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Of perhaps 8,000 Indians resident in the Transvaal, only about 350 had applied for permits.
We hold that our movement of passive resistance merits the approval of all religious men, of all true patriots, of all men of commonsense and integrity. It is a movement so potent as to compel the respect of our adversaries by virtue of our very non-resistance, of our willingness to suffer; and we are the more firm in our determination to offer this opposition, because we consider that our example, on a small scale in this Colony, whether successful or unsuccessful, may well be adopted by every oppressed people [and] by every oppressed individual, as being a more reliable and more honourable
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In recent years, he had increasingly subordinated his legal practice to his social activism. The reasons for this are clear – it was due to the compelling need to secure Indians in South Africa their rights. The reason for his wanting to qualify as a doctor are less apparent. Why now would he want to exchange one profession for another? Perhaps he was bored with the law. The range of cases for an Indian representing other Indians was rather limited in South Africa. The issuing of new permits and licences, the renewal of lapsed permits and licences – these more or less exhausted what he could
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When General Smuts refused to repeal the Act and, to make matters worse, introduced fresh laws aimed at the Indians, Gandhi and his colleagues were compelled to start a new round of satyagraha. Kallenbach’s letter to his brother Simon was posted on 14 June; two weeks later, Gandhi announced to his colleagues that his talks with Smuts had failed. The Indians had now to follow the example of the Japanese and, albeit non-violently, make their European opponents ‘bite the dust’.
The methods it would follow were the burning of registration certificates, and the refusal to give signatures or fingerprints if asked to by the police. If traders or hawkers were denied licences because they would not sign or provide fingerprints, they would continue trading. Imprisonment on account of any of these breaches of the law would be immediately accepted. To the resisters, Gandhi would provide legal assistance ‘free of charge as usual’.61
Gandhi then contrasted western civilization, which was restless, energetic and centrifugal, with eastern civilization, which was contemplative and centripetal. These tended at present to be opposing tendencies, ‘but perhaps in the economy of nature both are necessary.’ He welcomed their meeting, whereby eastern civilization would be ‘quickened with the western spirit’, and the latter, presently directionless, would be infused with a purpose. Gandhi believed – or hoped – that as the encounter proceeded, ‘the eastern civilization will become predominant, because it has a goal.’
Gandhi used this comparison to urge the colonists to raise the standing and status of the Indians, their fellow immigrants; allowing them to ‘live freely without being restricted, move freely without being restricted, own land, and trade honestly.’ He acknowledged that to speak of political rights for Indians and Africans was premature, but insisted these too would come, that, in fact, it was ‘the mission of the English race, even when there are subject races, to raise them, to equality with themselves, to give them absolutely free institutions and make them absolutely free men.’ If ‘we look
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His speech bore marks of his elevated status, and the responsibilities that went with it. For perhaps the first time in public, he used the neutral ‘Africans’ instead of the pejorative ‘Kaffirs’. The
Just as characteristically, Gandhi paid close attention to what the boys would eat. They were encouraged to consume green vegetables, fresh fruit and pulses. On the other hand, tea, cocoa and coffee were forbidden, as these ‘are produced through the labour of men who work more or less in conditions of slavery’.20
The Cambridge scholar saw an ‘epoch-making’ change taking place in relations between East and West, whereby the Japanese, the Chinese and the Indians would no longer accept exclusion and disability on the grounds of race. It was increasingly clear that those whom Europeans had dismissed as ‘inferior peoples’ were not inferior in capacity; they claimed, demanded and deserved equal rights. Wolstenholme told Smuts that ‘it would surely be wise statesmanship, as well as good human fellowship, to concede in time and with a good grace what is sure eventually to be won by struggle.’
Gandhi proceeded to the Indian mosque in Pretoria, where he made a plea for donations. ‘While in gaol, I learnt from Mr Polak’s letter that the British Indian Association has become bankrupt … Therefore, those who have been carrying on their business [while others have been in jail] must lighten their pockets.’
if Gandhi was not ‘a Christian in any orthodox sense’, then ‘orthodox Christianity has itself to blame’. Christians in the colonies denied the faith in their laws and their practice. This ‘discrepancy between a beautiful creed and our treatment of the Indian at the door,’ wrote Doke, ‘repels the man who thinks’.
He spoke of Tolstoy’s fearlessness at the age of eighty, as manifest in his continuing criticisms of the Russian state. He quoted passages from Tolstoy’s writings chastising ‘those who oppress, imprison or hang thousands of men’, and which dared ‘the tyrannical officers’ to arrest him. A man who can write this, who has such thoughts and can act up to them has mastered the world, has conquered suffering and achieved his life’s end. True freedom is to be found only in such a life. That is the kind of freedom we want to achieve in the Transvaal. If India were to achieve such freedom, that indeed
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The ‘majestic personality of Mohandas Gandhi’, wrote this friend and follower, ‘overshadows his comparatively insignficant physique. One feels oneself in the presence of a moral giant, whose pellucid soul is a clear, still lake, in which one sees Truth clearly mirrored.’
In other places and past times, remarked Indian Opinion, jail-going ‘brought shame, humiliation and the criminal taint with it.’ In this place at this time, however, ‘the glory of heroism rests like a halo upon it – and in the Transvaal the man who has not been to gaol is the questionable character.
Gandhi to Manilal, 10 August 1909: Thinking of the state of affairs in the country, I believe very few Indians need marry at the present time … A person who marries in order to satisfy his carnal desire is lower than even the beast. For the married, it is considered proper to have sexual intercourse only for having progeny.
Gandhi to Manilal, 27 September, in reply to an apparently anxious, confused letter: You get nervous at the question, ‘What are you going to do?’ If I was to answer on your behalf, I would say that you are going to do your duty. Your present duty is to serve your parents, to study as much as you can get the opportunity to do and to work in the fields … You must be definite on this point at least – that you are not going to practise law or medicine. We are poor and want to remain so … Our mission is to elevate Phoenix; for through it we can find our soul and serve our country. Be sure that I am
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It does appear that Gandhi was, albeit slowly, growing into fatherhood.
On 3 November 1909, the Colonial Office wrote to Gandhi that ‘Mr Smuts was unable to accept the claim that Asiatics should be placed in a position of equality with Europeans in respect of right of entry or otherwise’.68 The rejection was definitive.
The views of Dhingra and Savarkar, and the gloss on them by Chesterton, persuaded Gandhi that he needed to write a manifesto for the freedom of India that was not derivative; that was based on the traditions of the subcontinent rather than on received models of European nationalism.
It seemed to him that the chief characteristic of modern civilisation [was that it] worshipped the body more than the spirit, and gave everything for the glorifying of the body. Their railways, telegraphs and telephones, did they tend to help them forward to a moral elevation?
He had come round to the view that ‘there is no impassable barrier between East and West’; rather, there was one between ancient and modern civilization.
Every time I get into a railway car, or use a motor-bus, I know that I am doing violence to my sense of what is right.
The book’s core consists of five chapters on ‘the condition of India’. These condemn railways, lawyers and doctors for spreading poverty and disease, and for intensifying social conflict.
Extrapolating, Gandhi said, in a striking passage, that ‘hundreds of nations live in peace. History does not, and cannot, take note of this fact. History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of love or of the soul.’
Gandhi argued that non-violent resistance required greater courage than armed struggle.
Hind Swaraj is also notable for its advocacy of inter-faith harmony.
Gandhi said that his tract was aimed at two different audiences: the party of violence within India, to whom he said that ‘whatever evils India is suffering from are mainly to our own defects and to our having worshipped the golden calf’; and to the English, to whom his appeal was ‘not necessarily to discard modern civilisation themselves, but to help India to retain her own civilisation’.
Wybergh commented that he did not think that ‘on the whole your argument is coherent or that the various statements and opinions you express have any real dependence upon one another’.
When all humanity has reached sainthood Governments will become unnecessary but not until then.
Explaining his gesture, Tata said he had watched with unfeigned admiration the undaunted and determined stand which our countrymen in the Transvaal – a mere handful in numbers – have made and are making against heavy odds and in the face of monstrous injustice and oppression, to assert their rights as citizens of the Empire and as freemen, and to vindicate the honour and dignity of our motherland … The ruinous sacrifices which men mostly of very modest means are cheerfully making in this unequal struggle, the fortitude with which men of education and refinement are ungrudgingly submitting to
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They were anti-racist egalitarians without being anti-industrial polemicists.
Working alongside the Africans, Gandhi came to a clearer realization of their predicament. ‘The negroes alone are the original inhabitants of this land’, he wrote in Indian Opinion. ‘We have not seized the land from them by force; we live here with their goodwill. The whites, on the other hand, have occupied the country forcibly and appropriated it to themselves’.
you came to know of my whereabouts and caught up with me. Obeying your orders I returned. I remained steadfast in my views. Therefore, instead of giving me a patient hearing you mutilated my thoughts and clipped my wings. You made me give up the idea of going to Lahore and instead made me stay in Ahmedabad. You promised to give me thirty rupees for monthly expenditure. You did not allow me to measure my capabilities; you measured them for me.11
With his children, Gandhi was the traditional overbearing Hindu patriarch – making them do what he intended for them. Because he had now become disenchanted with modern professions, his sons must not be permitted a modern education. Because he had himself embraced brahmacharya they must do likewise. Harilal and Manilal, as the two elder boys, were expected to be perfect and exemplary satyagrahis, courting arrest or labouring on the land as per their father’s whims and desires.
Gandhi’s harsh response to Harilal may have had a deeper basis – the fact that, in South Africa, he was accustomed to enmity and suppression, but not, really, to rebellion or disagreement.
Gandhi had a real gift for friendship – for making connections and conveying affection across racial, linguistic, religious and gender boundaries. The love he had for, and the intimacy he shared with, Henry and Millie Polak, Kallenbach, Sonja Schlesin, Ritch, the Dokes, Leung Quinn, Thambi Naidoo, A. M. Cachalia and Parsee Rustomjee was visible proof of this. But all these friends (and others like them) were ultimately in a position of deference to him. Their love for Gandhi had strong elements of reverence and adoration. Only the Polaks had the intellectual independence to argue with Gandhi
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Pranjivan Mehta was to Mohandas Gandhi what Friedrich Engels was to Karl Marx: at once a disciple and a patron, who saw, very early, that the friend of his youth had the makings of the heroic, world-transforming figure he was to later become.
Despite their professional (and/or personal) rivalry, the Phoenix crowd in fact agreed with P. S. Aiyar on the question of the tax. In late 1911, A. E. West wrote to Gandhi proposing an immediate satyagraha asking for its abolition. Gandhi, in reply, advocated a more incrementalist approach.
The thing cannot be taken up haphazard. If the men were asked to go to gaol today, I do not think you would find anybody taking up the suggestion, but if the preliminary steps as described above, are taken, by the time a final reply is received the men will have been thoroughly prepared to face the music.
The letter concisely captures Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance to unjust laws. He was a strategist of slow reform, of protesting by stages, of systematically preparing himself and his colleagues rather than spontaneously (or, as he would have it, haphazardly) rushing into confrontation.
On his visit to Tolstoy Farm, Pixley Seme may have noticed that its residents included, by ethnicity, Gujaratis, Tamils, North Indians and Europeans – and, by faith, Parsis, Muslims, Christians, Jews and Hindus. It is hard to decisively establish a chain of influence. Still, there is no doubt that there was a family resemblance between what Seme sought to do with the Africans and what Gandhi had already done with the Indians – that is to help them overcome distinctions of sect and tribe, and present a united front to the rulers.
Dube understood that this would be an ‘uphill fight’, with ‘enemies without’ and ‘dangers within’. Yet he insisted that ‘by dint of our patience, our reasonableness, our law-abiding methods and the justice of our demands, all these obstacles shall be removed and enemies overcome.’ By ‘the nobility of our character’, he said, ‘shall we break down the adamantine wall of colour prejudice and force even our enemies to be our admirers and friends.’44
In September 1912 Gandhi executed a deed transferring ownership of Phoenix Farm to five trustees, these being the Durban merchant Omar Hajee Amod Johari, Parsee Rustomjee, Kallenbach, Ritch and Pranjivan Mehta – a Muslim, a Parsi, two Jews and a Hindu respectively. The document transferred to these five others Gandhi’s right, title and interest in the land and machinery of Phoenix, and listed eight aims by which the farm would be run: namely, to earn a livelihood as far as possible by one’s own labour; to promote better relations between Indians and Europeans; to ‘follow and promote the ideas’
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On 30 October, Gandhi was interviewed by the Transvaal Leader on the progress of Gokhale’s visit. His mentor, he said, had ‘come to the general conclusion that the Indians resident here are entitled to civic equality. That is to say, their movement within the Union should not be hampered and, under restrictions of a general character applying to the community at large, they should be allowed freedom of trade.’ The caveat was crucial: civic, not social or political equality: the freedom to practise one’s trade and to live where one wished, not the right to vote or be treated as equal in all
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Despite his own extended stay in South Africa, Gandhi still considered himself Indian. Yet he recognized the profound change in the orientation of the community he worked with. He would return to India, but the others would stay on, to live and labour under a government – and ruling race – that was often strongly prejudiced against their interests. This is why Gandhi was so keen to arrive at a settlement with General Smuts, whereby the rights to work and residence of Indians in all provinces of the Union were safeguarded, existing policies that bore down unfairly on them (such as the £3 tax in
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While in London in 1906 and 1909, Gandhi had seen the suffragettes at work – and admired them.
In India itself, the idea that women could participate in popular social movements was out of the question.
Kallenbach explained – or justified – his jail-going in a long letter to his sister, where he detailed the discriminations against the Indians and argued that satyagraha – ‘the teaching not to meet force and violence in a likewise manner, but to meet them with passive suffering’ – was consistent with the teachings of ‘almost all religions’, Judaism among them.
My Dear Millie, You are brave. So I know you will consider yourself a proud and happy wife in having a husband who has dared to go to gaol for a cause he believes in. The £3 tax is the cause of the helpless and the dumb. And I ask you to work away in the shape of begging, advising and doing all you can. Do not wait for their call but call the workers. Seek them out even though they should insult you. Miss S[chlesin] knows the struggle almost like Henry. Assist her. I have asked her to move forward and backward and assume full control. Draw upon West and Maganbhai for your needs. May you have
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