) who indulged them with love and presents. ‘Please tell Mr Kallenbach,’ said Harilal, ‘that I hope he will not harbour any anger against me for not having returned to the farm, and that he will bless me. I shall never forget the obligation that I am under to him.’

Harilal told Gandhi that when he reached India, ‘for the moment I intend only to study. I shall certainly need money, and if you can send it please send. After I am settled, if I am [to] succeed in my ambition, I shall write to you.’ He added a telling, and moving, postscript: ‘Although I am leaving, if the struggle is to be revived, no matter in what part of the world I may be I shall present myself there and seek imprisonment.’
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The letter was deeply felt, its text and subtext swirling with contradictory emotions – affection, anger, anguish, ambition. Harilal’s feelings
towards his father were confusing and complicated; so, too, his reasons for leaving South Africa. He wished to break free of Gandhi, yet remained dependent on him. Not satisfied with the schooling he had received in India, Harilal had asked his father to send him to London to qualify as a barrister. Gandhi said it was not necessary to qualify as a barrister or doctor to serve the people. The saint Ramakrishna, the reformer Dayananda Saraswati, the warriors Shivaji and Rana Pratap – none had the benefit of English education, and yet admirably served the motherland. Harilal countered with the names of Ranade, Gokhale, Tilak and Lajpat Rai, well-educated men who had served India nobly as well.
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The arguments were renewed when Pranjivan Mehta endowed two scholarships for Phoenix boys to study in London. Rather than nominate his son, Gandhi had first chosen Chhaganlal, and then a Parsi student named Sorabji Adajania. Mehta now agreed to fund a third scholarship, but Harilal’s pride would not allow him to accept.
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His desire to educate himself remained; this he now wished to fulfil in India, with his wife by his side, and with a subsidy from an overbearing yet indispensable father.

When he reached Delagoa Bay from Johannesburg, Harilal walked into the British Consulate and said he was a poor Indian in need of a free passage to Bombay. The officials recognized him and sent word to Gandhi, who wired Harilal asking him to come back to Johannesburg.
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Harilal returned to the city on 15 May. Father and son talked through the night, eventually agreeing that he could continue with his plans and return to India. Gandhi’s account of their conversation is contained in a letter written immediately afterwards to Maganlal:

It is just as well that Harilal has left. He was much unsettled in mind … He bears no ill-will towards any of you. He was angry with me, really. He gave vent to all his pent-up feelings on Monday evening [the 15th]. He feels that I have kept all the four boys very much suppressed, that I did not respect their wishes at any time, that I have treated them as of no account, and that I have often been hard-hearted. He made this charge against me with the utmost courtesy and seemed very hesitant as he did so … Unlike other fathers, I have not admired my sons or done anything specially for them, but always put them and [Kastur]Ba last; such was the charge. He seemed to have calmed down after this outburst. I pointed out
his error in believing what he did. He saw it partly. What remains, he will correct only when he thinks further. He has now left with a calm mind. He is resolved to learn more about those things on account of which I was displeased [with him]. He is strongly inclined to study Sanskrit. Thinking that, since Gujarati is our language, his education should for the most part be in Gujarat, I have advised Harilal to stay in Ahmedabad. I believe that is what he will do. However, I have left him free. I feel it will all turn out well.
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Harilal’s version of the conversations is shorter, and written some years after the event. It diverges on some crucial points of detail and interpretation. ‘I was delayed at Delagoa Bay’, recalled the son,

you came to know of my whereabouts and caught up with me. Obeying your orders I returned. I remained steadfast in my views. Therefore, instead of giving me a patient hearing you mutilated my thoughts and clipped my wings. You made me give up the idea of going to Lahore and instead made me stay in Ahmedabad. You promised to give me thirty rupees for monthly expenditure. You did not allow me to measure my capabilities; you measured them for me.
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‘You did not allow me to measure my capabilities; you measured them for me.’
This is a harsh but accurate judgement, confirmed – albeit in gentler and more euphemistic language – by a close observer of the Gandhi household, Millie Polak. At Phoenix and at Tolstoy Farm, Gandhi was often found cradling a baby while talking politics with an adult. Juxtaposing this with his treatment of Harilal, Millie concluded that it was easier for Gandhi

to deal with the needs of young children than those of adolescence, with its warring emotions, its struggle for liberty and self-expression, and its developing mind. During that period in the life of the developing individual, he did not so easily realise the strength of the storms that can sweep reason aside.
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The clash between father and son was intensified by their closeness in age. Harilal was born when Gandhi was only eighteen. His adolescent crisis thus coincided with his father’s midlife crisis. As Harilal sought a career and education path of his own, Gandhi was moving away from the law towards social service and political activism. The
desires of the one clashed with the convictions of the other. Gandhi would not, could not, recognize that there were two sides to the story. He blamed Harilal’s rebellion on his recent reading of
Sarasvatichandra
, a Gujarati novel by Govardhanram Tripathi whose hero, disenchanted with his father, leaves the parental home to discover himself.
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There is little question that Gandhi bore down heavily on his eldest son. He did not recognize his good fortune in being allowed to follow his own path independent of his parents’ wishes. Had his father Kaba Gandhi been alive when Mohandas finished his Matriculation, he might never have allowed the boy to proceed across the
kala pani
to London. Had his mother been alive in 1893, she might not have permitted him to make another perilous overseas journey to South Africa. Once in the diaspora, Gandhi was able to carve out a professional and activist career of his choice, without interference from family elders.

With his children, Gandhi was the traditional overbearing Hindu patriarch – making them do what he intended for them. Because he had now become disenchanted with modern professions, his sons must not be permitted a modern education. Because he had himself embraced
brahmacharya
they must do likewise. Harilal and Manilal, as the two elder boys, were expected to be perfect and exemplary satyagrahis, courting arrest or labouring on the land as per their father’s whims and desires.

When the Hindu priest Ram Sundar Pandit had abandoned the struggle, Gandhi dryly dismissed him as a ‘bad coin’. That detachment was not possible as regards his sons. The more they disagreed with him, the more intense and impatient he became with them. Those who secretly signed permits or failed to court arrest were not worthy of redemption. But his own sons could never be permitted to become ‘bad coins’. That what was bad in terms of their conduct and what good was a matter of opinion, bias and prejudice, rather than parental fiat, was something that Gandhi – in common, it must be said, with most or all Indian fathers of his generation – did not or could not understand.

Gandhi’s harsh response to Harilal may have had a deeper basis – the fact that, in South Africa, he was accustomed to enmity and suppression, but not, really, to rebellion or disagreement. The white reactionaries of Durban and the militant Pathans of Johannesburg had both physically attacked him. The regime of the Boers had several times put him in jail. But among his own flock and his own friends he was accustomed to
being the leader. The mentors he recognized – Gokhale, Raychandbhai, Tolstoy – had all lived in other continents.

Gandhi had a real gift for friendship – for making connections and conveying affection across racial, linguistic, religious and gender boundaries. The love he had for, and the intimacy he shared with, Henry and Millie Polak, Kallenbach, Sonja Schlesin, Ritch, the Dokes, Leung Quinn, Thambi Naidoo, A. M. Cachalia and Parsee Rustomjee was visible proof of this. But all these friends (and others like them) were ultimately in a position of deference to him. Their love for Gandhi had strong elements of reverence and adoration. Only the Polaks had the intellectual independence to argue with Gandhi on major or minor matters – and even they, in the end, recognized him as their leader.

Here lay the deeper significance of Harilal’s self-assertion (‘defiance’ would be too strong a word). His cardinal mistake was in not going all the way down the road marked out for him by his father. Harilal had, several times, bravely and unselfishly courted arrest. But the desire to study, to make a career of his own, remained with him. Gandhi was, by now, accustomed to the loyal, unquestioning support of many Indians in South Africa. (And of more than a few Europeans too.) That one of his own sons would choose to rebel was both unexpected and, for him, inexplicable.

Harilal knew this, which is why he had left in the first place without telling his father directly. He was too frightened to face Gandhi. He was brought back to Johannesburg, but remained truculent. When Gandhi failed, in that all-night conversation, to persuade Harilal to abandon his plans to return to India, he reluctantly agreed not to stand in his way. But he was never really reconciled to his son’s going.

When Harilal finally left, on 16 May, some students from Tolstoy Farm accompanied Gandhi to Johannesburg Station to wish the boy good-bye. One student recalled that ‘when the train was about to start, Bapu kissed Harilal, gave a gentle slap on his cheek, and said: “Forgive your father, if you think he has done you wrong”.’
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Ten days after Harilal left for India, Gandhi wrote urging him to read
Indian Opinion
‘carefully’. He was sent a list of Gujarati books to study – among them the works of Narmadashanker and Raychandbhai. He was advised to ‘make it a regular practice to read Tulsidas’s Ramayana’. Gandhi added that ‘most of the books I have listed at the end of
Indian Home Rule
are worth going through’, and ended by saying, ‘please write to me in detail and regularly’.
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