Gandhi Before India (78 page)

On 1 July, Gandhi left Cape Town. He travelled via Kimberley and Johannesburg, reaching Durban on the 4th. Two weeks were left for his departure; two weeks to bid good-bye to the friends, followers,
associations and places that he had known and experienced in twenty years in South Africa.

On 8 July, there was a farewell meeting for the Gandhis in the Durban Town Hall. Back in 1897, this had been the venue for the meetings of the mob that wanted to lynch him. Now, Indians and Europeans gathered in friendship, to hear Gandhi say that ‘he did not deserve all the praise bestowed on him. Nor did his wife claim to deserve all that had been said of her. Many an Indian woman had done greater service during the struggle than Mrs. Gandhi.’ He thanked all the Europeans who had helped him and the struggle, from the lawyer F. A. Laughton, who ‘stood by him against the mob’ in 1897, to Mrs Alexander, the policeman’s wife who ‘protected him with her umbrella from the missiles thrown by the excited crowd’, to his long-time comrades Kallenbach and Polak. He would go away with ‘no ill-will against a single European. I have received many hard knocks in my life, but here I admit that I have received those most precious gifts from Europeans – love and sympathy.’
⁴⁹

The Town Hall meeting was ecumenical. The next day, the Gandhis were congratulated by their own community, the Gujaratis of Durban. Gandhi asked the audience to ‘learn their mother-tongue and study the history and traditions of their Motherland, where he hoped to see them one day’. He urged them to treat members of other communities like guests in their house. Gandhi himself had ‘always shown the same respect for Muslims as for Hindus … If every Indian lived thus in amity with others, there is not the slightest doubt that we shall make great advance in South Africa.’

The same day, the 9th, Gandhi spoke at a sports day for children, held in the Albert Park. He was pleased that the trophy had been presented by Parsee Rustomjee, of whom he said the Indians

had no better, no more constant leader to work with in South Africa. Mr Rustomjee knew no distinction of race or religion. He was a Parsee among Parsees, but also a Mahomedan among Mahomedans in that he would do for them, die for them, live for them. He was a Hindu among Hindus and would do for them likewise.

Also on the 9th, Gandhi attended a reception hosted by the Dheds, a caste of untouchables charged with sanitary duties. The reformer saw them as ‘our own brethren’, and said that ‘to regard them with the
slightest disrespect not only argues our own unworthiness but is morally wrong, for it is contrary to the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita.’
⁵⁰

Two days later, Gandhi spoke at a banquet hosted by the Europeans of Durban. The value of the recent settlement, he said here, ‘lay in the struggle which preceded it – a struggle which quickened the conscience of South Africa – and the fact that there was a different tone prevailing today’. However, while the Commission and the Act had sorted out some difficulties, ‘it was not a full settlement. It was not a charter of full liberties.’ He especially urged a ‘sense of justice’ in administering and granting licences, on which many Indians who were traders depended.

The hosts had presented an address to Gandhi, and a set of books to Sonja Schlesin. The latter was not present, so Gandhi accepted the books on her behalf, noting that ‘Miss Schlesin had played a great part in the passive resistance movement. She had worked night and day and thrown herself into the work. She had not hesitated to court imprisonment but that was denied her.’

In Durban, Gandhi also called on his friend-turned-rival M. C. Anglia. Anglia had recently started a newspaper that regularly ran articles critical of Gandhi, complaining in particular that the settlement with the Government prohibited polygamy.
⁵¹
Notably, while Gandhi sought to mend fences with Anglia he did not do the same with P. S. Aiyar, judging perhaps that
this
critic was too far gone to be reconciled.

Gandhi then travelled to Phoenix where, on 11 July, there was a farewell party for him and Kasturba hosted by the settlers. There were two short speeches: one by Gandhi, the other by Albert West, who, ‘in a few brief sentences, referred to the ever-growing friendship, commenced eleven years ago, between Mr Gandhi and himself and its influence upon their lives and the history of the Phoenix Settlement. The singing of some favourite hymns in English and Gujarati brought the proceedings to a close.’ West had played a vital role in sustaining Phoenix and sustaining the struggle. He was one of Gandhi’s two greatest supporters in Natal; the other, equally self-effacing, was Parsee Rustomjee, who on this occasion too chipped in by providing the food.
⁵²

Gandhi now moved deeper into the countryside. He spoke to a large audience of indentured labourers in Verulam. This, to him, was

like going on a pilgrimage, for the Indian friends here played a great part in the recent strike; and in what wonderful a manner! When all the so-called
leaders [in Durban] were resting in their private rooms or were busy making money, the indentured brethren of this place, the moment they happened to hear that a strike was on in Charlestown and elsewhere about the £3 tax, struck work too. They looked for no leaders.

With the settlement in place, said Gandhi to the labourers, they could stay on in South Africa as free men, without paying tax or re-indenturing. Although he was leaving for India, they could approach those who remained at Phoenix for advice and help. And wherever he was, said Gandhi, ‘I shall, of course, continue to work for you. You are under indenture for one person for five years, but I am under indenture with 300 millions [of Indians] for a life-time. I shall go on with that service and never displace you from my hearts.’

There was a sprinkling of white managers in the crowd. Addressing them directly, Gandhi said that

sometimes the European employer was inclined to be selfish, and he asked them to bear in mind that the indentured Indians were human beings, with the same sentiments as themselves. They were not cattle, but had all the weaknesses of themselves, and all the virtues if only they were brought out. He made a plea for sanitary housing, and asked that the Europeans would look upon their indentured Indians as fellow-beings, and not as Asiatics who had nothing in common with them. The indentured Indian was a moral being.
⁵³

Everywhere he went, Gandhi was presented with addresses and sometimes with a purse, which he said he would use for public work only. His speeches at these farewells were artful but also sincere, addressing the specific concerns and anxieties of the audience, while underlining his own special connection to them.

Europeans, Indians, labourers, merchants, high-castes, low-castes, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsis – all had worked with Gandhi at various points in his years in Natal. His links with these groups were varied – political, personal, professional; social, spiritual, sentimental. One group however is absent from this otherwise capacious list – the Africans. To them alone were Gandhi’s connections too slight to merit a formal and public farewell. This was a sign in part of his own orientation, and a sign, perhaps in greater part, of the times.

On 12 July, Gandhi and Kasturba left for Johannesburg. This city he had come to later than Durban, but had come to know more intimately. It was where he had befriended Polak, Kallenbach, L. W. Ritch, A. M. Cachalia, Sonja Schlesin, Joseph Doke and Thambi Naidoo; where he had first formulated the theory of satyagraha; and where, with the aid of Gujarati merchants and later of Tamils, he had put this theory to the test.

On the 13th, Gandhi was interviewed by a representative of the
Transvaal Leader
. Asked to recall ‘the more remarkable incidents in his career’, he selected some from the recent march across the border. He spoke of how he had convinced the striking miners ‘that they would win, not by putting their sticks over the shoulders of others, but over their own’. He praised their doggedness, their ability to march days and days on meagre rations. Then he praised the Europeans who had helped them, such as the station-master who had offered the marchers milk, the woman shopkeeper who invited them to take what they wanted, the hotel-owner who said they would be warmer spending the night inside his premises – gestures made spontaneously and without asking for payment, proof of the ‘old British sense of sympathy’ present in some whites in South Africa.

Gandhi told the newspaper that he was leaving for good, ‘with the intention of never returning’. If ‘I ever have to return to South Africa or leave India,’ he said, ‘it will be owing to circumstances beyond my control, and at present beyond my conception’. The definitiveness of this departure prompted an elegy for the man and what he represented. ‘So it is humanly certain’, remarked the
Leader
,

that the most arresting figure in the Indian community in South Africa to-day is to say good-bye to a country in which he has spent many years, crowded with experience and exertion, his work on behalf of his countrymen at last crowned with success. When a man has been imprisoned so often that were his offences not merely political he would have qualified as a ‘habitual’, when he has time without number endured fatigue, and fasted with a smile, when he has moved steadily on over obstacles that might daunt the bravest, to the goal to which his eye has been fixed, you might picture him physically as an Apollo, and imagine his heart made of the fibre that belongs to martyrs. In the qualities of the heart and of the soul you may believe the best of Gandhi, but you would wonder,
did you see him, that so frail a figure could house so vigorous a character.
⁵⁴

Gandhi would surely have read this tribute. Swept along by its eloquence, did he recall that this was the same paper that, a bare nine months previously, had written off his leadership and his movement? In September 1913 the
Leader
had spoken of an ‘astonishing apathy’ among the Indians, of an ‘absolute distrust’ in Gandhi. It had suggested that the satyagraha campaign was ‘threatened with collapse’. Now, after the march and the mass strike, the arrest of hundreds of Indians (including women and children) and the acceptance of their demands by the Enquiry Commission, the supposedly failed leader had become a ‘most arresting figure’, his exertions ‘crowned with success’.

The
Leader
was, as some newspapers tend to do, bowing and bending with the wind. The day after its reporter met Gandhi, a meeting in honour of the Indian hero was held at Johannesburg’s Masonic Lodge. Addresses were presented on behalf of the British Indian Association, the Cantonese Club, the Tamil Benefit Society, the Transvaal Indian Women’s Association, the European Committee, and the Gujarati, Mahomedan and Parsee communities of the city. In a dramatic gesture, Thambi Naidoo offered his four sons to Gandhi, to become under his guidance, ‘servants of India’.

The details of some of these tributes have come down to us. That presented by the British Indian Association had as its first signatories A. M. Cachalia and Thambi Naidoo, respectively the foremost Gujarati and Tamil colleague of Gandhi in the satyagraha. It praised the leader’s ‘nobility, steadfastness, self-sacrifice, and indomitable courage’. It also offered salutations to ‘the dignified and silent devotion, to the cause of Indian Womanhood, of the Gracious Lady who shares your joys and sorrows’. Kasturba’s ‘wonderful self-surrender’, the tribute noted, had played a key role in mobilizing the Indians against the marriage laws, now amended in light of their struggle. For their part, the Cantonese Club of Johannesburg offered thanks for Gandhi’s ‘wise counsel’ and the ‘remarkable example’ of his ‘character and conduct’. Through the campaigns of which he was the ‘shining exemplar’, he had ‘raised the prestige of the Asiatic name not only throughout the Union of South Africa, but in the whole civilised world’.
⁵⁵

Responding to the tributes, Gandhi gave a speech whose contents were
noted by a reporter who was present. He lovingly marked his own memories of, and debts to, this city of gold, greed, conflict and conscience:

Johannesburg was not a new place to him. He saw many friendly faces there, many who had worked with him in many struggles in Johannesburg. He had gone through much in life. A great deal of depression and sorrow had been his lot, but he had also learnt during all those years to love Johannesburg even though it was a Mining Camp. It was in Johannesburg that he had found his most precious friends. It was in Johannesburg that the foundation for the great struggle of Passive Resistance was laid in the September of 1906. It was in Johannesburg that he had found a friend, a guide, and a biographer in the late Mr Doke. It was in Johannesburg that he had found in Mrs. Doke a loving sister, who had nursed him back to life when he had been assaulted by a countryman who had misunderstood his mission and who misunderstood what he had done. It was in Johannesburg that he had found a Kallenbach, a Polak, a Miss Schlesin, and many another who had always helped him, and had always cheered him and his countrymen … It was in Johannesburg again that the European Committee had been formed, when Indians were going through the darkest stage in their history, presided over then, as it still was, by Mr Hosken.

Having praised his European friends, Gandhi now turned to the Indians of the city who had given their lives in and for the satyagraha campaign. He singled out three names: all Tamil, all young; two men, one woman; two who had died in prison and one who had died while being deported to India. It was, said Gandhi,

Johannesburg that had given Valiamma, that young girl, whose picture rose before him even as he spoke, who had died in the cause of truth … [I]t was Johannesburg again that had produced a Nagappen and Narayansamy, two lovely youths hardly out of their teens, who also died. But both Mrs Gandhi and he stood living before them. He and Mrs Gandhi had worked in the lime-light; those others had worked behind the scenes, not knowing where they were going, except this, that what they were doing was right and proper, and, if any praise was due anywhere at all, it was due to the three who died.
⁵⁶