Gandhi Before India (47 page)

As the letter suggests, it appeared that Gandhi’s son Harilal was facing a conflict between the needs of his self and the claims of his society. By January 1909, the twenty-year-old had been to jail twice already. He now prepared to court arrest for a third time. In between jail terms
he was based in Johannesburg, assisting in the campaign. His wife Chanchal, at Phoenix, missed him terribly. They now had a baby girl who – if things went on the same way – would grow up with an absent father, much as Harilal himself had done.

In a vivid memoir, Harilal’s youngest brother recalled the competing claims on the first of Gandhi’s sons. Devadas was some thirteen years younger than Harilal, and just a little older than his brother’s child. He adored Harilal, with his cheery manner and his handsome face, his hair parted in the middle ‘with beautiful curls over the forehead’. Before one of his departures from Phoenix to court arrest, Harilal told the boy, ‘Yes, Devadas, I will send you your top from Durban.’ ‘I forget the top,’ wrote the boy, decades later. ‘But I remember sharing sweets with my niece the next day, while my sister-in-law shed tears over a letter.’
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Harilal was torn between his wife, whom he loved dearly, and with whom he had (by all accounts) a companionable marriage, and his obligations to his father and the movement he led. At this time, Harilal was briefly back at Phoenix with Chanchal. How long he would stay there was not certain, since he might at any moment be asked to re-enter the Transvaal and seek arrest. He communicated his confusions to his father, who answered that he could

see that you are unhappy. I have got to accept your opinion as to whether you would be unhappy or not on account of separation. However, I see that you will have to undergo imprisonment for a long period … The struggle is likely to be a prolonged one. There are some indications of its being a short one also. There is a likelihood of Lord Curzon interceding. Let me know what arrangement should be made in regard to Chanchal during your absence.

The letter ends with this intriguing line: ‘I have not been able to follow what you say about taking a stone in exchange for a pie. In what context have you written that?’ It seems reasonable to assume that Harilal was contrasting the pie of marital bliss with the stone of physical separation.
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In the first week of the New Year,
The Times
printed a letter signed by twenty-six Europeans living in the Transvaal. The first signatory was W. Hosken. The others included seven clergymen (among them Joseph
Doke and Charles Phillips), several accountants, the jeweller Gabriel Isaacs, the draper W. M. Vogl, and the missionary-turned-advocate A. W. Baker, all old friends of Gandhi. The letter reminded the British public that ‘there is an important body of sympathizers in the European section of the community who are grieved and hurt at the treatment being meted out to the Asiatics [in the Transvaal] for no apparent purpose at all.’ The signatories saluted the ‘courage and self-sacrifice’ of a movement in which ‘all faiths and castes are represented’. Morality and the Imperial interest mandated that their demands be conceded. For passive resisters deported to India from the Transvaal would ‘not be slow to ventilate [their grievances] amidst the sympathetic surroundings of their native land’.
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At this time, Gandhi himself was unsure as to whether the struggle would be long or short. He had, as he indicated to Harilal, some hope that the former Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, would help bring about a settlement. As Viceroy, Curzon had written with feeling about the ‘invidious’ and ‘odious’ handicaps facing Indians in the Transvaal.
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He was now in South Africa, on a private visit. Gandhi asked to meet him when he passed through Johannesburg; Curzon said this would not be possible since he had ‘so short a time here’. However, he asked the Indians to ‘give me as full a statement of their case as they can’; he would read this on the train to Cape Town, where he was due to meet Generals Botha and Smuts.
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On 29 January, Gandhi wrote a remarkable letter to his nephew Maganlal. Some Gujarati merchants were turning away from the struggle, and the Pathans had been sceptical of Gandhi in any case. With earlier attempts on his life in mind, he told Maganlal that

I may have to meet death in South Africa at the hands of my countrymen. If that happens you should rejoice. It will unite the Hindus and Mussalmans … The enemies of the community are constantly making efforts against such a unity. In such a great endeavour, someone will have to sacrifice his life. If I make that sacrifice, I shall regard myself, as well as you, my colleagues, fortunate.
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The letter was posted from Natal, where Gandhi had come again to spend time with his wife. Dr Nanji had diagnosed her as suffering from pernicious anaemia, for which the textbook treatment included a healthy
dose of beef extract. When Gandhi discovered what Kasturba had been given, he decided to take her back to Phoenix and treat her by his own, naturopathic methods. The doctor remonstrated; he was a man of science, as well as a Parsi, for whom there were no taboos as regards beef. He argued that Kasturba was too sick to be moved. Besides, it was raining heavily. Gandhi was unmoved; he sent a message to Phoenix to make preparations for their arrival. Albert West met them at the station with hot milk, umbrellas, and six men to carry Kasturba home in a hammock.
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‘Dr and Mrs Nanji were much grieved’ by his removing Kasturba from their care, wrote Gandhi to Kallenbach. ‘They do not believe in water treatment. They consider me to be a brutal husband and Dr Nanji certainly considers me to be either mad or over conceited. I have risked friendships for the sake of a principle.’

At Phoenix, Gandhi gave Kasturba a series of cold baths. He also put her on a diet of fruit. ‘She appears to be none the worse for it,’ he reported to Kallenbach:

She is probably better. But she has lost heart. She cannot bear the idea of my leaving her bedside for a single minute. Like a baby she clings to me and hugs me. I fear that my departure next week will send her to her grave. It is a great conflict of duty for me. Yet there is no doubt in my mind that I must leave her next week and accept the King’s hospitality.

It was a curious sequence of phrases and sentiments: recognizing that he faced, yet again, a serious conflict between family duties and societal obligations, Gandhi had ‘no doubt’ that (yet again) he would choose to go to prison rather than stay with his ailing wife.
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On 2 February, Curzon wrote to Gandhi reporting on his meeting with the Boer soldier-politicians. Botha and Smuts had promised ‘to treat the British Indians in the Transvaal in a spirit of liberality and justice’. But no specific promises were made with regard to, for example, the repeal of the 1907 Act or the admittance of educated Indians. Curzon’s own view was that ‘a final and satisfactory settlement of the vexed problem’ would have to await the creation of a single, unified government of all the South African colonies.
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The letter was posted to the Johannesburg address of the British Indian Association, who sent it on to Phoenix. Its non-committal, even unhelpful, contents made Gandhi decide to renew the struggle. He may
also have been provoked by derisive comments in the Transvaal press, suggesting that passive resistance was on its last legs. ‘Mr Gandhi has been beaten,’ wrote one paper, ‘and the sooner he admits it and tells his deluded fellow-countrymen frankly that they have not the ghost of a chance of altering the opinions of the people of this Colony, so much the better for all concerned.’
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In the second week of February, Gandhi dispatched Harilal across the border from Natal, to seek (and obtain) his third term of imprisonment. The father followed ten days later. Like his eldest son, he was arrested for refusing to produce a valid registration certificate, and remanded in police custody.

On 25 February Gandhi was brought to trial before a magistrate in Volksrust. He told the court that he would ‘continue to incur the penalties so long as justice, as I conceive it, has not been rendered by the State to a portion of its citizens’. Sentenced to pay a £50 fine or accept three months in prison with hard labour, he opted for the latter. Afterwards, he released two letters that he had composed before going to court. The first, in Gujarati, was addressed to the weak-kneed who had succumbed to the Government’s demands. It reflected a certain resignation; where once the blacklegs were fiercely chastised, now they were asked to do what they could. ‘Those who are fallen can rise again,’ said Gandhi. ‘They can still go to gaol … Even if they cannot, they can offer monetary help, and send statements to newspapers to say that, though they have surrendered, they are in favour of the fight and wish it success.’ The second letter, in English, was addressed to his ‘Tamil brethren’, whom he praised for having discharged their duties ‘brilliantly’ and borne ‘the brunt of the battle’.
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To his ‘great pleasure’, in Volksrust prison Gandhi was placed in the company of some fifty fellow satyagrahis. They included Harilal, and his old and valued friend Parsee Rustomjee. The food this time was ‘nice and clean’ and included large helpings of ghee. The ‘hard labour’ they were put to involved repairing roads and weeding fields.

A day after he was sentenced, Gandhi wrote to Chanchal asking her to read ‘good writing and poems’ to Kasturba, to take care of her own health, and to breastfeed her child for some more time. Then he added: ‘Harilal and I are quite well [in Volksrust jail]. Be sure that we are happier here than you.’ (He spoke for himself, but perhaps not for Harilal.)
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After a week in Volksrust, Gandhi was shifted to Pretoria. He travelled with escort, and at night, shivering under a blanket. His cell in this jail was marked ‘isolated’; the bed was hard, there was no pillow, and ghee was served only twice a week (but the dreadful mealie pap every day). The other prisoners were all Africans; one asked Gandhi whether his crime was theft, another if it was the illegal sale of alcohol.

The work he was put to in Pretoria was dreary, namely, polishing the floor of his cell and the corridor. He was also denied permission to write letters in Gujarati. He pleaded that his wife was recovering from a serious illness, and that his letters ‘served as medicine to her’, but the authorities were unyielding.
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Since he could not communicate directly with his wife, Gandhi sent her a message via Albert West. ‘Please tell Mrs G. that I am all right,’ he wrote to West.

She knows that my happiness depends more upon my mental state than upon physical surroundings. Let her cherish this thought and not worry about me. For the sake of the children, she should help herself get better. She should have the bandages regularly and add hip-baths if necessary. She should adhere to the diet I used to give. She ought not to start walking till she is quite restored.
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It was brave and unselfish of Gandhi not to draw attention to his own condition. For this, without question, was his harshest prison term yet. He could write only one letter a month, and there were strict curbs on visitors. Henry Polak applied three times to see him, but was refused permission. However, Gandhi’s agent in Pretoria was allowed to visit. This was M. Lichtenstein, the man who, back in September 1906, had offered the vote of thanks at the Empire Theatre meeting which first proposed passive resistance. Now, visiting the leader of the satyagraha in jail, he was dismayed to find him in solitary confinement, where his warders ‘regularly abuse and humiliate him’, while giving him ‘a worse diet than that of a Kaffir prisoner’.

Lichtenstein communicated what he saw to Polak, adding as his own view that he thought Gandhi ‘was very near a break-down’. Polak then wrote an anguished letter of complaint to David Pollock, a Justice of the Peace and a well respected resident of Johannesburg. He found it ‘heart-breaking’ that ‘this high-minded gentleman, who has all along
conducted a campaign with clean hands and a lofty spirit, is being tortured in this way’. Knowing the prisoner as he did, Polak was certain that

what is in Mr Gandhi’s mind today, in the midst of these degrading circumstances by which he finds himself surrounded, is no thought for himself and his own personal sufferings, but the feeling that, if this treatment is meted out to him, a cultured man, a barrister, a member of a noble Indian family, a man who has refused the Chief Justiceship of his native State, what must be the attitude of the Authorities to his less highly-equipped brethren in the Transvaal who are voiceless …

In a postscript whose tone matched that of the letter itself, Polak said he dared not communicate these things to Gandhi’s wife Kasturba. For ‘the poor lady’s life is sufficient of a tragedy as it is, with her husband in gaol and her eldest son in gaol … She is now just managing to drag herself about after a long and painful illness, and it will almost certainly mean a relapse for her, if I so much as whisper what is going on.’
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David Pollock passed on this letter to the Governor of the Transvaal, with a note marking his own dismay that Gandhi, ‘of all people in South Africa’, was marched in handcuffs ‘like a common felon through the streets of the Capital’ when conveyed from the prison to the courts to testify in a case. He urged Lord Selborne to institute an enquiry ‘into the specific allegation that the considerate treatment accorded to political prisoners in civilized territories has not been extended to Mr Gandhi’. Pollock received a brusque reply, stating that ‘Mr Gandhi, when he voluntarily sought imprisonment, did [so] of course knowing that he could not expect treatment in any way different from other prisoners.’
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This suggests that whereas the Transvaal Government thought Gandhi to be a common criminal, in the eyes of his friends and supporters he was (as Henry Polak put it) ‘a political prisoner, fighting for conscience’s sake and the self-respect of his people.’ Their complaints reached London, and from London were re-directed to Pretoria. This had some effect, for the Transvaal Prime Minister sent David Pollock a terse note saying that ‘Prisoner M. K. Gandhi is confined at Pretoria Gaol, where he has been shown special consideration. He was offered ghee but declined. He has however accepted the sleeping outfit reserved for Europeans and is well supplied with books.’
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