Gandhi Before India (21 page)

Gandhi had asked an English friend, Herbert Kitchin, an electrician with an interest in Indian philosophy, to help with the raising of the ambulance corps. Gandhi managed one unit, Kitchin another. While the lawyer was in Spion Kop, the Englishman was at Elandslaagte, from where he sent this account of their ‘busy and exciting time’ at the front:

I was away with a party of eight Indians, a corporal and a sapper, taking down a portion of the Boer telegraph line around Ladysmith. We passed three of the Boer laagers. All of them are filthy, and are noticeable for … the quantity of cartridges scattered about, and the number of bottles and English biscuit tins. We could have picked up a sackful of cartridges. A party of our men … dropped across a party of Boers who put a shell on the midst of them. Luckily no one was hurt. I came across a stray horse, which I suppose was left behind by the Boers, but it was too wild and I could not catch it. Had I been able to, I could have sold it for a decent sum.
³⁴

Even as a non-combatant, the Englishman was enjoying the battle, taking pleasure in the discomfiture of the hated Boers and the scattering of their possessions. Gandhi had joined the British in their fight out of loyalty and duty. His reactions to this letter are unrecorded. But one thinks
the vegetarian Bania could scarcely have seen the fight as his English friend did, as a thrilling and utterly pleasurable chase after a quarry in flight.

At the start of the war the British suffered serious reverses. The Boers were agile fighters, who knew the terrain well. However, over time the greater numbers and superior firepower of the British began to prevail. By the summer of 1900 the war had been largely won, although bands of Boer guerrilla fighters continued to resist capture for many months afterwards.

The Indian ambulance workers had played a modest part in the British victory. To mark this, a meeting was held in the Congress Hall in Durban. This, wrote a Natal newspaper, was ‘the first occasion upon which Europeans and Indians in this Colony have met on a common platform for a common purpose’.
³⁵
In the chair was the former prime minister of Natal, Sir John Robinson. In the ‘struggle for supremacy between Boer and Briton,’ said Robinson, the Indians had done ‘excellent work’. ‘I cannot too warmly compliment your able countryman, Mr Gandhi,’ the Natal leader told the Indians, ‘upon his timely, unselfish, and most useful action in voluntarily organising a corps of bearers for ambulance work.’
³⁶

The volunteers came out of regard for Gandhi, and he solicited them out of regard for the British Empire, of which he was a loyal subject, his criticisms of the Natal Government notwithstanding. Indeed, those criticisms often made the case that discriminatory laws were at odds with British tradition. His ‘Open Letter’ of December 1894 contrasted the colonists with their compatriots at home – ‘I have … to remind you,’ said Gandhi, ‘that the 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.’ A petition protesting against the £3 tax in default of re-indenture insisted it was ‘in direct opposition to the fundamental principles upon which the British Constitution is based’. A memorial of 1895 to the Secretary of State for the Colonies said the policies in Natal were ‘entirely repugnant to the British notions of justice’. The Governor of Natal was told in July 1899 that the Dealers’ Licence Act was ‘really bad and un-British’.
³⁷

That telling term, ‘un-British’, was to be made famous in a book
published by Dadabhai Naoroji in 1901,
Poverty and Un-British Rule in India
. This argued that the spread of famine, the drain of wealth and the stifling of Indian manufactures were the result of policies that departed from the ideals of the rulers. Gandhi knew and respected Naoroji; like the Parsi veteran, he was an admirer of the British liberal tradition and its powers, real or fictive, of self-criticism and ameliorative action.

Another Indian leader Gandhi admired, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, distinguished between a ‘narrower imperialism’ which regarded ‘the world as though it was made for one race only’, and a ‘nobler imperialism’ that enabled ‘all who are included in the Empire to share equally in all its blessings’.
³⁸
Gandhi’s work during the War was done to evoke or re-activate these ‘nobler’ instincts of the rulers. As he later wrote, ‘I felt that, if I demanded rights as a British citizen, it was also my duty, as such, to participate in the defence of the British Empire. I held then that India could achieve her complete emancipation only within and through the British Empire.’
³⁹

The Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 is usually seen as a ‘white man’s war’. This is not strictly true. In every major battle of the war, non-Europeans played a part. While a handful of Indians served as ambulance workers, many black Africans – Zulus, Xhosas and others – participated as armed combatants. One historian estimates that perhaps as many as 30,000 blacks fought on the British side. Others worked as scouts, spies, servants and messengers. Like Gandhi, these African volunteers believed – or hoped – that ‘a British victory would bring about an extension of political, educational and commercial opportunities for black people’.
⁴⁰

What Gandhi wrote in these years is printed in his
Collected Works
; samples of what was written to him lie in cupboards in the Gandhi Museum in Delhi and the Gandhi Ashram in Sabarmati. These writings focus very largely on his career as a lawyer and community organizer. What the biographer lacks are contemporary accounts of his personal, familial situation. We know that in 1898 Kasturba gave birth to a third son, Ramdas; and two years later to a fourth, Devadas. But to sense what life was like in the Gandhi household, we have to rely largely on the patriarch’s recollections and our own speculations.

Many years later, while writing of their life in Durban, Gandhi said the central challenge he faced was where and how to educate his children. There were a few schools for children of indentured labourers, run by missionaries. For reasons of class Gandhi would not have wanted his sons admitted there. ‘I could have sent them to the schools for European children,’ he remarks, ‘but only as a matter of favour and exception. No other Indian children were allowed to attend them.’
⁴¹
This is confirmed by documents in the Natal archives, which tell us that in the last week of February 1897, Gandhi sent a petition requesting that James Godfrey, the son of one of his (Tamil Christian) clients, be admitted to the whites-only Durban High School. The request was denied, the Superintendent of Schools claiming that if the Godfrey child was allowed in, ‘a majority of the parents would remove their boys, and the boys who were left would make the Indian’s life unsupportable by practical joking.’
⁴²

If a Christian boy was subject to racist taunts, a Hindu boy would find it even harder. So Gandhi would have reasoned, which is why he chose to educate his sons Harilal and Manilal and his nephew Gokuldas at home. He taught them the alphabet of their mother tongue, Gujarati, himself. An English governess was engaged to teach other subjects. Meanwhile, their mother acquainted them with the myths and morals of their native Hinduism.
⁴³

The boys could play with one another, but it is hard to see how or with whom Kasturba found companionship. There were no other women in the household. The shopping was in the hands of a manservant; both social custom and personal inhibition prevented Gandhi’s wife from going out alone on the streets of Durban. Most of her husband’s clients were Gujarati Muslims. Despite a common language, divergent faiths made it hard for Kasturba to break bread with their wives. Even had she sought friendship with them, she would not – with four sons, a nephew and a husband to look after – have had the time.

As a successful barrister, Gandhi had chosen to live not in the Indian ghetto in central Durban but in Beach Grove, on the city’s outskirts. His ‘well-furnished English villa’ (to use Younghusband’s phrase) was one of several in the locality, the others occupied by men who were English by blood as well as in spirit. Gandhi’s desire to mark his social status by
acquiring a house away from where his compatriots lived posed serious problems for his wife. She did not know English, and tradition forbade her from talking to white people anyway. The social distance separating her from her neighbours was even greater than the physical distance between the suburbs and the city. She could not go to meet the Gujarati women in Grey Street unescorted. Her husband was unavailable (and perhaps also unwilling) to take her there. So she retreated further into her home, where her children provided her with both company and consolation.

It was in this house in Beach Grove that Gandhi and Kasturba had a disagreement that he wrote about in his autobiography. Living with the Gandhis were a Gujarati cook and a Tamil-speaking clerk, Vincent Lawrence. Before their conversion to Christianity, Lawrence’s family were regarded as Panchammas, a term, translating as the ‘fifth’ caste, denoting their Untouchable status. Kasturba refused to clean the clerk’s chamber pot, and thought her husband should also not pollute himself by doing so. Gandhi was enraged. ‘I will not stand this nonsense in my house,’ he remembers telling Kasturba in his autobiography, adding the further recollection that, in his fury, he dragged her down to the gate. His wife, weeping, asked if he had no shame, to push her out in a foreign country, with no parents or relatives to take her in. Gandhi pulled himself back in time, and returned with his wife to the house.
⁴⁴

In May 1901, Gandhi learnt that his preceptor Raychandbhai had died, at just thirty-three. Gandhi read about Raychandbhai’s passing in his office, from a newspaper that arrived in the post. He set the paper aside and resumed his work, but, as he wrote to a friend, ‘I can’t put it out of my mind … [W]henever there is a little leisure, the mind reverts to it. Rightly or wrongly, I was greatly attracted to him and I loved him deeply too. All that is over now.’
⁴⁵

From that first meeting in July 1891, Gandhi had accepted Raychandbhai as his mentor. Gandhi’s father died when he was in his teens. His elder brothers were incapable of giving him moral (or intellectual) instruction. It was into this vacuum that the jeweller-thinker stepped. He had helped Gandhi come through the loss of his beloved mother. When he was a briefless barrister in Bombay in 1892, Gandhi would leave the court to go to Raychand’s shop and speak with him. In South
Africa some years later, torn between religions, Raychand once more helped sort out his confusions.

What did Raychandbhai mean to Gandhi? What did he
learn
from him? Contemporary accounts or letters are scarce, so we must answer these questions with the aid of later reflections. Speaking at Raychand’s birth anniversary in 1915, Gandhi said ‘he followed no narrow creed. He was a universalist and had no quarrel with any religion in the world.’
⁴⁶

Nine years later, Gandhi wrote a long preface to a Gujarati book on his teacher. This recalled that even when Raychand was in his shop,

some book on a religious subject would always be lying by his side, and, as soon as he had finished dealing with a customer, he would open it, or would open the note-book in which he used to note down the thoughts which occurred to him. Every day he had men like me, in search of knowledge, coming to him. He would not hesitate to discuss religious matters with them. The Poet did not follow the general … rule of doing business and discussing dharma each at its proper time, of attending to one thing at a time.

Gandhi took heart from this plurality of vocations, becoming both a hardworking lawyer and a curious seeker himself. While Raychand could teach Gandhi little about the law, he encouraged him to see his faith in broader terms.
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.

There were, argued Raychand, parallels in the teachings of all great religions. All preached against falsehood and against violence. Human beings, following the texts of their faiths dogmatically, had ‘erected veritable prison-houses’ in which they were, in a spiritual sense, confined. Gandhi, following Raychand, came to the conclusion that ‘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’.

When his Christian friends in Johannesburg and Durban were pressing Gandhi to convert, Raychand advised him to stay within the Hindu fold, yet remain open to the teachings of other religions. The seer liked
to say that ‘the different faiths were like so many walled enclosures in which men and women were confined’. Gandhi, following Raychand, lived in the enclosure he was born into, but breached its walls by frequently travelling into other similarly well demarcated terrains. He never permanently abandoned his compartment for another, yet by visiting other compartments came to see more clearly what united as well as divided them all.
⁴⁷

A few months after Raychand’s death, Gandhi decided to return home to India. This, on the face of it, was a puzzling move: his legal practice was well established, and he was a figure of some renown in Natal. In his autobiography he writes that he wished to ‘be of more service in India’, where the movement for political rights was gathering ground.
⁴⁸
But surely there were other reasons, among them the desire to give his children a decent education. The eldest child, Harilal, was now entering his teens. There was no suitable school for him or his brothers in Durban. In Rajkot, however, they could attend their father’s old school, follow him in taking the Bombay Matriculation, and in time build up professions and careers of their own.