Gandhi Before India (82 page)

The commitment of his friends to Gandhi was striking indeed. To L. W. Ritch he was always the ‘big little chief’. Henry Polak chose to travel for months in a strange land, to separate himself from his beloved wife and children, out of regard for Gandhi and his cause. Thambi Naidoo was happy to court arrest time and again, and to risk his own life to save Gandhi’s. For another serial satyagrahi, P. K. Naidoo, every time he was released the one person he ‘naturally’ most wanted to meet was Gandhi. The spirited Sonja Schlesin worked all day to keep Gandhi’s office going, while finding the time – and energy – to comfort Tamil women and carry food to their husbands in jail. And then there was Hermann Kallenbach, whose devotion was the most complete and unquestioning of them all.

The reverence for Gandhi of his inner circle is manifest in a letter Kallenbach wrote to Chhaganlal in July 1911. The architect was leaving to see his family in Europe; in his absence, he asked Chhagan ‘to remain and continue to be the right hand of the man, whose life has given us all such a wonderful life, that we all wish to cling closer to him’. As Gandhi ‘dauntlessly pushes ahead,’ remarked Kallenbach, his disciples were sometimes unable to keep pace. Yet ‘in our sane and quiet moments, we all cannot help but rejoice about the brilliant fire burning in him, in order to re-light again and again the candle which so often loses his lustre. May we all fully recognize our good fortune to be with him and work with him.’
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Those who spent less time with Gandhi were stirred by his example
too. Among the most striking of Gandhi’s achievements is the fact that during the satyagrahas in the Transvaal in 1907–10, some 3,000 Indians courted arrest. They constituted an astonishing 35 per cent of the Indians in the colony. In September 1906, Gandhi’s friend, the Pretoria lawyer R. Gregorowski, had advised against passive resistance, as ‘not a great number of people are made of the stuff that seek martyrdom and Asiatics are no exception to the rule.’ As it turned out, however, thousands of Indians were inspired by Gandhi’s call to defy the law and go to jail.

Notably, many of these satyagrahis were merchants. Merchants are known to be the most cautious, conservative of men – perhaps Indian merchants especially so (some would say – and Gujarati merchants most especially so). Singly or collectively, merchants are loth to take political risks or confront established authority.
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Gandhi was mobilizing merchants in a colonial context who were living away from their homeland, in circumstances where one would expect them to be even more timid. And yet they followed their leader into prison. As did, in time, the hawkers, workers and professionals whose diasporic status would likewise have made them reluctant to throw away their livelihood by embracing a struggle so uncertain of success.

In acting as they did, the Indians knew that their leader was not just prepared to court arrest for the cause, but to be killed for it as well. After Gandhi was attacked and nearly murdered in Durban in January 1897, he received a stirring letter of support from a Gujarati fish curer in Cape Town. This praised his ‘single-hearted efforts and fearless representations of grievances under which the unfortunate Indians suffer’. His correspondent, ‘deeply grieved’ that Gandhi ‘should have been subjected to the cruel treatments reported in the papers here … at the hands of a mad mob’, assured him ‘that the eyes of thousands [of Indians in the Cape] are on you and are watching with sympathetic appreciation on all you have done’.
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Those who set upon Gandhi in Durban in 1897 were working-class whites. Eleven years later, he was attacked once more, this time in Johannesburg, and by a group of Pathans. Once more, his calmness and determination brought around Indians otherwise unimpressed by him and his movement. These two attempts on Gandhi’s life, and his resolution in the face of both, confirmed his standing in the community.

Gandhi met later threats with equanimity. Thus, when stories spread in 1909 that some Pathans in Johannesburg were planning to attack him once more, he told his nephew Maganlal that he did not fear, and even welcomed, the prospect of death at the hands of his countrymen, since it would ‘unite the Hindus and Mussalmans’.
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Gandhi, his fellow Indians knew, was ‘so frail a figure [but] so vigorous a character’, in the description of a meat-eating and whisky-guzzling Johannesburg journalist who marvelled at the unexpected or at any rate counter-intutitive courage shown by a teetotal vegetarian. Relevant here is a remark of the Gujarati headmaster who, in the 1960s, found the young Mohandas’ school records in Rajkot, which brought to light the erratic attendance and indifferent academic performance of a now most venerated figure. ‘Gandhiji, it has been well said’, wrote this teacher-archivist, ‘could fashion heroes out of common clay. His first and, undoubtedly, his most successful experiment was with himself.’
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In his years outside India, Gandhi came gradually, and in time decisively, to turn his back on his profession. Had he not found it hard to get briefs in Rajkot and Bombay he might never have left for Durban. In South Africa he met with considerable professional success. Slowly, however, his legal work was conducted less for monetary gain and more to aid his fellow Indians. Moving further away from the career for which he had been trained, he eventually handed over his practice to his colleagues L. W. Ritch and Henry Polak. At the same time, he began simplifying his life and his needs, exchanging a home in the city for a place on the land. Over the years, he elaborated an ascetic, workaholic regime, disregarding pleasure and leisure: no alcohol or meat, of course; no sugar or spices: and – lest it be forgotten – no sports or pastimes either.

Gandhi’s abiding interest in the simple life in general, and in a vegetarian diet, natural methods of healing, and celibacy, in particular, are to the modern eye difficult to appreciate. Why be so fussy about what to eat and what not to eat? Why not be rational and scientific, and embrace the allopathic regimen of pills and surgeries, rather than treat illnesses with natural methods learnt from untrained quacks or of one’s own concoction? And why the obsession with
brahmacharya
? Is not sex one of the joys and pleasures of life? And is not sex with one’s wife in particular the very enactment and embodiment of true, enduring love?

In truth, these concerns were not always appreciated by Gandhi’s contemporaries, nor even by some of his friends. In her book
Mr Gandhi: The Man
, an always affectionate, often insightful, and absolutely indispensable account of their life together in South Africa, Millie Polak could not conceal her puzzlement with her friend’s sometimes strange ways. Her husband Henry, while deeply devoted to his Bada Bhai’s political programme, was not particularly enchanted by his social or natural philosophy either. Neither Millie nor Henry spent much time at Phoenix or Tolstoy Farms; neither subjected themselves to steam baths and mud packs; neither ever remotely contemplated the practice of celibacy.

To some people then (and now), Gandhi’s ascetic, austere regimen, his idiosyncratic diet, his refusal to take pills when sick, his sexual abstinence, were hard to take and harder to understand. If one admired Gandhi’s political philosophy, then – like the Polaks – one treated these as amiable eccentricities, as fads. If one disagreed with Gandhi’s political philosophy, then one saw in these obsessions confirmation of how irrelevant his entire world-view was to the modern era. The prominent Indian Communist E. M. S. Namboodiripad, writing of Gandhi’s membership of the Vegetarian Society of London as a law student, thought it an early illustration of the ‘extremely reactionary social outlook which guided Gandhi throughout his activities’. Namboodiripad continued:

While Gandhi, the young barrister, was writing articles for the
Vegetarian
, Lenin, also a young lawyer, was translating Marx, Sydney Webb, etc., and himself writing
The Development of Capitalism in Russia
. Lenin combined the militant mass movement of the working class with the most advanced ideology. Gandhi combined it with the most reactionary and obscurantist of ideologies that was current in the contemporary world.
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In the first half of the twentieth century, Marxism had an enormous appeal. Well-read young men all over the world saw it as the way, and wave, of the future. (The French sociologist Raymond Aron, a precocious dissenter himself, termed it the ‘opium of the intellectuals’.) These same men, if they knew or knew of Gandhi, saw him as ‘reactionary and obscurantist’ because he used a religious idiom rather than a secular-scientific one, because he preached a moderation of material wants rather than welcoming the cornucopian promises of modernity, because he advocated the (to them) tame, timid, effeminate alternative of satyagraha to the militant, masculine route of armed struggle.

Namboodiripad’s emphatic dismissal of Gandhi (and Gandhism) was first published in the winter of 1955–6. The next year, Khrushchev’s speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union confirmed the murderous outcomes of the ‘most advanced ideology’ of Lenin and his successor Stalin. The image of Marxism took a battering in subsequent decades. News of the Gulag, the purges, the brutal suppression of minorities, and the mass famines induced by Communist regimes, have made it less easy to hail Marxism as ‘progressive’ while dismissing Gandhism as ‘reactionary’.

But let us not win the argument between these rival philosophies through hindsight, but rather try and see Gandhi’s own experiments as he saw them, as steps to a purer, more meaningful life. To simplify his diet, to reduce his dependence on medicines and doctors, to embrace
brahmacharya
, were all for him ways of strengthening his will and his resolve. By conquering the need to be stimulated by sex or rich food – the ‘basal passions’ according to his teacher Tolstoy – Gandhi was preparing himself for a life lived for other people and for higher values. If he ate little, and that merely fruits and vegetables, without salt, sugar and spices; if he didn’t care how often (or if at all) he had sex with his wife (or with others); if he dressed simply and didn’t own property or jewellery, he could more easily embrace the rigours of prison life, more fully and whole-heartedly devote his being and his body to the oppressed Indians of Natal and the Transvaal.

His religious quest, his individual and social relationships, his work as writer and editor, his legal career, his lifestyle choices – these were all subordinated, in lesser or greater degree, to Gandhi’s work for the rights of the Indians in South Africa. This subordination of individual choice to social commitment happened incrementally, over the twenty-odd years that Gandhi spent there.

This gradualism may have had its roots in the time he spent as a student in London. As his old flatmate Josiah Oldfield once noted, the vegetarians provided ‘a fine training ground in which Gandhi learnt [that] by quiet persistence he could do far more to change men’s minds than by any oratory or loud trumpeting’.
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Henry Salt, who was, properly speaking, Gandhi’s first mentor (since he met him even before he met Raychandbhai) had said that ‘to insist on an all-or-nothing policy would be fatal to any reform whatsoever.
Improvements never come in the mass, but always by instalment.’ Likewise, Gandhi’s policy for personal improvement as well as his agenda for social reform was that of one step at a time. However, even if he recognized that the individual self was not, ultimately, perfectible, he never lost sight of the ultimate social goal of racial and national equality.

Someone who understood the pragmatic roots of Gandhi’s gradualism was his friend L. W. Ritch. When asked why Indians did not immediately demand the franchise, Ritch answered that ‘the whole tone and temper of white South Africa was such that any claim of that kind was absolutely outside the range of practical politics.’ Then he continued, ‘Still, the ideals of the one day become the practical politics of another, and the children of a later generation will in all likelihood look with amazement upon what they will doubtless consider the narrow-mindedness of their predecessors.’
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While fighting for the repeal of an unjust law or tax, or for more freedom of movement or of trade, Gandhi did not go so far as to press for equal citizenship or for voting rights for Indians. To speak of comprehensive equality for coloured people was premature in early twentieth-century South Africa. Nonetheless, Gandhi believed that in time such equality would come, that (as he put it in a speech of May 1908) the rulers would one day recognize the need to raise subject peoples ‘to equality with themselves, to give them absolutely free institutions and make them absolutely free men’. Six years later, in his farewell speech to the Europeans of Durban, he told them that they could not forever postpone the day when coloured peoples would enjoy ‘a charter of full liberties’ in South Africa.

As his political thought evolved, so also did Gandhi’s confidence in himself as a leader and maker of men. His letters to Lord Milner in 1903 and 1904 were extremely deferential in tone. Within a few years this had changed. Gandhi’s letters to General Smuts were courteously worded, yet far more assured. He spoke to him as the leader of one community to another. To be sure, equivalence did not imply equality, since the whites were the dominant race in a political as well as economic sense. Still, the confidence conveyed in Gandhi’s exchanges with Smuts is unmistakable, a product of the fact that so many Indians had followed his call and courted arrest.

This political and personal evolution was also accompanied by shifts in how Gandhi viewed rival cultures and civilizations. When he first
went to South Africa, Gandhi was both an Empire loyalist and a believer in the superiority of British justice and British institutions. He was, in dress and orientation of mind, a
Westernized
Oriental Gentleman, a modern man who admired and was comfortable with (European) modernity. Reading Tolstoy and Ruskin, and re-reading Raychandbhai, led him to reconsider his position. He began to exalt the rural against the urban, the agrarian against the industrial and, eventually the Indic versus the European. As this London-trained barrister began to think more like an Indian, he began to look more like an Indian too. His adoption of the home-spun dress of a peasant after the satyagraha of 1913 was the analogue, in apparel, of the intellectual indigenism contained within the pages of
Hind Swaraj
.