Gandhi Before India (34 page)

Speaking to the gathering, Gandhi singled out the Indian students in the room, whose predicament highlighted the trouble in the Transvaal. These young men contemplated their return to South Africa ‘with considerable anxiety and apprehension’; they worried they would share the fate of the dispossessed Indians in the colony. For, as Gandhi observed, ‘here, in England, they will become barristers or doctors, but there, in South Africa, they may not even be able to cross the border of the Transvaal.’
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Gandhi’s energetic lobbying in London alarmed the Transvaal Government. As the deputation sailed back to South Africa, the colony’s Lieutenant-Governor wrote to his boss grumbling that ‘His Majesty’s Government have evidently been greatly impressed by the representation of Messrs. Gandhi and Ally.’
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The Governor of the Transvaal, Lord Selborne, then wrote a letter to
his
superior, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, pointing out that the Ordinance was ‘regarded almost unanimously by the European community as being vital to the best interests of the Colony’. He defended the proposal to make registration compulsory, and warned that the provision of appeal to the Supreme Court (which the Indians were agitating for) would defeat the legislation’s purpose, since ‘experience has shown how difficult it is when once an Asiatic has entered the country to find him again’. The Governor remarked that

Mr Gandhi must know better than most people that there is an extensive traffic in permits and registration certificates, and he has had unique experience of the ease with which the Courts can be moved (and rightly so while the law remains as it is) to upset any administrative action which is intended to carry out an effective control over immigration.

The parenthetical comment scarcely served to soften what was a direct insinuation against Gandhi’s motives: namely, that he had a vested interest in the old law, and in profitably fighting court cases under it. Selborne then explained the larger project of which the Ordinance was part. ‘Every patriotic South African,’ he wrote,

looks forward to the establishment of a large and vigorous European population here … The immigration of an Asiatic population on a large scale he regards as a menace to the realisation of this ideal. He sees already in Natal a picture which impresses even the casual observer of the rapidity with which the Asiatic is filling a place in trade, and now even in agriculture, which otherwise would have afforded scope for a growing European population. He sees the same process at work in the Transvaal, more slowly at present, but, capable, as he believes, of rapid acceleration. He is quite willing to recognise the claims which British Indians naturally have on His Majesty’s Government, but he protests against, and is prepared to resist, those claims when they involve the peopling of his country which he believes to be fitted to be the home of a strong European nation with a people who can never be to him anything but an alien race.
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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? Evidently, the Indians were seen as the main, perhaps only, threat to the creation of a settler state to be ruled and dominated by whites, with a submissive native population alongside. For South Africa to become more like Australia, Canada and New Zealand, it was imperative that no more Indians were allowed into the territory.

The intensity and passion, even paranoia, that characterized the presentation of the colonists’ case was an indirect tribute to Gandhi. The opposition led by him had unnerved and unsettled them. To the Governor’s private warnings were now added a book published in London with the alarmist title,
The Asiatic Danger to the Colonies
. Written by the Johannesburg journalist L. E. Neame, this aimed at influencing ‘home’ opinion against the Indians, and thus smoothing the path for the new policies in the Transvaal. Neame was particularly worried by the rise of nationalism in India, as manifest in the Swadeshi movement. He warned that ‘the idea is gaining ground that a weak spot has been found in the armour of Europe.’ This activist spirit would not just be aimed at British rule in India; it ‘may be used for the forcing of many a closed door’. Like
Europe, Asia ‘too needs room for its surplus population’; hence the demand, led by Gandhi, to allow Indians the freedom to move to South Africa on the grounds that it was also part of the British Empire.

It was not, however, merely a question of competing numbers. As Neame acutely observed, ‘the Asiatic has another fault – from the white man’s standpoint. He is ambitious. The plantation coolie may die a coolie; his son may become a landowner, or a small trader or storekeeper, even a merchant on a considerable scale.’ As successive generations of Indians graduated to more sophisticated occupations, they took away jobs and trades previously monopolized by the whites. And so this European in Johannesburg plaintively asked: ‘What is to be their future if the Indian works in the farm, owns the store, and performs skilled labour in the factory?’

Gandhi and company, complained Neame, had mobilized the support of ‘Members of Parliament who know India but not the Colonies’. To counteract this, the colonist appealed to the baser instincts of the mother country, by arguing that

in the end the colony with the largest Asiatic population where white men should dwell will be of least value to the Empire. It is an economic axiom that the white man consumes more than the Asiatic. The trade of a colony with a big white population must be more remunerative to England than that of a colony where a decreasing white population is struggling hard against the competition of the Eastern peoples.
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L. E. Neame was answered by Henry Polak, a European who had crossed the racial divide to stand up for the underdog. In a four-part review in
Indian Opinion
, Polak (writing as ‘The Editor’), accused Neame of a ‘Caucasian bias’, as one ‘who does not question the ultimate and inherent superiority of the white race’ while relegating ‘the disturbing Asiatic to the limbo of permanent inferiority’. By dividing the world into Asiatic and non-Asiatic, Neame had shown that he ‘does not, evidently, believe in the brotherhood of man and his unity with Nature. He cannot conceive that men are moulded, all the world over, in the same general way by the same series of circumstances.’

Of Neame’s argument that Asiatic traders would swamp white competition, Polak archly noted that ‘his plea is not that the white man should make a living, but that the Asiatic should not.’ For if the Caucasians were indeed ‘inherently superior’, then

what is the added advantage to be derived from Registration Laws, Immigration Acts, commercial barriers, protective walls [and other such methods] … betokening, not a calm self-assurance, not a strong sense of breathing a purer atmosphere than that breathed by any other, but a mortal fear lest the phantom of an alleged superiority should be discovered and exposed to public derision – a terror lest the windy dummy of inflated self-importance be pricked.
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Gandhi and company did not really want to challenge, still less overthrow, European rule in the Transvaal. What they asked for was the safeguarding of existing and previously guaranteed rights of residence, trade and travel. 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.

Gandhi returned to South Africa in the third week of December 1906. Landing at Cape Town, he and his colleague H. O. Ally took the train to Johannesburg. Arriving on the morning of the 22nd, they were met at Park Station by a large crowd of Indians. The next day an even larger gathering welcomed the duo at the hall of the Hamidia Islamic Society.
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The next week Gandhi and Ally were in Natal, speaking at Verulam and then at Durban, where so many gathered to hear them that the meeting was shifted from the Congress Hall to the covered market at Pine Street. Afterwards, Parsee Rustomjee hosted a dinner in their honour. The next day, Gandhi took Ally and a few others on a tour of Phoenix, where ‘the various departments were inspected with interest and the visitors expressed pleasure at what they saw.’ That, at any rate, was the claim of
Indian Opinion
; perhaps the epicurean Ally, unused to and disenchanted by the ascetic life, saw things rather differently.
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Gandhi had come to Natal not merely to garner praise. The Natal Government was planning fresh curbs on merchants who were not white. On board the RMS
Briton
he had written a note urging that Indian traders be allowed to import clerks and assistants; that when denied a licence they be permitted to appeal to the courts; and that educated or propertied Indians be granted the municipal franchise. Gandhi insisted that ‘Natal cannot be allowed to draw upon India for a supply of indentured labour when she refuses to treat the resident Indian population with justice and decency.’
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Sent the note by the Imperial Government, the Natal Ministers refuted Gandhi’s points one by one. There were already more Indians than whites in Natal; now, ‘if permission were accorded to Indian clerks or domestic servants to enter the Colony temporarily, as proposed by
Mr Gandhi, insuperable difficulties would be opposed to returning them at the end of their time.’ As for greater leeway in the granting or renewal of dealers’ licences, ‘the Indian Merchant has already a very strong footing in the Colony’ and his European rivals were ‘determined that Natal shall be a white-man’s colony and that they shall not be ousted by those who are incapable of governing the Colony and whose only object is to make money’. Since the Indians were said to be more loyal to India than to Natal, they could not be trusted with the vote either: ‘The European Colonists intend to reserve the franchise, political and municipal, for those who will exercise it for the best interests of Natal.’
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Fourteen years of representative government had made the Natal colonists more truculent, more willing to disregard the Imperial interest and treat their coloured subjects as they pleased. Inspectors of the Natal Government would not renew Indian traders’ licences, citing unsanitary conditions or unconventional book-keeping. These were the professed reasons; often, it was prejudice or fear of competition that lay behind the refusal.
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In the Cape, traditionally the most liberal of the South African provinces, feelings against Indians likewise hardened. When, in 1907, the councillors of Cape Town considered nine applications by Indian traders, they rejected seven outright, referring the other two for more information. The report of the meeting contained the forceful yet representative views of a councillor named Gibbs:

‘Indians’, said Mr Gibbs with great scorn, ‘I want none of them – none of that nationality! I’m not in favour of these Indians coming here at all, and I would like to see as many of them as possible getting out of this country … I really think a good deal of the depression existing at this time is due to them. Why, they live on the smell of an oil-rag, and sleep on the butter! (laughter) I’ll do everything possible in my power, whatever Council I’m on, to drive them out. Look at the Post Office returns, and you’ll see that all their money gets sent out of the country’.
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Soon afterwards, the Cape Assembly constituted a committee to look into the question. The Indians who gave testimony complained about harassment by immigration officials, and insisted that their premises were clean and their accounts up-to-date. European merchants, on the other hand, complained that the Indians ‘eat curry and rice without any
spoons’. A trader named Philips said ‘the Indians come here merely as blood suckers, it is a vulgar term, but true’. Claiming that many Europeans had to ‘close their doors’ because of competition, the committee concluded that ‘it is impossible to view the extinction of the European storekeeper without the gravest fears for the future of the Colony’.
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Faced with renewed hostility to his compatriots, Gandhi characteristically did not give up hope. Perhaps if the Indians presented a better face they might be treated more kindly? In two striking articles in
Indian Opinion
, he asked shopkeepers in Natal to maintain proper accounts, keep their premises clean, and dress well in order to make sure their licences were renewed. And he urged them not to spit, belch or break wind in public. ‘It is sheer stupidity to believe that all these things will not prejudice the Europeans,’ he wrote. ‘While we live in this country, we should so behave that the whites’ prejudices against us are weakened.’
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Gandhi also proposed that some Indians from Natal be sent to the United Kingdom to qualify for the Bar. His former assistant Joseph Royeppen was in London, qualifying at Lincoln’s Inn. Royeppen had gone under his own steam; Gandhi’s friend Pranjivan Mehta – now a prosperous jeweller in Burma – offered to fund another student to follow him. Gandhi’s choice fell on Chhaganlal. ‘You seem to be the only person who can be depended upon to carry forward the heritage of my thought and words,’ he told his nephew. ‘Our ultimate capital is not the money we have, but our courage, our faith, our truthfulness and our ability. If therefore you go to England, your intellect remains unspoiled and you return with your physical and mental powers strengthened, our capital will have appreciated to that extent.’
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Chhaganlal was the son of Gandhi’s first cousin Khushalchand. He was a nephew once removed, yet far closer to him than this relationship might suggest. Twelve years younger than his mentor, he was devoted to Gandhi’s example and his ideas. He had acquired his trust by the manner in which he supervised the composing, printing and distribution of
Indian Opinion
. In their father’s absence he had to supervise the education of Gandhi’s children as well. Gandhi’s letters to Chhaganlal thus run seamlessly from matters of politics to the upbringing of his sons. A letter of 7 February 1907 says: ‘I know that Manilal is weak in his arithmetic. Please give him adequate attention’; and further – ‘Though
Harilal has agreed to stay [in South Africa], I find some uncertainty in what he writes. Therefore, I wrote to you to treat him in such a manner as to have a steadying influence on his mind.’
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Soon afterwards, Chhaganlal had a child of his own, whereupon Gandhi instructed him on how best to raise
his
baby. He suggested that Chhagan invest in an English cradle, and make sure that the mother’s bed was ‘kept neat and tidy’. The father should do the cleaning himself, even though this particular form of labour was not consistent with his caste. In the rearing of the child, said Gandhi, ‘please do not allow our old customs about untouchability, which are useless and wicked, to come in the way’.
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In the third week of February 1907 the white males of Transvaal voted to elect their first government. The party of the Boers, Het Volk, won a majority. General Louis Botha was sworn in as Prime Minister. Another former General, J. C. Smuts, was appointed Colonial Secretary.

Louis Botha was a quintessential Afrikaner – of farming stock, brought up on a large estate in wide open country in a family which read the Bible out loud several times a day. He had been a brave commander during the war, his resistance delaying the British victory by more than a year. Now, however, Botha ‘stood for the magic cause of reconciliation between the [Boer and British] races’. The war had ravaged the economy of the Transvaal. To restore it to health the one-time rivals had to work together. Botha himself recognized that there was, after all, ‘a great deal in common between the Boer and the English country gentleman – in their joy in country sports, their suspicion of change, their habit of command’.
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More than a love of hunting, what compelled Boer and Briton to now stand together was the need to deny people of colour the elementary rights of citizenship. One of the new Government’s first acts was to have the Asiatic Ordinance of 1906 made into law. A bill embodying its provisions was introduced in the Transvaal Assembly on 20 March. It went through three readings in a single day, before being sent for approval to the Legislative Council. On the 22nd its passage was announced in the government gazette. Lord Selborne wrote to London urging that the King grant his assent as soon as possible. The ‘illicit and unauthorized influx of Asiatics,’ he claimed, was ‘proceeding at an alarming rate’; the bill, which aimed to check this, represented ‘the unanimous demand of all sections of the white community in the Transvaal.’
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On 29 March, the British Indian Association convened a meeting to protest the haste with which the bill was passed. More than a dozen people spoke, in at least four languages. Abdul Gani, Chairman of the BIA, said the bill showed that ‘our legislators [are] the custodians of the whites alone’. Else ‘how could the members become familiar in a night with a bill, which was admittedly very important and complicated?’ Another merchant, Essop Mia, extended the charge of racial prejudice to the Governor, noting that ‘Lord Selborne has been ill-disposed towards us from the outset. He has always regarded us all as coolies and no better than locusts.’ A Hindu priest from Germiston, Ram Sundar Pundit, remarked that ‘the mother gives her child milk, but a step-mother eats him up. The Government is like a step-mother.’

The meeting passed a resolution offering ‘to submit to voluntary registration’ in order to ‘satisfy the Government and popular prejudice’. If this offer was rejected, the Indians requested ‘full Imperial protection by reason of the fact that British Indians have no voice in the choice of the legislators, and represent a very small and weak minority.’ Speaking last, Gandhi said the procedure of voluntary registration would ‘be based on mutual understanding … If gaol-going – which we have been contemplating – comes after this proposal, it will appear more graceful.’
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The Chinese of the Transvaal had joined the Indians in their protest. About 1,100 in all, they worked as merchants, gardeners and laundrymen. The new Act would bear down hard on them too. Their leader, Leung Quinn, decided to make common cause with Gandhi. Originally from Canton, Quinn was a partner in a firm of mineral-water manufacturers in Johannesburg. He had ‘no intention of registering under any circumstances’. The Chinese Association wrote to the Transvaal Government that it endorsed the resolutions passed by the Indian meeting of 29 March. Thus, as the
Rand Daily Mail
observed, ‘the Asiatic communities of the Transvaal are now as unanimously against the act, as perhaps, the white communities are in favour of it.’
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The protests were amplified in London, where L. W. Ritch was now based. Ritch sent the Colonial Office a series of letters detailing Indian handicaps in the Transvaal. He asked that Royal Assent to the new Ordinance be withheld.
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A more pointed petition came from Joseph Royeppen, once a clerk in Gandhi’s law office in Durban, now a Cambridge graduate and qualified lawyer himself. After a decade studying in the best colleges in England, Royeppen wished to return to South Africa
and practise as a lawyer in the Transvaal. But, as he told Lord Elgin, while he was ‘entitled to follow my calling anywhere in His Majesty’s Dominions, I shall not be able to do so in a British Colony neighbouring my own home.’ The liberties that he had enjoyed in England would be denied Royeppen in the country of his birth, ruled as it was by ‘obnoxious restrictions emanating from unreasoning prejudice’.

It is likely that Gandhi put Royeppen up to this challenge; for his case highlighted the hypocrisies of the rulers like no other. Royeppen was a Christian, a Cambridge man, and a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn. However, he was not white. If a man with his qualifications was debarred from entering the Transvaal, then ‘Indians as a whole will have just reasons for losing much of their faith in the Briton’s sense of justice in the colonies.’
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Back in the Transvaal, Gandhi asked for and was granted an appointment with the new Colonial Secretary, Jan Christian Smuts, a man who – in the decades to follow – was also to have a most profound impact on the history of the British Empire. Born a few months after Gandhi – on 24 May 1870 – Smuts was, unlike the Indian, ‘an expert examination hurdler’. Of proud Boer stock (his family had been in South Africa since the 1690s), Smuts got a first-class in his matriculation, a double first in his BA (from Victoria College, Stellenbosch), and then another first in his Law Tripos at Cambridge.
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A lover of poetry (particularly that of Walt Whitman, on whom he wrote an unpublished book), and a keen student of philosophy and science (especially ecology and botany), Smuts returned to his homeland in 1895 and sought to enter public life. In an early speech at Kimberley, he argued that the Boers and the Britons had to close ranks, or else their position would ‘become untenable in the face of that overwhelming majority of prolific barbarism’. However, the Jameson Raid made him suspicious of British intentions. In 1897 he shifted from Cape Town to the South African Republic, in an expression of solidarity with his fellow Boers. In June 1898 he was appointed State Attorney there. He became a protégé of President Kruger, their relationship akin to, and sometimes described as, that between father and son.