Gandhi & Churchill (16 page)

Boers and Britons had already fought one war over control of the Transvaal and would soon be fighting another. Meanwhile the influx of would-be prospectors and adventurers—not only Englishmen but Americans, Germans, and East Europeans—swelled the population of every city in South Africa, from Capetown and Durban to Johannesburg, the Transvaal’s largest city and the hub of the gold rush.

The whole region, including Natal, was in the grip of gold fever. “People here think of little except gold,” Gandhi noted as he arrived.
³⁷
But even in a world where every immigrant dreamed of striking it rich, someone still had to do the work of keeping the British colonies (Cape Colony and Natal) and the Boer republics (Transvaal and Orange Free State) fed and clothed and producing the goods and services essential to any urban economy. That job fell to many German and English Jews, businessmen like Hermann Kallenbach and Henry Polak, who would become close friends of Gandhi; it also fell to South Africa’s Indians.

Indians had been arriving in large numbers since 1860. Some were wealthy merchants like Dada Abdullah and his partners, but many more were poor indentured laborers. They arrived in conditions of virtual slavery and lived in shantytowns adjoining the sugarcane plantations and coal mines where they worked to earn their freedom and a meager income. By 1891 there were more than 41,000 of these laborers in Natal. A decade later it was close to 100,000.
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Although few cared to admit it, this was the other essential contribution India had made to the British Empire: providing literally hundreds of thousands of manual laborers to replace the black slaves who had been set free in 1837, when slavery was abolished. Poor illiterate Indians did the jobs, and kept down the wages, that enabled the British imperial economy to remain profitable and productive, from the West Indies to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean and Fiji in the Pacific. Thousands flocked from India’s rural areas to East Africa, and many more to Natal and the Cape Colony.
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Their lives were miserable, although probably not as miserable as they would have been if they had remained in their diseased and hunger-ridden homes in India. Every other group in South Africa took ruthless advantage of them, including their own countrymen. Gujarati merchants lent them money at exorbitant interest rates, as historian Maureen Swan has shown. Indeed, many of the ships that brought them from India in unsafe and unsanitary conditions were actually owned by Gandhi’s client Dada Abdullah.
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These indentured “coolies” (another English word borrowed from Hindi-Urdu roots) and their offspring were the backbone of South Africa’s domestic economy. So were the well-to-do Indian merchants. Yet both groups, rich and poor, found themselves under growing social pressure. South Africa’s whites, especially but not exclusively the Boers, deeply resented their dark-skinned presence. Natal’s colonial legislature threatened several times to cut off immigration, and legislators generally looked for ways to shrink their influence and visibility. No one was ready to expel the Indian immigrants, as the Orange Free State had in 1891; not with the Colonial Office watching, or the British government in India, which steadfastly stood up for the rights of its subjects living abroad. But every Indian living in Durban felt the heat, including Gandhi.

Issues of race and racism permeated every part of the British Empire at that time, but they were far more blatant and intense in South Africa than anything Gandhi had experienced in England or India. In London, Gandhi had found that his skin color and accent had rarity value and made him the object of respectful curiosity more than hostility. A fellow student from Madras even told
Indian Magazine
in April 1888 that his one regret about living in London was that his skin wasn’t blacker.
⁴⁰
When Gandhi had returned to Rajkot, he had the unpleasant experience of being treated rudely by a British civil servant with whom he had been friends in England, but put it down to the typical behavior of the white
sahib
under the Raj.

In Durban the lash of white supremacy was more naked and obvious. On Gandhi’s very first day in court, the European judge refused to speak to him until he took off his turban—which, to a respectable Indian, was a deliberate insult.
⁴¹
Abdullah’s partner explained that whites treated every Indian like an ignorant coolie because of his or her skin color, regardless of their actual status or income or education. Hence he and the other Muslim Gujarati merchants preferred to describe themselves as “Arabs,” and the Parsis in town called themselves “Persians.” It was the first important discovery Gandhi made about the color bar in South Africa: it made everyone deny who they really were, in order to fit into a scheme dreamed up and imposed by whites.

Just a few days after he arrived in Durban, Dada Abdullah asked Gandhi to go to the Transvaal’s capital, Pretoria, where the case against his cousin was being tried. Gandhi took his seat in the first-class section of the train. A European entered the carriage at Maritzburg, took one look at Gandhi, and left. He came back with a railroad official who told Gandhi, “Come along, you must go to the van compartment.” That was where blacks and Indian laborers were supposed to travel, as Gandhi well knew.

“But I have a first-class ticket,” Gandhi protested.

“That doesn’t matter,” the official said, “You must leave this compartment, or else I shall have to call a police constable to push you out.”
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Gandhi still refused to leave, and so a constable threw him and his luggage out onto the train platform. It was close to midnight and very cold. Gandhi’s coat was in his luggage. He ended up spending the night there, becoming angrier by the minute at the unfair treatment.

Worse was to come. The next train dropped him in Charlestown, where the next stage of the journey was by stagecoach. The stage driver denied him a seat inside and ordered him to sit outside, at the coach driver’s feet. Gandhi became furious. He said, “You would have me sit at your feet. I will not do so, but I am prepared to sit inside.”

The conductor started punching Gandhi until the passengers inside protested: “Man, leave him alone. Don’t beat him. He is not to blame. He is right.” The conductor gave up, and finally Gandhi ended up taking the outside seat reserved for the black African servant. The coach got under way, but “my heart was beating fast within my breast,” Gandhi remembered, “and I was wondering whether I should ever reach my destination alive.”
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He did, but in Pretoria more humiliations lay ahead. He was denied a room at the main hotel, and a table in the dining room at another. With each incident whites expressed sympathy, even embarrassment. “I have no color prejudice,” protested one, but if Gandhi were given the same table as a European, she said, “the other guests might be offended and go away.” This was Gandhi’s second discovery: whites, or at least some of them, seemed to be as embarrassed by the color bar as he and his fellow Indians were. Yet they refused to do anything about it. When he complained to Abdullah’s trade representative, the man only laughed. “This country is not for men like you…Only
we
can live in a land like this, because, for making money, we do not mind pocketing insults.” He advised Gandhi to do the same.
⁴⁴

But Gandhi could not. Later biographers would suggest that the train ride to Pretoria in 1893 formed a watershed in his life. His remarks in an interview with Dr. J. R. Mott and passages in his autobiography, written thirty years after the event, imply as much.
⁴⁵
But nothing at the time indicated that it radically changed his worldview or turned him into a fearless opponent of racism or colonialism. Gandhi was certainly furious. His dignity had been deeply offended, as had his sense of what the British called “fair play.” He fired off a long letter to the directors of the railway company, spoke to a gathering of Indian businessmen urging them to protest the treatment they were receiving from South African whites, and wrote an editorial for the
Natal Advertiser
that concluded: “Is this Christian-like, is this fair play, is this justice, is this civilization?”
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What really outraged Gandhi was he had been treated as if his education and professional status counted for nothing. He had risked physical injury rather than be forced to sit where, as he put it, the “Hottentot” sat. For Gandhi still believed in Queen Victoria’s Proclamation, the Indian Magna Carta. Loyal Indians of “superior abilities” like himself deserved to be treated like any similar white person, not like ignorant coolies, let alone like African blacks. Whatever his views later, in 1893 Gandhi thought of himself as a Briton first and an Indian second. On the dividing line between European civilization and “barbarism,” which is to say non-Western cultural standards, Gandhi still came down firmly on the side of civilization. Nothing about his spiritual awakening in London with Salt and Blavatsky had changed that.

Besides, he had no time for lengthy recriminations. His legal case was wrapping up; it was time to return to India. At the end of May 1894 his clients threw a farewell party in Durban. Someone thrust into his hands a newspaper announcing that the Legislative Assembly would soon vote on a bill to strip Indians of the vote in Natal. Gandhi confronted Dada Abdullah, who shrugged his shoulders and said, “What can we understand about these matters? We can only understand things that affect our trade.”

“It is the first nail in our coffin,” Gandhi warned Abdullah. “It strikes at the root of our self-respect.”
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At that moment, Gandhi tells us, he decided to stay in South Africa to help to organize Indians to fight the disenfranchisement bill and save them from oppression by whites. This is the account in Gandhi’s autobiography, and most of his biographers have accepted it as true. The full story is somewhat different. Neither Abdullah nor the other Indian merchants were as naïve as Gandhi’s account suggests. In fact, well before Gandhi appeared on the scene, Natal’s Indian merchants and storeowners had been organizing and lobbying to protect not only their own rights but the rights of fellow Indian businessmen in the Boer Republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State. In 1891 and 1892 they had sent protests to Bombay and Calcutta as well as London. They even enlisted in their cause the former viceroy Lord Ripon, who was now secretary of state for India in the new Liberal government.
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Abdullah and the others did not need Gandhi to alert them to what the so-called Franchise Adjustment Bill might mean for them and their business interests. What they did need was someone who could give them legal help, since so much of the battle was couched in terms of interpreting existing laws both in Natal and in Great Britain, and someone willing to handle the busywork and administrative details in English. On both counts Gandhi was their man.

So in June 1894 Gandhi agreed to stay on in Durban and help with the political lobbying. He drew up a so-called “monster petition” to the Natal Assembly protesting the effort to deprive Indians of the vote. Based on his London studies, he cited various British scholarly authorities on the civilized character of Indians and their capacity for self-government. He did not hesitate to stoop to race history. He reminded the Natal premier that legal scholars like Sir Henry Maine and Orientalist linguists had established beyond doubt that Anglo-Saxons and Indians are “sprung from the same Aryan stock, or rather the Indo-European” peoples. They shared the superior propensity toward freedom and civilization; unlike black Africans, Indians were racially fit to exercise the franchise.
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“For it is justice we want and that only,” Gandhi concluded the petition. The “flower of the British and Indian nations” did not deserve to be treated like “Asian dirt.” Gandhi and his well-to-do merchant friends were entitled to be treated better than the poor Indian laborers in their midst, let alone the native blacks.
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This elitist view should come as no surprise. Pictures of Gandhi in those years show a smartly dressed and self-assured man, dressed in expensive business suits, with a gold watch chain and an elegant straw boater. His legal business would soon earn him more than £5,000 a year, and his house at Beach Grove Villa was filled with graceful furniture and an extensive library.
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To be sure, Gandhi never set aside his New Age interests. He found time to finish a how-to “Guide to London” for Indians traveling abroad, advising them where to get vegetarian meals (he included the entire menu from the Central) and how to keep their expenses to a minimum. He experimented with a new vegetable and fruit “vital diet” and kept a meticulous diary on its health benefits. He took up an intense correspondence with one of his father’s old Brahmin friends on the meaning of Hinduism and on the
Gita,
while at the same time he peddled pamphlets from the Esoteric Christian Union.

But in every other respect Gandhi’s dress, lifestyle, and attitudes were resolutely British imperial. When he sailed back to Bombay in the spring of 1896 to drum up support against the disenfranchisement bill and to gather his family, he still thought of himself as a child of the empire: “Hardly ever have I known anyone to cherish such loyalty as I did to the British constitution.”
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Except perhaps for the well-born young man, five years his junior, who was to arrive in India only a few months later.

Chapter Five

AWAKENING II:

Churchill in India, 1896–1899

East of Suez Democratic reins are impossible.
India must be governed on old principles.