Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (16 page)

Yes, he was preoccupied with the satyagraha campaign. But he was also working out a new sense of family in these years. “I fail to understand what you mean by the word ‘family,’ ” he’d written in 1907 to his elder brother Laxmidas not quite a year after he’d deposited his wife and sons at Phoenix. Laxmidas had complained that he was failing to meet his family obligations on two continents. “If I could say so without arrogance,” he now replied, “I would say that my family now comprises all living beings.”

He’d been sending money to his brother for more than a decade to pay off various debts and fulfill his role as the extended family’s primary earner, which he undertook when he sailed to Britain for legal training. Laxmidas had a continuing claim on his income, Gandhi now acknowledged. But there was a catch—he no longer viewed himself as having a personal income. He didn’t deny that his law practice still raked in money, only that he put it to his own use. “
I use all the money that God gives me for the public good,” he explained breezily. Basically the “public good” in this context meant covering the losses of the weekly
Indian Opinion
and helping to keep the Phoenix Settlement afloat. (It would have been “both a loss and a disgrace,” Gandhi later wrote, if the paper had been allowed to die. “
So I kept pouring out all my money until ultimately I was practically sinking all my savings in it.”) In effect, Gandhi was presenting a seemingly secular—some would say heretical—take on the traditional Hindu concept of the sannyasi, the religious wanderer who turns his back on the joys, distractions, and obligations of family life in order to devote himself wholly to spiritual discipline in the form of meditation and prayer. Self-invented, one of a kind, he henceforth presents himself as the sannyasi as social worker.

His own visits to the Phoenix Settlement in these years proved to be irregular and usually brief, so much so that they took on the air of royal visitations or command inspections. “
One day news came that Gandhiji would be visiting Phoenix,” wrote Prabhudas Gandhi, a nephew’s son who grew up there. “The settlement became alive with excitement. The settlers began to tidy the press as well as their homes.” Prabhudas cannot
remember “if Gandhiji ever stayed longer than a fortnight or a month.” Sometimes he “did not come for months,” and then it might be only for a matter of days. “
I could stay there only for brief periods,” Gandhi himself acknowledges. Considering that he’d kept Johannesburg as his base of operations, it’s not altogether surprising that he didn’t drop in more often, or that his erstwhile Durban followers didn’t see more of him.
The two centers, now an hour’s flight distant from each other, were twenty-four hours apart by rail in that era; he’d leave Joburg one evening, arrive in Durban the next. We don’t know exactly how often he made the trip, but it’s plain he didn’t make it as often as he might have. It’s a pattern that would recur in Gandhi’s life. Only sometimes would his travels be geared to the obvious needs of the movements that viewed him as their leader; frequently his whereabouts—in an ashram, on tour for a cause—would be dictated by a more personal agenda; his followers would understand that he was engaged with something else, or sense that he’d withdrawn. That sense began to spread among the Indians of Natal, especially among the Muslim merchant class whose members had been his earliest clients and supporters. They didn’t appreciate his remoteness, or understand his readiness to compromise with Smuts on the “Black Act” after preaching that it was a “do or die” issue. At his first meeting in Durban in 1908, another Pathan rushed the platform brandishing a club. Someone doused the lights, saving Gandhi from yet another beating.

Meanwhile, he was assembling a surrogate family in Johannesburg, where his following remained avid, especially among
Tamils, originally from South India, whose difficult
Dravidian language he’d periodically
set himself to learning when immobilized in prison or on an ocean voyage. The most stalwart of the Johannesburg Tamils was a builder and trader named
Thambi Naidoo who’d come to South Africa from the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, where his parents had been indentured. Naidoo was uneducated but spoke five languages (English, three South Indian languages, and the Hindustani of North India).
Physically strong and quick-tempered, he’d be arrested fourteen times and serve ten jail sentences between 1907 and 1913 in the Transvaal
satyagraha campaigns.
According to
Prema Naidoo, a grandson who became an elected city councillor in Johannesburg after the end of white rule nearly nine decades later, this patriarchal resister never fully recovered from blows to the head he took trying to protect Gandhi from the
Pathans at the time of their 1908 attack, suffering dizzy spells for the rest of his life. “
If Thambi Naidoo had not been rash and if he had been free from anger,” Gandhi later wrote, “this brave man could easily have assumed the leadership of the community in the Transvaal.”

Johannesburg attorney, with Thambi Naidoo
(photo credit i4.1)

But Gandhi’s surrogate kin in this Johannesburg period didn’t turn out to be Tamils. They were Westerners, mostly nonobservant Jews, who like Gandhi had dipped into the murky waters of
Theosophy. “
Mine would be considered an essentially heterogeneous family,” he wrote in his
Autobiography
, referring to this period, “where people of all kinds and temperaments were freely admitted. When we think of it, the distinction between heterogeneous and homogeneous is discovered to be merely imaginary. We are all one family.” This was the ultimate rejection of caste, but Gandhi didn’t put it in those terms. By strictest Hindu standards, the Westerners in his circle, some of whom now joined his household, were untouchable; all black and white South Africans were.

In 1904, Gandhi had met
Henry Polak, a young copy editor on
The Critic
, the newspaper, at
Ada Bissicks’s vegetarian teahouse on Rissik Street, across from Gandhi’s law office. Polak, just turned twenty-one then and in his first year in South Africa, had been struck by a letter Gandhi had written to a paper on the wretched sanitary conditions in an Indian area where there had been an outbreak of
plague. Their conversation ranged widely, and soon they discovered a mutual reverence for Tolstoy and shared enthusiasm for German nature cures involving mud packs. Months later Polak made John Ruskin another such enthusiasm, lending Gandhi a copy of the tract
Unto This Last
, which in one overnight reading on a train instantly inspired the idea of the Phoenix
Settlement. It’s a eureka moment that says more about Gandhi and his activist reflexes than it does about Ruskin, who’d inveighed against the skewed values of industrial society, with its focus on capital formation and undervaluing of physical labor, but hadn’t imagined the founding of idealistic rural communes as a response. Gandhi, preoccupied with the costs of running
Indian Opinion
from
Durban, instantly took that leap. Giving Ruskin’s ideal of sturdy husbandry a Tolstoyan twist, he found an answer to his immediate practical problem: he could save his paper by moving it to a self-sustaining rural settlement. In that instant the patriarch chose to be father to a whole community—later it would be a nation—so he gathered an extended family of followers, Westerners as well as Indians, nephews and cousins, and, finally, his own wife and sons. So when he wrote to his brother two years later about his redefinition of “family,” it was a fait accompli. Workers on the farm were expected to double as pressmen and simultaneously feed themselves. Hand labor, thereafter, would be the reflexive Gandhian answer to various problems, from colonial exploitation to rural underemployment and poverty. He would elevate it into a moral imperative.

Within a year of first meeting Gandhi, Henry Polak was living with the barrister’s family in a spacious rented house, graced by a deep upstairs veranda, in a then-upscale white Johannesburg neighborhood called Troyeville, where some neighbors objected to the proximity of an Indian family, possibly the only one within a couple of miles. Most Indians were relegated by law to a “location”—prefiguring the segregated townships and “group areas” of the apartheid era—at the other end of town. It’s noteworthy that the barrister gave no thought to moving in there, preferring to set himself up among whites, in a house suitable by their standards to his professional standing and income.
Gandhi’s house still stands in what’s now a racially mixed, slightly rundown Troyeville, half a block down Albermarle Street from another house that mistakenly bears a plaque saying it’s the one where Gandhi lived. Polak was married there to an English non-Jew, Millie Downs, the day she arrived in South Africa at the end of 1905, with Gandhi as best man. “
His voice was soft, rather musical, and almost boyishly fresh,” Millie told a
BBC interviewer much later, recalling her first impressions of the Johannesburg Gandhi, who instantly welcomed her to his extended family. Months later Henry was dispatched to edit
Indian Opinion
, until Millie, whom he’d met at an Ethical Society meeting in London, decided she’d had enough of Phoenix and the dignity of rural labor. So the tables were
turned later in 1906, when Gandhi, having moved out of Troyeville, returned without family to Joburg from the front of the so-called war with the Zulus and moved in with the Polaks, in a tiny house in a neighborhood called Belleville West. Later they shifted to an area called Highland, taking their revered boarder with them. Kasturba commented sourly from her place of exile in Natal that Gandhi treated Polak as his “eldest son.” In fact, he signed his letters to Polak “Bhai,” meaning brother.

Ba was obviously alluding to the sense of neglect their actual eldest, Harilal, was already feeling, had probably always felt, given that he’d gotten to live with his father less than two of his first eight years.
When Harilal was married in Gujarat in 1906, shortly before his eighteenth birthday, a disapproving Gandhi had written from South Africa: “I have ceased to think of him as a son.” Several years later when a wealthy supporter made funds available so one of his sons could study in Britain as he had himself, Gandhi passed over Harilal, considered sending Manilal, his next born, but finally sent a nephew instead. He was giving up on Western ways and professions and wanted his sons to follow him in his transformation, gathering what education they could in Gujarati, rather than English, while doing manual labor at Phoenix and dedicating their lives to
satyagraha and service.
In a will drafted in 1909, he said it was his wish that his sons “should devote their lifetime” to Phoenix or similar projects. For a while Harilal bent every effort to win his remote, usually absent father’s approbation by proving himself the perfect satyagrahi; in the Transvaal campaign he went to jail six times, for a total of nineteen months in a twenty-seven-month period. Then, making a break, he set off on his own in 1911 for India, where, years later, the pathos of his intermittent rebellion culminated in alcoholic free fall and a short-lived conversion to Islam. Father and son had a meeting before he left Johannesburg. “
He feels that I have always kept all the four boys very much suppressed … always put them and Ba last,” Gandhi wrote, offering a dispassionate summary of his son’s bitter complaint.

Clearly, he’d not put them first. Not putting them first was by then a matter of duty for Gandhi, even creed, as his 1906 letter to Laxmidas had shown. In fact, Gandhi had moved in with the Polaks just as Harilal arrived in Johannesburg without his new bride to join his father’s struggle. There was no room for Harilal in their little household, and he was soon sent down to Phoenix. When the arrival of a baby made quarters at the Polak residence too cramped for Gandhi’s modest needs, he moved
in with the architect
Hermann Kallenbach in what became, it can reasonably be said, the most intimate, also ambiguous, relationship of his lifetime.

“They were a couple,”
Tridip Suhrud, a Gandhi scholar, said when I met him in the Gujarati capital of Gandhinagar. That’s a succinct way of summing up the obvious—Kallenbach later remarked that they’d lived together “
almost in the same bed”—but what kind of couple were they?
Gandhi early on made a point of destroying what he called Kallenbach’s “logical and charming love notes” to him, in the belief that he was honoring his friend’s wish that they be seen by no other eyes. But the architect saved all of Gandhi’s, and his descendants, decades after his death and Gandhi’s, put them up for auction. Only then were the letters acquired by the
National Archives of India and, finally, published. It was too late for the psychoanalyst
Erik Erikson to take them into account, and most recent Gandhi studies tend to deal with them warily, if at all.
One respected Gandhi scholar characterized the relationship as “clearly homoerotic” rather than homosexual, intending through that choice of words to describe a strong mutual attraction, nothing more. The conclusions passed on by word of mouth in South Africa’s small Indian community were sometimes less nuanced. It was no secret then, or later, that Gandhi, leaving his wife behind, had gone to live with a man.