Gandhi Before India (81 page)

Gandhi’s capaciousness was not complete, however. It was constrained in one fundamental sense. While he had Indian and European friends of all castes, classes and faiths, he forged no real friendships with Africans. He knew and respected the educationist John Dube. He met, and possibly influenced, the political pioneer Pixley Seme. And he laboured alongside some Africans at Tolstoy Farm. That was the extent of his personal and professional relations with the original inhabitants and majority community of South Africa.

That said, over the twenty and more years he lived in the land, Gandhi’s understanding of the African predicament steadily widened. At first, he adhered to the then common idea of a hierarchy of civilizations – the Europeans on top, the Indians just below them, the Africans at the very bottom. Everyday life in Durban and Johannesburg alerted him to the real and structured discrimination that Africans were subject to. In 1904 and 1905
Indian Opinion
carried reports of laws and practices that bore down heavily on them. In a speech of 1908 he looked forward to a ‘commingling’ of the races in a future South Africa. By this time he was prescribing satyagraha as a cure for the predicament of Africans, too.

From his days as a student, Gandhi was curious about other faiths, other ways of living and relating to the world. This tendency was further deepened by the experience of living in countries other than his own. London, Durban, Johannesburg – these were cities much larger and more varied than Rajkot or Porbandar. Gandhi was free to explore their pluralism and their cosmopolitanism, not least because he lived for such long periods away from his family.

Of these different cities, perhaps it was Johannesburg that shaped Gandhi most decisively. In the early 1900s this was a city being made in a society (and country) being formed. There was a churning abroad, as migrants from all parts of the world came seeking not just a share of the mining boom but also a liberation from social orthodoxies. On the one side, the rulers sought to impose a new, stable, racial order; on the other side, individuals sought to fashion their lives in accordance with their own inner urges, experimenting with new forms of diet, health-care and inter-cultural and inter-religious dialogue. It was among these amiably eccentric (and distinctly non-violent) dissenters that Gandhi found his own cohort – Polak, Kallenbach, Ritch, Joseph Doke, Sonja Schlesin,
et al.

Had Gandhi always lived or worked in India, he would never have met dissident Jews or Nonconformist Christians. Life in the diaspora also exposed him more keenly to the hetereogeneity of his own homeland. Had he followed the family tradition and worked in a princely state in Kathiawar he would never have met Tamils or North Indians. Had he practised law in Bombay he could not have counted plantation workers or roadside hawkers among his clients.

For most people, South Africa in the early 1900s was a crucible of social inequality, where individuals of one race or class learned very quickly to separate themselves from people of other races and classes. For this Indian, however, South Africa became a crucible of human togetherness, allowing him to forge bonds of affiliation with compatriots with whom, had he remained at home, he would have had absolutely no contact whatsoever.

In this dissolving of social distinctions so prevalent (and so confining) at home, Gandhi subsumed and embodied the experience of Indians in South Africa more generally. The lives of Indians in India were circumscribed by caste, kin and religion. Even in cities such as Bombay and Calcutta, migrants tended to live with those with whom they shared a language or caste. But here in South Africa, inspired by Gandhi, the
Indians came together in an inclusive social movement. This happened over a twenty-year period: first in Natal, then in the Transvaal, and finally in the massive strikes and epic march of 1913. During these satyagrahas, and in between them, Tamils, Gujaratis, Hindi-speakers; Parsis, Hindus, Muslims, Christians; high, middle, and low castes; labourers, merchants, priests ate together, talked together and struggled together.

An intriguing manifestation of Gandhi’s cosmopolitanism was his relations with the Chinese in the Transvaal. Now, in the twenty-first century, China and India have begun increasingly to be coupled together. Both were ancient civilizations that are now assertive new nations, both have experienced a sharp spurt in economic growth. Their rise has been made more noteworthy by their size and population – together, they account for a little less than 40 per cent of all human beings on earth.

In the context of this rise – variously viewed as alarming, admirable, and premature – these previously obscure connections between the greatest of Indian nationalists and his Chinese comrades in South Africa acquire a curious contemporary resonance. That some Chinese men were among the audience in that epochal meeting in the Empire Theatre on 11 September 1906; that these Chinese men willingly courted arrest when the satyagraha actually started; that in prison Gandhi discussed the multiple paths to God with his Chinese comrades; that the Chinese (as Gandhi acknowledged) surpassed the Indians in generosity towards their European supporters – these facts, interesting in their own right, acquire perhaps a fresh relevance now.

When, in January 1908, the passive resisters signed a pact with the Transvaal Government, there were three signatories from their side: a Gujarati, Gandhi; a Tamil, Thambi Naidoo; and a Chinese, Leung Quinn. This implied a certain parity, each man speaking for his own particular community. Over time, Gandhi emerged as the main leader of the Asians in the Transvaal. But the support of the Tamils, and the Chinese, remained crucial to him, and his movement.

In these years, Gandhi himself did not speak specifically of a pan-Asian solidarity. But Leung Quinn did, saying in a speech in Madras (after he was deported there) that the satyagraha in the Transvaal was for ‘the honour of Asia’. In the same manner, Smuts’ English friend H. J. Wolstenholme thought that Gandhi’s movement reflected an ‘epoch-making’ change between East and West, whereby Indians and
Chinese were ‘developing rapidly a sense of nationality’ with which to challenge their European rulers.

After he came back to India in 1915, Gandhi lost touch with his Chinese colleagues. Now, as he applied his techniques of satyagraha to win political freedom for India, nationalists in China were fighting Western (and Japanese) imperialism by other methods, namely, armed struggle. In the 1930s, the American journalist Edgar Snow went to meet Mao Zedong after the latter’s Long March. Snow was coming from India, where he had met and come to admire Gandhi. The Mahatma was by this time a figure of great world renown, especially in America, where he figured often in the
New York Times
and had been chosen by
Time Magazine
as their Man of the Year (in 1930, after his own Long March to break the salt laws). The Chinese revolutionary and the American journalist discussed the Indian path to political freedom. Mao was dismissive, since, unlike the Chinese Communists, Gandhi had not undertaken an agrarian revolution by forcibly dispossessing large landlords.
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In the 1930s and 1940s there were few takers for Gandhian methods in China. In the China of today, however, there is an increasing interest in Gandhi and what he stood for. A prominent Chinese blogger has a portrait of Gandhi on his profile. Another admirer is the Nobel Laureate Liu Xiabao. A recent collection of his essays has many references to Mao, all hostile or pejorative, and several references to Gandhi, all appreciative. In January 2000 he wrote:

Compared to people in other nations that have lived under the dreary pall of Communism, we resisters in China have not measured up very well. Even after so many years of tremendous tragedies, we still don’t have a moral leader like Václav Havel. It seems ironic that in order to win the right of ordinary people to pursue self-interest, a society needs a moral giant to make a selfless sacrifice. In order to secure ‘passive freedom’ – freedom from state oppression – there needs to be a will to do active resistance. History is not fated. The appearance of a single martyr can fundamentally turn the spirit of a nation and strengthen its moral fibre. Gandhi was such a figure.
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What Liu Xiabao did not know – but we may hope one day will know – is that the ‘moral giant’ and ‘martyr’ Gandhi was supported, at an early and crucial stage of his political career, by Chinese activists such as Leung Quinn.

The relationships that Gandhi pursued were at once personal and instrumental. He had enormous affection for his sons (or at least three of them), for his nephews, and for his Indian and European friends. But that they aided him in his social and political work was of more than incidental importance. They assisted him with his journal and his law practice; they canvassed support for his cause among the community and among the ruling race; they helped, if they had the means, to fund his public and social activities; they went, if they had the will, to jail with him.

These ‘secondary’ characters were considerable figures in their own right. They were men and women of intelligence and commitment. And it is through them that we get to know Gandhi more fully as an individual and as an historical actor. It is through his relations with Henry Polak, Thambi Naidoo, A. M. Cachalia, Sonja Schlesin and Parsee Rustomjee that we can more properly appreciate Gandhi’s political campaigns; through his experiments with Hermann Kallenbach that we get a deeper insight into his interactions with Tolstoy and Tolstoyans and his intense desire for self-improvement (and also self-abasement); through his conversations with Raychandbhai, Joseph Doke and C. F. Andrews that we see how he arrived at his own brand of religious pluralism; through his lifelong friendship and correspondence with Pranjivan Mehta that we understand his larger ambitions for himself and his homeland; through his relations with (and misrecognitions of) Kasturba, Harilal and Manilal that we arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the man, juxtaposing his familial failures with his social and spiritual successes.

As it happens, we can come to know Gandhi better through his South African adversaries as well. The parochial Montford Chamney, the proud General Smuts, the paranoid East Rand Vigilantes and the perfervid white mob in Natal – they shaped Gandhi’s world and world-view too. So did the militant Pathans and the jealous Durban editor P. S. Aiyar. As much as his friends and followers, his critics and enemies helped convert the earnest, naïve lawyer who arrived in Durban in 1893 into the smart, sagacious and focused thinker-activist who sailed from Cape Town in 1914.

The two most powerful of these adversaries were the imperial pro-consul Alfred Milner and the scholar-warrior Jan Christian Smuts. History has already placed Gandhi substantially above Smuts and massively above
Milner. But in the South Africa of Gandhi’s day they were far more substantial figures than he. It was this perceived aysmmetry of status that led both men to treat the lawyer’s modest demands with contempt. Had either bent slightly, and taken some account of the Indian point of view, who knows what history’s verdict on Gandhi now would be? If, in 1904, Milner had agreed to legalize the existing rights of Indian traders in the Transvaal, Gandhi would have returned home without ever having thought of civil disobedience. If, three years later, Smuts had repealed the Asiatic Act and agreed to the return of about a thousand Indians who claimed pre-Boer War rights of residence, Gandhi would have returned home with no knowledge of how long he could sustain the morale of his followers.

In 1903, the Johannesburg correspondent of the
Daily Telegraph
said of Lord Milner’s sanctioning of ‘locations’ that ‘the controversy it will arouse will not be confined to the Transvaal, but will extend to England and India.’ In 1907, the
Natal Mercury
wrote of General Smuts’ intransigence that it would ‘produce quite unforeseen results, both here and in India’. Both statements were prescient. Had either Milner or Smuts compromised early with Gandhi, he might never have had the chance to develop the technique of satyagraha, nor the confidence to think it might work in a country so large and so divided as India. In the event, the arrogance of British imperialist and Boer racist gave Gandhi the opportunity to emerge as a mass leader in South Africa and, in time, in his homeland as well.

It was in South Africa that Gandhi achieved proficiency as a writer and editor. To be sure, he got a start in England, where his fellow vegetarians allowed him a free run of their journal. In his early years in Natal, a stream of letters to newspapers and petitions to Government poured from his pen. In 1903 he chose to start his own periodical,
Indian Opinion
. Its purpose was at once documentary and political: it was a journal meant to advance not Gandhi’s interests, but the interests of Indians in Natal and the Transvaal. Gandhi wrote many essays for it, in Gujarati and in English. He also supervised its production from week to week, and was chiefly responsible for its financing.

Gandhi’s skills as writer and editor were considerable. He was, however, an indifferent, if not disastrous, public speaker. His friend and admirer Joseph Doke noted that, in Johannesburg itself, there were
‘several of his countrymen whose elocution, natural and unaffected, is far superior to his’. Gandhi spoke in a low voice, and in a monotonous tone. He ‘never waves his arms’, remarked Doke, ‘seldom move[s] a finger’.
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And yet the Indians who heard him listened, because even if the tone was unvaried the words carried conviction. Gandhi inspired devotion not so much by his articles or speeches as by the exemplary nature of his life and conduct. His austerity, his hard work, his courage, were impressive enough to attract followers from very different backgrounds – be they Muslims or Jews or Christians or Tamils, merchants or hawkers or priests or indentured labourers. By influencing individuals of different backgrounds, he created a moral and in time political community, whose members were willing, under his leadership and direction, to embrace poverty and court imprisonment.