Gandhi Before India (66 page)

Gokhale departed for India, with Aiyar’s complaints following him across the ocean. Aiyar now wanted a deputation to proceed to the motherland and stir up the Indian public. ‘Of course,’ he wrote, ‘such a deputation must be absolutely free from the influence of Messrs Gandhi, Polak, Rustomjee and Co.’ When Gokhale praised Gandhi in a public meeting in Bombay, Aiyar erupted again. It ‘is a national misfortune,’ said the angry journalist,

that a man of Gokhale’s intellectual calibre should have been hypnotised by Messrs Gandhi and Pollock [
sic
] who are notoriously lacking in those ingredients [necessary] for political work, and but for the regrettable influence that these two men possess over Mr Gokhale, he would have been able to do more solid work for the Indians of South Africa.
⁸⁶

P. S. Aiyar’s animus was in part born out of jealousy. He would have liked Gandhi to consult him, to work with him, to substitute Polak with him as his second-in-command. While Aiyar himself had marginal influence, for the biographer he merits attention as the only
articulate
opponent of Gandhi within the Indian community. From 1895 or thereabouts the whites of Natal had poured a steady stream of abuse at Gandhi. From 1907 or thereabouts they had been joined by their colleagues in the Transvaal. Polak, Kallenbach, Doke and Sonja Schlesin notwithstanding, Gandhi was an object of hate and ridicule to the majority of Europeans. Conversely, he was the acknowledged popular leader of the Indians in Natal and the Transvaal. To be sure, the respect he commanded among his people was not universal: some Pathans had attacked him physically when he sought to compromise with the rulers, some merchants had refused to follow him into jail when he resumed the struggle. P. S. Aiyar, however, was
sui generis
 – the only Indian in South Africa who expressed his disagreements with Gandhi in print and in sometimes splendidly vituperative prose.

With the Union of South Africa in place, there was no reason for Gandhi to remain in the Transvaal any more. Immigration laws were no longer colony-specific: any settlement General Smuts and he arrived at would apply to South Africa as a whole. And so, at the beginning of 1913, Gandhi moved to Natal, to live with his family and his disciples on the farm he had founded eight years previously.

When he was based in Johannesburg, Gandhi had still considered Phoenix his home. It was where his family lived, where his journal was produced, where his ideas for moral regeneration were enacted. The settlers looked forward to his visits with keen anticipation. The children prepared welcome arches for him; or, if he arrived at night, lighted the path to his hut with candles. The affection was reciprocated; so long as they were not his own, and not yet teenagers, Gandhi delighted in the company of children. Chhaganlal’s son recalled how the patriarch carried them across his shoulder, rolled them down a sloping garden plot, showed them his teeth fillings and – not least – cured their ailments by, in this case, prescribing raw tomatoes for boils. ‘Another thing that attracted me,’ remembered the boy, ‘was that he laughed more often than anyone in Phoenix in spite of being such an important person.’
¹

When Gandhi moved to Phoenix in January 1913, the school had thirty children. Teachers and students worked on the farm from 6 to 8 a.m. After breakfast Gandhi took the boys to the classroom, while the men went off to the press. In the afternoons, while someone else took class, Gandhi worked at the press himself. Dinner, at 5.30, was followed by songs and prayer. From 7.30 to 9 p.m. Gandhi supervised Manilal’s lessons, in a belated recognition of the special obligations of biological parenthood.

In the nine years since the settlement was founded, it had made steady progress. The hedges were trim and neat, marking out fields that produced an array of vegetables and fruits, among them succulent pineapples. The homes were furnished; some even had (as Millie Polak noted appreciatively) ‘attractive curtains at the windows’. The common areas included the river, open grounds, shrubs and trees, and a large one-room structure that served as a school in the day and as a meeting-place in the evening.

Every Sunday the residents of Phoenix gathered for an inter-faith prayer meeting. Passages from the Gita and the New Testament (among other texts) were read, and hymns in Gujarati and English sung. The founder’s own favourites included ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ and ‘The Hymn of Consecration’. An admittedly partisan observer wrote that ‘perhaps in no place in the world’ were these hymns ‘sung with greater fervour and meaning than in that little lamp-lit corrugated-iron room, where Mr Gandhi was the centre of the life of an assembled congregation of about twenty people, from East and West’.
²

With
Indian Opinion
’s first issue for 1913, Gandhi began a weekly series in Gujarati called ‘General Knowledge about Health’. This drew on wide reading and, even more, on his own experiments and experiences. This ‘quack physician’ (to use Gandhi’s self-description) was critical of the modern dependence on drugs. ‘Once the [medicine] bottle enters a house,’ he complained, ‘it never leaves.’ He thought bad air to be the cause of most diseases. Dirty latrines and open-air urination fouled the atmosphere, as did the casual dumping of food peelings and garbage, and spitting – all practices common to Indians. He spoke of the dangers of drinking contaminated water, and explained how water could be cleaned and purified in homes.

The self-taught physician turned next to substances to be eschewed or encouraged. ‘Drink, tobacco, hemp, etc., not only damage physical health,’ he said, ‘but also impair mental fitness and entail wasteful expenditure. We lose all our moral sense and become slaves to our weakness.’ Chillies, spices and salt were also to be avoided. Gandhi outlined a hierarchy of ideal and preferred diets. A purely fruit diet was the best, then fruit and vegetables with no salt or spices, then a mix of vegetables and meat. Last, and most deplorable, was a purely carnivorous diet. ‘Those who … subsist exclusively on flesh,’ remarked Gandhi,
‘need not detain us here. Their state is so vile that the very thought of them should be enough to put us off meat-eating. They are not healthy in any sense of the term.’
³

In the last week of January 1913, Gandhi wrote to his son Harilal saying that he hoped to return to India quite soon. With him would come some of the boys he was schooling at Phoenix. ‘I should certainly be able to go if a law satisfying to our demands is passed,’ he remarked, ‘so it appears. I have therefore settled in Phoenix. I don’t wish to stir out from here for five months.’
⁴

As before, Gandhi’s optimism was misplaced. In February, he complained to Gokhale that the assurances given him by the ministers were not being honoured. ‘The Immigration Acts are being administered with an ever-growing severity. Wives of lawfully resident Indians are being put to great trouble and expense.’
⁵

In the third week of March, a judgment in a Cape Town court called into question the validity of Indian marriages. One Hassan Esop, a barber working in Port Elizabeth, had, while on holiday in India, married a lady named Bal Mariam. After his return, he applied for a permit for his wife to join him. Although Bal Mariam was his only wife, the court refused to allow her to join her husband, on the grounds that Islam permitted polygamy. ‘The courts of this country,’ said the judge, a Justice Searle, ‘have always set their faces against recognition of these so-called Mahommedan marriages as legal unions’, since a woman admitted as a wife could ‘be repudiated the next day after the arrival by the husband’. To the argument that at least one wife should be admitted, the judge said sarcastically, ‘I do not know whether it is to be the first that comes, or the first that is married.’
⁶

Hindu law did not ban polygamy either. Did this mean that only Christian marriages would be recognized as valid in South Africa? The judgement alarmed the Indians, whose concerns were forcefully articulated by Gandhi in an editorial in
Indian Opinion
:

This decision means as from today all Hindu or Muslim wives living in South Africa lose their right to live there … a Hindu, Muslim or Parsi wife can live in this country only by the grace of the Government. It is quite on the cards that the Government will not permit any more wives to come in or that, if it does, it will entirely be a matter of favour … The remedy is
entirely in our hands. Every Anjuman, every Dharma Sabha and every one of the [community] associations must respectfully submit to the Government that the law should be amended and that marriages solemnized under the rites of Indian religions should be recognized as legal. Any nation that fails to protect the honour of its women, any individual who fails to protect the honour of his wife is considered lower in level than a brute.
⁷

Gandhi’s own marriage had its good periods and bad. His children and his wife had to bear the brunt of his social and ethical experiments. But of his commitment to marriage as a social institution there could be no doubt. The Searle judgment, if interpreted literally and implemented vigorously, threatened to sunder husband from wife, mother from children. This would seriously damage the life of the Indian community in South Africa. Gandhi may also have worried that, in the absence of their wives, Indian men would patronize prostitutes. Hence his call to community organizations to mobilize in protest against the Searle judgment. He was heeded, and quickly. The judgment was delivered on 21 March; eight days later, a mass meeting of Indians was held at the Hamidia Hall in Johannesburg. The meeting expressed ‘deep distress and disappointment’ at the court verdict, which was calculated ‘to disturb Indian domestic relations, to break up established homes, to put husband and wife asunder, to deprive lawful children of their inheritance …’ The Indians wanted remedial legislation that recognized as valid any marriage solemnized under the rites of ‘the great religions of India’. If this was not forthcoming, then it became ‘the bounden duty of the community, for the protection of its womanhood and its honour, to adopt passive resistance’.
⁸

This meeting was attended only by men, but the women were likewise outraged by the Searle judgment. Kasturba asked Gandhi whether this meant ‘that I am not your wife according to the laws of this country’. When he answered in the affirmative, she suggested that they should perhaps return to India. Gandhi said that would be cowardly, whereupon Kasturba asked, ‘Could I not, then, join the struggle and be imprisoned myself?’

Kasturba’s offer was a mark of her deep loyalty to her husband, and of her acquired understanding of his cause. Despite their very different temperaments, Gandhi and Kasturba had, over thirty years of marriage, developed a relationship of understanding and companionship, to
which the word ‘love’ may also be applied. Back in 1901, Kasturba had resisted Gandhi giving back jewels presented to him for his work. Now, twelve years later, she was herself volunteering to go to jail. Thus she underlined her commitment to a marriage the new law chose to regard as ‘invalid’; thus also she showed her solidarity with the Indian community as a whole.

Reporting their conversation to Gokhale, Gandhi said, ‘this time the struggle, if it comes, will involve more sufferings than before.’ He did not want to ask the public in India for support; rather, ‘the plan would be to beg in S[outh] A[frica] from door to door.’ He thought ‘most of the settlers [at Phoenix] including the womenfolk will join the struggle. The latter feel they can no longer refrain from facing the gaol no matter what it may mean in a place like this. Mrs. Gandhi made the offer on her own initiative and I do not want to debar her.’
⁹

The resentment against the Searle judgment was felt equally in Natal and the Transvaal. In recent years, the Indians in these two provinces had tended to conduct their affairs separately. The marriage question bound them together once more. The Natalians were also very exercised by the continuance of the £3 tax. The Durban journalist P. S. Aiyar had convened several meetings asking for its removal. Aiyar wrote to the Prime Minister, General Botha, that a repeal of the tax would be ‘hailed with unbounded joy’ and ‘have a far-reaching influence on the consolidation and stability of the Empire’.
¹⁰

The request, or plea, was disregarded. In April 1913 the Government released the draft of a new Immigration Bill. This had distinctly, and perhaps deliberately, failed to take the sentiments of Indians into account. It retained the £3 tax, while making the qualifications for domicile more stringent and inter-provincial migration for Indians more difficult. It did not allow appeals to courts, and rendered the status of wives and children uncertain and insecure. The Bill gave wide discretionary powers to officials, allowing them to keep out ‘any person or class of persons deemed … on economic grounds or on account of standard or habits of life to be unsuited to the requirements of the Union or any particular Province thereof’.
¹¹

In the third week of April, the Natal Indian Congress wired the Governor-General in protest. Unless the amendments it asked for were made, it said, the ‘Indian community will be obliged strenuously to oppose [the] Bill with all [the] resources in its power’.
¹²
The same week,
Gandhi travelled from Phoenix to Johannesburg, to attend a meeting at the Hamidia Hall. A large and excited crowd heard him say that since the Union Bill incorporated the worst features of provincial legislation, this time ‘the struggle might be prolonged and fierce’. L. W. Ritch, speaking after him, said that ‘if he as an Englishman were settled in any country and found himself treated as his Indian brothers were, he would fight unto death’.
¹³

The Interior Minister now was Abraham Fischer, a Free Stater who, on the Indian question, was even more hardline than General Smuts. Fischer defended the harshness of the Bill in Parliament. For the ‘self-preservation of the white man’, he said, it ‘was considered undesirable that this country should be encroached upon by Asiatics’. His predecessor, Smuts, had once complained to Gandhi about the intransigent attitude of the MPs from the Orange Free State. Fischer now praised them for having ‘shown from the start what was good for the country’. As for the contentious question of Indian marriages, the Minister told Parliament that ‘a man was entitled to have only one wife, which some people maintained was quite sufficient. (Laughter.) A European was not allowed the privilege of having more than one wife, and surely we were not going to give that privilege to non-Europeans? (Laughter.)’
¹⁴

A few liberal politicians opposed the Bill in Parliament. The Cape lawyer Morris Alexander called it a ‘serious infringement’ of the rights of Asiatics. W. P. Schreiner thought this was really an ‘Immigrants Restriction [rather than Regulation] Bill’; its provisions were contrary to the assurances given to Gokhale, whom Schreiner described as ‘one of the greatest men of the time’. The majority opinion, however, was solidly behind the Minister and his Bill, which was necessary for ‘the self-preservation of the white race in South Africa’. As one Boer MP put it, apart from ‘a few cranks’ the ‘unanimous opinion of [white] South Africa was against the importation of Asiatics’. Some of them wanted to go further, and deport the Asiatics already in the country.
¹⁵

As Interior Minister, Smuts had at least been prepared to talk to Gandhi. His successor, however, treated Gandhi as an interloper. The lawyer, said Abraham Fischer, was ‘representing only that section of the Indian community in the Transvaal, which was known some three or four years back as the “Passive Resisters”.’ His secretary told Gandhi that the Minister did not accept that he was ‘acting on behalf of the entire Asiatic population of the Transvaal’. Later, when Gandhi asked for the
Searle judgment to be overturned, the Minister answered that ‘from the earliest times, following the introduction of European civilization into South Africa, the law of the land has only recognised as a valid union the marriage, by a recognised marriage officer, of one man to one woman, to the exclusion, while it lasted, of any other.’
¹⁶