Gandhi Before India (58 page)

As ever, Gandhi left open the possibility of a compromise. Two English friends, the lawyer J. C. Gibson and the minister Charles Phillips, had offered to talk to the Government. Gandhi told them that if the existing legislation was repealed, so that all
bona fide
Indian residents of Transvaal were allowed to enter, live and practise their trade, and the laws so modified ‘as to enable any Asiatic immigrants of culture to enter the Colony on precisely the same terms as Europeans’, then ‘the granting of these two concessions will finally close the struggle, and remove the question from the arena of Indian politics.’
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In India, Gopal Krishna Gokhale introduced a bill in the Viceroy’s Legislative Council seeking to stop the export of indentured labour to Natal. The bill was tabled on 25 February 1910, with Gokhale speaking eloquently on the handicaps of Indians in different provinces of South Africa. Indenture was the original sin; had it not been introduced there ‘would have been no Indian problem in that sub-continent today’. The system was akin to slavery; it ferried ‘helpess men and women to a distant land’ to labour under harsh conditions and under employers whose language, customs and traditions were so alien to their own. When freed, the labourers were subject to a savage and punitive tax. The traders who serviced their needs were, in turn, subject to manifold restrictions.

Such was the situation in Natal; the whites in the Transvaal, meanwhile, had inflicted on their Indian co-subjects ‘galling and degrading indignities and humiliations’ of a kind unprecedented in the history of the Empire. These cumulative insults meant that ‘no single question of our time has evoked more bitter feelings throughout India – feelings in the presence of which the best friends of British rule have had to remain helpless – than the continued ill-treatment of Indians in South Africa.’
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Gokhale’s motion was resoundingly endorsed by other members. The gifted Bombay lawyer M. A. Jinnah said the treatment of Indians in South Africa had ‘roused the feelings of all classes in this country to the highest pitch’. Yet, because of the indifference of the Government of India, ‘we are not a wee bit better than we were at the commencement of 1907 when the struggle reached its very height’. A Mr Mudholkar affirmed that on this question there was ‘a singular unanimity of opinion among men of all the races, creeds, castes and sections who inhabit this vast continent’. Mazharul Haque, a member from Bihar, compared the £3 tax in Natal to the
jeziya
, the fee levied on non-believers in Islamic states about which European historians had written so harshly. Its application was both ironic and shameful, since ‘Buddha, Christ and Mohammed were [all] Asiatics.’
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Gokhale was followed by more than a dozen speakers, with the debate covering sixty closely printed pages of the legislative record. The motion passed unanimously: with effect from 1 July 1911, no more Indians would be sent to work on the sugar plantations or in the coal mines of Natal. Following the proceedings through the newspapers that came to him by post, Gandhi thought this would lead to an ‘immediate improvement’ in the status of Indians in Natal. In the Transvaal, the struggle for just treatment would continue, but now perhaps with a greater chance of success.
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The hopes were illusory. From March, the Transvaal Government instituted harsh measures to break the resistance. Many prisoners (among them Manilal Gandhi) were put in solitary confinement. Other resisters were sent overland to the Portuguese-controlled port of Delagoa Bay and back by ship to India. They arrived in Bombay and Madras, in near destitution. The stories of the deportees were circulated in the Indian press and passed on to the Colonial Office by L. W. Ritch. From Ritch’s account, it appeared the authorities had picked on the
poorest and most vulnerable. Those deported included Gulam Mahomed, a mine worker who had served with the British in the Anglo-Boer War; Kathia, a washerman who had originally come to Natal under indenture; Narajana Apanna, a bottle-seller who had lost an arm during the war; and Ramsamy Moodlai, a hawker who had lived in the Transvaal since 1888.
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On 1 June 1910, the four Colonies of Natal, Transvaal, the Cape and the Orange Free State – previously autonomous if not independent – became constituents of a larger entity, known officially as the Union of South Africa. There would be a new, whites-only parliament, with a prime minister and cabinet working under the (nominal) supervision of a governor-general sent out from London.

Superficially, the Union in South Africa followed the pattern laid down by other British dominions. In 1867 the different provinces of Canada came together and formed a central parliament. In 1900 the Australian colonies did likewise. The South African case, however, differed in one crucial respect from its predecessors. At the time of the Union, the white settlers were very far from being a majority in a land they claimed as their own.

On 2 June, Gandhi issued a letter to the press, noting that for his people the day of Union was marked by fresh arrests. Those in jail included ‘Mr Joseph Royeppen, the Barrister and Cambridge Graduate’ and ‘a cultured Indian and representative Parsee, Mr Sorabji’. The Indian leader pointedly and poignantly asked:

What can a Union under which the above state of things is continued mean to Asiatics, except that it is a combination of hostile forces arrayed against them? The Empire is supposed to have become stronger for the Union. Is it to crush by its weight and importance Asiatic subjects of the Crown? It was no doubt right and proper that the birth of Union should have been signalised for the Natives of South Africa by the clemency of the Crown towards [the Zulu chief] Dinizulu. Dinizulu’s discharge will naturally fire the imagination of the South African Natives. Will it not be equally proper to enable the Asiatics in South Africa to feel that there is a new and benignant spirit abroad in South Africa by conceding their demands, which are held, I make bold to say, to be intrinsically just by nine out of every ten intelligent people in this Continent?
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The Union of Europeans in South Africa was hostile to the Asians who lived in the country. However, individual Europeans were sympathetic, none more so than Hermann Kallenbach. On 30 May, the architect had donated a farm outside Johannesburg to the Indians. So long as the struggle lasted, ‘passive resisters and their indigent families’ could live on the farm ‘free of any rent or charge’.
²³
The farm was large – more than 1,000 acres – and had many fruit trees, two wells and a small spring. The ground was mostly level, but a small hillock rose at one edge of the property. The property was twenty-two miles from the city, yet close to a railway station named Lawley. Gandhi, with Kallenbach’s endorsement, chose to name the farm after Tolstoy.

As a vegetarian himself, Kallenbach prohibited shooting on the farm. He also eschewed, as far as possible, the use of machinery and hired labour. A reporter who visited shortly after the gift described Tolstoy Farm as ‘an earnest attempt to bring East and West nearer along (shall I say) right lines and by easy though slow stages.’
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Tolstoy Farm had further consolidated the friendship between the European Jew, Hermann Kallenbach and the Indian Bania, Mohandas Gandhi. Yet some other Western friends of Gandhi were not equally enamoured of the experiment. Henry Polak had presented Ruskin’s
Unto This Last
to Gandhi, thinking it would appeal to his friend’s romantic ruralism. It did, and the founding of Phoenix followed. But the Polaks themselves did not spend much time at the settlement. They were anti-racist egalitarians without being anti-industrial polemicists. Millie especially had found the facilities at Phoenix primitive, and the company confining. The Polaks were all city people, and quite happy (and proud) to be so.
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Likewise, some of Gandhi’s closest Indian companions were not ascetic in their disposition. He himself was very aware that not all protesters were seekers. He knew that few
satyagrahis
would become
sevak
s, servants of society in the deeper sense. He knew that Gujarati merchants, whether Hindu or Muslim, did not like working with their hands. So, for this new venture, he asked them merely to contribute money and materials. The work of settling and improving Tolstoy Farm would be done by the Gandhi family, by Indians from castes and communities more accustomed to hard labour, and by the owner and patron himself.

The first residents of the new settlement were Gandhi, his son Manilal, and Kallenbach. They were soon joined by a group of Tamils, among them Thambi Naidoo and his family. The Indians worked with African labourers on constructing new buildings, carrying stones from the hill to the site. Friends and supporters in Johannesburg sent mattresses, blankets, towels, utensils, fruits and vegetables. The donors were not all Indian; thus the wife of a Nonconformist minister sent forty pounds of home-made marmalade, while the Cantonese Club of Johannesburg gave rice, sugar, monkey-nuts and paraffin.
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By the end of June, a school was functioning on the farm. It had five pupils, including Manilal and Ramdas Gandhi. Their father was the main teacher. In late July, Kasturba Gandhi arrived to join her husband. The family unit had been restored, after a five-year period in which the father had been mostly in Johannesburg, the mother wholly at Phoenix, and the sons shuttling in between.

Since Kasturba had the company of other women, she was not lonely. And the experience for her boys was transformative. Cooking, cleaning, digging the land – his sons, Gandhi told his nephew Maganlal, were no longer

engrossed in thought as [they] used to be in Phoenix. This is the result of manual labour. In pampering the corpulent body that has been given to us and pretending that we earn [our living] by our intellect, we have become sinners and are tempted to fall into a thousand and one evil ways. I regard the Kaffirs, with whom I constantly work these days, as superior to us. What they do in their ignorance we have to do knowingly. In outward appearance we should look just like the Kaffirs.
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Working alongside the Africans, Gandhi came to a clearer realization of their predicament. ‘The negroes alone are the original inhabitants of this land,’ he wrote in
Indian Opinion
. ‘We have not seized the land from them by force; we live here with their goodwill. The whites, on the other hand, have occupied the country forcibly and appropriated it to themselves’. The formulation was striking, as well as new – once accustomed to praising British values and British institutions, Gandhi now pointed instead to the illegitimacy of their presence and rule in Africa.
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Clearly, he had progressed considerably from the unsympathetic and hostile attitude towards Africans he had displayed in his first years in
Natal. When the annual high school examinations for 1910 were held in Pretoria,
Indian Opinion
asked why Africans were not allowed to sit with their white peers. In previous years, all students had taken the examination together. This time, the management of the Town Hall – where the exams were held – passed a resolution that no African or any other person of colour would be allowed to enter the building.
²⁹
Gandhi thought this provocation enough for passive resistance. ‘In a country like this’, he remarked,

the Coloured people are placed in an extremely difficult situation. We think there is no way out of this except satyagraha. Such instances are a natural consequence of the whites’ refusal to treat the Coloured people as their equals. It is in order to put an end to this state of affairs that we have been fighting in the Transvaal, and it is not surprising that the fight against a people with deep prejudice should take a long time.
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Shortly afterwards, Gandhi received a letter from two friends in Natal, who felt that his having recently travelled third-class was demeaning to the leader and to the prestige of the community he represented. Gandhi answered that he wished to live like a poor man; besides, he ‘shuddered to read the account of the hardships the Kaffirs had to suffer in the third-class carriages in the Cape and I wanted to experience the same hardships myself.’
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At Tolstoy Farm, the Gandhi family and the African labourers both worked under the direction of Hermann Kallenbach, who was both a trained architect and a superbly skilled mason and carpenter. The benefactor found rich fulfilment in his gift and his work. ‘I have given up meat-eating, smoking and drinking, and practise asceticism,’ he wrote to his brother Simon. ‘What Tolstoy wants and what I too strive for, is to recognise the correct thing without disturbing my fellow man.’
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Gandhi, meanwhile, had written to Tolstoy, telling him about the farm named after him and worked according to his principles. The seer wrote back, saying, ‘your work in Transvaal, which seems to be far away from the centre of our world, is yet the most fundamental and the most important to us [in] supplying the most weighty practical proof in which the world can now share and with which must participate not only the Christians but all the peoples of the world.’ He compared the work of the Indians to men in Russia refusing to serve in the military.
The two struggles were joined, in Tolstoy’s mind, in a common, heroic endeavour. Thus, ‘however small may be the number of your participants in non-resistance and the number of those in Russia who refuse military service, both the one and the other may assert with audacity that “God is with us” and “God is more powerful than men”.’

Two months later Tolstoy died.
Indian Opinion
printed a commemorative issue, with a large portrait and several appreciations. Gandhi noted, not without pride, that ‘in his last days’ Tolstoy had extended ‘encouragement to the [Transvaal] satyagrahis’, assuring them ‘justice from God, if not from the rulers’.
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