Gandhi Before India (15 page)

After Mohandas Gandhi established himself in Durban, Parsee Rustomjee became a devotee of the Hindu lawyer, and hence a steadfast supporter of the Natal Indian Congress. Congress meetings were often held in his shop in Field Street, the audience standing or sitting amidst the sacks of grain and bottles of pickle. On successive Sundays in September 1895, Gandhi – then just short of his twenty-sixth birthday – spoke to a mixed audience of Hindus and Muslims, outlining his plans for their future. A government spy, taking notes, reported Gandhi as saying:

I may go [to India] for a while, in five or six months, but then there will be four or five advocates like me, who will come here to watch over your interests … and they will see that Indians are treated on the same footing as Europeans. If you unite and we work together we shall be very strong … I am sorry that the Indians in Johannesburg have not someone now with them as I am with you, but that will come before long.
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Seeking to widen the Congress’s circle of patrons, Gandhi toured Natal in the company of other NIC workers. The police asked a plantation owner to monitor his movements. We know thus that in the first week of November, Gandhi and company crossed the Umgeni River, visited a couple of estates, and stopped at Verulam for the night. Here the collections were good – in the range of £50 – but the next day they met stiff resistance, when the Indians in the village of Victoria refused – perhaps out of fear of their white masters – to part with any money. Gandhi took out his turban and placed it at their feet. He and his colleagues refused to eat the dinner brought for them. The protests worked: one by one, the Indians reached into their pockets.

Gandhi’s final stop was the Tongat plantation, where he addressed the indentured labourers. The verdict of the planter/police informant on
the lawyer was less than complimentary. Gandhi ‘will cause some trouble I have no doubt,’ he wrote: ‘But he is not the man to lead a big movement. He has a weak face. He will certainly tamper with any funds he has the handling of. Such at any rate is my impression of the man – judging him by his face.’
³³

With a weak face, hesitant in court, polite in print and courteous in conversation, Mohandas Gandhi yet represented the first challenge to European domination in Natal. By the 1890s, Africans in the Cape had discovered modern forms of political expression. A Native Educational Association was formed in 1879, its members educated by missionaries and proficient in English. A South African Native Association and the Transkei Mutual Improvement Society were started soon afterwards. There were influential African reformers in the Cape, such as the teacher J. T. Jabavu, who edited a newspaper detailing acts of discrimination while urging closer bonds between blacks and whites.

The Cape also had some precociously liberal whites, who allowed people of colour on to the electoral rolls, so long as they passed a property and literacy test. In Natal, however, the whites were more reactionary, and the Africans less educated. When the Natal Indian Congress was formed, there was no comparable Native Association in the colony. In 1894 and 1895, there was no African Gandhi in Natal, no black lawyer who appeared in court or wrote regularly for the newspapers.
³⁴

Despite their mildness and their moderation, Gandhi and his colleagues thus represented something quite radical in Natal’s modern history. The reaction they provoked is proof of this. A columnist in the
Natal Mercury
, signing himself as ‘H’, published periodic attacks on Gandhi and his work. In October 1895 he said Gandhi was ‘a paid agitator’ for the Indian merchants. ‘H’ called upon the Europeans to stand up and ‘capsize the little apple cart Messrs. Gandhi and Co. are wheeling along’. The attack prompted a rejoinder from Joseph Royeppen, a young clerk in Gandhi’s office. ‘Not a penny,’ said Royeppen, was ‘given Mr Gandhi in return for his valuable services to the [Natal Indian] Congress’. ‘H’ was unabashed. He had been told that ‘a list was made out and signed by certain Indian merchants and business men, whereby Mr Gandhi was guaranteed £300 (payable in advance) to remain there’. Noting that Royeppen was less than twenty years of age, the columnist said he ‘must decline, in future, to reply to all the Indian
boys Mr Gandhi may select to write, the fraternity being too large, and my time too limited.’
³⁵

In October and November 1895, the white colonists in Natal held many meetings in support of the Government’s Franchise Bill. The feeling against the Indians was particularly intense in the plantation and mining districts. At a meeting in Stanger, one speaker said that

the Indians were of a low caste, and not fit for the vote … They did not benefit the country, they did not lay their money out here, but they got as much out of the country as possible, and then left it. He would make a difference between black and white. He would not allow the vote to even such a man as Mr Gandhi.
³⁶

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. In the Transvaal, the ‘steady and uncompromising firmness’ of the Boers had ‘overcome the obstinate fussiness of British negrophilists’. On the other hand, the ‘shilly-shally half-hearted action’ of the Natal colonists had generated ‘strength for the sentimental British faddist, and for the unscrupulous Indian agitator’.
³⁷

Angry whites now called for the ‘complete disenfranchisement of the whole of our Indian population’. If this was not done, they warned, and if the ‘monstrous and unjust policy of the Home Government’ was forced upon them, then

the early part of 1900 would probably, nay undoubtedly, see us with a Ministry composed somewhat after this fashion: –

Prime Minister – Ali Bengharee

Colonial Secretary – Dost Mahomed

Attorney-General – Said Mahomed

Treasurer – Ramasamy.

In our Supreme and other courts we would have Chief Justice Ghandi [
sic
] and the other long and white robed gentry he is about to bring from India, and so on, in all public departments … What an attractive, pleasing picture! What an impetus to our European prestige and patriotism! What a reward
for our struggles and ambitions! Why, a kafir Ministry would be infinitely more preferable than an Indian. The native is a gentleman compared to him. He is manly, brave, and straightforward, while the Indian is otherwise.
³⁸

By the end of 1895, Mohandas Gandhi had been resident in Durban for more than a year. He was living in a house of his own, in the central locality of Beach Grove. The house was quite spacious, extending over two storeys, with a verandah and also a little garden. The furniture in the living room was sparse: a sofa and a few chairs, and a bookcase with pamphlets on vegetarianism mixed with the Koran, the Bible, Hindu texts, and the works of Tolstoy.

Living with Gandhi in his house were a Gujarati-speaking cook – whose name has not come down to us – and Vincent Lawrence, a Tamil from Madras who served as his clerk. Every morning, Gandhi and Lawrence walked from Beach Grove to the lawyer’s office, which was at the corner of West and Field Streets. The streets they passed through had shops owned by both Indians and Europeans – the former hawking fruits, vegetables and groceries; the latter selling less essential commodities such as medicines and chocolates. Below Gandhi’s chambers was a shop selling cigars, owned by a former deputy mayor of Durban.
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For a while, Gandhi’s home was also shared by his old schoolfriend Sheikh Mehtab, a recent migrant from Rajkot to Durban. Gandhi’s trust in Mehtab was, as before, misplaced; once, when he came home for lunch, he found his friend in bed with a prostitute. Angry words ensued; when Gandhi threatened to call the police, Mehtab quietly left the premises.
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The clerk and cook, on the other hand, gave no trouble. Vincent Lawrence took dictation, typed letters and, when required, translated materials into Tamil (the mother tongue of many Indian labourers in Natal). As for the cook, by preparing his meals and generally keeping the house in order, he left his employer time to read and write.

In the last weeks of 1895, Gandhi published a long pamphlet on ‘The Indian Franchise’, framed as ‘an appeal to every Briton in South Africa’. Extending over fifty printed pages, it provided a comprehensive overview of the Indian question in Natal. Gandhi argued that the ‘Indian’s fitness for an equality with the civilized races’ was demonstrated by the fact that, in British India, they had served as senior civil servants, High Court judges and vice-chancellors of universities. Indian soldiers had
shed their blood for the defence of the realm. His countrymen were loyal and law-abiding; it was unfair to relegate them to second-class status in any part of the British Empire.

Gandhi dismissed the fear, widespread among whites, that if the Indian were allowed to vote he would soon dominate the European. Of nearly 10,000 registered voters in Natal, only 251 were Indians, mostly merchants. Gandhi believed that ‘the number of trading Indians in the Colony will remain almost the same for a long time. For, while many come every month, an equal number leaves for India,’ If the Government wished, they could introduce a more stringent property qualification. But ‘what the Indians do and would protest against is colour distinction – disqualification based on account of racial difference.’

The pamphlet consolidated arguments and evidence presented by Gandhi in other forums and other writings. There was, however, one point that he was making for the first time. It had been said of the agitation led by the Natal Indian Congress that ‘a few Indians want political power and that these few are Mahomedan agitators and that the Hindus should learn from past experience that the Mahomedan rule will be ruinous for them.’ Gandhi said in response that ‘the first statement is without foundation and the last statement is most unfortunate and painful.’ This was a ‘most mischievous’ attempt ‘to set the Hindus against the Mahomedans’ in Natal, ‘where the two sects are living most amicably’.
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Gandhi sent his pamphlet to a friend in England, the civil servant and author W. W. Hunter. Hunter, in turn, sought an interview with the Secretary of State for India. The claims of the Natal Indians, reported Hunter to Gandhi, had ‘unfortunately got mixed up in English opinion with the monotone of complaint made by the Indian Congress party.’ The Congress, founded in 1885, had been canvassing for the greater representation of Indians at all levels of government. The cause of Gandhi and his fellows, found Hunter, ‘suffers in England from being too prominently connected with the Congress platform’.
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As it happened, Gandhi had also posted copies of his pamphlet to Congress leaders in India. A copy sent to the Poona radical Bal Gangadhar Tilak found its way instead to the office of S. M. Tilak and Company in Bombay. The packet was opened by the firm’s manager, who noting its contents, wrote back to the author in admiration. ‘I have been watching with the greatest zeal your movements in the foreign land,’ the parcel’s accidental recipient told Gandhi. Saluting his work ‘from heart and soul
even at the cost of [your] precious life towards the welfare of [our] countrymen,’ he hoped that ‘the Almighty [would] crown you with success’. The manager gave Gandhi the correct address of B. G. Tilak (‘Editor, Kesari and Maratha, Poona City’), before ending with this apology: ‘Please excuse me from plying in trade’ (rather than national service).
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Whether the original mistake was Gandhi’s or the postman’s one doesn’t know. But one should be grateful for the error. For it gave us this charming letter, written by an unknown Indian, the first unsolicited fan mail that we know Gandhi to have received.

Gandhi’s pamphlet on ‘The Indian Franchise’ was widely distributed in Natal, where – among the whites – it attracted scepticism and, at times, outright hostility. One newspaper admitted that the lawyer’s tone had at least ‘the great merit of moderation’. But it worried that it would lead to greater demands for representation – for Indians to be judges, civil servants and newspaper editors in South Africa, as they were in India. Another paper dismissed the pamphlet as ‘specious’. ‘Mr Ghandi [
sic
] may plead his best,’ it said, ‘but he will never succeed in convincing South Africans that the immigrant Asiatic is a desirable fellow-citizen … He may mend his ways in time it is true, but he usually takes the task of amendment very leisurely.’
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A third paper, the
Natal Advertiser
, chose to express its reservations in verse. The versifier was not particularly skilled. However, in so far as this was very likely the first poem about Gandhi ever written, and one which keenly captures the animosity against him among the Europeans of Natal, I think I must reproduce it in full:

Goosie, Goosie, Gandhi, Oh!

(An old song, re-sung with apologies.)

Oh, I am a man of high degree,

And seek a proud position,
For I must become, what seems to me

A proud politician.
For my constituents I must stand

In parliamentary traffic;
So I sailed away from India’s strand

In the pay
of the Asiatic.

Chorus:
I’m a regular goosie Gandhi, oh

With a talent that’s quite handy,

And a pamphlet bash, that’s full

For this sunny-landy, oh!

I’ve a temper sweet as candy, oh

And a book and pencil handy, oh

You never saw such a social bore

As Goosie, Goosie, Gandhi, oh!

When the Press and people out of pique

Behave like a set of ninnies,
I write a book to show they’re weak

And gather in the guineas.
I’m here to fight for the coolie man,