Gandhi & Churchill (23 page)

“We had no hesitation” about going, Gandhi wrote proudly, as ambulances with their fluttering Red Cross flags gathered at the foot of the mountain. Meanwhile, as the dead and wounded were piling up in “a bloody, reeking shambles,” Lieutenant Churchill watched from a neighboring hillside.

By four o’clock Churchill could not sit and passively watch any longer. He and a brother officer rode down and through “the village of ambulance wagons” and, leaving their horses behind, climbed up the spur.

“Streams of wounded met us and obstructed our path,” he wrote, with men “staggering along alone, or supported by comrades, or crawling on hands and knees, or carried on stretchers.” In fact, he and Gandhi must have passed literally within yards of each other, since one of the men Gandhi carried away was indeed the wounded Woodgate—something he would remember with pride more than forty years later.
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Gandhi’s bearers had to carry the wounded for miles over ground that the rickety ambulances could not traverse, in order to get them to the field hospitals. In some cases they covered as much as twenty-five miles in a single day. Gandhi was delighted when someone said he could think of no European ambulance corpsmen who could have made the trip under the same broiling sun without food or water.
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General Redvers Buller would mention the Indians’ bravery at Spion Kop in his dispatches, and Gandhi and thirty-seven other volunteers were awarded the War Medal. It bore the queen’s portrait on one side and a helmeted Britannia on the other, summoning to her aid the men of South Africa. There was even a poem published in praise of their exploits, ending with the refrain: “We are sons of Empire after all.”

Some weeks later the Indian ambulance corps was disbanded. “You have shown your patriotism and brought honor to yourself and your country,” Gandhi wrote to his fellow corps leaders in April.
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He could now sit back and wait for the war to end and for the new era of liberty and equality that Churchill and others were promising for South Africa to begin. “Every one believed that the Indians’ grievances were now sure to be redressed,” Gandhi wrote later.
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For the end was finally in sight—or so it seemed. Ladysmith was relieved in March 1, 1900. Johannesburg fell on May 31. Days later the Boers abandoned Pretoria; and on June 5 Lord Roberts and his army entered the Transvaal capital. One of the first to arrive was Lieutenant Churchill, who made a beeline for the Model States School, where his fellow officers were still imprisoned. At half past eight in the morning “suddenly Winston Churchill came galloping over the hill,” an astonished prisoner remembered, “and tore down the Boer flag, and hoisted ours to cheers.”
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Winston would participate in one more firefight, at Diamond Hill, east of Pretoria, on June 11. But with the war almost over and the mission accomplished, he was impatient to leave South Africa. Two days earlier he had written to his mother: “I propose to come home…Politics, Pamela [Pamela Plowden, the daughter of an Indian civil servant whom he had met in Hyderabad and whom he hoped would become his fiancée], finances, and books all need my attention.” Among the books was the one he was writing to describe his adventures, entitled
From London to Ladysmith via Pretoria,
which became an instant best seller.

Churchill had had a good war. Several of his friends had been killed or wounded. His own brother Jack had been shot beside him during the relief of Ladysmith.
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But once again, just as at Omdurman, he had come through without a scratch. And although he would never win the Victoria Cross or marry Pamela Plowden, his celebrity and fame meant he could write his own political ticket.

His boat reached Southampton on July 20, 1900. On September 17 Britain’s Tory government, eager to cash in on its success against the Boers, dissolved Parliament and called for a general election for October 1. Winston had less than two weeks to gear up for his campaign to take the seat for Oldham, which he had stood for but lost the year before.

This time things came out right. He came in second at the polls, but Oldham’s peculiar electoral rules gave seats to both the first-place and the second-place finishers. Churchill was launched on his father’s path at last. A few days later he received a letter from Simla, from India’s new viceroy, Lord Curzon, congratulating him on his victory. “It is a great moment,” Curzon wrote. “It is the starting point of a career of great possibilities, infinite excitement, and dangerous vicissitudes.”
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Those words about Churchill’s future were truer than even Curzon, one of Britain’s most brilliant public men, could know. For despite every obstacle Churchill would reach the goal that eluded Curzon all his distinguished career: Number 10 Downing Street and leadership of the British Empire.

But in the end, India would defeat them both.

Chapter Seven

CONVERGING PATHS

1900–1906

All activity pursued with a pure heart is bound to bear fruit, whether or not such fruit is visible to us.

M. K. GANDHI

O
N
O
CTOBER
6, 1900,
THE
B
RITISH
C
ROWN
annexed the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The war would drag on for another year and a half, its toll brutal. The Boers’ continuing guerrilla resistance would force Britain to launch a ruthless counterinsurgency that cleared tens of thousands of Boer homesteads and created disease-ridden “concentration camps” to hold the evacuees. Nearly 28,000 Boer prisoners would die in those camps, including 26,000 women and children and at least 14,000 blacks. But all of South Africa—and its gold fields—was now under formal British rule.

Through it all, no one had said a word about South Africa’s Indians.

The war had launched Winston Churchill’s career, but Gandhi’s was left high and dry. The triumphal lifting of discriminatory laws against Indians that he had expected did not happen. The prospect of returning to the same thankless and fruitless rounds of protest and petition was more than Gandhi could stomach, especially given the sense of excitement and purpose that the war had brought him.

He decided it was time to move on. In October 1901 he headed back to India, “convinced the Congress’s cause in Natal was lost.”
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He remained there a year, struggling to launch himself in Indian nationalist politics. India’s leading politician, Gopal K. Gokhale, gave him his patronage, but Gandhi got nowhere. Then in November 1902 he received a cable from his Natal friends begging him to return. Change was coming to South Africa, they said, and they would need his help. Later, in his autobiography, Gandhi suggested that the telegram arrived “just when I seemed to be settling down as I had intended,” as an ordinary Bombay barrister. Some biographers have taken him at his word, but the truth was otherwise. His letters at the time reveal his doubts about his ability to support himself in Bombay (it was a loan from the Natal Congress that had enabled him to move there) either as a lawyer or as a politician. Gandhi realized that if he was going to become a leader of men and inspiration to his fellow Indians, it was going to be in South Africa or nowhere.
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The situation there had indeed changed, seemingly for the better. The war and the Boer insurgency were finally over. Lord Milner, the Indians’ friend from the Cape, was now in full charge, and another Gandhi sympathizer, Foreign Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, was conducting a personal tour of the region. That December, shortly after he returned to Durban, Gandhi headed an Indian delegation to meet Chamberlain. The Indians reminded Chamberlain of his earlier favorable responses to their petition against the Transvaal “bazaar” laws. Chamberlain’s reply was friendly but cautious. “I shall do what I can,” he told Gandhi and his fellow delegates, “but you must try your best to placate the Europeans, if you wish to live in their midst.”
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Later Gandhi remembered how that reply had “cast a chill” over the other members of the delegation. But he was convinced that British rule would do more for Indians in the former Boer republic than it had in Natal. He decided to set up his new law office in Johannesburg, Transvaal’s largest city and the very center of the great gold rush. The city was booming, having grown to more than 100,000 settlers with new suburbs springing up on all sides. The pace and pressure were so intense, Gandhi said, that people seemed to run everywhere rather than walk, and the roar of machinery from the mines was incessant from dawn to past dusk. But Gandhi’s law practice also thrived, with four Indian clerks, and he soon had to hire a Scottish lady, Miss Dick, because she knew how to type.
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Compared to Durban, Johannesburg also had a thriving cultural scene, which enabled Gandhi to resume his New Age counterculture contacts. He made two new European friends, Hermann Kallenbach, a liberal-minded Polish Jew and successful architect, and Henry Solomon Polak. Polak was only twenty-two but a journalist and a devoted follower of Madame Blavatsky, as well as a vegetarian. As a result of meeting Polak, Gandhi would spend most of his evenings at the Johannesburg Theosophical Society, even as he spent his days trying mobilize Transvaal Indians to assert their political rights.

At first, Gandhi tried to follow Chamberlain’s advice. He set up a new lobbying group, the British Indian Association (the name made clear where the members’ political loyalties lay), and took over a failing local newspaper,
Indian Opinion,
to serve as the BIA’s sounding board.
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He sought to win support for revoking the harshest anti-Indian laws by convincing whites that the Indian elite of Pretoria and Johannesburg would help to enforce the traditional color bar. Editorials in
Indian Opinion
pushed for a new racial order in which whites and Indians would in effect preside together over South Africa’s blacks and coloreds.

“We believe in the purity of race as much as we think” whites do, Gandhi wrote. “If there is one thing which the Indian cherishes more than any other, it is the purity of the [racial] type.”
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Gandhi felt “strongly” that blacks and Indians should not be forced to live in the same Johannesburg suburbs. “I think it is very unfair to the Indian population,” he said. In fact, many of Gandhi’s proposals in
Indian Opinion
pushing separate facilities for separate races would make him an early architect of apartheid.

Biographers are understandably uncomfortable with or silent on this side of Gandhi. But as historian Maureen Swan has concluded, “Gandhi was a racial purist, and proud of it.”
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He had little or no respect for South Africa’s blacks. His goal all along had been, not to overturn the color bar, but to get whites to accept Indians on their side of the line. British Indians, he wrote in June 1903, “admit the British race should be the dominant race in South Africa.”
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Gandhi was offended not by the system of racial separation per se, but by the “insult” of being legally reduced to the level of the black majority. “In this respect he became a segregationist,” Gandhi scholar James Hunt admits, “albeit a liberal one.”
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In fact, his awareness of the importance of race as defining identity would have a huge impact on his thinking about India, once his efforts in South Africa failed.

Because they did fail. Once again the dismally familiar pattern reasserted itself: expectant effort, initial hopes, then crushing disappointment. The truth was that the only imperial minority that Chamberlain and Milner were interested in placating was the Boers. After the long, hard-fought war, the British government was willing to accept as much of the old prewar legislation and racial chauvinism as they needed to win the Boers’ acquiescence to the new order. In 1905, when Lord Milner left South Africa, his promise that “respectable British Indians or civilized Asiatics” would never again suffer discrimination was still unfulfilled. In fact, the Cape Colony was now considering its own anti–Indian immigration bill.
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Everything Gandhi had done over the past decade had proved useless. Instead of helping South Africa’s Indian minority, his campaigns had almost certainly worsened their plight. The pneumonic plague broke out in Johannesburg’s indentured laborers’ quarters, which heightened the whites’ desire to drive the Indians out of the city. Even as he volunteered to work with the sick and dying, and to set up a temporary camp where families could escape the disease and squalor, Gandhi was at his wit’s end. He had enough sense to realize that his efforts, indeed his life, needed a radically different direction. It was his new friends Kallenbach and Polak who helped him find it.

Gandhi and Polak already shared a passion for the works of the Russian writer, vegetarian, pacifist, and New Age sage Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy was a favorite among English-speaking counterculture intellectuals for his rejection of industrial civilization and traditional Christianity, as well as his advocacy of a “return to the land” and nonviolence. Gandhi had read Tolstoy’s
The Kingdom of God Is Within You
in the day after his experience on the Maritzburg train platform. He had been “overwhelmed” by its message that God’s greatest gift to man was the power of universal love to overcome all conflict and hatred. (Many years later Gandhi would say that it was reading Tolstoy that made him a believer in nonviolence.)
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