Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (10 page)

In describing these events, Gandhi cultivates the manly, modest voice of a leader who doesn’t want to boast. On a rereading, there comes to seem a touch of the mock-heroic in that voice as well; his small ambiguities seem more calculated than careless. Yet biographers make the most of them. Here’s
Louis Fischer, one of the earliest and still one of the most readable, on the stretcher bearers: “
For days they worked under the fire of enemy guns.” Pyarelal, the apostle turned biographer, describes Gandhi’s role in carrying General Edward Woodgate, the mortally wounded commander at Spion Kop, to the base hospital. “
The agony of the General was excruciating during the march and the bearers had to hurry through the heat and dust.” Two months were to pass before Woodgate finally died from his wounds. It’s possible he was conscious as the stretcher or, more likely,
curtained palanquin in which he was evacuated bumped along across the Tugela River valley for a little more than four miles to the base hospital at Spearman’s Camp, where General Buller had established his headquarters. Physical details of the evacuation are sparse in Gandhi’s account. Whether he accompanied the wounded commander for the whole distance is never entirely clear.

Spion Kop was a strategic hilltop that Woodgate had led his troops to capture in the middle of the night, only to discover in the morning that
he’d neglected to secure the highest ground. Their trenches were half-dug when the Boers opened fire. Recklessly standing outside the trenches, Woodgate was shot through the head as soon as the morning mist lifted. He had to be pulled into a trench filled with dead and dying Lancashire fusiliers, then evacuated to “the first dressing station” by a squad of his troops, next hauled down the hillside to a “field hospital” by British stretcher bearers before his body could be handed over to the Indians. The contemporaneous
“
Times” History of the War in South Africa
has a
detailed narrative of these events, even naming one
Lieutenant Stansfield as head of the squad that got Woodgate’s body down the hill. The narrative doesn’t mention the Indians, nor did a young British correspondent who climbed the hill late in the day after “the long, dragging hours of hell fire” had wound down.

“
Streams of wounded met us and obstructed the path,”
Winston Churchill wrote in his dispatch to the
The Morning Post
. “Corpses lay here and there. Many of the wounds were of a horrible nature.” At the base of the hill, “a village of ambulance wagons grew up.” Gandhi and Churchill were seldom again on the same side. They wouldn’t actually meet until a brief official encounter in London in 1906, which proved to be their only one. It’s intriguing to think they may have crossed paths at Spion Kop. What’s especially striking is the complete absence from Gandhi’s accounts of the picture Churchill described. Either he saw very little of it, or, somehow, the impression it left soon faded.

Thirty educated Indians from
Durban had been designated as “leaders” and given uniforms (paid for by the Muslim traders, none of whom volunteered). Leaders also got tents.
The recruits from the ranks of the indentured had to sleep on open ground, often without blankets, at least in the early weeks. Gandhi was leader of the “leaders.” It’s never entirely clear that the leaders actually carried stretchers. In his several accounts Gandhi leaves the point vague. It’s at least as likely that they supervised the work, marching along and setting the pace (though Gandhi’s first biographer, Doke, came away from his interviews with the impression that his subject actually hauled stretchers). When it was all over, Gandhi wrote a beseeching letter to the colonial secretary noting that a gift of “the Queen’s Chocolate”—held out as more than a gift, a royal beneficence—had just been distributed to British troops in Natal. He asked that the chocolate go as well to the uniformed leaders of the ambulance corps who had served their brief tours without compensation. He made no request on behalf of the much larger number of indentured laborers whom he had not personally recruited.
In the event, no
Indians got “the Queen’s Chocolate.” The exchange makes a pathetic coda. The official replied stiffly. The chocolate was intended only for enlisted men and noncommissioned officers, he said; only for whites, he might just as well have said, for that’s how Gandhi, scrounging for some small recognition of common citizenship, no matter how symbolic, would have read it. Eight Indians, including Gandhi, got medals. None of the other stretcher bearers got any recognition except a letter from Gandhi himself accompanied by a modest unspecified gift.

Vincent Lawrence, the outcaste clerk whose chamber pot had disgusted Kasturba Gandhi, was among the “leaders” sleeping in tents, which shows that for Gandhi the great social divide had become a matter of class, not caste. The idea of crossing that divide is presented only retrospectively.
At the time he finds it remarkable that the stretcher bearers got along well with British soldiers they encountered, considering that the indentured laborers were “rather uncouth.”

The fastidiousness is Gandhi’s. He’d not always be this fussy. Much later, in India, after he’d crossed the social divide, Gandhi adopted an untouchable girl as his daughter. She was named Lakshmi. Years after his death, when the writer
Ved Mehta sought her out, Lakshmi described Gandhi’s obsession with the system of sanitation he established in his ashram: how his followers were trained to pass stool and urine into separate whitewashed buckets in a whitewashed latrine, then cover the stool with earth, eventually emptying the stool buckets in a distant trench, covering what was disposed there with cut grass, and then using the urine to rinse the bucket out. “
Bapu had found a use even for urine,” Lakshmi said. Ved Mehta doesn’t indicate whether this was said with pride, irony, or some measure of each. Maybe she was simply matter-of-fact, in which case she sets an example for anyone trying to understand his thinking on such matters now.

The ashram and the refinements of its sanitation system were still to come when Gandhi reached Calcutta in 1901. But the impulse to experience India as the mass of rural Indians did, more or less the way Tolstoy sought to experience the Russia his former serfs inhabited, was now breaking through. Perhaps the spectacle of South Indian
Brahmans shielding themselves from pollution behind wicker walls was what triggered it. The boundaries of caste were obviously more firmly drawn in India, even in the precincts of the
Indian National Congress, than they had been in South Africa. There, among the indentured at least,
intercaste relationships, sometimes sanctified as marriages, were not uncommon, an adaptation to a shortage of females resulting from the decision
of colonial officials to import only two women for every three men. A laborer on a particular estate could hardly be sure of finding a mate from his specific subcaste and region there. He might not even care about these categories anymore.
In a contemporary send-up of the recruiting agents for the distant plantations who operated in the most depressed parts of India, the promise that caste restrictions could be loosened or abandoned in the new land is part of the pitch of a “sweet-tongued talker.” In this lightly satiric version, the agent promises high wages, light workloads, and no priests “to call on you to conform to the customs of caste traditions.” The laborer will be able to eat, drink, or lie down “with any lass you may love and no one demurs or disputes your rights.”

In fact, an 1885 judicial commission looking into conditions on the sugar plantations in Natal found “
high-caste men married to low-caste women, Mahommedans to Hindus, men from Northern India to Tamil women from the South.” Later, when the contracts of indenture ran out, upwardly mobile ex-indentured Indians who’d elected to stay in South Africa and make a life there soon started to reerect the barriers that had been taken down. In 1909, fifteen years after Gandhi had first come forward as a spokesman for the Indians of Natal, twenty-nine Hindus sent a petition to the protector of immigrants, demanding the immediate dismissal of two
Pariahs who’d been appointed as constables in their community. “
These two Indians are sent out to execute writs,” the petitioners complained, “and at other times to search our houses … What we wish to point out is that if a pariah touches our things or makes an arrest we [are] polluted. They also put on airs.”

Today, five or six generations later, marriages between persons of South and North Indian extraction, not to mention Hindus and Muslims, are still likely to provoke family tensions in South Africa. Marital Web sites tend to be less pointed about caste requirements, however, than they still are in India, but there are sometimes veiled allusions. In marital ads in India today, there are occasional explicit references to
Dalits, the preferred name for the former untouchables in recent decades. In South Africa today, such up-front, unashamed allusions to untouchability seem to be beyond the scope of marital ads aimed at the Indian minority. Untouchability is never mentioned.
Except for a rare academic study, it may not have been acknowledged in print since a single mention a long lifetime ago in
The Star
of Johannesburg. The headline on a small article on June 18, 1933, nearly two decades after Gandhi left South Africa, said:
UNTOUCHABILITY IN JOHANNESBURG REMOVED
.
The elders of the Hindu temple in a neighborhood called Melrose, the article said, had decided to admit untouchables to worship there, in response to a fast against the practice that the Mahatma had ended in India three weeks earlier. Without acknowledging it in so many words, the article thus confirmed that there had long been Indians deemed to be untouchable by other Indians in South Africa and that they’d been barred from the temple throughout Gandhi’s time there.

Gandhi must have known this. But since it was not in the open, untouchability never had to be named as a particular target of his reforming zeal, much as he’d come to abhor it. Even if he had the impulse to launch a campaign among South African Indians against it, how could he have done so without reinforcing anti-Indian sentiments among whites or splitting his small community? Calcutta at the end of 1901 was a different story. At the Congress session untouchability was blatantly in the open as an unquestioned social practice. Not only did Gandhi see it with a foreign eye; he reacted.

When the Congress ended, he stayed on in Calcutta for a month, lodging for most of that time with his political guru, Gokhale, and calling on prominent figures, including
Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu reformer known to his followers as “the Seraphic Master.” An overnight sensation at the World’s Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in conjunction with the World’s Fair in 1893 when he was just thirty, Vivekananda had been hailed as a prodigy, even prophet, in some religious circles in the West. But when the colonial lawyer came to call, he was on his deathbed at the age of thirty-nine and not receiving visitors. There’s no way of knowing whether Gandhi wanted to talk about religion or India. For both men, these were never unrelated subjects. Vivekananda’s central theme was the liberation of the soul through a hierarchy of yogic disciplines and states of consciousness, starting with some Gandhi would later profess:
nonviolence, chastity, and voluntary
poverty. He also spoke scathingly about the involuntary poverty to which Indians by the millions were subjected, saying it was futile to preach religion to the Indian masses “
without first trying to remove their poverty and their sufferings.” When Gandhi mentioned Vivekananda in speeches later, it was almost always to haul out a favorite quotation about the evil of untouchability. The swami could be down-to-earth as well as mystical.
He condemned India’s “morbid no-touchism.” And, in the phrase Gandhi regularly used, he played on the official designation of India’s lowest and poorest as “depressed classes.” What they really should be called, Vivekananda said before Gandhi
came on the scene, was “the suppressed classes.”
Their suppression depresses all Indians, Gandhi would always add.

On leaving Calcutta at the end of January 1902, Gandhi resolved to travel alone across India by train on a third-class ticket in order to experience firsthand the crowding, squalor, and filth that were the lot of the poorest travelers. With a rhetorical flourish but no direct reference to anything his Master said then or later, Pyarelal wrote that Gandhi wanted to bring himself “
into intimate touch with a wide cross-section of the Indian humanity with whom it was his ambition to merge himself.” He bought a blanket, a rough wool coat, a small canvas bag, and a water jug for his expedition.

His resolve to travel third-class from Calcutta may not have become as celebrated as his resistance to being expelled from a first-class compartment on the other side of the Indian Ocean nearly nine years earlier. But it’s not far-fetched to see it as a turning point that’s equally laden with portents. If he hadn’t crossed the social divide in his own mind and heart before, he did so now. It wasn’t a political gesture, something done to attract attention, for no one was paying him any except Gokhale, who, after reacting incredulously to the unheard-of notion of an upper-caste lawyer in third class, finally was touched by Gandhi’s earnestness, so touched he accompanied his protégé to the station, bringing him some food for the journey and saying, “I should not have come if you had gone first-class but now I had to.” That, at least, was the way Gandhi remembered his send-off. Gokhale’s admiration for his would-be apprentice, who was only three years younger, grew into a kind of reverence. “
A purer, a nobler, a braver and more exalted spirit,” he would tell a crowd of Punjabis in 1909, while Gandhi was still in South Africa, “has never moved on the earth.”

After that trip across India in early 1902, Gandhi made it a rule—it might even be called a fetish—always to travel third-class in India (even when, as sometimes happened in later years, the railway laid on entire cars and even trains for the exclusive use of his entourage, inspiring the poet
Sarojini Naidu’s loving jibe: “
You will never know how much it costs us to keep that saint, that wonderful old man, in poverty”). On this first outing, he found the noise unbearable, the habits of the passengers disgusting, their language foul. Chewing betel and tobacco, they “
converted the whole carriage into a spittoon,” he said. Getting into “intimate touch” with Indian humanity proved to be a nasty experience, but, Pyarelal wrote, “
in retrospect, Gandhi even enjoyed it.” Presumably he means that Gandhi got a kick out of the thought that he was doing
something completely original for an aspiring Indian politician. In South Africa, he noted, third-class accommodations, used mainly by blacks, were more comfortable with cushioned rather than hard wooden seats and railway officials not as completely indifferent to overcrowding as they were in India. But in South Africa he had mostly traveled first-class until then. Merging with
indentured Indians there wasn’t yet part of his program, and they weren’t often on trains; merging with blacks never occurred to him.