Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (11 page)

F
ROM HIS FIRST MONTHS
in South Africa, the young Mohandas Gandhi was acutely sensitive to the casual racism that dripped and oozed from the epithet “coolie.” Never could he get over the shock of seeing the word used as a synonym for “Indian” in official documents or courtroom proceedings; making that translation in reverse—defining himself on behalf of the whole community as an Indian rather than as a Hindu, Gujarati, or Bania—was his first nationalist impulse. Years later he could be freshly affronted by the memory of having been called a “coolie lawyer.” Yet it took him more than fifteen years to learn that the word “kaffir” had similar connotations for the people he occasionally recognized as the original owners of the land, the “natives,” as he otherwise called them, or Africans, or blacks.

Gandhi is likely to have heard the term in India. Originally derived from the Arabic word for infidel, it was sometimes used by Muslims there to describe Hindus. Its range of meanings in the speech of white South Africans would have been new to him. In Afrikaans and English, whites used “kaffir” in a variety of compounds and contexts. The Kaffir Wars of the early nineteenth century were fought by white settlers against black tribes who inhabited territory known as Kaffirland or Kaffraria. Kaffir corn was the grain used in their mealie porridge and beer. Anything with the word attached to it was normally deemed to be inferior, backward, or uncivilized. In its most polite usage, as a noun, it signified a primitive being. When it came with a sneer, it amounted to “nigger.”
Kafferboetie
was an abusive term in Afrikaans for anyone who liked or sympathized with blacks; a fair translation was “nigger lover.” It was something Gandhi was never called.

Here he is in early 1908, reporting on his first experience of prison as an inmate:

Indians sentenced to hard labor were routinely placed in the same cells with blacks, an experience Gandhi would have himself the next time he went to prison, later that same year.

Much happened in the eight months between these two prison experiences. Initially, he’d urged Indians to refuse to register in the Transvaal as the “Black Act” required; then he’d quixotically struck a deal with Smuts under which, as he understood it, Indians would register “voluntarily” and then, in recognition of their easy compliance, the law requiring them to do so would be repealed. As Gandhi saw it, the removal from the statute books of a racial law defining Indians as second-class citizens had to be welcomed even if little or nothing changed in their actual lives.
Similarly, he would later demand changes in a law called the Asiatic Act (enacted in 1907 by the all-white new provincial legislature, as soon as self-rule was restored to the former
South African Republic) that barred Indian immigrants to the Transvaal with no history of previous residence there. Gandhi wanted six, just six, highly educated Indians to be admitted annually as permanent residents, even if they had no ties to the territory. By Gandhi’s puzzling, legalistic standard, the admission of half a dozen Indians a year would cancel any suggestion that they were innately unequal and unworthy of citizenship. It could also be interpreted as a sly tactical maneuver designed to establish or, rather, insinuate a precedent or right, which is precisely why the new white government resisted the demand. “
The spirit of fanaticism which actuates a portion of the Indian community” made it inadvisable, Prime Minister
Louis Botha explained to a British official, suggesting it would be an invitation to further Gandhian resistance. What the prime minister really meant was that even six Indians a year—one every two months—would be enough to inflame whites, for whom, of course, there had never been numerical quotas or educational standards.
It would violate one of their regularly proclaimed demands: that a lid be placed absolutely on the number of Indians. “Resolved,” a group calling itself
the White League had formally declared as early as 1903, “that all Asiatics should be prevented from coming into the Transvaal.” In Botha’s view, that was reasonable, not “fanatical.”

The registration issue came first; and for the first but not last time, Gandhi’s instinct for compromise, for sticking to a principle even if it meant gaining little in practice, confused and upset followers, to the point that he was waylaid and severely beaten on the day he himself went to register by burly
Pathans, Muslims from the frontier area of what’s now Pakistan who’d been brought over during the war to serve in various noncombatant roles. The Pathans were quick to conclude that Gandhi’s supposed deal was a betrayal. The distinction between being fingerprinted voluntarily and being fingerprinted under duress was not apparent to them. Reacting in horror to the assault on their leader, who was now beginning to be recognized as a spiritual pilgrim as well as a lawyer and spokesman, the broader Indian community finally heeded his appeal and registered. But, in a further twist, the “Black Act” wasn’t repealed as he’d assured them it would be. A nonplussed Gandhi said he’d been double-crossed. As his grandson and biographer Rajmohan Gandhi observes, he then “
for the first time permitted himself the use of racial language,” saying Indians would never again “submit to insult from insolent whites.” Satyagraha resumed with the aroused mass meeting at the Hamidia Mosque in Johannesburg, where, following Gandhi’s example, Transvaal Indians flung their certificates into the iron cauldron, where they were promptly doused with paraffin, set aflame, and incinerated.

So Gandhi had no certificate to present when, in October, he led dozens of similarly undocumented Indians from Natal into the Transvaal border town of Volksrust, where, refusing to be fingerprinted, he was arrested and sentenced to two months of hard labor.
Brought to Johannesburg under guard and wearing the garb of ordinary black convicts (“marked all over with the broad arrow,” in Doke’s contemporaneous description), the well-known lawyer was paraded through the streets from Park Station to the Fort, Johannesburg’s earliest prison, where he was tossed into an overcrowded holding cell in the segregated “native jail,” full of black and other nonwhite criminals. This too is commemorated: the skeleton of the old Park Station, all elegant fretwork and filigree open to the elements under a pitched metal roof, sits today as a monument on a bluff above the rail yards in downtown Johannesburg; the communal holding cell at the Fort has been converted into a permanent Gandhi exhibition where his reedy voice, recorded in an old
BBC
interview, can be heard complaining a dozen or so times an hour about being belittled as “a coolie lawyer.” The prison, where
Nelson Mandela and many other political prisoners were subsequently jailed, has been converted into a museum preserving the memory of past oppression and struggle. Hard by its thick ramparts stand the open, airy chambers of South Africa’s new Constitutional Court, pledged to uphold a legal order guaranteeing equal rights for all South Africa’s peoples: an imaginative juxtaposition intended as an act of architectural restitution and rebalancing, meant to enshrine, not just symbolize, a living ideal.

All that—the dedication of the new court building, the renaming of the prison precincts as Constitution Hill—came ninety-six years after Gandhi’s first imprisonment there in 1908. His experience, recounted to Doke and subsequently written up in
Indian Opinion
, more than confirmed his earlier fears. The future Mahatma was mocked and taunted by a black inmate, then by a Chinese one, who finally turned away, going to “
a Native lying in bed,” where “the two exchanged obscene jokes, uncovering one another’s genitals.” Gandhi, who tells us that both men were murderers, admits to having felt uneasy and finding it hard to fall asleep for a while; the Baptist preacher Doke, with whom he spoke the next day, is instantly horror-struck. “
This refined Indian gentleman was obliged to keep himself awake all night, to resist possible assaults upon himself, such as he saw perpetrated around him,” Doke writes. “That night can never be forgotten.” The man who didn’t have the experience is more vivid in this instance than the one who did, probably, we may surmise, because of the immediacy, the sense of looming violation, with which the badly shaken prisoner related it to him as compared to the cool indifference Gandhi attempted to affect two months later, when he got around to writing about that evening himself.

On that second day in the holding cell at the Fort, as Gandhi was starting to use a prison latrine, so he later wrote, “
a strong, heavily built, fearful-looking Native” demanded that Gandhi step aside so he could go first. “I said I would leave very soon. Instantly he lifted me up in his arms and threw me out.” He was not injured, Gandhi tells us, “but one or two Indian prisoners who saw what happened started weeping,” out of shame over their inability to defend their leader. “They felt helpless and miserable,” he says. Here again Gandhi doesn’t say how he felt. It was the fourth assault on his person in South Africa, the first by a black. Yet he writes about it only once, doesn’t dwell on it even then. He’s not shocked, he leads us to infer, not even surprised.

Writing after the passage of two months, he draws a conclusion that’s
not about jail life. It’s about ordinary relations between Indians and the black majority. “
We may entertain no aversion to Natives,” he says, “but we cannot ignore the fact that there is no common ground between them and us in the daily affairs of life.” This time he doesn’t say “kaffirs.” But the sentiment isn’t conspicuously different from what a refined Brahman in that era—or, for that matter, most Banias—might have voiced about untouchables.
Is that, as some Indian scholars suggested to me, really how Gandhi saw Africans, as people who should be deemed untouchable?
In strict interpretation of caste, any non-Hindu or foreigner, white or black, is an outcaste by definition, unsuitable as a dining companion, or for partnering of a more intimate kind. Then and later, other South African Hindus found it natural to apply the strictures of untouchability to black servants, not allowing them to have contact with their food or dishes or persons. Gandhi himself had for years eaten with non-Indian vegetarians, all whites. At this stage in his life, he was actually living with a non-Indian, a Jewish architect of Lithuanian background by way of East Prussia named
Hermann Kallenbach. So when we think it through, the question becomes this: whether, on account of race, he put hard-living, uneducated, meat-eating Africans in a separate category of humans from that of hard-living, uneducated, meat-eating Indian “coolies,” or the third-class passengers whose behavior appalled him on Indian trains; in other words, whether for him, race was a defining characteristic or, finally, as incidental as caste.

It’s in this context that we must view Gandhi’s early reflections on jail life from the same year. I’ve not highlighted them because they’re especially shocking or revealing of his feelings about race. There are passages sprinkled among Gandhi’s writings of earlier years in South Africa that sound—in, as well as out of, context—even more condescending to Africans, sound, frankly, racist. As early as 1894, in an open letter to the Natal legislature, he complained that “
the Indian is being dragged down to the position of
the raw Kaffir.” Two years later he was still going on about “the raw Kaffir, whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a number of cattle to buy a wife, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness.” (The very proper young lawyer Gandhi then was plainly had no premonition of the day he’d teasingly vow to be “as naked as possible” himself.) In 1904, during an outbreak of
plague in Johannesburg, he asks the official medical officer why the so-called Indian location—the area where the city’s Indians were mostly required to live—had been “chosen for dumping down all the Kaffirs of the town.” Hammering his point further, he declares what’s only obvious:
“
About the mixing of the Kaffirs with the Indians, I must confess I feel most strongly.” And there’s Gandhi the eager racial theorist who had written a couple of months earlier: “
If there is one thing the Indian cherishes more than any other, it is purity of type.” And a couple of months before that: “
We believe as much in the purity of races as we think they [the whites] do.”

All that can be said by way of extenuation about such passages is that they were addressed to whites. If we want to give him any benefit of the doubt, we might say that the eager-to-please advocate was maybe playing to his audience, seeking to advance his argument that so-called British Indians could safely be acknowledged as cultural and political equals of whites, worthy citizens bound to them by their common imperial ties—that equality of sorts for Indians would not, in the near or far future, undermine the dominance of whites. But he was up against the color bar. For many whites, color was all that mattered; in this view, Indians had to be classed first and foremost as “non-white” if white dominance was to be maintained as the basic premise of social order. To concede that there could be “British Indians”—Indians who met standards that could be acknowledged as “civilized”—was a step away from admitting the unthinkable, the possibility of “British” or “civilized” Africans. It was an attitude that had riled Gandhi practically from the time he set foot in the country. In his fifth month in South Africa he clipped and saved a snatch of racist verse from a humor column in a Transvaal newspaper: