Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

Roosevelt, Churchill, De Gaulle – these are all great national leaders, whose appeal steadily diminishes the further one strays from their nations’ boundaries. Of all modern politicians and statesmen, only Gandhi is an authentically global figure.

Anticolonial agitator, social reformer, religious thinker and prophet, he brought to the most violent of centuries a form of protest that was based on non-violence.

Asked by a British journalist what he thought of modern civilization, he answered: ‘I think it would be a good idea.’

A study conducted of some five dozen transitions to democratic rule concluded that in over 70 per cent of cases, authoritarian regimes fell not because of armed resistance but because of boycotts, strikes, fasts and other methods of protest pioneered by this Indian thinker.

The distinctiveness of Gandhi’s method lay in shaming the rulers by voluntary suffering, with resisters seeking beatings and imprisonment by breaking laws in a non-violent yet utterly determined manner.

From one vantage point, Gandhi was merely a community organizer. However, since his work had an impact on the politics of three continents, it had much larger consequences. In an age when even the telephone had not come into common use, when the fax and the internet lay many decades in the future, Gandhi’s struggles thus carried connotations of what is now known as a ‘global social movement’.

Finally, London in 1888 was a great international city. No city in the world had more people – about 6 million in all, twice the number in Paris – or more nationalities represented in them.

In any case, the Englishman in England was less prejudiced than the Englishman abroad. In India, an Englishman was marked out as a member of the ruling race. Wherever he went, there were a ‘large number of dark-skinned men ready and willing to serve him in numerous ways’.

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.

Nothing in Mohandas Gandhi’s previous experience had prepared him for the intensity of racial prejudice in South Africa.

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.

The paper nonetheless advised Gandhi not to push the Indian case for the franchise, for ‘it may be doubted whether there is a white man on this Continent who would be prepared to see the affairs of any responsibly governed community administered by any other than white men’. Rather than seek to ‘achieve the impossible’, namely, equal political rights, Gandhi should work for the ‘just and humane treatment’ of Indians throughout Africa.63

In his early years in South Africa, Gandhi read two books by heterodox Christians that made a great impression on him. One was The Perfect Way, by Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland. Kingsford was the first Englishwoman to get a medical degree, studying in Paris, where she persuaded her teachers that she could qualify to be a doctor without cutting up a single animal. On returning home, she became active in the Vegetarian Society. Maitland was a religious dissenter: the son of a priest, himself trained to take holy orders, he instead became a Theosophist.

The second book that impressed him, Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1893), likewise put salvation in the hands of the individual believer – rather than bishops or Churches – while emphasizing suffering and the simple life.

From the 1880s, Tolstoy had increasingly turned his back on fiction, seeking to express himself via pamphlets and religious tracts. The change in emphasis mirrored a change in lifestyle, whereby a landlord turned to working with his hands, a warmonger converted to pacifism, and a once-devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church began leaning towards other religions.

The etiology of plague was imperfectly understood; it was not yet established that rats and fleas were the disease’s main carriers. Some doctors, and more ordinary folk, feared that it could spread through human contact.31

This used the mob rage in Durban to probe the question – who were more reactionary in racial matters, the British or the Americans? In the middle of the nineteenth century, said ‘D. B.’, the British were seen as progressive imperialists, who had abolished slavery and promoted free trade. Their empire was ‘free to every nationality, and within its confines was known no distinction, Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free’. But soon things changed. ‘Under the stress of the Indian mutiny [of 1857] and the Jamaican rebellion [of 1865], we developed a brutality as great as was ever shown by a civilized people, and which men of the highest culture tried to justify’. Colony after colony adopted protectionist policies, suppressing native peoples and keeping out coloured immigrants, erecting racial barriers as sharp as in the American South.

Racial politics in the Transvaal were more complicated than in Natal. The Boers had come here to carve a space separate and independent from the British. For many decades their Utopia lay safe, until the discovery of gold near Johannesburg in 1886 prompted a massive and mad rush of immigrants. By the time Gandhi first visited the city in 1893, English-speaking migrants outnumbered the Afrikaans-speaking Boers by two to one. The workers in the mines were mostly African, but the managers, supervisors and owners were largely English. And as Johannesburg boomed, it was the English, rather than the Boers, who ran the new hotels, restaurants, hospitals, clubs, theatres and other accoutrements of a bustling modern city.

Missing from this statement of the journal’s aims was any mention of the largest section of the population of South Africa – the Africans themselves.23

Back in 1899, when the two sets of white colonists in South Africa went to war, Gandhi was an Empire loyalist, a believer in Imperial citizenship who thought that flattery and persuasion would end discrimination against Indians in South Africa. Thus he signed up to support the British in their campaign against the Boers.

This defence of the white case begged a crucial question – why were the Indians more ‘alien’ than the Europeans? Unlike the Africans, neither had originated in the continent. Both groups had come from across the oceans, the Europeans from the West, the Indians from the East, each seeking better prospects for themselves and their families. The Europeans now claimed that South Africa was their home. But why couldn’t the Indians be likewise ‘patriotic’ about a land where they too lived and worked?

They had said time and again that the political superiority of the whites was not in question, but the ruling race was not reassured. Unlike the Africans, the Indians were adept at trade and (as Gandhi’s own example had shown) at the professions. Here they directly competed with Europeans. The danger in admitting more Indians was that the economic challenge would intensify, leading to claims for political representation as well. Hence, as L. E. Neame put it, the door had to be firmly shut to the Indians.

In going to jail for a political principle, Gandhi chose to follow people he had previously praised in the pages of Indian Opinion – such as the Indian nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the American radical Henry David Thoreau, the Russian pacifists and the British suffragettes.

Gandhi and Tolstoy were akin in good ways and bad. Both were indifferent fathers and less than solicitous husbands. There were also differences. Gandhi’s prose style was more restrained, less polemical. Whereas Tolstoy loved nature, and took his family for holidays in the hills, Gandhi did not much care for beaches, parks or forests.

This letter is somewhat self-promoting. Yet it speaks of an extraordinary self-confidence. The struggle in the Transvaal involved a few thousand Indians in a single colony of a single country, and yet Gandhi was already seeing it in world-historic terms – as, indeed, ‘the greatest of modern times’.29 Even as Gandhi asked Tolstoy to publicize his struggle, he used Tolstoy’s name to legitimize the movement in South Africa itself.

Clearly, he had progressed considerably from the unsympathetic and hostile attitude towards Africans he had displayed in his first years in Natal.

‘The one virtue which distinguishes Mr Gandhi from all others’, he remarked, ‘is that he never puts forward an idea or extols an action, which he himself would not be prepared to act upon when circumstances required him to do so. In fact, he practises himself first what he desires to preach to others.’ Once Gandhi had decided upon a particular line of conduct, wrote his friend, ‘no risk, nothing, will deter him from going on, on that path without in the least caring whether anyone else believes in it at all, or is prepared to follow him in his footsteps.’

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.

P. S. Aiyar’s animus was in part born out of jealousy. He would have liked Gandhi to consult him, to work with him, to substitute Polak with him as his second-in-command. While Aiyar himself had marginal influence, for the biographer he merits attention as the only articulate opponent of Gandhi within the Indian community.

Gandhi’s own marriage had its good periods and bad. His children and his wife had to bear the brunt of his social and ethical experiments.

In India itself, the idea that women could participate in popular social movements was out of the question. Middle-class women, whether Hindu or Muslim, were not expected to mix socially with members of the other sex. The only men they spoke to were family members, or servants, or itinerant traders who came knocking at their door. They were not supposed to leave the house unescorted.

Gokhale then listed, for Robertson’s benefit, the five major demands of the Indians in South Africa, namely, the removal of racial handicaps in the immigration law; the restoration of the right of South Africa born Indians to enter Cape Province; the abolition of the £3 tax; the recognition of monogamous marriages performed under the rites of Indian religions; and, finally, a more generous and sympathetic administration of all laws concerning Indians.

In the last week of May, a bill embodying the Enquiry Commission’s recommendations was published. This provided for the recognition of past monogamous marriages conducted under the tenets of any Indian religion the parties professed; recognized the rights of children such unions produced; mandated the appointment of priests of any Indian religion to be marriage officers; abolished the £3 tax and waived the right of the state to collect past arrears against it; and permitted the Government to provide free passage to anyone in South Africa who wished to go back permanently to India.45

He would go away with ‘no ill-will against a single European. I have received many hard knocks in my life, but here I admit that I have received those most precious gifts from Europeans – love and sympathy.’

Some years later, when set upon by a white mob in Durban, Gandhi chose to remember not his persecutors but the whites who stood by him. Still later, when faced with the rigorous racial exclusivism of the Transvaal, Gandhi sought ‘points of agreement’ with the oppressors, with whom he hoped to live in ‘perfect peace’. Years of harassment and vilification at the hands of Boers and Britons did not deter him from seeking ‘the unity of human nature, whether residing in a brown-skinned or a white-skinned body’.1

Churchill answered that ‘the practice of allowing European, Asiatic and native families to live side by side in [a] mixed community is fraught with many evils.’

Gandhi had exceeded his own mentor, Gokhale, in the breadth of his social vision and (especially) his personal practice. He had successfully reached out to compatriots of other religions and linguistic communities, and of disadvantaged social backgrounds. The involvement of women in the struggles led by Gandhi was also impressive – as supporters and cheerleaders in the first satyagrahas, and as resisters and jailbirds in the last.

to a group of women students in Lahore in July 1934, Gandhi remarked, ‘When I was in South Africa, I had realized that if I did not serve the cause of women, all my work would remain unfinished.’

Gandhi’s capaciousness was not complete, however. It was constrained in one fundamental sense. While he had Indian and European friends of all castes, classes and faiths, he forged no real friendships with Africans.

That said, over the twenty and more years he lived in the land, Gandhi’s understanding of the African predicament steadily widened. At first, he adhered to the then common idea of a hierarchy of civilizations – the Europeans on top, the Indians just below them, the Africans at the very bottom. Everyday life in Durban and Johannesburg alerted him to the real and structured discrimination that Africans were subject to.

In the 1930s and 1940s there were few takers for Gandhian methods in China. In the China of today, however, there is an increasing interest in Gandhi and what he stood for. A prominent Chinese blogger has a portrait of Gandhi on his profile. Another admirer is the Nobel Laureate Liu Xiabao. A recent collection of his essays has many references to Mao, all hostile or pejorative, and several references to Gandhi, all appreciative.

Gandhi’s skills as writer and editor were considerable. He was, however, an indifferent, if not disastrous, public speaker.

Gandhi’s own experiments as he saw them, as steps to a purer, more meaningful life. To simplify his diet, to reduce his dependence on medicines and doctors, to embrace brahmacharya, were all for him ways of strengthening his will and his resolve. By conquering the need to be stimulated by sex or rich food – the ‘basal passions’ according to his teacher Tolstoy – Gandhi was preparing himself for a life lived for other people and for higher values.

These methods of civil disobedience lay in between the older method of petitioning the authorities and the rival method – then gathering ground in India – of bombing public places and assassinating public officials.

Pranjivan Mehta went even further – he called his fellow Gujarati a ‘Mahatma’, the sort of spiritual leader born every few hundred years to rescue and redeem the motherland.

Then, in June 1914 – on the eve of his departure from South Africa – he described satyagraha as ‘perhaps the mightiest instrument on earth’. As I write this in August 2012, sixty-five years after Indian independence, forty-four years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the United States, twenty-three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, eighteen years after the ending of apartheid, and in the midst of ongoing non-violent struggles for democracy and dignity in Burma, Tibet, Yemen, Egypt and other places, Gandhi’s words (and claims) appear less immodest than they might have seemed when he first articulated them.