Gandhi Before India (13 page)

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

One newspaper dismissed the lawyer’s petitions in two sharp, short paragraphs:

It is questionable whether Mr Ghandi [
sic
] has done much good to the Indian community by his advocacy. There is such a thing as overproving a case, and when every virtue under the heaven is claimed for the mild Hindoo, the claimant only raises a smile from those who know the facts …

As for the sanitary question, Mr Ghandi cannot persuade us against the testimony of our own eyes and noses. As for the franchise, despite quibbles as to Indian Village Municipalities, he has not got it in his own country, where the Government is purely autocratic, and no one in his wildest dreams of negrophilism has ever urged that he is fitted for anything else. His claim to vote here, in a country he knows nothing about, and under a constitution he cannot understand, is nothing less than sheer impudence. But if Mr Ghandi really believes the Indian to be persecuted and oppressed in Natal, his line of duty is very clear and simple. Let him try and persuade his countrymen not to come to this accursed country and every true Natalian will do his utmost to second his efforts.
⁶⁵

Other attacks were even more intemperate. The
Times of Natal
had written an editorial dismissing Indian claims; in reply, Gandhi said that the title of the editorial, ‘Rammysammy’, itself displayed a ‘studied contempt towards the poor Indian’. He charged the paper with judging people merely by the colour of their skin – ‘so long as the skin is white it would not matter to you whether [what] it conceals beneath it is poison or nectar’. Articulated by self-proclaimed Christians, this attitude, said Gandhi, was ‘not Christ’s’.

To be charged with betraying the founder of their faith was too much for the
Times of Natal
to bear. There was no racist connotation in the epithet ‘Rammysammy’, said the paper; it often used the term ‘Hodge’ to describe Englishmen of the labouring classes. As for the critic,

Mr Gandhi does not meet any of our arguments fairly; he misrepresents the views we expressed, he makes without any call, a parade of Christianity, and so far as lies in his power he does his best to be offensive. His aim, however, is transparent; it is that of introducing himself as a champion of his fellow-countrymen. Should the learned gentleman desire to address us again in a similar strain, with the object of publicity in view, he will save time by communicating directly with the advertising department of this journal.
⁶⁶

Gandhi had come to South Africa to help settle a commercial dispute. He had, without expecting or anticipating it, become an activist for a political cause instead. Many Indians in the colony now knew of him; as did many Europeans. How did he respond to this public acclaim and public disparagement? His autobiography is silent on this score. But that 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 Abdullah.

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 inland Indian town (Rajkot) to a growing, bustling South African port (Durban). 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 organizing political campaigns in – of all places – Natal.

As a London-trained lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi was the only Indian in Durban who bridged the gap between the races. Alone, without his family, he kept a diary, which tells how he passed the time. During the week, he drafted contracts and partnership agreements for his Indian clients, and lobbied for their rights. A lawyer-legislator he came to know well was a man named Harry Escombe. Escombe ‘admitted the justice’ of their claim for the franchise but said he ‘could not help’. By way of compensation, and consolation, he sponsored Gandhi for admittance to the Natal Bar.

Gandhi also befriended a couple named the Askews, Methodists by faith, a ‘very kind gentleman’ married to ‘an extremely kind lady’. The friendship prospered, till the Hindu’s earnestness grated on his hosts. A diary entry for Sunday, 16 September 1894 says it all:

Saw Askews at their house. Mrs A. did not like me to chat on vegetarianism or Buddhism [for] fear that her children may become contaminated. She questioned my sincerity. Said I should not go to their house if I was insincere and not seeking the truth. I said it was not within my power to make her believe that I was sincere and that I had [no] wish to thrust myself on her as a companion. I told her also that I did not go to [her] place as a spy to convert her children.
¹

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

Gandhi’s religious pluralism was precocious. The late nineteenth century saw the rise, on the one side, of atheistic sentiments among intellectuals, and on the other, of an aggressive proselytizing by missionaries. Even as Gandhi was meeting Christians in Durban, his fellow Kathiawari Dayananda Saraswati was travelling through north India, warning Hindus against the seductions of Christianity.
⁴

Like his mother, Gandhi cared deeply about his faith without being dogmatic about it. Pran Nath, the founder of Putlibai’s sect, quoted from the Koran; she herself entertained Jain monks. In his open-mindedness, Mohandas was following his mother; yet, as a man, with a freedom to travel denied her, he could take this ecumenism further and deeper, through meeting people of different faiths, and by reading their texts as well.

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.

Among Kingsford’s other books was
The Perfect Way in Diet
, which argued that the shape of the human face and jaw, and the structure and functioning of the stomach, showed that man was meant to be a herbivore and frugivore, not a meat-eater. She noted that the Hindus, among whom ‘a pure vegetarian diet is regarded as the first essential of sanctity’, were among ‘the first civilised communities’, possessing ‘a cultus, a literature, and a religious system which many authors deem to be of higher antiquity than those even of Egypt’.

The vegetarian doctor thought that carnivorous tendencies produced many illnesses and disorders. Tuberculosis, gout and epilepsy were a product of eating too much meat. ‘In his highest development,’ she wrote, ‘man is not a hunter, but a gardener. The spirit of the Garden is incompatible with that of the Chase, and the inevitable tendency of moral, intellectual, and aesthetic progress is to eradicate in man the desire to kill and to torment’.
⁵

After Kingsford died in 1886, Maitland devoted himself to promoting her memory and furthering her ideas. In 1891 he formed an Esoteric Christian Union, which asked humans to renew themselves according to their inner urges rather than follow priests or creeds. The approach was ecumenical.
The Perfect Way
, which was subtitled ‘
Or the Finding of Christ
’, spoke appreciatively of Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi and Greek thought. Scorning officials of the Church and authorized (or self-appointed) interpreters, it insisted that ‘in the momentous drama of the soul’, there were only two people involved, ‘the individual himself and God’.
⁶

The Kingsford–Maitland view of Christianity appealed to Gandhi because it asked not for exaltation of a personal Saviour, but fidelity to one’s conscience. That the principal author was a convinced vegetarian, and that it had nice things to say about his ancestral faith, added to its appeal. 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.
⁷
Gandhi was attracted to the moralist rather than the novelist. He does not seem to have read
Anna Karenina
or
War and Peace
, but he read – and reread –
The Kingdom of God is Within You
. It is a rambling, repetitive book, with one central, powerful message – that a good Christian follows his conscience rather than the laws imposed by tsars, bishops and generals. The book’s title comes from a remark made by Jesus, who, when asked how one would recog
nize the Kingdom of God when it arrived, said that this Kingdom was not something outward and visible, but lay within you.

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.

Tolstoy had little time for the Church, or indeed for secular intellectuals who exalted violence. He quoted Émile Zola, ‘the most popular novelist in Europe’, who had written that ‘only an armed nation is powerful and great’, that ‘the warlike nations have always been strong and flourishing’, that ‘a general disarmament throughout the world [would] involve something like a moral decadence which would show itself in general debility and would hinder the progress of humanity’. Tolstoy, on the other hand, saluted the conscientious objector, who seeks ‘the preservation of his human dignity, the respect of good men and above all the certainty that he is doing God’s work’.

Towards the end of the book, Tolstoy saw hope in the redemption of those who held power, in the conscience-stricken official who refused to collect taxes and who released prisoners, in the rich man who built hospitals, schools and homes for the poor. But true liberation would come only when ‘each man according to the strength that is in him [will] profess the truth he knows and practise [it] in his own life’.
⁸

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

In November 1894, Mohandas Gandhi placed an advertisement in the Natal newspapers, stating that he was an agent for both the ‘Esoteric Christian Union’ and the ‘London Vegetarian Society’, whose literature he stocked and sold. The ad prompted a reader to comment:

‘Whence come we, what are we, whither go we?’ This is not part of an advertisement of Eno’s Fruit Salt; they are the three supreme questions which, we are told, humanity has asked itself, and which, Mr Gandhi assures us, find an answer complete and satisfactory in one or two little philosophical works in which he is interested.
¹¹

Meeting orthodox Christians like the Askews and reading heterodox Christians such as Kingsford and Tolstoy invigorated Gandhi but also perplexed him. Sometime in the late summer of 1894 he wrote a series of letters to his friend and mentor Raychandbhai in India, outlining his confusions. He posed more than two dozen questions, asking, among other things, about the functions of the soul, the existence of God, the antiquity of the Vedas, the divinity of Christ and the treatment of animals.

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.’ Like the Vedas, the Bible could not be said to contain a perfect or singular truth. ‘Allegorically, of course, Jesus can be taken to be a son of God, but rationally such a belief is impossible.’

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’.

Raychandbhai said the ‘best thing’ would have been for the two of them to ‘meet together and have a personal talk about these questions’. Since – with one in India and the other in South Africa – they could not meet, he instructed Gandhi to cultivate ‘a detached mind and if you have any doubts please [write again] to me. It is the detached mind which gives strength for abstinence and control and ultimately leads the soul to
Nirvana
’.
¹²

Gandhi’s theological explorations continued. In April 1895, he visited a Trappist monastery in the Natal highlands, writing about his trip for
The Vegetarian
. The monks ate no fish, flesh or fowl, although an exception was made for the sisters in their midst, who were allowed meat four days a week because they were ‘more delicate than the brothers’. The monastery hummed with artisanal activity, its inmates making shoes, tables and kitchen utensils. What really impressed the Indian visitor was the lack of racial feeling. Whereas elsewhere in Natal, there was ‘a very strong prejudice against the Indian population’, the Trappists ‘believe in no colour distinctions. The Natives are accorded the same treatment as the whites…. They get the same food as the brothers, and are dressed as well as they themselves are.’ The contrast with other white Christians was stark. ‘It proves conclusively,’ wrote Gandhi, ‘that a religion appears divine or devilish, according as its professors choose to make it appear.’
¹³

In June 1895, the non-monastic Christians of Natal brought in a new bill aimed at Gandhi’s compatriots. This proposed that labourers who stayed on after the expiry of their contract pay an annual tax of £3, then a substantial sum. The supporters of the tax hoped it would force Indians to re-indenture, or else go back to India.

Over the next few weeks, three memorials were drafted and dispatched by Gandhi. One was to the Natal Legislative Council; a second to the Secretary of State for the Colonies; the third to the Viceroy of India. The Natalians were asked why it was necessary ‘to make a man pay heavily for being allowed to remain free in the Colony after he has already lived under bondage for 10 years’. The Secretary of State was reminded that it was ‘against the spirit of the British Constitution to
countenance measures that tend to keep men under perpetual bondage’. The Viceroy was told that the ‘special, obnoxious poll-tax’ was designed to ensure that the Indian in Natal