Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

The Matriculation of 1887 was, in purely intellectual terms, the sternest test of Mohandas’s life. Some of the question papers he confronted have survived. For his English paper he had to ‘write an essay of about 40 lines on the advantage of a cheerful disposition’. Among the terms he had to define were ‘pleonasm’ and ‘apposition’. For the Arithmetic exam, he had to calculate some very complicated equations, running into tens of decimal points. The Natural Science paper obliged him to provide the chemical formulae of, among other substances, lime and sulphuric acid. The History and Geography test asked him to ‘write a short history of Puritan Rule in England’ and to draw a map tracing the course of the Rhine.

To settle the matter, a ‘huge meeting’ of the Modh Banias was called. Mohandas was seated in the middle, while community leaders ‘remonstrated with me very strongly and reminded me of their connection with my father’. The boy answered that he was going overseas to study, and that he had promised his mother not to touch a strange woman, or drink wine, or eat meat. The elders were unmoved. For his transgression, the boy would be treated as an outcaste; anyone who spoke to him or went to see him off would be fined. But, as the transgressor recalled, ‘the order had no effect on me’. On 4 September 1888, a month short of his twentieth birthday, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi sailed for London.57

Gandhi’s involvement with the vegetarians of London was far more important to him than is commonly recognized. Had he not joined their Society, he would have kept to his compatriots, as Indian students abroad were wont to do at the time (and sometimes still are). These first, close friendships with English people expanded his mind and his personality. He learnt to relate to people of different races and religious beliefs, to mix, mingle and eat with them, and even to share a home with them.

Mohandas Gandhi had no entrée into high society, into the balls and salons of the great houses in St James’s or Grosvenor Square. Nor did he rub shoulders with the labouring poor, whether in their homes in the East End, or in the factories and sweatshops where they worked. Gandhi’s encounters with English society were with the people in the middle.

Not yet twenty-five, a Gujarati educated in London who had been but a year in South Africa, Gandhi had now become the leader of the Natal Indians. ‘The responsibility undertaken is quite out of proportion to my ability,’ he wrote to Naoroji. He was ‘inexperienced and young and therefore, quite liable to make mistakes’. He asked the Parsi stalwart for guidance, saying any advice would ‘be received as from a father to his child’.56

The struggle against the new Act prompted the creation of the Natal Indian Congress, founded in August 1894 by a group of merchants living in and around Durban. Abdulla Haji Adam – who was a manager in Dada Abdulla’s firm – served as president, and there were as many as twenty-two vice-presidents.

The organization listed seven objectives, among them the removal of the hardships of Indians in Natal,

the promotion of Indian literature and the promotion of ‘concord and harmony among the Indians and the Europeans residing in the Colony’.60

Neither body was opposed to imperial rule per se; they hoped rather to make it more sympathetic to the rights of British subjects who were not white.

A picture of the Natal Indian Congress taken soon after its foundation is revealing. Six men are seated: bearded, clad in long flowing robes, wearing turbans and carrying umbrellas or walking sticks, all are evidently Gujarati Muslims. Seven men are standing: three are bearded, while the others only have moustaches. Among the latter group is Gandhi, clad in an English suit, but with a close-fitting Indian cap. The merchants in the front row paid the bills, whereas the barrister at the back did the work.

When he went to court to take an oath, the Chief Justice asked him to remove his headgear. Gandhi complied. When Dada Abdulla complained that he had abandoned his principles, Gandhi said he needed ‘to reserve my strength for fighting bigger battles’.61

The Star of Johannesburg praised the lucidity of Gandhi’s style and the ‘conspicuous moderation’ of his approach.

Other whites were more critical, accusing Gandhi of a ‘lawyer-like’ approach which presented only the ‘pretty’ side of Indian life while leaving out the ‘pathetic’ side. While Gandhi had focused on the ‘character and attainments of the exceptional Indian in India’, the average Indian in South Africa was – it was here claimed – a creature of ‘bestial habits, given to malingering and dishonest practices’.64

he diligently followed the press for every trace of his name seems clear. In a steel almirah in an archive in Ahmedabad lie many volumes of newspaper clippings from the Natal of the 1890s, doubtless collected by Gandhi himself.

In October 1894, Mohandas Gandhi turned twenty-five. No Gandhi before him had travelled outside India. Few had even left Kathiawar. Had his father Karamchand Gandhi not died in 1886, Mohandas might not have left the peninsula either. He would, soon after leaving school, have followed his brother Laxmidas, working for (and intriguing with) a petty prince in the peninsula. Instead, he travelled to London, where he met Josiah Oldfield, Henry Salt, the Vegetarians and the Theosophists. Then he returned home, where he was deeply influenced by the Jain savant Raychandbhai. The break-in at the Porbandar Palace forced him away to South Africa, where his spiritual and political education was continued by A. W. Baker and Dada Abdulla.

In Kathiawar itself, Mohandas Gandhi could never have met or befriended these men, who became, as it were, unwitting agents of a transformative process whereby he moved from orthodoxy to heterodoxy in religion, from lawyering to activism in professional life and from a conservative inl...

Leaving Bombay in 1888 a small-town Bania with the habits, manners and prejudices of his caste, six years later Gandhi had become a Hindu who befriended Christians and worked for Muslims while orga...

That Gandhi placed the Buddha on a par with Christ irritated Mrs Askew. His vegetarianism was an even greater problem. The hostess’s young son, seeing that Gandhi preferred an apple to a hunk of animal flesh, asked why. The Indian lawyer reproduced the ethical arguments he had first learnt at the feet of Henry Salt. The next day the boy begged his mother not to serve him meat. Convinced (like all good Christians) that eating meat made children strong, she told Gandhi to henceforth speak only to her husband. Gandhi said in that case it was best he stopped visiting them altogether.2

In court and out of it, Gandhi was meeting Europeans who were also Christians. They discussed their respective creeds. Gandhi told a friend he wished to attend service at his church. The friend passed on the request to his vicar. To allow Gandhi to sit alongside white worshippers was impossible. The vicar’s wife, out of solidarity and sympathy, offered to sit with him in the church’s vestibule, from where they heard the service.3

Tolstoy contrasted the teachings of Christ with the practices of the established Church. Christ abhorred violence, while the Church promoted war and capital punishment. Christ’s essence was to be found in the Sermon on the Mount, which exalted the poor, the meek, the righteous and the peace-makers, mandated that ‘thou shalt not kill’, and urged one to love one’s enemies and pray for them. The bishops, on the other hand,

followed the Nicene Creed, which represented Christ as judgemental and made the Church infallible, insisting on absolute obedience from its members.

When he first read The Kingdom of God Is Within You, recalled Gandhi years later, he was ‘overwhelmed’ by the ‘independent thinking, profound morality and the truthfulness of this book’.9 Tolstoy’s book reinforced his own heterodoxy, his stubborn insistence on forging a spiritual path for himself regardless of churches and creeds whether Hindu or Christian. Meanwhile, Gandhi was also rereading the Gita, which he saw less as a celebration of a ‘just war’ and more as a manifesto for ethical conduct, advocating indifference to love and hate, attachment and possession.10

Raychandbhai answered with patience and at length. Spiritual equanimity was the essence of self-realization. Anger, conceit, deceit and greed were its adversaries. God was not a physical being, he ‘had no abode outside the self’. God was emphatically ‘not the creator of the universe. All the elements of nature such as atom, space, etc., are eternal and uncreated. They cannot be created from substances other than themselves.’ Raychandbhai also believed that ‘we may make thousands of combinations and permutations of material objects, but it is impossible to create consciousness.’

The Jain scholar refused to accept the claim of Hindu dogmatists that all religions originated from the Vedas. True, these were very old, older than Buddhist or Jain texts. However, ‘there is no logic in saying that whatever is antique is perfect and whatever is new is imperfect and true.’

A question Gandhi asked, emanating from his experiences in Natal, was: ‘Will there ever develop an equitable order out of the inequities of today?’ The Jain’s answer upheld a reformist anti-Utopianism. It was ‘most desirable that we should try to adopt equity and give up immoral and unjust ways of life’. At the same time, it was ‘inconceivable that all living beings will give up their inequities one day and equity will prevail everywhere’.

Some Natalians looked enviously across to the Boer-dominated Transvaal, which had ‘set its foot down from the first, and made the position of the Indian that ventured within its territories anything but an enviable one’. There, apart from being denied the franchise, Indians were also forbidden to own property and trade in their own names.

a Tamil

Gandhi’s struggle in Natal was based on a Tolstoyan interpretation of the Christian credo. ‘Our method in South Africa is to conquer this hatred by love,’ he said. ‘We do not attempt to have individuals punished but as a rule, patiently suffer wrongs at their hands. Generally, our prayers are not to demand compensation for past injuries, but to render a repetition of those injuries impossible and to remove the causes.’5

On 26 September, a public meeting was convened at the Framji Cowasji Institute to discuss the Indian question in South Africa. Pherozeshah Mehta presided. Gandhi was too nervous to speak.

Unlike some other nationalists, Ranade was keenly aware of the humiliations that Indians were prepared to heap on their own kind. ‘Was this sympathy with the oppressed and down-trodden Indians,’ he wondered, ‘to be confined to those of our countrymen only who had gone out of India?’ Or would it be extended to a condemnation of the shameful manner in which low castes were treated within India? Ranade asked ‘whether it was for those who tolerated such disgraceful oppression and injustice in their own country to indulge in all that denunciation of the people of South Africa’.10

The editor of a prominent Indian newspaper took him to be ‘a wandering Jew’. Another kept him waiting for an hour; when he was finally called in, Gandhi was told that ‘there is no end to the number of visitors like you. You had better go. I am not disposed to listen to you’.20

As for the police chief, he thought that he had not done enough to protect Gandhi. ‘I am very sorry indeed,’ he wrote, ‘that I had not sufficient force at my back, to do that duty without inflicting upon you and yours, further degradation, by compelling you to escape the mob, in the disguise of one so very far beneath you.’ He trusted that Gandhi, ‘like our own Prophet, when placed under a similar trial, will forgive your accusers, for they know not what they did’.52

Such men as these naturally resent the use of the term “coolie” … But while they complain of being classed separately from Europeans they are much offended at Kaffirs being classed with them.’18

An Englishwoman who got to know Lord Milner during the Anglo-Boer War found him ‘clear-headed and narrow’, adding, ‘Everyone says he has no heart, but I think I hit on the atrophied remains of one.’

Gandhi took heart from the fact that British officials in India tended to side with his people in South Africa. A leading member of the Indian Civil Service had chastised the Transvaal Government for placing members of an ‘ancient and orderly civilization’ on a par with ‘uncivilized African labourers’.63 A second ICS man told a delegation from Natal that ‘the Indian is not on a level with the kafir; he belongs to a higher class. The Indian trader is almost as advanced as ourselves.’64

He had once hoped to unite the Indians with the British against the Boers; now, after the war, the British were uniting with the Boers against them.

But ultimately he felt that their causes must stay separate and distinct. In a fascinating piece in Indian Opinion he spelt out his reasons for this: This Association of Coloured People does not include Indians who have always kept aloof from that body. We believe that the Indian community has been wise in doing so. For, though the hardships suffered by those people and the Indians is almost of the same kind, the remedies are not identical. It is therefore proper that the two should fight out their cases, each in their own appropriate way. We can cite the Proclamation of 1857 in our favour, which the Coloured people cannot. They can use the powerful argument that they are the children of the soil. They can also argue that their way of life is entirely European. We can petition the Secretary of State for India, whereas they cannot. They belong largely to the Christian community and can therefore avail themselves of the help of their priests. Such help is not available to us.28

One member argued that by allowing coloured people to buy tickets the operations would be made profitable. Other members disagreed, saying that if Indians came aboard, whites would boycott the trams, forcing the company to close. Eventually, regulations were drafted reserving trams for Europeans and their pets alone.35

H. O. Ally spoke briefly, endorsing Gandhi’s stand and emphasizing that they were ‘loyal British subjects’ who did not demand political parity. ‘We are content that the white man should be predominant in the Transvaal,’ said Ally, ‘but we do feel that we are entitled to all the other ordinary rights that a British subject should enjoy.’

On 27 November, Gandhi and Ally met the Under-Secretary of State in his rooms in the Colonial Office. Churchill asked them to send him a short note, no longer than one foolscap page, of what they ‘had to say on this Ordinance, on the Vrededorp Stands Ordinance and on the question as a whole’.

Of Neame’s argument that Asiatic traders would swamp white competition, Polak archly noted that ‘his plea is not that the white man should make a living, but that the Asiatic should not.’ For if the Caucasians were indeed ‘inherently superior’, then what is the added advantage to be derived from Registration Laws, Immigration Acts, commercial barriers, protective walls [and other such methods] … betokening, not a calm self-assurance, not a strong sense of breathing a purer atmosphere than that breathed by any other, but a mortal fear lest the phantom of an alleged superiority should be discovered and exposed to public derision – a terror lest the windy dummy of inflated self-importance be pricked.35

In two striking articles in Indian Opinion, he asked shopkeepers in Natal to maintain proper accounts, keep their premises clean and dress well in order to make sure their licences were renewed. And he urged them not to spit, belch or break wind in public. ‘It is sheer stupidity to believe that all these things will not prejudice the Europeans,’ he wrote.

When hostilities ceased he played a key role in the Treaty of Vereeniging. His command of English, his education in England, his love of American poetry and his knowledge of European philosophy all made Smuts – in the eyes of his erstwhile enemies – an exception. An English friend wrote to him that ‘you are the only Afrikander … who has the power of expressing on paper the sentiments, moral and political, of your people.’ Smuts stood out, as ‘for the most part the Afrikander people are still dumb, only able to express themselves in deeds.’19

It would ‘be disastrous to the interests of the white population of South Africa’, said Smuts, if Transvaal were to follow ‘the desperate and ruinous example of Natal’.20

The voluntary courting of arrest was foreign to his class and profession, as it was to the class and profession of the people he now hoped to mobilize.

In an article for Indian Opinion, Gandhi clarified the future course of action. Anyone charged or arrested for not taking out a permit would be defended by him free of charge. In court, he would say that the client had acted on his advice, in which case it was likely that ‘Mr Gandhi will be arrested and his client let off.’ Even if protesters were prosecuted and sent to jail, ‘the chances are that they will soon be released and the law amended suitably.’ The wife and children of anyone in jail would be maintained by public subscription. ‘There is no disgrace attached to going to gaol on this occasion,’ said Gandhi. ‘On the contrary, it will positively add to one’s prestige.’23

A week later Gandhi visited Durban himself. Speaking to the Natal Indian Congress, he observed with some pride that in India, ‘the Government succeeds by setting the two cats – Hindus and Muslims – against each other. Here it is not so. Both the communities are united, hence our courage will bear fruit.’

In Gandhi’s paraphrase, Thoreau said that ‘we should be men before we are subjects, and that there is no obligation imposed upon us by our conscience to give blind submission to any law, no matter what force or majority backs it.’

what Thoreau provided Gandhi with was ‘encouragement, not inspiration’.51

‘I have no quarrel with the Indians,’ said Smuts: ‘the object is not persecution, but a stoppage of the influx of Indians. We have made up our mind to make this a white man’s country, and, however difficult the task before us is in this matter, we have put our foot down, and shall keep it there.’