Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

Poona radical Bal Gangadhar Tilak

Nonsense. Poona radical? Not complimentary to leader of his stature

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

Ranade

Brought in on the case, Gandhi argued that Indians were of ‘Indo-Germanic’ stock, and hence exempt from the racial laws of the Transvaal Volksraad.

Gandhi arguing Indians were Indo German stock

Gandhi answered that they lived in South Africa as subjects of the British Empire. To help the rulers now would refute the charge that Indians were interested only in ‘money-grubbing and were merely a deadweight upon the British’.

Gandhi 's rationale

By the first week of January, 1900, 500 Indians had agreed to serve in the ambulance corps.

same rationale applied later through world wars supporting British as their subjects.

English in England have shown by their writings, speeches and deeds that they mean to unify the hearts of the two peoples, that they do not believe in colour distinctions, and that they will raise India with them rather than rise upon its ruins.’

when it is too good to believe

Gandhi’s work during the War was done to evoke or re-activate these ‘nobler’ instincts of the rulers.

Acknowledged contradictions of Brits and appeals to nobler instincts

held then that India could achieve her complete emancipation only within and through the British Empire.’

important guiding philosophy of his political career

Dharma, said the seer, did not ‘mean reading or learning by rote books known as Shastras or even believing all that they say’. It was a combination of theoretical learning and practical knowledge. After a certain level of religious instruction, the scriptures could help no further; but one’s own experience certainly could.

yes

‘every religion is perfect from the point of its followers and imperfect from that of the followers of other faiths. Examined from an independent point of view, every religion is both perfect and imperfect’.

Gandhi and religion

Gandhi ‘advised the Muslim community to send its children to college, as it was only through education that they would make a mark in life’.

Gandhi to Mauritius Muslims on education

‘not the politics of fight[ing] against the government, but the fight for its rights and a place in the sun under the pavilion of liberty’.

Another guiding philosophy

‘God has never allowed any of my own plans to stand. He has disposed of them in His own way.’70

same here

Shyamaji Krishnavarma.

So any patriotic Indian who is not a Hindu in name only is a radical? He hardly uses such derogatory term on people who are not Hindus. He doesn't even call Jinnah like that

though the hardships suffered by those people and the Indians is almost of the same kind, the remedies are not identical.

On Indians and Blacks

Muslims and a Tamil, met Selborne in his office.

Interesting choice of words whenever mixed background is involved. Muslims are always identified as Muslims irrespective of their background in this book. However he uses Tamils, Gujaratis, Telugus, Reddys instead of referring them as Hindus. Even Jews and parsis mentioned by religion. Even Tamil Christians, he makes sure to mention religion For some strange reason, laborers or otherwise of Hindu sect, he uses different denomination to identify

‘it is not for me to say whether the revolt of the Kaffirs is justified or not. We are in Natal by virtue of British power. Our very existence depends upon it. It is therefore our duty to render whatever help we can …

Driven by selfish motives? perhaps that's how people mostly are.. But when it came to Hindu interests or India's interests post partition where was it?

Tamils and a few people from North India.

Again why separate Tamils and North India? Mischievous. How North of Tamilnadu is North enough?

Gandhi had conveyed in Indian Opinion his admiration for the Swadeshi movement in British India. This admiration was shared by his colleagues – hence the appreciative reference in Hajee Habib’s speech to the incarceration of the militant nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The idea of protest and sacrifice was more directly influenced by the events in India in 1905–6.

Tilak

About 1,100 in all, they worked as merchants, gardeners and laundrymen.

Chinese in South Africa

his love of American poetry and his knowledge of European philosophy all made Smuts – in the eyes of his erstwhile enemies – an exception.

why would these make an exception

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.

To Gandhi 's point, this explains why he consistently favored and worked for unity. What he forgot was that India is a different terrain with a completely different problem.

He considered the new law ‘inevitable’, and saw no difference between voluntary and compulsory registration.

May be Hitler used this precedence later? Need to see if there is any direct relationship between the two registrations

The jail-going resolution of 11 September 1906 had been invented on the spot; in later weeks and months,

A different kind of 9/11. To quote him it is passive resistance

Christ-loving Hindu and a Hindu-loving Christian

well... Christ loving Hindu but no Krishna loving Christian

if my action has been hitherto serviceable to the Indian cause, it simply means to that extent a triumph of truth.

Gandhi 's guiding philosophy

if appropriate things come from my pen on appropriate occasions, you may take it that I am not to be credited.

wow

Gandhi asked Hindus and Muslims as much as Christians to recall the nobler values and practices of their own moral or religious tradition.

Appealing to take their noblest values

had deliberately defied the Government and had taken up a very serious position – one which he was sorry to see any resident in this country adopt. It had been a mistake, he had no doubt, which had been copied from the [Nonconformist] passive resisters at Home in connection with the Education Bill, and that was an attitude which had never appealed to him in any shape at all. The laws of a country must be complied with by the people resident there, and if they could not do that, there was but one alternative – such people must go somewhere else.

Passive resistance and its origins on educational bill in England : Judge Jordan

Gandhi’s campaign appealed to Doke because of its obvious resonances with the passive resistance of his fellow Baptists against the Education Act in England,

Was Satyagraha copied from Education act in England?

Gandhi’s political style was oriented towards reconciliation and compromise.

A key takeaway from his life

In a report for his newspaper, Gandhi admitted the Chinese had surpassed the Indians in ‘culture and generosity’.31

This is his problem. To praise some, you don't have to take liberty of self deprecating fellow community men. Especially when they stood by you in the hours of need

the sincere effort made by each individual person to coordinate one’s life and actions with those moral foundations one considers to be true, regardless of the demands of family, society, and government’.56 This, precisely, was the goal that Gandhi and Kallenbach had set themselves.

That's what Hinduism does. so why did Gandhi attempt something else

Indian religious traditions placed a very high value on abstinence from sexual pleasure.

Wrong. Remember it is land of Kamasutra. Sure moderation was emphasized. Moderation suggested actually for everything Grahastasrama is a dharma. You are never asked to give that up. Many vaishnava acharyas are not sanyasis. Specifically calling out vaishnavism because that was Gandhi 's background

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 do for his clients.

It came with both opportunities and limitations

While recognizing the technological, political, economic and social superiority of Europeans, he saw no reason why it must necessarily be maintained into the future.

Acknowledge and accept differences. Work towards reducing the difference

Gandhi was now the leading coloured resident of Johannesburg. 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’.

From Kaffir to Africans

In the future, Indians and Africans would be absolutely free men, mingling with Boers and Britons in a nation where one’s citizenship did not depend on the colour of one’s skin.

is MLK 's speech based on this?

The walls dividing continents are breaking down: everywhere European, Asiatic and African will inter-lard. The world on which the twenty-first century will open its eyes, will be one widely different from that which the twentieth sees at its awakening. And the problem which this century will have to solve, is the accomplishment of this interaction of distinct human varieties on the largest and most beneficent lines, making for the development of humanity as a whole, and carried out in a manner consonant with modern ideals and modern social wants. It will not always be the European who forms the upper layer.

Bang on

Exhausted by the struggle, hoping to get on with their lives, many Indians were reluctant to go to jail again or to live without certificates of residence.

primary reasons for protests to wither

This suggests that whereas the Transvaal Government thought Gandhi to be a common criminal, in the eyes of his friends and supporters he was (as Henry Polak put it) ‘a political prisoner, fighting for conscience’s sake and the self-respect of his people.’

common prisoners vs political prisoners debate

mental capacity not inferior to that of the highest Western people, who are developing rapidly a feeling of nationality and a capacity for the more active and practical life of the more materialized West

Are these good qualities?

Lord Ampthill and not go to the press, since ‘diplomacy is only possible through individual agency and by private action’.

important point on diplomacy

Polak made the large, daring, claim that ‘perhaps, in this generation, India has not produced such a noble man – saint, patriot, statesman in one.’ Gandhi, said his English admirer, ‘lives for God and for India’.

Polak's work in India perhaps laid down the foundation for Gandhi as a leader

The conventional wisdom has it that it was the poet Rabindranath Tagore who, around 1919, first began to call Gandhi ‘Mahatma’, after he had become a major figure in Indian politics. An alternate claim has been made on behalf of the Gujarat town of Gondal, which seems to have conferred the title on Gandhi when he visited it on his return from South Africa in 1915. Pranjivan Mehta preceded them both – although, of course, in a private letter rather than a public declaration.

Mahatma

‘there is no impassable barrier between East and West’; rather, there was one between ancient and modern civilization. Thus ‘the people of Europe, before they were touched by modern civilisation, had much in common with the people of the East.’

interesting

If ‘British rule was replaced tomorrow by Indian rule based on modern methods’, said Gandhi to Polak, ‘India would be no better’;

Compelling argument for swaraj

the tendency of Indian civilization is to elevate the moral being, that of the Western civilization to propagate immorality. The latter is godless, the former is based on a belief in God.

on godless society

Machines had impoverished India, by throwing craftsmen out of work and encouraging a division between capitalists and labourers. He thought ‘it would be folly to assume that an Indian Rockefeller would be better than the American Rockefeller.’

hmmm

those who lived (and died) by the gun, Gandhi said the claim that ‘there is no connection between the means and the end is a great mistake’. He spoke of how the wrong means produced an escalating cycle of violence and counter-violence.

The escalation will continue until one side establish that they are decisively stronger. Other approach could intimidate and pre empt like Peace through strength