Gandhi Before India (77 page)

Kasturba’s life was no longer in danger, but now her husband’s life was. Word that the Enquiry Commission would only recognize monogamous marriages had reached the Muslim merchants in the Transvaal. These merchants had brought Gandhi to South Africa; they had funded his early campaigns; many of them had gone to jail under his leadership. But recognition of the right of a man to have multiple wives was a central article of their faith. Now they accused Gandhi of betraying their interests, and, more crucially, their religion.

In early March, Gandhi heard that his brother Laxmidas had passed away in Porbandar. He had been sick for some time. Although they had not met for more than a decade, in recent years they had become somewhat reconciled. Gandhi had forgiven or forgotten the intrigue that got the family into trouble in Porbandar in 1891. Laxmidas had gloried in the popular acclaim his younger brother was receiving in India for the work he was doing in South Africa.
³⁴
Gandhi’s other brother, Karsandas, had died the previous June. Preoccupied with the satyagraha, he did not comment in public on either death; but he knew now that he would go back to a India bereft of his parents and his brothers too. Only his sister Raliat, herself a widow, still survived.

On 11 March, Gandhi wrote to his nephew Chhaganlal that he had heard that ‘they are plotting again in Johannesburg to take my life. That would indeed be welcome and a fit end to my work.’ In case he was killed, Gandhi left instructions on what the family must do. They should live like farmers on the land, simply. Gandhi had to provide for five widows, these being his sister, the wives of his two dead brothers, and two other family members. If Gandhi was now murdered by his enemies, the money for this could be taken from Pranjivan Mehta. Over the course of time, however, sons should assume responsibility for their widowed mothers, including Harilal for Kasturba.
³⁵

It was a young man named Medh who had written to Gandhi about the plot to murder him. We do not know who the plotters were. The Pathans who had assaulted and nearly killed him in 1908? And were they to act on their own or as mercenaries of the merchants? How active was the plot in any case? Had Medh drawn hasty conclusions from words spoken in anger? What we do know is there were increasing concerns in Johannesburg about what the Commission would say on the marriage question. In the last week of March, a ‘largely attended meeting representing all sections of Mohammedans in the Transvaal’ took
place in the Hamidia Hall. Gandhi had often spoken here to appreciative and even admiring crowds. But this time he was, so to speak, an absent presence. The meeting resolved that ‘the recommendation of recognising one wife only and her children … if carried out, will molest and violate the principle of our sacred religion.’ The meeting further made ‘it known to whom it may concern that Messrs Gandhi, Polak and their associates have no right or authority whatsoever to represent the Moslem community or any matters concerning them.’
³⁶

In the last week of March, the report of the Enquiry Commission was published. It was ambivalent about Gandhi, acknowledging that he was ‘the recognised leader of the Indian community’, but regretting that he and his followers chose ‘entirely to ignore the Commission’, so that no witnesses came forward to substantiate the allegations of the excessive use of force against the strikers. Compelled to rely on the evidence of the police, the Commission concluded that in the places where men in uniform had shot bullets into crowds, ‘the use of firearms was fully justified’.

Other recommendations of the Commission were more comforting to the Indians. It asked the Government to pass legislation that would, among other things, allow Indian residents in South Africa to bring in one wife and minor children by her; permit the appointment of Indian priests of different denominations to solemnize marriages in South Africa; register
de facto
monogamous marriages already in existence; repeal the £3 tax applied annually on Indians in Natal; issue identification certificates for three years at a time (rather than for one year, the existing practice); and to provide interpreters to assist Indians in making applications to register marriages, obtain certificates, etc.
³⁷

Gandhi was pleased with the report, whose promptness justified his boycott. Had the Indians given evidence, he argued, then the Europeans would have insisted on doing likewise, and the report would have been delayed by months. Indians and whites would have exchanged bitter words in public, and it would ‘not have been possible for Mr Andrews to do what he did, sowing the seeds of conciliation so silently and with such deep love and humility’. In any case, the Commission’s recommendations on the £3 tax and marriage question ‘could not possibly have been better even if we had tendered voluminous evidence’. He now hoped that the Government would meet Indian demands in the Cape and the Free State.
³⁸

The favourable recommendations of the Enquiry Commission were noted in the press in India, which gave the credit to the passive resisters.
Sadhva
, a Kannada weekly published in Mysore, published a striking paean to the distinctiveness of Gandhi’s political method. Thus

not a sword was drawn, not a gun fired … Mr Gandhi merely defied the unjust laws of the South African Government, agitated for their removal, even went to jail, and renewed his campaign of passive resistance the moment he was released. In this manner he raised an uproar against their iniquities and finally forced them to the right path. He performed, so to speak, the obsequies of unrighteousness. History has its heroes in men of the type of Alexander the Great whose fame is measured by the havoc and devastation they caused, but heroism of the type displayed by Mr Gandhi in making iniquity’s defeat its own end is without a parallel.
³⁹

In early May the Gandhis were back at Phoenix, where Kasturba’s health continued to improve. ‘If her progress continues,’ wrote her husband to Gokhale, ‘in a month’s time she should regain most of her former health. In that case and in any case I could come to London taking her with me. And after consultation with you, we may both proceed to India directly and the rest of the party may leave here after we have left.’
⁴⁰

Gokhale was spending the summer in London, as was C. F. Andrews. They had long talks, the gist of which were passed on to Gandhi in Durban. Unlike the priest and the ascetic, Gokhale was not a seeker for or after God. He told Andrews that ‘his love for the Motherland, his vision, his absorption in its life and future was to him religion itself and made the Divine real to him.’ Patriotism was Gokhale’s religion; a patriotism that did not rule out partnership with the foreign rulers as long as they remained on Indian soil. Gokhale told Andrews that ‘there was the need of three kinds of national work – that in connection with the foreign Government, that in independence of it, and that in opposition to it. And all were needed.’ He worried that Gandhi’s insistence on the ‘independence’ of Indians from Government ‘would be a stumbling block’ in his working for, and in, the Servants of India Society.
⁴¹

Meanwhile, back at Phoenix, Gandhi’s attentions were again diverted to rumours of sexual transgression at the ashram. In mid April Kasturba
told Gandhi that she suspected Jeki Mehta of still harbouring romantic feelings for Manilal. Gandhi dismissed the speculation. Kasturba, he thought, was excessively prejudiced against Pranjivan Mehta’s daughter; she tended to ‘spit fire’ on Jeki at every opportunity.

Kasturba then accused Gandhi of shielding Jeki. He answered that she was paranoid. The disagreement spiralled into a fearful row, by all accounts the most intense the Gandhis had had in the thirty years of their marriage. The husband’s version, outlined in a letter to Kallenbach, ran:

Immediately she began to howl. I had made her leave all the good food in order to kill her. I was tired of her, I wished her to die, I was a hooded snake … The more I spoke the more vicious she became … She is quite normal today. But yesterday’s was one of the richest lessons of my life. All the charges she brought against me she undoubtledly means. She has contrary emotions. I have nursed her as a son would nurse his mother. But my love has not been sufficiently intense and selfless to make her change her nature … Yes, a man who wishes to work with detachment must not marry. I cannot complain of her being a particularly bad wife … On the other hand no other woman would probably have stood the changes in her husband’s life as she has. On the whole she has not thwarted me and has been most exemplary … My point is that you cannot attach yourself to a particular woman and yet live for humanity. The two do not harmonise. That is the real cause of the devil waking in her now and again. Otherwise he might have remained in her asleep and unnoticed.
⁴²

As with Harilal, Gandhi’s relations with his wife were tested again and again by his tendency to place career and cause above family and marriage. In this case, Kasturba was protective about her second son, and thus inclined to blame Jeki for her romance with Manilal. Gandhi was more even-handed, seeing the son as equally responsible for the transgression.

This particular dispute brought to the fore other disagreements the couple had over the years. In his reflections on their relationship, Gandhi is detached and (to a degree) balanced. With Harilal he tended to be more one-sided. The boy was blamed, and blamed again, for not living up to the ideals of the father. On the other hand, this letter to Kallenbach, while unable to conceal a sense of impatience with Kasturba, sees her discontent as having its origins in choices made by him, that she
(and he) were unaware of when they got married in their teens in Porbandar.

Two weeks after Kasturba and Gandhi quarrelled, Jeki Mehta was found making sexual overtures to another man, not Manilal. Gandhi was hurt and angry. Jeki was a ‘finished hypocrite’, a pathological liar who had betrayed him, her father and the community. He decided to send her back to join her husband Manilal Doctor in Fiji.
⁴³

To atone for Jeki’s new lapse, and his own inadequate supervision, Gandhi decided to go on a two-week fast. Kasturba asked him to desist; she feared for his health. Her husband went ahead anyway. After it ended, he wrote to Kallenbach that

this fast has brought me as near death’s door. I can still hardly crawl, can eat very little, restless nights, mouth bad … The fast was a necessity. I was so grossly deceived. I owed it to Manilal of Fiji, to Dr. Mehta, and to myself. It was one of the severest lessons of my life. The discipline was very great. Everyone around me was most charming. Mrs. Gandhi was divine. Immediately she realized that there was no turning me back, she set about making my path smooth. She forgot her own sorrows and became my ministering angel.
⁴⁴

In the last week of May, a bill embodying the Enquiry Commission’s recommendations was published. This provided for the recognition of past monogamous marriages conducted under the tenets of any Indian religion the parties professed; recognized the rights of children such unions produced; mandated the appointment of priests of any Indian religion to be marriage officers; abolished the £3 tax and waived the right of the state to collect past arrears against it; and permitted the Government to provide free passage to anyone in South Africa who wished to go back permanently to India.
⁴⁵

Gandhi spent the whole of June in Cape Town, lobbying MPs and meeting ministers. The bill passed through Parliament in stages, meeting opposition which was skilfully negotiated and eventually overcome by General Smuts and the Prime Minister, General Botha. The Governor-General wrote to the Colonial Office praising the duo ‘for their courage in forcing a thoroughly distasteful policy upon their followers’. For ‘the strength of the anti-Indian prejudice among our Dutch legislators and the extraordinary cussedness of some of our British
Natalians [were] really amazing’. The former were loth to recognize any Indian marriages; the latter loth to give up the punitive £3 tax. To tame the opposition, Botha and Smuts had to use all their ‘powers of persuasion’; in fact, ‘but for party loyalty all the Dutch back-benchers would have voted against the Bill.’
⁴⁶

On 27 June, there was a meeting of Europeans and Indians in Cape Town to celebrate the passage of the Indians’ Relief Bill. Here Gandhi thanked ‘the many European friends whose help had most materially contributed to the success now realized’. He said that

potent, however, though passive resistance was as an instrument for winning reforms – perhaps the mightiest instrument on earth – it could not have achieved success had the Indian community not moderated their demands to what was reasonable and practical. This, again, was not possible until some of them were able to see the question of Indian rights from the European standpoint … The Indians knew perfectly well which was the dominant and governing race. They aspired to no social equality with Europeans. They felt that the path of their development was separate. They did not even aspire to the franchise, or, if the aspiration existed, it was with no idea of its having present effect. Ultimately – in the future – he believed his people would get the franchise if they deserved to get it, but the matter did not belong to practical politics. All he would ask for the Indian community was that, on the basis of the rights now conceded to them, they should be suffered to live with dignity and honour on the soil of South Africa.
⁴⁷

As the bill was making its progress through Parliament, Gandhi wrote to Gokhale that Kallenbach would accompany Kasturba and him to London. The architect had long wished to visit India; to this wish was now added the desire not to be separated from his friend. After Gandhi had consulted with Gokhale in London, and Kallenbach said good-bye to his family in Europe, they would carry on to India. With the bill now gazetted, their bookings were made for 18 July. ‘My one desire,’ wrote Gandhi to Gokhale, ‘is now to meet you and see you, take my orders from you and leave at once for India.’
⁴⁸