Gandhi Before India (52 page)

Through his conversations, speeches and writings in India, Polak had helped make Gandhi far better known in his own country. The admiration was manifest and genuine, and the subject was suitably grateful. When an Anglo-Indian paper dismissed Polak as a ‘paid agent’ of the Transvaal Indians, Gandhi wrote a spirited rejoinder, praising his
commitment and sacrifice, and saying, with uncharacteristic sharpness, that ‘if a son in a joint family dying in the performance of his sonship may be described as a paid agent, because he is clothed and fed out of the family funds, then Mr Polak is undoubtedly a paid agent, but not until then.’
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The Government of India knew how important and effective Polak’s work was. He was followed everywhere by police spies, who tampered with his mail, and asked questions of those working in the homes and inns where he stayed. Polak noticed this with amusement at first, but with time also with irritation. ‘The authorities must be mad,’ he told Gandhi, ‘to follow that damnable Russian System [of spying] which in England we affect to condemn but apparently it is all lies and hypocrisy!’
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When told of the spies, Gandhi told Polak that he could ‘understand my letters to you being opened, but that Millie’s letters to you are deliberately opened, passes my comprehension. Let us hope they are wiser for having read the letters, and also that they have learnt the meaning of wifely devotion.’
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Polak’s reply underscored the difference between the marriage of the Gandhis, based as it was on obligation and tradition, and his own, based rather on love and romance. ‘You take the opening of Millie’s letter more philosophically than she and I do,’ he remarked. ‘I see that your days of writing love-letters are over! I am sorry for you! I haven’t yet authorised Millie to start classes in marital devotion!’

Polak’s extended trip to India was itself an object lesson in devotion to a friend and a cause. The real nature of his sacrifice is revealed in a letter that thanked Gandhi, with sincerity and also envy, for spending so much time with his family in London. ‘Don’t you find Millie more lovable as time passes?’ he wrote, adding, ‘I do!!! (Amazing discovery, isn’t it?)’
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From Madras, Polak took a boat to Rangoon. He was met at the wharf by Pranjivan Mehta – now back from London – and by Madanjit Vyavaharik, one of Gandhi’s original collaborators on
Indian Opinion
, who was also based here, editing a journal called
United Burma
.
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Polak stayed with Mehta, discussing, among other things, the past and future of their mutual friend. Either off his own bat, or in consultation with Polak, Mehta wrote Gopal Krishna Gokhale a remarkable letter which began:

Dear Sir,

During my last trip to Europe I saw a great deal of Mr Gandhi. From year to year (I have known him intimately for over twenty years) I have found him getting more and more selfless. He is now leading almost an ascetic sort of life – not the life of an ordinary ascetic that we usually see but that of a great Mahatma and the one idea that engrosses his mind is his motherland.

It seems to me that any one who desires to work for his country ought to study Gandhi and his latest institution – Phoenix Colony and Phoenix School. The passive resistance as carried on in the Transvaal under his Guidance can also be better studied on the spot.

Mr Polak who is now here and living with me, tells me that the ‘Servants of India’ are doing excellent work; it seems to me that the study of every worker for India is not complete unless he has studied Mr Gandhi and his Institutions.

Mehta went on to offer to fund an associate of Gokhale’s to go to South Africa ‘and put himself absolutely at the disposal of Mr Gandhi’. He even suggested a name – that of the Madras scholar and orator, V. S. Srinivasa Sastri.
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This was a precocious pronouncement of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s greatness. Particularly striking is Mehta’s use of the honorific ‘Mahatma’, ‘great and holy soul’, normally reserved for spiritual figures whose influence resonates down the centuries, here conferred on a mere lawyer and activist. The conventional wisdom has it that it was the poet Rabindranath Tagore who, around 1919, first began to call Gandhi ‘Mahatma’,
after
he had become a major figure in Indian politics. An alternate claim has been made on behalf of the Gujarat town of Gondal, which seems to have conferred the title on Gandhi when he visited it on his return from South Africa in 1915. Pranjivan Mehta preceded them both – although, of course, in a private letter rather than a public declaration.

We do not know whether Polak read Mehta’s letter before it was sent, and it appears that Gandhi never saw or knew of it at all. The recipient of the letter, although a man of great wisdom and selflessness, must have read it with mixed emotions. Gandhi professed Gokhale to be his mentor; but here was Mehta telling the teacher that he could learn a lesson from the student in South Africa, that the struggle for the
emancipation of millions in India could profit from a close study of the struggle of a few thousand migrants in Natal and the Transvaal.

After staying with Mehta in Rangoon, Polak sailed to Calcutta to carry on his campaign for the South African Indians. A large public meeting was held here on 3 December, ‘to protest against the treatment of Indians in the Transvaal’. The gathering was ecumenical – it included the prominent Hindu liberals Bhupendranath Basu and Surendranath Bannerjee, leading Bengali Muslims, as well as some Marwari businessmen of the city.
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From Calcutta, Polak proceeded to the north of the country, speaking at towns across the United Provinces and Punjab. In Banaras the meeting was chaired by Annie Besant, the former British socialist who was now an Indian spiritualist. Besant, said Polak, ‘delivered the finest address that I have heard for many years. There was no play acting in it. What she said was from the heart and she spoke very strongly.’ Mrs Besant subscribed Rs 30 for a fund for the South African Indians, which had collected Rs 1,000 by the end of the meeting. This pleased Polak, as did a ‘most refreshing dip’ the next day in the river Ganges, a rite of passage for a Hindu, but purely optional for this mostly lapsed Jew.
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Polak’s talks and writings were noticed by, among other people, the brilliant Bengali radical Aurobindo Ghose (later known as Sri Aurobindo). In April 1907, Ghose had written a series of essays on the possibilities of passive resistance in India.
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He had not, it appears, read Gandhi at that stage; nor, it seems, had Gandhi read him. Now, Polak’s visit spurred the Bengali revolutionary to write a fascinating essay on the situation in South Africa. ‘The great glory of the Transvaal Indians,’ wrote Ghose,

is that while men under such circumstances have always sunk into the condition to which they have been condemned and needed others to help them out of the mire, these sons of Bharatavarsha, inheritors of an unexampled moral and spiritual tradition, have vindicated the superiority of the Indian people and its civilisation to all other peoples in the globe and all other civilisations by the spirit in which they have refused to recognise the dominance of brute force over the human soul. Stripped of all means of resistance, a helpless handful in a foreign land, unaided by India, put off with empty professions of sympathy by English statesmen, they, ignored
by humanity, are fighting humanity’s battle in the pure strength of the spirit, with no weapon but the moral force of their voluntary sufferings and utter self-sacrifice … The passive resistance which we had not the courage and unselfishness to carry out in India, they have carried to the utmost in the Transvaal under far more arduous circumstances, with far less right to hope for success. Whether they win or lose in the struggle, they have contributed far more than their share to the future greatness of their country.
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Indian politics was then divided into ‘Moderate’ and ‘Extreme’ camps, the former politely, even apologetically, asking for concessions from the British, the latter militantly, even angrily, demanding them. Aurobindo Ghose was in political terms an ‘extremist’, indeed, an
extreme
Extremist. He had close contacts with terrorist groups in Bengal, and in May 1908 he and his brother Barindranath were arrested in what became known as the Alipore Bomb Case. Barin was sentenced to life imprisonment; Aurobindo, however, was released after a year in prison.
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The party of the Ghoses had (the word is inescapable) extreme contempt for Moderates like Gandhi’s mentor, Gokhale. It is a measure of Polak’s success as a publicist that he could obtain, for their cause in the Transvaal, the endorsement of both Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Aurobindo Ghose.

With Gandhi in London and Polak in the subcontinent, the English pages of
Indian Opinion
were being edited by the Reverend Joseph Doke. As before, the journal carried weekly updates on the struggle. One issue noticed the death of a young Tamil named Nagappen, who had contracted pneumonia in jail. Thirty horse-driven cabs accompanied the cortège to the cemetery. There was a wreath from the British Indian Association, and another ‘from Leung Quinn with deepest sympathy; he died for conscience’s sake.’ An editorial in
Indian Opinion
praised the contributions of Tamil women. ‘They have seen their husbands and sons imprisoned, they have taken up the duties of life which do not usually fall to a woman’s lot and have borne the heaviest burdens to make it possible for those they love to be true to conscience.’
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Gandhi’s journal also wrote about a failed assassination attempt on the Viceroy of India. ‘As passive resisters,’ commented the paper,

we have absolutely no sympathy with the employment of bombs and such like symbols of force to achieve Nationalist objects … We are thankful to believe that the upholders of bomb throwing are a small minority of the responsible men, who are working for the uplifting of India, and we trust that the ethics of passive resistance, which are now prominent in our Motherland through the interest which she is taking in our welfare [in South Africa], may lay hold of the judgment of our people.

This was written by the stand-in editor, Joseph Doke, who had to ventriloquize in the absence of Gandhi and speak thus of India as his ‘Motherland’, too.
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In other issues, Harilal’s fourth term in prison was noticed, as also the fresh incarcerations of Parsee Rustomjee, Thambi Naidoo and others. In other places and past times, remarked
Indian Opinion
, jail-going ‘brought shame, humiliation and the criminal taint with it.’ In this place at this time, however, ‘the glory of heroism rests like a halo upon it – and in the Transvaal the man who has not been to gaol is the questionable character.’
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As before, meetings were held every Sunday at the Hamidia Mosque in Johannesburg, where the latest batch of satyagrahis released were welcomed and the latest batch of satyagrahis who had courted arrest were saluted. At one meeting, in early September, Joseph Doke made a special point of praising the Chinese resisters. He told his Indian friends that they ‘ought to be delighted how loyally they were standing by their Asiatic brethren, so that Mr Quinn and 74 Chinese had just been arrested, and would have to face imprisonment.’
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Gandhi was keeping in touch with South Africa through
Indian Opinion
and via letters from friends. One of these was Thambi Naidoo, now temporarily out of jail. When he emerged from his most recent prison sentence,
Indian Opinion
wrote that ‘Mr Thambi Naidoo looks well and hardy, and he has come out a giant in purpose. His is an uncrushable spirit.’
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In early October, Thambi wrote to Gandhi that ‘all Tamil prisoners discharged from the prison during your absence are ready to go to jail again and again until the Government will grant to [
sic
] our request.’ The Tamil leader travelled to Pretoria in the last week of September, receiving a batch of resisters who had recently been discharged. He found them ‘thin and weak’ owing to the ‘insufficiency of food and the absence of ghee’ in the prison diet, and yet ‘they are all
prepare[d] to go back to gaol.’ Thambi saluted their human will, adding however that ‘I depend upon no other than Bhagawan [God], he is the only one who can bring the Government down to do their duty towards [the] weak.’
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By October 1909 it was clear that the diplomatic method advocated by Lord Ampthill had failed. Gandhi now wrote to the Colonial Office that since a settlement was not forthcoming, he intended to address a series of public meetings before returning to South Africa. He spoke to a group of Parsis in London, where he saluted the sacrifice of their co-religionists – Parsee Rustomjee, Shapurji Sorabjee,
et al
. – in South Africa. On 24 October, he spoke to a mixed gathering of Indians, sharing a platform with V. D. Savarkar. It was Vijaya Dashami, the last day of the Dasehra festival, marking the victory on the battlefield of Ram over Ravan. The moderate and the extremist were a study in contrast. Gandhi wore a tailcoat and a dress shirt. Savarkar was dressed more casually. Gandhi wrote later that ‘Mr Savarkar delivered a spirited speech on the great excellence of the Ramayana.’ Savarkar had insisted that just as, in ancient times, Hindu gods had vanquished Lankan demons with the force of arms, so with the same methods would modern Hindus now put their British conquerors to flight.
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A young student who was present remembered – forty years later – the contrast between the two men. Savarkar was ‘by far the most arresting personality’ at the meeting; for ‘around him had been built a flaming galaxy of violent revolutionism’. Gandhi, on the other hand, seemed shy and diffident; the students had to ‘ben[d] their heads forward to hear the great Mr Gandhi speak’. His voice and speech were of a piece with his manner – ‘calm, unemotional, simple, and devoid of rhetoric’.
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