Gandhi Before India (31 page)

The Ordinance was viewed differently by those subject to its workings. In a letter of 25 August, the British Indian Association said that to make all Asians aged eight and over, of either sex, undergo fresh registration would ‘needlessly violate female modesty, as it is understood by millions of British Indians’. An editorial in
Indian Opinion
characterized the new bill as ‘abominable’. It threatened to ‘invade the sanctity of home life’, and appeared to have been drafted ‘with the deliberate intention of injuring the Indian community’.

On 1 September, a delegation led by Gandhi travelled to Pretoria to meet the Colonial Secretary, Patrick Duncan. They told him ‘that the Asiatic Act would be unacceptable to the Indian community under any circumstances and that re-registration would simply not take place’. The Secretary refused to consider the withdrawal of the legislation.
Indian Opinion
now compared British rule in the Transvaal to the regime of the autocratic Tsar of Russia. While the Russian state ‘murder[s] people openly and directly’, it said sarcastically, the British in Transvaal ‘kill[s] them by inches’.
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At their meeting, Gandhi told Duncan that if the legislation went through, the Indians would refuse to abide by its regulations, even if it meant courting arrest. He said he was prepared to be the first to go to jail. That Gandhi was seriously thinking of courting arrest is confirmed by a letter written to him by his friend the Pretoria lawyer R. Gregorowski. Gregorowski told Gandhi that the penalties for failing to
register were severe – imprisonment with hard labour and perhaps a stiff fine too. He advised the Indians to send a deputation to London, to lay their case before the new Liberal Government. Gregorowski argued that

any other form of resistance than by constitutional means is … to be deprecated. It would be an offence to invite people to disobey the law and not to re-register. I think such agitation is also bound to fail as not a great number of people are made of the stuff that seek martyrdom and Asiatics are no exception to the rule. The same result could, I think, be attained by constitutional agitation.
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Gandhi accepted the advice – for the moment. The British Indian Association would send a deputation to London, whose members would be ‘Mr Gandhi and a member from the trading classes’. A thousand pounds was sanctioned for their expenses. However, to assess the mood of the community, a public meeting was proposed prior to their departure. To plan the meeting, a group of Indians met daily in the hall of the Hamidia Islamic Society, a body funded and patronized by Gujarati Muslims. Letters were sent to every small town in the Transvaal, urging Indians to attend. Handbills and posters were discussed and drafted. A list of possible speakers was drawn up and debated.

The meeting, scheduled for Sunday 11 September, was held at the Empire Theatre, a large hall with balconies that seated close to 2,000 people. On the big day, Indian shopkeepers and hawkers in Johannesburg stopped work at 10 a.m. The doors of the Empire Theatre opened at noon, to accommodate the people coming in from the countryside. By 1.30 the theatre was packed to overflowing. Describing the scene within, the
Rand Daily Mail
wrote that

even in its palmiest days, the old variety theatre could never have boasted of a larger audience than that which assembled yesterday. From the back row of the gallery to the front row of the stalls there was not a vacant seat, the boxes were crowded as surely they had never been crowded before, and even the stage was invaded. Wherever the eye lighted was fez and turban, and it needed but little stretch of the imagination to fancy that one was thousands of miles from Johannesburg and in the heart of India’s teeming millions.
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Gandhi had invited Patrick Duncan to attend the meeting. The Colonial Secretary chose to send Montford Chamney as his representative. The
Protector of the Asiatics sat on the dais, silent and uncomprehending, as a series of speakers inveighed against the new ordinance.

Chairing the meeting was Abdul Gani, a Johannesburg merchant who served as the President of the British Indian Association. He sat on a sofa covered with a yellow silk cloth, the person and his background illuminated by electric light. Gani spoke in Hindustani. Whatever his inadequacies as a petition writer, he was clearly a practised orator. His main point was that they should defy the law and go to prison rather than subject themselves to a fresh process of registration. When ‘Mr Gani spoke of gaol-going’, reported
Indian Opinion
, ‘the audience shouted in one voice, “We shall go to gaol, but will not register ourselves again.”’

Other speeches were made in Gujarati and English. One speaker, Nanalal Shah, flourished his existing registration certificate before the crowd. This had his name, his profession, his wife’s name, his caste, his height, his age, and even his thumb impression. ‘Is all this not enough?’ demanded Mr Shah. ‘How can anyone else use this register? Does the Government want now to brand us on our foreheads? I will never return my registration certificate. Neither will I be registered again. I prefer going to gaol, and I will go there.’

Five resolutions were presented to and passed by the meeting. The first outlined what in the ordinance was repugnant; the second asked the Transvaal Government to withdraw it. The third gave formal approval to the delegation being sent to London. The fifth authorized the meeting’s Chairman, Abdul Gani, to forward the resolutions to the Transvaal administation and to the Imperial Government in London.

The crucial resolution was the fourth, which said that

In the event of the Legislative Council, the local Government, and the Imperial Authorities rejecting the humble prayer of the British Indian community of the Transvaal in connection with the Draft Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance, this mass meeting of British Indians here assembled solemnly and regretfully resolves that, rather than submit to the galling, tyrannous, and un-British requirements laid down in the above Draft Ordinance, every British Indian in the Transvaal shall submit himself to imprisonment and shall continue to do so until it shall please His Gracious Majesty the King-Emperor to grant relief.

Moving the resolution, the Pretoria merchant Hajee Habib said, ‘Everything depends upon it. There is no disgrace in going to gaol; rather it is
an honour. Only a few people knew of [the Indian patriot] Mr [Bal Gangadhar] Tilak before he went to gaol; today the whole world knows him.’ Gandhi spoke after Habib, in (as a reporter on the spot noted) ‘clear, low tones, in earnest, serious, and carefully-chosen language’. He said that the responsibility for advising them to go to prison was his. ‘The step was grave, but unavoidable. In doing so, they did not hold a threat, but showed that the time for action – over and above making speeches and submitting petitions – had arrived.’ Gandhi added that he had ‘full confidence in his countrymen’. He ‘knew he could trust them, and he knew also that, when occasion required an heroic step to be taken, he knew that every man among them would take it.’

One of the last speakers was a Tamil named Thambi Naidoo. Born in Mauritius in 1875, he had come to the Transvaal as a young man, and set up as a carrier. He probably got to know Gandhi during the plague epidemic of 1904. He was stocky, strongly built, and of firm convictions. Now he stood up to persuade his fellow Tamils to commit to a path of action drawn up by the Gujaratis.

The meeting ended with a vote of thanks, proposed by an M. Lichtenstein and seconded by an I. Israelstam. They (and Gandhi) had been put up to it by Henry Polak. For these were ‘both sons of Israel, both, therefore, representative of a people that have, for centuries, suffered persecution and oppression, by reason of the ignorance, prejudice, superstition, and jealousy of their opponents, even as the British Indians in South Africa to-day.’
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Thus far, the movement to get the Indians a fair deal in South Africa had followed a strictly legalistic route. Letters, petitions, court cases, delegations – these were the means by which Gandhi and his fellows had challenged laws which bore down unfairly on them. Now, however, they were threatening to defy this new Ordinance and go to jail.
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It has been sometimes assumed that this resolution of 11 September 1906, mandating a move from petition to protest, was influenced by Henry David Thoreau’s classic tract on civil disobedience, first published in 1849. There is no evidence to support this conjecture. At this time, Gandhi had
not
read Thoreau. Another speculation, offered by the respected Gandhi scholar James D. Hunt, is that he was influenced by protests by Nonconformists against the Education Act in England, which forced Anglican instruction on state-aided schools. Baptists,
Wesleyans and Congregationalists had courted arrest rather than allow their children to be indoctrinated in the official faith of the state.
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Gandhi did know some Baptist and Methodist priests in Johannesburg. He did read the British press. The term ‘passive resistance’, used by him, was one made popular by Nonconformists, although it also had a more distant origin in the term ‘non-resistance to evil’, made famous in a book Gandhi knew well, Tolstoy’s
The Kingdom of God is Within You
.
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These influences may be inferred but they cannot, alas, be demonstrated. Prior to the 11 September meeting, there are no references in Gandhi’s writings and speeches to Nonconformist protests against the Education Act in England. On the other hand, 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. But, as Gandhi pointed out, even the defiance of a specific law had indigenous precedents. Writing in Gujarati in
Indian Opinion
, he said of the resolution threatening mass resistance that it

is, and at the same time is not, unique. We consider it unique, because nowhere else in the world have Indians so far resolved, as they have done now, to go to gaol rather than submit to a law. On the other hand, we do not consider it unique because a number of similar instances are found [in history]. When we are dissatisfied with anything, we resort to
hartal
. In India we often consider it our duty to do so, in order to obtain redress of our grievances, particularly in the Native States. The
hartal
only means that we do not approve of a certain measure taken by the ruler. This tradition of resisting a law has been in vogue among us from very early days, when the English people were in a barbarous state. Thus, really speaking, the Resolution passed by the Transvaal Indians is nothing extraordinary and there is no reason why we should feel nervous.
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The editors of the
Collected Works
do not translate the word ‘
hartal
’. A
hartal
refers to the withdrawal of support and services from the state, or from one’s employers. Among the various forms it took, and takes, were workers laying down tools to demand larger wages, peasants migrating from a kingdom to protest high taxes, and shopkeepers
closing their shutters to protest a new tax. A cognate word is
dharna
. A
hartal
is a collective act of protest; a
dharna
more often an individual act of resistance. A servant who refuses to wait on his master after being abused by him is on
dharna
. When, back in 1894, Gandhi would not eat in an Indian home until his hosts contributed their mite to the Natal Indian Congress, he was invoking this old (and well-regarded) tradition of moral-persuasion-shading-into-coercion. Now, twelve years later, he was redirecting that tradition in a collective protest against a racially biased law.

The Ordinance that sparked the Resolution of 11 September was peculiar to the Transvaal. Residents of British India were
not
required to take out registration certificates. However, Indians in India had protested oppressive laws in similar fashion in the past. In Gandhi’s native Kathiawar, a distinction had long been made between two ways of protesting the arbitrary actions of a state. The first was to resort to violence, a method preferred by bandits who roamed the countryside. This was called
baharvatiya
 – literally, going outside the law. On the other hand, a grievance could also be expressed without the use of force, as for example by sitting outside the home of the official responsible for the law or measure one was opposed to. By refusing to move, and perhaps combining this with refusing to eat, the protester hoped the state or its representative would be shamed into withdrawing the offending statute. This second, peaceful form of protest, was known as
risaamanu
, which meant the temporary severing of relations between people who were otherwise closely and even intimately connected.
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Indian precedents to the Resolution of 11 September existed; and Gandhi knew of some of them. Even so, his appeal to ancient Indian custom legitimized rather than explained the threat to court arrest. For the meeting at the Empire Theatre was carried along by its own momentum. Encouraged by the large crowd, the speakers competed with one another to raise the temperature. The speeches and resolutions represented a specific response to a specific situation. The new Ordinance had consolidated the grievances of the Indians in the Transvaal, who now sought means of protest more direct, and more radical, than any they had resorted to before.

Notably, the Indians were supported by the Chinese in the Transvaal, who, as fellow Asians, were also affected by the Ordinance. The gathering at the Empire Theatre included several Chinese leaders. Two days
later, the Chinese Consul-General in Johannesburg wrote to Lord Selborne urging him not to sanction ‘an offensive measure’ that was in breach of international law and which, if implemented, would harm friendly relations between China and Great Britain. By calling for the compulsory registration of all Asiatics, he said, the Ordinance would subject his countrymen to ‘the degrading exposure of all their bodily infirmities which to our Oriental minds is most repulsive, as such a system of identification, is only resorted to in cases of criminals in China.’
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