Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

Reporting the event, Indian Opinion said the committee chaired by Hosken represented the effective individual support that hundreds of Europeans on the Rand gave to the passive resistance hawkers; the few warders and other gaol officials who, out of sympathy, made the lives of passive resisters in the Transvaal prisons as free from difficulty as possible, whilst the hand of perhaps the majority of them was against these prisoners. It represents Miss Schlesin, at the mention of whose name at the banquet an enthusiastic applause rang through the hall and who has been working for the cause as no other man or woman, European or Asiatic, has worked. It represents an unknown railway refreshment waitress who was glad to serve bread and cheese for a passive resister, who was being taken under custody to Volksrust, for which she would not accept payment. It represents Mrs. Vogl who, as a direct result of the struggle, has, as a labour of love, established a sewing class for Indian women and girls.72 These words do not appear in the Collected Works, but they must surely have been written by Gandhi. The language is his, as are the sentiments, nurtured through twenty and more years of friendship with Europeans (from the vegetarians of London onwards), friendships that survived his social objections to their laws and his moral objections to their civilization.