Gandhi & Churchill (20 page)

It had all been over in less than two minutes: “It was I suppose the most dangerous 2 minutes I shall live to see.” Out of 310 men, the Twenty-first Lancers had lost five officers killed or wounded, sixty-five troopers, and 120 horses—a quarter of their strength.
⁴⁸
Winston observed their bodies on the field afterward and was horrified to see that they had been terribly butchered and mutilated. But all around them were the bodies of the enemy, cut down by the rest of the army’s rifles and Maxim guns, “scattered like bits of newspaper.” In fact, the combined firepower of more than 20,000 British rifles and machine guns had mowed down 11,000 charging Dervish warriors with a loss of only 360 men for the entire army. Winston had had his moment of chivalrous action, “as in days of old,” and was lucky to be alive. But it was science and civilization that had decisively defeated the forces of barbarism and fanaticism. “My faith in our race and blood was much strengthened,” by the victory, Winston told Hamilton.
⁴⁹

By Christmas he was back in Bangalore. Then in February 1899 came his last chance to lead the Fourth Hussars to the polo championship. Despite another fall that nearly permanently crippled his shoulder, he led his team to victory over the Fourth Dragoon Guards, 4 to 3, before a crowd of thousands. It was his final triumphant moment in India. Inside of a month he would be leaving it, and the army, for good.
^*21

Certainly as a stage in his military career, India had been important. But as a stage in his personal development, it had been decisive. For the culture and people, he developed no great sense of respect or warmth, unlike some other British who had served in India. Just before he left, he noted in a letter that the plague had broken out in Bombay and southern India, killing nearly seventy thousand. His only observation was pure Winwood Reade: “Nature applies her own checks to population and a philosopher may watch unmoved the destruction of some superfluous millions, whose life must of necessity be destitute of pleasure.”

Nonetheless, British rule there seemed to reveal how a great nation could civilize a foreign people for its own good by introducing good government, law and order, and respect for property and “the fruits of work, enterprise, or thrift.” It was nothing less than the mission of the British Empire and the Raj.

He had seen, as he wrote later, “a sedate Government tied up by laws, tangled about with parleys and many intimate relationships” and by “purely Anglo-Indian restraints varying from the grandest conceptions of liberal magnanimity down to the most minute obstructions and inconveniences of red tapes.” Yet the system seemed to work. The government “is patient because among other things it knows that if the worst comes to the worst, it can shoot anybody down. Its problem is to avoid such hateful conclusions.”

Indeed, in some ways the Raj had seemed to him a model for all governments. “Overwhelming force on the side of the rulers, innumerable objections to the use of any part of it.”
⁵⁰
Yet he also knew that deeper darker passions ran through the ruler as well as the ruled, “the deep-seated instincts of savagery, over which civilization has but cast a veil of doubtful thickness.”
⁵¹
He had seen it in the slaughter of Pathan tribesmen by the Guides. He saw it again in Kitchener’s treatment of the wounded Dervishes at Omdurman, where most were simply shot or bayoneted out of hand. And he would see it again in the actions of General Reginald Dyer in the enclosed square at Amritsar in 1919, which Churchill would describe in a phrase he remembered from his reading of Macaulay: “the most frightful of all spectacles, the strength of civilization without its mercy.”
⁵²

Still, India would remain a precious memory for him. “India is a great trust for which we are responsible,” he would say early in his parliamentary career. “The lives, liberties, the progress towards civilization—towards a better and happier life—of nearly 300 million souls are in our hands.”
⁵³
The Raj “could not endure—certainly not a month—unless it were founded on the belief which the people of India have acquired that our motives are lofty” and that “British justice is the foundation of British domination.” The grave, turbaned servants; the moonlit verandas; the polo-playing maharajas; the grinning Punjabi and the fearless Sikh soldiers—this was the India he remembered and cherished. On January 28, 1944, he was at Chequers with his secretary Marian Holmes. He was “in a reminiscent mood,” she recalled years later, and he spoke wistfully of his days fifty years earlier as a young subaltern, of his reading of Gibbon and Macaulay and playing polo, “the other great occupation of his life then.”
⁵⁴

A year later he was on HMS
Orion
making his way to his fateful meeting with Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta. His mood was more somber. “I have had for some time a feeling of despair about the British connection with India,” he wrote to his wife Clementine, “and still more about what will happen if it is suddenly broken…I see such ugly storms looming up there.”
⁵⁵

By then his dreams of India had become a nightmare, thanks to Mohandas Gandhi.

Chapter Six

MEN AT WAR

1899–1900

The battle in the end must be to the strong.

WINSTON CHURCHILL
, 1899

O
N
D
ECEMBER
18, 1897, G
ANDHI ARRIVED
in Durban with his family on the SS
Courland
. The ship was the pride of Dada Abdullah’s merchant fleet. Besides Gandhi it carried more than 250 expectant Indian immigrants. The crossing had been rough, with storms and a steady downpour.

After the
Courland
dropped anchor, but before any of the passengers disembarked, the Natal authorities decided to put the ship in quarantine. Their pretext was that there had been an outbreak of plague after the
Courland
left Bombay, but Gandhi knew the real reason: Natal’s whites wanted to keep the immigrants out. They also knew Gandhi was on board, and they were determined that he never set foot in South Africa again.
¹

Gandhi was suddenly famous in his chosen home, but not in the way he might have preferred. His Green Pamphlet, published in 1896 during his stay in India, had recited his woes about the treatment that “respectable Indians” suffered in South Africa; how they were forced to use the same lavatories and same entrances to public buildings as African blacks, how they were spat upon and insulted in the street, and so on. The pamphlet had been a sensation in India; it thrilled Natal Indians but outraged Natal whites. Natal’s attorney general, Harry Escombe, had been Gandhi’s neighbor in exclusive Beach Grove and a Gandhi ally. Now a furious Escombe was the main force behind the quarantine order, which kept the
Courland
laid up in harbor for a total of twenty-three days, including over Christmas and New Year’s.

When the quarantine finally ran out, SS
Courland
was permitted to dock. An angry crowd of whites had gathered on the quayside. “I was conscious of my responsibility,” Gandhi wrote later. “The lives of the passengers were in danger, and by bringing my family with me I had put them likewise in jeopardy.” Gandhi was able to smuggle his family and get the other passengers ashore safely. Kasturbai and their two boys found refuge in the home of one of Gandhi’s wealthy Parsi clients, who locked his doors and waited for the worst.

Then Gandhi disembarked, moving swiftly but easily down the gangplank. He made no attempt to disguise his identity. In fact, he got as far as the edge of the harbor when “some youngsters recognized me and shouted, ‘Gandhi, Gandhi.’” All at once a mob gathered and descended on him, throwing stones and bricks. “Someone snatched my turban,” he wrote, “while others continued to batter and kick me.”
²
A white woman, the wife of Durban’s police superintendent, finally intervened and shielded the bleeding Gandhi with her parasol. Two policemen carried him to his client’s house and to a frightened and sobbing Kasturbai. It was her welcome to South Africa.

That night a howling mob surrounded the house, threatening to burn it down and singing: “Hang old Gandhi on the sour apple tree!” The police superintendent finally convinced Gandhi to escape in disguise and take refuge in the police station. He would spend two days there—his first, but by no means his last, encounter with that institution. He had plenty of time to mull over his situation and his options. Only one thing seemed clear. He would not leave South Africa until he had secured justice both for himself and for his fellow Indians.

In his autobiography, written almost a quarter-century after the event, Gandhi would describe his near-lynching that day in January 1898 as “The Test,” without specifying what kind. Certainly it was a test of his loyalty to an empire that, for all its chatter about equal treatment under law for all the queen’s subjects, had left him to be treated in this way. Already Gandhi was reaching the reluctant conclusion that Britain’s imperial system, and the European civilization that those like Winston Churchill claimed it epitomized, was “superior” only in its projection of coercive force, whether by lawbreakers like the rioters or by law keepers like the police. He had even made a bitter speech to this effect at the New Year’s dinner on the
Courland
before they disembarked.
³
It was not what you did, or even who you knew, that seemed to count in South Africa or anywhere else in the British Empire. It was whom you had the power to hurt.

The incident was a test, also, of the opposite Hindu principle that he had embraced in New Age London and that his recent contacts in India with a Jain thinker named Shrimrad Rajchandra Mehta had reinforced. Later Gandhi listed Raychandbai, as he liked to called him, as one of the three most important personal influences in his life, and the only Indian.
^*22
Although a worldly man and brother of one of the Indian National Congress’s most powerful politicians, Raychandbhai evoked the principle of nonviolence or
ahimsa
(literally, “not doing harm to others”) in all things.

Gandhi would describe Raychandbai as the closest figure to a
guru,
or guiding teacher, he ever encountered.
⁴
In a world that seemed to tolerate, accept, and on the battlefield even exalt the power to cause pain to others, rejecting violence became for Gandhi a declaration of spiritual independence, much like his rejection of eating meat. “By using violence to subjugate one another,” he often said, “we are using violence against our own souls.”
⁵

In the midst of the battle at Durban wharf, Gandhi had resolutely refused to raise his hand against his attackers. His refusal to pursue the matter in the courts, even when Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain personally urged him to do so, gained the respect even of Natal’s whites. Gandhi had shown the power of Jesus’ admonition to turn the other cheek and had won, at least in his own mind. It was a powerful lesson for the future.
⁶

Finally Gandhi saw the incident as a test for a quality of character that mattered as much to him as it did to the young Churchill: physical courage. Afterward he played the entire sequence over and over in his mind: how he had faced the first murderous mob without flinching but had fled the second in disguise. “Who can say whether I did so because I saw that my life was in jeopardy,” he would wonder years later, “or because I did not want to put my friend’s life and property or the lives of my wife and children in danger?”

In the end, Gandhi concluded, “it is difficult to say for certain how a particular man would act in a particular set of circumstances.”
⁷
But for the rest of his life acting bravely and boldly
but without violence
would form the baseline of his own self-respect. Nonviolence “is the supreme virtue of the brave,” he declared. “Non-violence is the virtue of the manly.” In the midst of a world war, he would even proclaim: “You cannot teach non-violence to a man who cannot kill.”
⁸

Like Churchill, indeed like other late Victorians, Gandhi was obsessed with standards of manliness and masculinity. Not surprisingly, physical courage was to them both a crucial measure of male character.
⁹
But in Gandhi’s case it had another dimension: he desired to dispel the stereotyped image of Indians, especially Hindus, as unmanly and servile. Physical courage became for Gandhi a powerful measure of equality between Briton and non-Briton, white and nonwhite. Throughout his life Gandhi was determined to live up to that measure wherever he found it.

In the coming South African war, both men would find opportunities to face the supreme test of courage and character.
^*23
Indeed, war would bring them together in the danger zone, in the same place but in different ways.

In the meantime, however, Gandhi settled back into his role as lawyer and lobbyist for the organization he had helped to form three years earlier, the Natal Indian Congress. The situation for Indians in South Africa was rapidly deteriorating. The attack on him was only one of a number of anti-immigrant riots that fall and winter. Working-class whites, in particular, were furious that cheap Indian labor was threatening their jobs. “They breed like rabbits,” the
Natal Witness
quoted one exasperated demonstrator. “The worst of it is we can’t shoot them down.”
¹⁰
The riots, and the attack on Gandhi in particular, gave the Natal assembly the excuse to put together a harshly restrictive immigration bill in April 1897, limiting new Asian immigrants only to people possessing at least £25 and a working knowledge of English.