Gandhi Before India (51 page)

In the middle of September, after ten fruitless weeks in London, Gandhi wrote asking for a further interview with Lord Morley, the celebrated liberal thinker who was now serving as Secretary of State for India. ‘We cannot believe,’ wrote Gandhi, ‘that Lord Morley, who is regarded all
over the world as the type of British Liberalism would regard with indifference so reactionary and illiberal a policy as that which has been adopted by the Transvaal Government.’ Having appealed to Morley’s reputation, he now appealed to the duties of his office, by speaking of the support that Henry Polak was receiving on his tour through the sub-continent, which showed that ‘India is deeply hurt by the insult that is put upon her by the racial disqualification imported for the first time into colonial legislation, and is much moved by the sufferings that have been gone through by hundreds of British Indians in the Transvaal.’

The letter received an arch reply, which noted that ‘the point which you wish to press upon Lord Morley is not new to him’. Morley would not grant another interview. Gandhi and Habib were told to meet the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Crewe, instead. When they did, Crewe asked: ‘Can you not accept the substantial thing that General Smuts is willing to give?’ Gandhi answered that Smuts’ proposal to admit educated Indians by administrative discretion ‘still leaves the racial taint on the Statute-book’. Crewe responded, ‘What you say is just and proper, but General Smuts is not an Englishman and, therefore, does not like the idea even of theoretical equality.’

At this stage, Hajee Habib played the Imperial card, noting that ‘the matter was exciting a very great deal of commotion in India.’ Gandhi added that ‘the racial question is being very keenly resented in India.’ Crewe said he had already spoken to Smuts of the wider repercussions, but the General felt that ‘if theoretical equality were kept up, it might be used for fresh agitation in order to increase the demands.’ Gandhi clarified that if the principle of right was conceded, ‘we should not raise any further agitation.’ Crewe said, in closing, that he would discuss the question again with Smuts.
³³

Henry Polak’s campaign in India – mentioned meaningfully to Lords Morley and Crewe – had indeed been bearing fruit. Landing in Bombay in the first week of August, he met newspaper editors, leading industrialists (such as the Parsi, Jehangir Petit), rising lawyers (among them the London-educated Gujarati Muslim, Mohammed Ali Jinnah) and veteran nationalists, notably Dadabhai Naoroji, who, despite being very old and very frail, read
Indian Opinion
regularly and said he admired Gandhi’s ‘persistence and perseverence’. ‘All my time has been occu
pied,’ wrote Polak to Gandhi, ‘in seeing people [and] being interviewed.’ His friend’s mentor, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, had placed ‘the whole of his organisation [the Servants of India Society] at my disposal’. Although Gokhale was ‘killing himself with overwork’, and had just received ‘a most depressing report’ from his doctor, he had found time to read a draft of a pamphlet Polak had written on the situation in South Africa. The Professor ‘thinks it good, has read it, and whilst he thinks it much too strong in parts (I have since toned it down somewhat), has passed it.’ Polak was now in search of a publisher, armed with an assurance from Jehangir Petit that he would underwrite the cost of printing 20,000 copies.
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Having acquired a smattering of Hindustani, Polak had taken to addressing Gandhi as ‘Bhai’, or brother (he later amended this to ‘Bada Bhai’, elder brother). Hearing of the stonewalling by the big men in London, Polak wrote that ‘yours is splendid patience. I envy you. I see more and more the beauty of the Gita teaching – act, and don’t worry about results. But I see more and more how difficult it is to do this and admire the man who can.’

Three weeks talking to Indians in India had only consolidated Polak’s respect for Gandhi. ‘The conclusion I have [come] to after all these conversations and interviews,’ he wrote,

is that India, even at its most intelligent, is many miles behind us in the Transvaal. The people here admit the value of passive resistance, but say that you wouldn’t get anyone to go to gaol. I don’t know what my countrymen are worrying about India for. It seems a harmless enough country. Provided they don’t send another Curzon or anyone … approaching one here, the country is safe for apparently hundreds of years. They want a couple of hundred Gandhis here. Do you know, I haven’t met a man here who approaches you spiritually or in intensity of devotion. Mr G[opal] K[rishna] G[okhale] is the nearest, and though he is probably ahead of you intellectually, in public experience, and in administrative power, he is not in the running so far as pure religion is concerned and he himself admits it.
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On 14 September, a large public meeting in support of the Transvaal Indians was held in Bombay’s Town Hall. Polak and sundry Servants of India did the organizing. An array of knights were in attendance, of different faiths – Sir J. B. Petit, Sir V. D. Thackersey, Sir Currimbhoy
Ibrahim. Among the untitled grandees were the lawyer M. A. Jinnah and the editor K. Natarajan. The main speaker was Gokhale, who, after rehearing the facts of discrimination and the course of the struggle, saluted the leadership of ‘the indomitable Gandhi, a man of tremendous spiritual power, one who is made of the stuff of which great heroes and martyrs are made’. Gandhi and his colleagues were ‘fighting not for themselves but for the honour and future interests of our motherland’. ‘I am sure,’ said Gokhale, that ‘if any of us had been in the Transvaal during these days we should have been proud to range ourselves under Mr Gandhi’s banner and work with him and suffer in the cause.’ This was extraordinary praise, from a man who was perhaps the pre-eminent Indian statesman of his day. Polak, speaking after Gokhale, stressed the unity that had been forged by the struggle. The Indians in the Transvaal had thrown aside ‘all ancient misunderstandings. Hindu, Mahomedan, Parsi, Christian, and Sikh have … stood in the same prisoner’s dock and starved in the same gaol.’ Class as well as community differences were transcended, as ‘the merchant and the hawker, the lawyer and the priest, the Brahmin and the man of low caste, have all drunk the same bitter sweet draught, have all eaten from the same dish of bitter experience.’ Polak then named some stalwarts, such as the Tamil Thambi Naidoo, ‘who goes to jail with a smile on his face’; the Muslim A. M. Cachalia, who ‘lost his whole fortune rather than break his solemn oath’ (to go to jail); the Parsi, Rustamjee, who would ‘give all he could himself, in the cause of his country’; and, not least, ‘Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, saint and patriot, who would gladly allow his body to be torn asunder by wild horses rather than compromise his honour and that of his country.’
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The press reports of this meeting reached Gandhi in London, to cheer and console him after the failure to get the Imperial Government to see his point of view. Later letters from Polak, who had been to stay with the Indian leader in Poona, passed on confirmation of Gokhale’s admiration. He held Gandhi up ‘as an example of patriotism, moderation, endurance, self-sacrifice and practical endeavour’. ‘His profoundest regret,’ continued Polak, ‘is that you are not here to join him and inspire him in his work. Were you two together, it would be a rare combination of soul forces.’
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From Bombay, Polak proceeded to Gandhi’s homeland, Gujarat, where meetings were held in Surat, Kathore and Ahmedabad, all
passing resolutions condemning the ‘unjust and degrading legislation’ in Transvaal and saluting the sacrifice of those who opposed it.
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Polak now moved south to Madras, to the land of the Tamils who had been in the vanguard of the satyagraha in the Transvaal. His host there was G. A. Natesan, an energetic editor, printer and publisher known to his friends as an ‘American hustler’. Polak spoke at a public meeting, where, as he told Gandhi, ‘I had a fine ovation, and people told me it drew tears. Isn’t it wonderful! And yet, the Transvaal story is enough to bring tears.’ The people he met in Madras were, like Gokhale, impressed above all by the inter-religious harmony that underlay the struggle in South Africa. ‘Everybody to whom I have spoken,’ he reported, ‘Hindu, Mahomedan and Parsi alike, feels that we are far advanced politically over the majority of Indians here. They all feel that we have sent a lesson which they ought to follow but that they will have the greatest possible difficulty in following.’

Polak travelled from Madras to the
mofussil
, to the interior of the Tamil country where so many of the indentured labourers in Natal had their roots. Among the towns Polak visited and spoke in were Madurai, Tirunelveli, Trichy and Tuticorin, drawing the comment from Gandhi that he had seen ‘practically the whole of India – a privilege I have myself not yet been able to enjoy’.
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Not the ‘whole of India’, actually, for, as Polak cheekily told his friend, he still hoped to ‘go over to Malabar before I leave here, in order to see the Nair women, who I am told, take one husband after another. That beats you all, who take one wife after another. I am inclined to think the women are right!’
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In the last week of October, G. A. Natesan brought out Henry Polak’s pamphlet
The Indians of South Africa: Helots Within the Empire and How They Are Treated
. This was divided into two parts, the first providing an overview of Indian migration into South Africa, the migrants’ work as labourers and traders, and the restrictions they faced in different provinces; the second focusing on the Transvaal and the resistance movement there. Written with passion and clarity, it described indenture as a system of ‘heartlessness and cruelty’, and the free Indian as always living ‘in peril of having his feelings outraged and his sense of decency offended in a number of ways’. The anti-Asiatic prejudices of colonial statesmen like Lord Milner and General Smuts were exposed and documented. The struggle of the Indians, who had ‘deliberately pitted soul-force against brute-strength’, was narrated and celebrated.

While Polak spoke at length of the heroism of ordinary folk, he did not fail to draw attention to Gandhi’s own sufferings. He mentioned a protest by him which led to better food being served to the prisoners. He wrote in vivid, even lurid, detail of how a Chinese prisoner attempted a ‘bestial act’ on an African, with Gandhi, in the same cell, ‘dread[ing] every moment that the Chinese, foiled of his horrible purpose with the powerful Kaffir, would direct his attentions to himself (Mr Gandhi)’. On another occasion, Gandhi, reaching for a closet to answer nature’s call, ‘was seized by a burly Kaffir, lifted high in the air, and dashed violently to the ground. Had he not seized hold of a door-post as he fell he would undoubtedly have had his skull split open!’

Polak ended his pamphlet with a pointed, passionate wake-up call to India and Indians:

Do the names of Gandhi, Dawood Mahomed, Rustomjee Jeevanjee, Cachalia, Aswat, Thambi Naidoo, Vyas, Imam Abdul Kadir Bawazeer, and a host of others, not call forth the flush of shame and indignation upon the cheek of the leaders of Indian thought and life, that these men should have done so much for India, and they so little for their humble suffering brethren in the Transvaal? Mahomedan, Hindu, Parsee, Christian, Sikh, lawyer, priest, merchant, trader, hawker, servant, soldier, waiter, poor man, rich man, grey-beard, child, man, and woman have suffered alike in this gigantic struggle to maintain the national honour unsullied. The Transvaal Indians have understood that upon their efforts depended whether or not this race-virus should infect the rest of South Africa and the rest of the Empire, whether India herself would not have to suffer and drink deep of the cup of humiliation. What of all this has India realized? Have the bitter cries from the Transvaal Indians penetrated to the ears of their brethren in the Motherland?

What patriotic Indians should do, said Polak, was to form a national body with branches in every major city, which would make ‘powerful representations’ to the Government on the condition of their compatriots in South Africa. Simultaneously, ‘the press should agitate the question in season and out of season.’ Surely it was not ‘beyond the powers of the accumulated intelligence of India … to keep the ship of State off the rocks of racialism’.
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Polak’s pamphlet was deemed dangerous enough for the South
African authorities to publicly denounce it.
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On the other hand, his publisher, G. A. Natesan, was so impressed that he now asked Polak to write a short life of Gandhi, in a series that had previously seen profiles of Dadabhai Naoroji, M. G. Ranade, G. K. Gokhale, Lajpat Rai and other leaders of the Indian national movement.

Modestly titled
M. K. Gandhi: A Sketch of His Life and Work
, this second pamphlet was published anonymously. Polak began by speaking of Gandhi’s ‘extraordinary love of truth’, his ‘proverbial’ generosity, his ‘sense of public duty’. The ‘majestic personality of Mohandas Gandhi’, wrote this friend and follower, ‘overshadows his comparatively insignficant physique. One feels oneself in the presence of a moral giant, whose pellucid soul is a clear, still lake, in which one sees Truth clearly mirrored.’

These personal qualities were oriented towards a large cause. ‘Mr Gandhi had appointed for himself one supreme task – to bring Hindus and Mussalmans together and to make them realise that they were one brotherhood and sons of the same Motherland.’ Polak made the large, daring, claim that ‘perhaps, in this generation, India has not produced such a noble man – saint, patriot, statesman in one.’ Gandhi, said his English admirer, ‘lives for God and for India’. His ‘one desire is to see unity among his fellow-countrymen’. By forging unity among Hindus and Muslims in South Africa, Gandhi had demonstrated ‘the possibility of Indian national unity and the lines upon which the national edifice shall be constructed’.
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Polak wrote to his friend that ‘with your great modesty you will probably be unable to appreciate the fact that you are regarded as one of India’s greatest men today. But I am afraid I shall play but a poor Boswell to your Johnson.’ In another letter he was slightly less modest. ‘I have revealed to the Indian leaders what sort of man
you
are,’ wrote Polak to Gandhi. ‘Do you know, I have not met
one
man to equal you in meekness, spirituality, devotion, and practical energy. I don’t believe any other country could have given you birth.’