Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (5 page)

In his own mind, his two vows were now bound together, almost inextricable. Gandhi held to a traditional Hindu idea that a man is weakened by any loss of semen—a view aspiring boxers and their trainers are sometimes said to share—and so for him his vows, from the outset, were all about discipline, about strength. “
A man who deliberately and intelligently takes a pledge and then breaks it,” he said that night in the Empire Theater, “forfeits his manhood.” Such a man, he went on, “becomes a man of straw.”
Years later, upon learning that his son Harilal’s wife was pregnant again, Gandhi chided him for giving in to “this weakening passion.” If he learned to overcome it, the father promised, “you will have new strength.” Later still, when he’d become the established leader of the Indian national movement, he’d write that sex leads to a “
criminal waste of the vital fluid” and “an equally criminal waste of precious energy” that ought to be transmuted into “the highest form of energy for the benefit of society.”

After a while, he sought an Indian term to replace “passive resistance.” He didn’t like the adjective “passive,” which seemed to connote weakness.
Indian Opinion
held a contest.
A nephew suggested
sadagraha
, meaning “firmness in the cause.” Gandhi, by then accustomed to having the last word, changed it to
satyagraha
, normally translated as “truth force” or sometimes, more literally, as “firmness in truth,” or “clinging to truth.” To stand for truth was to stand for justice, and to do so nonviolently, offering a form of resistance that would eventually move even the oppressor to see that his position depended on the opposite, on untruth and force. Thereafter the movement had a name, a tactic, and a doctrine. These too he would bring home.

Gandhi kept changing, experiencing a new epiphany every two years or so—Phoenix (1904), brahmacharya (1906), satyagraha (1908), Tolstoy Farm (1910)—each representing a milestone on the path he was blazing
for himself. South Africa had become a laboratory for what he’d later call, in the subtitle of his
Autobiography
, “My Experiments with Truth,” an opaque phrase that suggests to me that the subject being tested was himself, the pursuer of “truth.” The family man gives up family; the lawyer gives up the practice of law. Gandhi would eventually take on garb similar to that of a wandering Hindu holy man, a
sadhu
off on his own lonely pilgrimage, but he would always be the opposite of a dropout. In his own mind, his simple handwoven loincloth was a signal not of sanctity but of his feeling for the plight of India’s poor. “
I did not suggest,” he would later write, “that I could identify myself with the poor by merely wearing one garment. But I do say that even that little thing is something.” Of course he was aware, politician that he was, that it could be read in more than one way. His idea of a life of service also meant staying in the world and having a cause, usually several at a time.

The householder takes to the land and settles on a farm. “
Our ambition,” one of his colleagues explains, “is to live the life of the poorest people.” He was a political man, but he was surprisingly free in Africa, as he would not have been in India, to go his own way. Family and communal ties, less binding in the new environment, had to be reinvented anyway; he had room to “experiment.” And, of course, there were no offices to seek. Whites had them all.

It’s not easy to pinpoint the moment in South Africa when the ambitious, transplanted barrister becomes recognizable as the Gandhi who would be called Mahatma. But it had happened by 1908, fifteen years after his arrival in the land. Still called
bhai
, or brother, he sat that year for a series of interviews by his first biographer, a white Baptist preacher in Johannesburg named
Joseph Doke who, not incidentally, still harbored the ambition of converting his subject. It doesn’t demean Doke’s well-written tract to call it hagiography, for that’s distinctly its genre. Its main character is defined by saintly qualities. “Our Indian friend lives on a higher plane than most men do,” Doke writes. Other Indians “wonder at him, grow angry at his strange unselfishness.”
It also doesn’t demean Doke to note that Gandhi himself took over the marketing of the book. He bought up the entire first edition in London in order, he said with false modesty, to save Doke from “a fiasco” but actually to have volumes to distribute to members of Parliament and ship to India; later he arranged for publication of an Indian edition by his friend
G. A. Natesan, a Madras editor; and every week for years to come he ran house ads in
Indian Opinion
inviting mail orders. In Gandhi’s hands, Doke’s book becomes a campaign biography for a campaign as yet unlaunched.

He’s still wearing a necktie and a Western suit in the group portrait for which a garlanded Gandhi and Kasturba posed on the docks in Cape Town on their last day in the country, but if you look closely, there’s what may be a tiny foreshadowing in his shaved head and the handcrafted sandals on his feet of a sartorial makeover he’d already experimented with on several occasions and that he’d display on his arrival in Bombay six months later and then adapt over the following six years until he had reduced his garb to the utter, literally bare simplicity of the homespun loincloth and shawl. In the Bombay arrival pictures, suit and tie have been banished for good; he wears a turban, the loose-fitting tunic called a
kurta
on top of what appears to be a lungi, or wraparound skirt. The lungi would soon be replaced by a
dhoti
, a wide enveloping loincloth, which in later years, in its most abbreviated form, would sometimes be all he wore. He wanted, he would teasingly say in rejoinder to Churchill’s gibe, to be “
as naked as possible.”

Viewed as if in a digitally manipulated tracking shot over time, Gandhi the South African lawyer who goes through these changes seamlessly morphs into the future Indian Mahatma. In this long view, an extraordinary, heroic story unfolds: Within the brief span of five and a half years after landing in his vast home country, though still largely unknown to the broad population that hasn’t yet had a taste of modern politics, he takes over the
Indian National Congress—up to then a usually sedate debating club embodying the aspirations of a small Anglicized elite, mostly lawyers—and turns it into the century’s first anticolonial mass movement, raising a clamor in favor of a relatively unfamiliar idea, that of an independent India. Against all the obstacles of illiteracy and an absolute dearth of modern communications reaching down to the 700,000 villages where most Indians lived in the period before partition, he wins broad acceptance, at least for a time, as the authentic exemplar of national renewal and unity.

That outcome, of course, was not foreordained. If the earlier frames are frozen and the South African Gandhi is viewed up close, as he might easily have been seen a year or two before the end of his African sojourn, it’s not a mahatma who comes into focus; it’s a former lawyer, political spokesman, and utopian seeker. In this view, Gandhi shows up as a singularly impressive character. But in the political realm, he’s nothing more than a local leader with a weakening hold on a small immigrant community, facing an array of adherents, critics, and rivals. In such a perspective, if we had to guess, it would seem likeliest that his trajectory would end in a smallish settlement or ashram, a transplanted Phoenix,
lost somewhere in the vastness of India; there he’d be surrounded by family and followers engaged with him on a quest as much religious as political. In other words, instead of ending up on pedestals in India as Father of the Nation, the leading figure in a mistily viewed national epic and subject for legions of biographers, scholars, and thinkers who have made him perhaps the most written-about person of the last hundred years, the South African Gandhi could have become another Indian guru whose scattered devotees might have remembered him for a generation or two at best. In South Africa itself he might even have been remembered as a failure rather than held up for reverence, as he is there today, in the fading glow of the advent of democratic, supposedly nonracial government, as one of the founding fathers of the new South Africa.

In fact, the South African Gandhi was explicitly written off as a failure a little more than a year before he left the country by the irascible editor of a weekly newspaper in Durban that competed—sometimes respectfully, sometimes spitefully—with Gandhi’s
Indian Opinion
for Indian readers.
African Chronicle
was aimed mainly at readers of Tamil origin, among whom Gandhi found most of his staunchest supporters. “
Mr. Gandhi’s ephemeral fame and popularity in India and elsewhere rest on no glorious achievement for his countrymen, but on a series of failures, which has resulted in causing endless misery, loss of wealth, and deprivation of existing rights,” fumed
P. S. Aiyar in a series of scattershot attacks. His leadership over twenty years had “resulted in no tangible good to anyone.” He and his associates had made themselves “an object of ridicule and hatred among all sections of the community in South Africa.”

There was some basis for Aiyar’s tirade. Gandhi’s support had been dwindling for some time; the nonviolent army of Indians willing to step forward yet again and volunteer for the “self-suffering” that came with service as willing
satyagrahis
—offering themselves as fodder, that is, for his campaigns of civil disobedience against unjust racial laws, by courting arrest, going to jail, thereby losing jobs, seeing businesses fail—had visibly shrunk to the point that it hardly exceeded his own family and a band of loyal Tamil supporters in Johannesburg, members of what was called the
Tamil Benefit Society. The campaigns had pushed the government into compromises, but these fell many leagues short of the aspirations of the more emboldened Indians for rights of full citizenship; and the authorities had repeatedly stalled and reneged on the meager promises they’d made.

For all that, 1913 was to prove a turning point. Gandhi’s experience
over two decades in Africa is replete with turning points in his inner life, but this is the one in his public life, in the political sphere, that best explains his subsequent readiness and ability to reach for national leadership in India. He might have faded into semi-oblivion if he’d returned to India in 1912. His final ten months in South Africa, though, transformed his sense of what was possible for him and those he led.

It was only then that he allowed himself to engage directly with the “coolies” he’d described twenty years earlier in his first letter to a newspaper in Pretoria. These were the most oppressed Indians working on sugar plantations, in the coal mines, and on the railroad under renewable five-year contracts of indenture that gave them rights and privileges only slightly less flimsy than those of chattel. A colonial officer with the title “Protector of Immigrants” had a statutory duty to make sure that these “semi-slaves,” as Gandhi termed them, were not overworked or underfed in violation of the letter of their labor contracts. But the records show that the putative protector more commonly served as an enforcer on behalf of plantation owners and other contract holders. Under the indenture system, it was a crime for a laborer to leave his place of employment without authorization: not only could he lose his job; he could be clapped in jail and even flogged. Yet, for a spell of only several weeks in November 1913, in a collective spasm of resentment and hope, what had been unthinkable happened: thousands of these indentured Indians walked off the mines, plantations, and railroad to follow Gandhi in the greatest and last of his campaigns of nonviolent resistance in South Africa.

For their leader it was a sudden and radical change in tactics, a calculated risk: in part a result of events accelerating out of his control, transforming and renewing his own sense of his constituency, his sense of who it was he actually represented, for whom it was he actually spoke. If Gandhi had gone home at the start of that year as he’d originally hoped, it’s questionable whether he would ever have been able to conceive of, let alone effect, such a mass mobilization. Instead, he returned to India in 1915 with an experience no other Indian leader had yet known.

He hadn’t seen it coming. In June 1913 he outlined his expectations for this final struggle in a letter to Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the statesmanlike and moderate Indian leader whom he’d taken as a mentor years before and to whom he was now hoping to apprentice himself on his return. Gokhale had just visited South Africa, where he’d been hailed by
whites as well as Indians as a tribune of the empire. “
So far as I can judge at present 100 men and 30 women will start the struggle,” Gandhi wrote. “As time goes on, we may have more.” (
Reminiscing, many years later, he would remark that the number with whom he actually started was only 16.) As late as October 1913,
Indian Opinion
flatly declared: “
The indentured Indians will not be invited to join the general struggle.”

Then, just two days after the date on that issue, Gandhi showed up in the coal-mining town of Newcastle in northern Natal to address indentured laborers who’d already started to leave the mines. He had shaved his head, and for the first time at a political event in South Africa the former lawyer dressed in Indian garb, showing his allegiance to the laborers by donning their attire.

“
It was a bold, dangerous and momentous step,”
Indian Opinion
commented a week later. “Such concerted action had not been tried before with men who are more or less ignorant. But with passive resistance nothing is too dangerous or too bold so long as it involves suffering by themselves and so long as in their methods they do not use physical force.” This sounds like a passage Gandhi himself may have dictated in the full flush of the movement. The condescending reference to the ignorance of the strikers is a consistent Gandhian note.
Later, back in India, he would regularly speak of the “dumb millions” in summoning the national movement to work for the poorest of the poor, or, on an occasion when he contemplated with some irony the scope of his influence, of “
the numberless men and women who have childlike faith in my wisdom.” On this South African test run for satyagraha as a form of mass mobilization, the hint of concern that the dumb and childlike could lapse into violence foreshadows the Gandhi who would write, after his first call for a national movement of noncooperation with British rule in India ended in a spasm of arson and killing, “
I know that the only thing that the Government dreads is the huge majority I seem to command. They little know that I dread it more than they.”