Gandhi Before India (64 page)

When the news of Gokhale’s trip became public, a liberal editor in Cape Town wrote to the South African Prime Minister, General Botha, urging that the visitor be treated with courtesy. The editor had met Gokhale in India, and thus knew that he was not ‘a coolie or a mere agitator’, but ‘a man of the highest birth, character and intellect, a member of the Council of the Viceroy of India, and perhaps the strongest
individual force in Indian politics at the present time.’ Botha agreed that the guest should be treated well. Nonetheless, the risks associated with Gokhale’s visit were ‘considerable’. For instance, the municipal authorities in Johannesburg, Cape Town and other cities did not allow Coloured people to travel in trams. ‘What would Mr Gokhale say,’ asked Botha, ‘if he were to enter a tram and be asked to get out!’
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In the last week of August 1912, Pranjivan Mehta wrote to Gokhale about what he might expect to see in South Africa. Mehta worried that ‘too much strain’ would be put on Gokhale’s ‘mind and body by the gatherings and ceremonies that may have to be unavoidably held in your honour’. He then continued:

So, you will soon have an opportunity of meeting and discussing things with him. From what little conversation we have had about him, I was led to believe that you had not studied G[andhi] quite well. In my humble opinion, men like him are born on very rare occasions and then in India alone. As far as I can see, it seems to me that India has not produced an equally far-seeing prophet like him, during the last five or six centuries and that [if] he was born in the eighteenth century, India would have been a far different land from what it is now and its history would have been altogether differently written. I shall be anxiously waiting to hear from you that your present view of his capacity has altered considerably since coming in greater personal contact with him and that you see in him one of those rare men who are occasionally born to elevate humanity in the land of their birth.
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Gandhi was being placed by his friend in very elevated company. Although Mehta mentioned no names, it is clear that he was comparing Gandhi to the medieval saints Nanak and Kabir, and, going further back, to Mahavira and Gautama Buddha, founders of Jainism and Buddhism respectively. He suggested that had Gandhi been born in the eighteenth century, India would not have been colonized by the British.

To place a mere lawyer and diasporic leader in this pantheon was an act of faith, and friendship. Gokhale’s answer is unavailable. How might he have reacted to Mehta’s letter? He was a generous man, and had praised Gandhi in private and in public. He probably considered Gandhi his most able protégé. He hoped that Gandhi would come back to India and take over the Servants of India Society. But surely he must
have been puzzled, if not offended, by this implicit reversal of their roles and place in Indian history. Gokhale was widely acknowledged to be the ‘strongest individual force in Indian politics’; it was in that capacity that he had been asked by Gandhi to visit South Africa. But here was Pranjivan Mehta telling him that a man he considered his follower was actually far greater than himself.

In September 1912 Gandhi executed a deed transferring ownership of Phoenix Farm to five trustees, these being the Durban merchant Omar Hajee Amod Johari, Parsee Rustomjee, Kallenbach, Ritch and Pranjivan Mehta – a Muslim, a Parsi, two Jews and a Hindu respectively. The document transferred to these five others Gandhi’s right, title and interest in the land and machinery of Phoenix, and listed eight aims by which the Farm would be run: namely, to earn a livelihood as far as possible by one’s own labour; to promote better relations between Indians and Europeans; to ‘follow and promote the ideas’ set forth by Tolstoy and Ruskin; to promote ‘purity of private life in individuals by living pure lives themselves’; to start a school to educate children mainly in their own vernaculars; to establish a sanitation and hygiene institute; to ‘train themselves generally for the service of humanity’; and to publish
Indian Opinion
for the advancement of these ideals.

Gandhi was to be manager of the trust during his lifetime, and have two acres and a building for the use of his family. He would draw the same allowance as other settlers, which was £5 a month. If he died, or left the settlement, the trustees would appoint a manager from among themselves.
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At the same time, Gandhi announced that
Indian Opinion
would no longer carry any advertisements. He had come round to the view that ‘the system of advertisement is bad in itself, in that it sets up insidious competition, to which we are opposed, and often lends itself to misrepresentation on a large scale’. In the past, the journal had ‘always used our discrimination and rejected many advertisements which we could not conscientiously take’. Now it would stop taking ads altogether.
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The affairs of Phoenix sorted, Gandhi turned his attention to welcoming Gokhale. He had not seen the older man for ten years, but they had been in regular correspondence. More recently, Gandhi’s nephew Chhaganlal had visited Poona. While studying law in London, Chhagan had fallen ill with tuberculosis, and had to abort his studies and return
to India to recover, before rejoining his uncle in South Africa. While in Poona he had written of Gokhale’s work in less-than-flattering terms. Writing to Maganlal, Gandhi said,

I felt sad when I read Chi. Chhaganlal’s description of the Servants of India Society. It is a matter of regret that a great man like Prof. Gokhale is engrossed in it. I believe he will come out of it, for he is honest. It is simply an indifferent imitation of the West. Is it proper for the servants to have servants? And who are the servants? Why was it necessary to engage them? Why do they have others cook for them? Why should there be large buildings in India? Why should not huts be enough? … What a superstition that only an M. A. or B. A. could become a ‘servant’? … I do feel that the aims of Phoenix as well as the way of life there surpass those of the [Servants of India] Society.
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There is a clear sense here that, as a person, social worker and political activist, Gandhi had equalled, if not surpassed, Gokhale. But respect was due to the latter’s status in Indian politics and his early encouragement of the then unknown Gandhi. So when Gokhale came to South Africa, his one-time disciple made sure he would get a stirring reception. He knew his mentor to have a fetish about etiquette and attire; so, to humour and honour him, he would, for the first time in years, wear a formal Kathiawari turban when meeting him off the ship in Cape Town.
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The ship carrying Gokhale, the RMS
Saxon
, landed at Cape Town on Tuesday, 22 October 1912. A large crowd of Indians had gathered at the quayside, making what Kallenbach (who was present) called ‘peculiar scenes’, a reference to the raising of flags and the shouting of slogans.
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Gandhi and a senior Muslim cleric, Imam Bawazeer, boarded the ship to escort the visitor ashore. They then took Gokhale to the home of his local hosts, the Gools, in a procession of fifty carriages.

Gokhale was presented an address on behalf of the local Indians. This was suitably ecumenical, with Hindus, Muslims and Parsis, and Gujaratis, Tamils and Hindi-speakers all signing on. Later, at a public meeeting, he was welcomed by the leading white liberal of the city, Senator W. P. Schreiner. In his speech, Schreiner praised Gandhi for his unselfishness of spirit; Gandhi, speaking next, doffed his hat in turn to the visitor, his ‘political teacher’, whose name was sacred to all Indians.

It was left to Gokhale to deal with the substantive issues. He reminded
the Europeans that since ‘everything in India was open to all’, they ‘could not hope to shut the Indian out of their territory altogether without inflicting a very serious blow on the prestige of the Empire’. He had not come to South Africa ‘to light a flame’; he had come in a ‘spirit of compromise’, with the desire to ‘aid the cause of justice’. He noted however that

India is now watching what is being done to her sons. There is a new awakening throughout the East, not merely in India, but all through Eastern lands. You feel a new life throbbing, a new national consciousness everywhere; and however indifferent India may have been in the past to the sufferings of her children and to her own humiliations, there will be more and more self-respect in the future in her dealings with such matters.
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Gokhale also met the leading Cape politician J. X. Merriman at Cape Town. Unlike Schreiner, Merriman had been too timid to attend the public reception in Gokhale’s honour. But he met him privately, later writing to Smuts that the Indian had ‘impressed me very favourably – an educated gentleman who speaks English as well as we do, is not a Baboo but a High Caste Mahratta, who were, as you know, a fighting race who gave us many a twister’. In Gokhale, Merriman saw ‘the new spirit that has arisen in the East of disgust at Western domination’. He urged Smuts to ‘do away with all the odious and illiberal machinery of repression’ against the Indians, to recognize that ‘there are other and surely greater interests at stake [in South Africa] than the conveniences of [white] traders and the prejudices of the [white] community’.
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For the next four weeks, as Gokhale travelled through South Africa, Gandhi was at his side. Everywhere, mentor and disciple made similar speeches, with Gandhi professing his admiration for Gokhale, and Gokhale asking the Europeans to look at the question not from their narrow communal interest but from the standpoint of Justice and Empire. Everywhere, Indians turned out in numbers to receive him, and to pass on messages from community groups to which they belonged – which included the Madras Indians, the United Hindu Association, the Hamidia Islamia Society, the Patidar Association, the Transvaal Indian Women’s Association, the Brahman Mandal, the Zoroastrian Anjuman, even the Ottoman Cricket Club.

From Cape Town, Gokhale carried on to Kimberley, where among those who received him was the novelist Olive Schreiner.
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Indians and
Europeans sat down together for a meal for the first time in the history of the mining town. Here, Gandhi praised Gokhale for, among other things, having ‘brought with him the much-needed rain which the parched land of Kimberley required so badly’.
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Gokhale and Gandhi carried on northwards, halting at the small towns of the Rand – Bloemhof, Klerksdorf, Potchefstroom, Krugersdorp, etc. – to allow the local Indians to pay their respects. At Krugersdorp the mayor turned up at the station to receive Gokhale, earning the ire of his fellow whites, who demanded why he had gone to meet the ‘Coolie Gentleman’ who had ‘evidently come here with the express purpose of stirring up strife’. Just because the mayor of Cape Town had met Gokhale, ‘it was not necessary that the Mayors of the Transvaal towns should follow suit.’ A meeting of whites affirmed that ‘they in Krugersdorp would do their share to help to keep this a white man’s country.’
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On 28 October, Gokhale’s party arrived at Johannesburg’s Park Station, whose ‘sombre grey of corrugated iron and girders’ had been ‘transformed for the time at least into a brilliant blaze of colours’. Gokhale exited the station through a giant arch of flowers, designed by Kallenbach, which had ‘Hearty Welcome’ written in Gujarati, and twin domes shaped in the form of the Muslim crescent and the Hindu trident.

Among the speakers at the Johannesburg meeting were two Europeans. William Hosken said that the recent incarceration of 2,700 out of 9,000 Indians in the Transvaal was ‘a horrible disgrace to our Christianity and our civilisation’. Joseph Doke asked that under the British flag ‘there should be justice for every man as a man, whether he was an Indian or a Chinese, or whatever his nationality’.

In his speech, Gokhale praised Gandhi in terms that might not have displeased Pranjivan Mehta. The Indians in South Africa, he said, ‘had self-reliance and they had a great leader’. Gandhi, ‘his friend, their friend, the friend of everyone in the room’, was ‘a great and illustrious son of whom she [India] was proud beyond words, and he was sure that men of all races and creeds would recognise in him one of the most remarkable personalities of their time’.
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On 30 October, Gandhi was interviewed by the
Transvaal Leader
on the progress of Gokhale’s visit. His mentor, he said, had ‘come to the general conclusion that the Indians resident here are entitled to civic
equality. That is to say, their movement within the Union should not be hampered and, under restrictions of a general character applying to the community at large, they should be allowed freedom of trade.’ The caveat was crucial:
civic
, not
social
or
political
equality: the freedom to practise one’s trade and to live where one wished, not the right to vote or be treated as equal in all respects with the ruling race.

Gandhi was also asked about the attitude of the Orange Free State. In his view, it was ‘part of the compromise that under the new Act the few fresh immigrants that will be allowed to come in will be free to move in any part of the Union’. In other words, Indians would or should be allowed to enter the Free State, but not perhaps to trade or farm in it. ‘But some day or other,’ added Gandhi, ‘the Free State barrier [to holding property or trading] must entirely disappear. Otherwise the Union will be a farce.’
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On 1 November, Gokhale was hosted for breakfast by the Chinese Association of Johannesburg. He was welcomed by Leung Quinn, now back in the Transvaal. Quinn spoke of how the Chinese ‘stood shoulder to shoulder with their brother Asiatics’. Theirs was ‘a fraternity larger than that of common religion and race … They hoped for the passing of British antagonism, and looked forward to the reign of sweet reason instead of stupid prejudice.’ Gokhale, in reply, spoke of the two communities having much in common, ‘both being old peoples and India having given China one of her oldest religions’.
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