Gandhi Before India (70 page)

Gandhi crossed into Transvaal without being detained. He proceeded to Johannesburg, where he addressed two meetings on 28 September, speaking once to an audience of men, the other time to women who had decided to court arrest.
¹¹
Two days later, the
Transvaal Leader
wrote that ‘the Indian passive resistance movement is threatened with collapse.’ The story’s headlines ran: ‘No Money for Martyrs / Passive Resisters in a Pickle / Indian Merchants against the Campaign / Support Very Scanty’.

The newspaper claimed that while Gandhi and his colleague A. M. Cachalia – chairman of the British Indian Association – were ‘proclaiming the opening of hostilities, and urging their compatriots to fill the gaols, there are growls and curses from the rank and file, open defiance, and frank avowals of contentment with the present order of things’. Last time, there were more than 3,000 convictions; but ‘on this occasion’, it was being said that ‘Mr Gandhi himself does not expect that more than 150 persons will go to prison in the cause.’ Even this was thought to be an over-estimate, since ‘a leading Indian merchant’ interviewed by the paper thought that at most fifty people in Johannesburg would ‘risk their liberty’. That the arrests so far had been of people from Natal showed, to the newspaper, that ‘whatever measure of success Mr Gandhi achieves amongst the poorer and more ignorant of his countrymen, the wealthy Indian traders [of the Transvaal] … are making no secret of their antagonism to the passive resistance campaign.’
¹²

The same day, Gandhi wrote to the
Transvaal Leader
disputing this story. The meeting of 28 September had, he pointed out, been attended by many merchants. He called the paper’s claim that passive resisters were ‘demand[ing] payment for their penance’ an ‘atrocious libel, and a cruel wrong to the men and women who have suffered during the last campaign, and who will suffer now’.
¹³

The protests continued. On 1 October, Manilal Gandhi was detained in Johannesburg for hawking without a licence. Like the other resisters, he chose to go to jail rather than pay a fine.
¹⁴
Two of the Gandhi boys were
now in prison; perhaps the eldest, an experienced jailbird, could be summoned to join them. Gandhi thus wrote to Harilal saying ‘both of you may come over here [from India] and get arrested. Chanchi may come while the fight is on only if she has the courage to go to gaol.’
¹⁵

In the second week of October, General Smuts – who had now resumed charge of the Interior Ministry – spoke to the Governor-General’s secretary about the developing situation. Smuts said ‘Gandhi was suffering from one of his periodic attacks of mental derangement, and was, for the time being, attracted by the role of prophet and martyr.’ The General ‘doubted whether there was much real enthusiasm or financial support behind it [the passive resistance movement], and he rather expected that it would soon collapse.’ Asked about specific grievances he said, with regard to the marriage question, that it was impossible to give ‘legal recognition to a polygamous system’. He was personally opposed to the £3 tax and was keen to repeal it, ‘but the narrow-minded folly of the [white] Natalians had been, and still was, an insuperable obstacle’. The planters wanted the tax as a means to get the workers to re-indenture; the non-planters wanted it to induce them to return to India.
¹⁶

On 12 October, the first Muslim woman joined the satyagraha movement. This was the wife of Gandhi’s old classmate Sheikh Mehtab. Mrs Mehtab left Durban with her mother, son and servant, aiming to cross the border and court arrest. She was seen off at the station by a large crowd, who presented her with bouquets and parcels of food for the journey.
¹⁷

The same day, Gandhi journeyed in the reverse direction, from the Transvaal to Natal. At a meeting in Durban’s Union Theatre, he was asked why Henry Polak had recently been sent to England. Did the Indians need to have ‘paid European workers’? Gandhi answered that Polak had been deputed at Gokhale’s request.
¹⁸

Gandhi now left for the coal-mining town of Newcastle. A meeting held here on the evening of the 13th ended ‘with cheers to the brave son of India, Mr M. K. Gandhi’. Thambi Naidoo also spoke, in Tamil, after which the mineworkers endorsed both Gandhi and passive resistance; they were particularly exercised by the £3 tax.
¹⁹

Gandhi returned to Durban, where there had recently been sharp criticism of his methods. He had spent much of the past decade in the Transvaal; in his absence, other leaders had emerged, who did not
always endorse his views. In July 1913, Gandhi’s old adversary P. S. Aiyar had claimed that passive resistance had outlived its usefulness. Instead of fighting for their rights in South Africa, said Aiyar, the Indians should depart
en masse
for the motherland. The South African Government should be made to buy their properties at market price, and pay for their passage back to India.
²⁰

Now, in October, at a well-attended meeting of the Natal Indian Congress, Gandhi was attacked for his ‘provocative and inefficient leadership’. A Gujarati merchant named M. C. Anglia said that Gandhi’s methods had not made their position more secure or elevated their standing among the whites. Why should they support him now? So long as the Indians ‘have a professional and political agitator at the head of political affairs’, said Anglia, ‘we are doomed to failure with the Government and the European public of South Africa.’
²¹
Some people rose to defend Gandhi, and since ‘passions were rising on either side’ the chairman closed the meeting, upon which his supporters ‘carried Mr Gandhi shoulder high through the Victoria, Albert, Queen and Field Streets’.
²²

In the days after the contentious meeting, Gandhi’s leadership was endorsed by the Hindustani Association of Durban and by a group of Muslim merchants.
²³
Among his newer admirers were the workers in mines and plantations, whose endorsement turned out to be definitive. By now, some 2,000 Indians working in the Natal collieries were on strike. The districts of Dundee and Newcastle were said to be ‘in a feverish state of excitement’. The striking miners assembled in the grounds of Dundee’s Hindu Temple, where they ‘expressed confidence in the leadership of Mr Gandhi’. They had been mobilized by eleven Tamil-speaking women, among them Mrs Thambi Naidoo. As Gandhi admiringly noted, ‘the presence of these brave women who had never suffered hardship and had never spoken at public meetings acted like electricity, and the men left their work’.
²⁴
For speaking at these meetings and urging the workers to strike, Mrs Thambi Naidoo and her colleagues were sentenced to three months in prison with hard labour.
²⁵

In the second and third weeks of October, Gandhi addressed crowds of striking workers in Durban, Newcastle, Hatting Spruit and other towns in Natal. Contemporary photographs show people listening to him in all variety of dress, Indian and Western, and in all manner of headgear – caps, hats,
topis
and turbans. The gatherings were large and
densely packed, with several thousand Indians come to support their leader.
²⁶

On 24 October, Gandhi wrote to Maganlal that ‘great things are happening in Newcastle. There is a move to lead a march of 2,000 men to Transvaal.’ The next day he told mine and plantation owners that their workers were on strike because of the Government’s failure to honour their promise to Gokhale to abolish the £3 tax.
²⁷
A Tamil poster circulated in the plantations quoted Gandhi as saying: ‘I have no grievances against the employers … I ask [them] to assist in getting the tax repealed. I am quite aware of the loss and hardship my unfortunate brethren have to suffer, and I trust even if you have to beg you would not return to work until the tax is repealed.’
²⁸

Reading these reports in Pretoria, General Smuts was provoked to deny them. In a speech on the 26th, he said the £3 tax was part of the contract signed by labourers in India before coming out to Natal. The Government had not promised Gokhale that the tax would be repealed; merely that they would consider the question afresh. Smuts wired the mineowners’ association that to repeal the tax now, under the pressure of Gandhi and company, ‘would be [a] public disaster’. He claimed that ‘with Gandhi repeal of tax is an afterthought, and is intended to influence Natal Indians to whom the real grounds on which he has started passive resistance and which never included this tax, do not appeal.’
²⁹

The evidence on this question supports Gandhi rather than Smuts. Gokhale was clearly given the impression the tax would be repealed; for that is what he told the Governor-General on 15 November 1912, immediately after he had met the Prime Minister, Louis Botha. In March 1913, when the South African Immigration Bill came up for debate, Gokhale again told a senior official of the Government of India that ‘Ministers have promised him, and quite publicly, that the Natal £3 licence tax will be revoked.’
³⁰

The repeal of the tax was manifestly one of the ‘real grounds’ on which the current satyagraha was begun. Truth was on Gandhi’s side, and so, as it happens, were the workers. A news report dated Wednesday, 29 October, tells this part of the story: ‘The [coal-mine] managers assembled the Indians on the mines this morning, but the Indians declined to listen, insulting the managers, and intimating that they were only prepared to receive instructions and advice from Mr Gandhi.’

Back in July 1913, the Durban journalist P. S. Aiyar had written off
passive resistance as a method of assering one’s rights. Two months later the first batch of satyagrahis, led by Kasturba Gandhi, courted arrest. Hundreds more followed them into jail. The Indian workers in the coal mines and sugar plantations downed tools. The editor of the
African Chronicle
was now obliged to do his professional duty, which was to report the news. The bravery of Kasturba’s pioneering band of resisters was praised. Two pages of the journal were devoted to the ‘Progress of Passive Resistance’, reporting arrests, speeches and strikes in different parts of Natal. But the editor could not suppress his prejudices entirely, calling upon the Indians to ‘keep in view the cause, not the man’ (namely, Gandhi).

In challenging Gandhi’s claims to lead the Indians, P. S. Aiyar was always fighting an uphill battle. The surge of support for the satyagraha now made his a pretty hopeless task. A report in his own newspaper conveyed the comprehensiveness of his defeat. In November 1913 the
Chronicle
was compelled to reduce its pages from sixteen to eight, noting that ‘the compositors, employed in our office, having joined the ranks of the strikers, we regret, we are unable to publish our paper in its usual form.’
³¹

The Indians on strike moved out of the collieries and plantations to the towns of Dundee and Newcastle, so that they could not be coerced back to work. When agents of the owners reached these towns nevertheless, it was decided to shift the striking workers to Charlestown, thirty-five miles away, closer to the border with the Transvaal. ‘To provide railway fare for thousands was out of the question’, so they walked, with Gandhi leading the first batch. The workers shouted ‘
Vande Matram!
’ and ‘
Ramchandra ki jai!
’, the first slogan a salute to the motherland, the second a homage to the mythical just and good king, Ram. They carried their own rice and
dal
. The marchers slept the first night in the open, reaching Charlestown the next day. But keeping so many people close together was deemed a risk – what if plague broke out?
³²

Gandhi liked walking. In the 1880s, he walked the streets of London in the company of his vegetarian comrade Josiah Oldfield. In the 1890s, he walked to the Bombay High Court from his home in Santa Cruz. In the 1900s, he walked a lot with Kallenbach in Johannesburg. He liked walking so much that when Henry Polak wrote a profile of his friend, he placed him not in the law court or his office, not in the Phoenix or
Tolstoy settlements, not even in a vegetarian restaurant, but on the road. ‘Here he is,’ wrote Polak of Gandhi,

a slim-built man of middle height, the tanned cheeks a little sunken, bare-headed, somewhat close-cropped and grizzled, with a small moustache. You see him walking along the road in profound meditation or animatedly conversing with a companion, the shoulders bent, the head thrown slightly forward, his arms behind his back, the left wrist grasped in the right hand, the sandaled feet outspread – a not too gainly walk, rather rapid, for he is an accomplished pedestrian from long practice, preference, and force of circumstance.
³³

Gandhi liked walking, but this was a very long march, even by his standards. For the satyagrahis under his command had now decided to walk on to the Transvaal. If not detained at the border, they would proceed onwards, all the way to Johannesburg, several hundred miles into the interior. A rich Hindu offered a 600-acre farm to host them; to this was added the 1,100 acres of Tolstoy Farm. Kallenbach was excited by the prospect. ‘We will have “common” tables and ordinary family life will not exist for the time being,’ the architect told a reporter. ‘This system was properly tested during the last campaign, and it can be carried on indefinitely … Passive Resistance does not mean idleness. There will be no lack of funds. Merchants everywhere are giving freely, and Professor Gokhale is with us heart and soul.’

Proof of the last statement was provided in an accompanying report, which quoted Gokhale in Bombay as saying that the Indian public would send £2,000 a month for the next six months to sustain the passive resisters.
³⁴

On 29 October, a large public meeting was held at Johannesburg’s West End Bioscope Hall, to coincide with the Hindu festival of Dasehra. The Indians turned out in force, as did their European sympathizers, W. Hosken, L. W. Ritch, Sonja Schlesin,
et al
. The Gujarati S. K. Patel, in the chair, said this Dasehra day, which should be ‘one of rejoicing and festivity’, had instead been turned by the Government into one ‘of sadness and mourning’. He was followed by L. W. Ritch, whose message was more hopeful. The resisters, said Ritch, should be congratulated for ‘using the weapons of the soul and not the weapons of the mob’ (these being the ‘bludgeon and the bomb’).