Gandhi Before India (74 page)

my wife’s father and I myself desire her to leave his place and that he would spare me the painful necessity of taking legal steps against himself and his son Manilal Gandhi for intercepting the smooth flow of my married life in the way they have in fact done. Allow me to add that my wife is a minor, I am legally her guardian, and that Mr Gandhi is no relation at all to us.
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Manilal Doctor certainly spoke for himself. But did he also speak for Pranjivan Mehta, who was his father-in-law, but also Gandhi’s closest and oldest friend? Alas, the archives are silent on the matter. Dr Mehta could not have been pleased with Jeki’s affair with Gandhi’s son Manilal – but would he have laid the blame for this at Gandhi’s own door? That seems unlikely. Jeki herself seems to have been unwilling to rejoin her husband. She was focused on staying in South Africa – but whether out of admiration for Gandhi’s politics or love for Gandhi’s son we cannot say.

In the second week of December, the South African Government announced that it would set up an ‘Indian Enquiry Commission’ to report on the recent disturbances and their causes. In his speech in Madras in late November, the Viceroy of India had called for such a commission. The Viceroy’s idea had now been taken forward by Lord Gladstone, the Governor-General of South Africa. For the protests by the Indians had been unprecedented in scope and scale. They had breached the boundaries of province, class and gender. They had fully stretched the forces of law and order, and had seriously endangered the
economy of Natal. Despite brave talk in the newspapers, whites were not really prepared to labour in mines, plantations, hotels or shops. Gladstone thus suggested to General Smuts that the Commission should go into the marriage and tax questions that had so exercised the Indians.
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Smuts agreed. A three-member Commission was appointed, to be chaired by the jurist Sir William Solomon. As a gesture to the Indians, Gandhi was released from jail on the morning of 18 December. Polak and Kallenbach were set free the same day. At a public meeting in Johannesburg, Gandhi said he was not satisfied with the constitution of the Enquiry Commission. Sir William Solomon was fine, but the other two members, Lt.-Col. Wylie and Edward Esselen, were known to have anti-Indian views. Gandhi said that ‘rather than have a weighted or packed Commission, which would militate against the welfare of the Indian community in South Africa, he would prefer to go back to prison and allow the Indian case to stand upon its own merits.’ In response, William Hosken ‘begged’ Gandhi to retain his ‘self-control’, and ‘to do nothing that would bring discredit on their cause’.
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The next day, Gandhi proceeded by train to Durban. As he stepped on to the platform on arrival, ‘flowers were thrown round him, and the Indians clambered around him’. He was conveyed from the station into an open carriage, which was pulled by young men ‘through the streets with every manifestation of enthusiasm’.
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It was a triumphant return to his first home in South Africa, but also a sombre one. In jail, Gandhi had shaved his head and chosen to wear white. His feet were bare. Speaking to a crowd of 5,000 assembled at the Durban racecourse, Gandhi said he had changed his dress when he heard of the police firing on Indian strikers. The bullets that shot his countrymen shot him through the heart as well. Henceforth, he would dress like an indentured labourer. Then he spoke of the Commission just appointed. He complained that Indians had no voice, while two of its three members were known for their hostility to them. Unless ‘the Commission is supplemented by responsible South African members of known standing, who are not prejudiced against Asiatics generally,’ he said, ‘we shall certainly be against it’.
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On 21 December, Gandhi wrote to Smuts suggesting the addition of two members to the Commission. W. P. Schreiner and Sir James-Innes
were both known for their liberal views. Smuts rejected the suggestion, insisting that the Commission as it stood was ‘impartial and judicious’. Gandhi now said the Indians would boycott the Commission.

The composition of the Enquiry Commission angered the rank-and-file even more. ‘The Government have treated us in such a rascally manner in the appointment of this Commission,’ wrote Henry Polak to his family in England, adding, ‘I fear that it will be impossible to avoid a revival of the struggle in its most bitter form.’ In that case Polak would court arrest once more, for which he asked in advance for the ‘sympathy and understanding’ of his parents. The senior Polaks admired and liked Gandhi, but as loyalist, assimilationist Jews, they were naturally not very keen for their son to follow him all the way into jail. ‘Whatever the consequences may be both personally and publicly,’ wrote Henry Polak to his parents, ‘I feel I am bound to support Mr Gandhi in his present attitude, of which I wholly approve. It may not be customary politics, but the Passive Resistance struggle has never been based upon politics but upon principles.’
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Speaking to reporters on 21 December, L. W. Ritch claimed that if their demands were not conceded, the Indians would once more go on strike. ‘Mr Gandhi will collect all the Indians who follow him,’ said Ritch, ‘and will march to Pretoria’, the march to commence on 1 January. Ritch predicted that Gandhi ‘would leave Durban with a thousand Indians, and by the time he reached the border, if he does so, his “army” will increase to at least 20,000’.
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The next day Kasturba Gandhi was released from prison. Gandhi had come up from Durban to Maritzburg to meet her. The Indians of the town had preceded him. They met Kasturba and her fellow prisoners outside the jail and pulled them in a flower-strewn carriage through the streets. At the meeting that followed, the speakers included Gandhi, Kallenbach and Millie Polak. Millie said that

this was essentially a women’s movement, and there was no question that had it not been for the women taking the lead, there would have been no strike. When women once realized the enormous power they had they would rise up and make their own lives and the world what they wished (loud applause).
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Kasturba and her comrades had spent eight weeks in jail. Unfortunately, whereas Gandhi wrote in much detail of his various prison terms,
his wife left no record of her ordeal. How did she cope with this radically new experience? Since her fellow satyagrahis included her nephews’ wives, at least she had some people to speak Gujarati with. In other respects life would have been altogether different, and much harder, than what she had been accustomed to in Porbandar, Rajkot, Johannesburg and Phoenix. The food in South African jails was uniformly bad. As a vegetarian, Kasturba had to make do with the terrible mealie pap. Her sentence also included ‘hard labour’, which took the form of washing clothes in the prison courtyard.
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Millie Polak saluted Kasturba’s spirit; her husband, meanwhile, was shocked at the state of her health. ‘Mrs Gandhi discharged prison almost irrecognisably altered owing refusal special diet’, Polak wired Gokhale. ‘Reduced skeleton tottering appearance old woman heart breaking sight.’
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Between 21 and 28 December, Gandhi and Gokhale wired each other once or twice a day. Gokhale said the boycott of the Commission would be a ‘grave mistake’, alienating friends and sympathisers, and forgoing the chance to present evidence of cruelty to Indians. Gandhi answered that he was ‘besieged by people all day’ protesting against the Commission and calling for a march on Pretoria. Gokhale said both boycott and march would constitute a ‘great personal humiliation’ to the Viceroy. Gokhale had persuaded Lord Hardinge to depute a senior civil servant named Sir Benjamin Robertson as the representative of the Government of India to the Commission. Even if Gandhi persisted with a boycott, Sir Benjamin would convey his concerns to the body.
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Gokhale’s counsel prevailed. Speaking to reporters on the 29th, Gandhi said that ‘at the request of friends’ he had postponed the march to Pretoria. They would ‘wait until we know that we have left no stone unturned to arrive at a honourable settlement’.
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Gokhale had asked Gandhi to be restrained; on the other side, Smuts was urged to be magnanimous by the British social reformer Emily Hobhouse. A Quaker by religious conviction, Hobhouse had endeared herself to the General during the Anglo-Boer War. In the first half of 1901 she travelled through South Africa, documenting the harsh treatment of Boer prisoners of war. She returned to England to present her findings before the British public, before taking a ship back to continue her investigations. Her criticisms had so angered British colonists,
that – in a striking reprise of Gandhi’s own experience in Durban in 1896–7 – she had not been allowed to land in Cape Town.
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In the latter part of 1913 Emily Hobhouse was back in South Africa, where she contacted Gandhi. They were introduced by a common friend, Elizabeth Molteno. The daughter of the first prime minister of the Cape Colony, Betty Molteno had left South Africa in disgust following the Anglo-Boer War. She had met Gandhi in London in 1909, returning from exile soon afterwards.

In December 1913, after Gandhi and Kasturba were released from prison, Betty Molteno travelled from Cape Town to Natal to meet them. She was moved by their stories of jail life, and by the cross-class support for the satyagraha. She passed on her impressions to Emily Hobhouse, urging her to press the Indian case on Smuts. Miss Hobhouse was sympathetic, not least because several members of her family had served in India, and back home in England she had friends from the subcontinent.

From Millie Polak on through Sonja Schlesin, Maud Polak and beyond, Gandhi got along with independent-minded Western women. Betty Molteno and he had hit it off from their first meeting, and so now did he and Emily Hobhouse. They discussed the Indian question, of course, but also other matters such as the tactics of the suffragettes and the respective merits of city life versus rural living. Miss Hobhouse had been unwell, so Gandhi wrote inviting her to Phoenix, where ‘the scenery around is certainly very charming’, where ‘there is no bustle or noise’, and where she would ‘find loving hands to administer to your wants’. Nothing, said Gandhi to Miss Hobhouse, ‘would give me personally greater pleasure than, if I were free, to be able to wait upon you and nurse you’.
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On 29 December, Miss Hobhouse wrote to Smuts as someone who was not ‘South African or Indian but in fullest sympathy with both’. While recognizing that white South Africa already ‘has as many Indians as it can digest’, she hoped the General would find ‘a
modus vivendi
to suit their
amour propre
’. To begin with, he could, she suggested, ‘readjust the marriage question and abolish that stupid £3 tax’.

There was now talk in Gandhi’s circle of starting the march to Pretoria on 15 January. Before then, said Hobhouse to Smuts, ‘some way should be found [of] giving private assurance to the leaders that
satisfaction is coming to them.’ The grievance of the Indians, she continued,

is really moral not material and so, having all the power of the spiritual behind him, he [Gandhi] and you are like [the British suffragette] Mrs Pankhurst and [the British Home Secretary Reginald] McKenna and never never will governmental physical force prevail against a great moral and spiritual upheaval.
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Like that other English friend of Smuts, the Cambridge don H. J. Wolstenholme, Emily Hobhouse was far in advance of white opinion in South Africa. More representative was an article published in the
Natal Advertiser
on 30 December, entitled ‘The Political Creed of Mr Gandhi’. The paper ‘deemed it well to enlighten the South African public, from Mr Gandhi’s own mouth, as to what manner of man this is, and what his ultimate political creed is as to the relations between the British and the Indian people’. A string of quotations from Gandhi’s book
Hind Swaraj
followed, damning modern civilization and British rule in India. ‘And it is an Indian capable of this farago of incoherent, inconsequent and hysterical nonsense,’ commented the newspaper,

whom our Union Government is negotiating with as a representative of the concrete demands of the South African Indian community! … This is the language of acute hypocrisy! If Western civilisation be so immoral as Mr Gandhi says, a British Dominion should be the last place he would wish his compatriots to enter … And it is a man capable of using this language to the British of India who is posing as a martyr here in South Africa because denied the privileges of a European British citizen!
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That was one view of Gandhi, expressed in public by whites angry and humiliated by the consequences of the recent uprising. Another view was expressed in private by Gopal Krishna Gokhale, in a letter written to Sir Benjamin Robertson on 31 December. ‘I do not think you have met Mr Gandhi,’ said Gokhale to the Viceroy’s emissary to the Enquiry Commission:

He is a thoroughly straightforward, honourable and high-minded man and though he may at times appear obstinate and even fanatical, he is really open to conviction … The bulk of the community there is devoted to Mr Gandhi and any confidence that you may repose in him will not
only be amply justified by
him by his conduct, but will be repaid tenfold
by the gratitude which it will inspire in the
community.
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Gandhi himself stressed what he owed the Indian community in South Africa, not what they owed him. On 31 December 1913,
Indian Opinion
printed its last issue for the year. This noted that the last satyagraha campaign ‘has hardly a parallel in history. The real credit for this goes to the Hindi and Tamil speaking brothers and sisters living in this country.’ To mark their sacrifice, and the memory of those killed by soldiers’ bullets, the periodical would now resume the publication of sections in Tamil and Hindi.
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