Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (6 page)

Of course, in South Africa, he didn’t command a majority. Here the huge majority was black. In his fixation on winning for Indians what he deemed to be their rights as citizens of the British Empire, he never posed the question about how or when that majority could be mobilized. Considering what a leap of faith it was for him to call out even Indian indentured laborers in Natal in 1913, it’s clear that mass mobilization would remain for him a dangerous political weapon, tempting but risky. He would try it on a national scale in India on only a roughly decennial basis—in 1921, 1930, and 1942—as if he and the country required years
to recuperate in each case. Yet this time in South Africa—because he desperately needed reinforcements on the front line of nonviolent resistance at a moment when his support among his people had dwindled, because his most devoted followers whom he’d trained for disciplined resistance wanted him to seize the opportunity—the Mahatma-to-be found the political steel, the will, to grasp the weapon. He was fighting for his people but also for his own political survival. The prospect of returning to India as the retiring head of an exhausted and defeated movement had little appeal; it may even have been a goad to action. Not to have seized the moment would have been to acknowledge the possibility that he might fade from the scene. “
The poor have no fears,” he later wrote wonderingly, looking back on the wildfire of strikes that spread across Natal after he and his comrades lit the fuse. It was an important discovery.

What had he known of the indentured laborers?
Maureen Swan, author of a pioneering study that filled in and thereby demythologized the received narrative of Gandhi’s time in South Africa, notes significantly that he’d never previously tried to organize the indentured, that he’d waited until 1913 before addressing the grievances of “
the Natal underclasses.” The received narrative, of course, was Gandhi’s own, based on the reminiscences he later set down in India; there they were serialized on a weekly basis, in the newspaper published from his ashram, as parables or lessons in satyagraha, until eventually they could be collected as autobiography. The scholar Swan speaks and works in the language of class. Her social analysis doesn’t touch on the categories by which Indians who came to South Africa were accustomed to viewing themselves. I mean those of region and caste or—to be a little more specific without plunging into a maze of overlapping but not synonymous social categories—
jati
and subcaste, the groupings by which poor Indians would commonly identify themselves. That her “underclasses” were heavily lower caste was not relevant to her argument. But it may have some relevance to the way Gandhi saw them, for he’d come, by his own peculiar route, early in his time in South Africa, to a position of moral outrage on the injustice of
caste discrimination by Indians, against so-called untouchables especially.

Gandhi’s ideas of social equality kept evolving during his time in South Africa and later, after he confronted the turbulent Indian scene. He’d struggled for the legal equality of Indians and whites. This had led him,
inevitably, to the issue of equality between Indian and Indian. He crossed the caste boundary before he crossed the class boundary, but all these categories would eventually blur and come to be overlaid on one another in his mind so that years later, in 1927, it would seem natural to him to refer back to his South Africa struggle when campaigning in India against untouchability: “
I believe implicitly that all men are born equal … I have fought this doctrine of superiority in South Africa inch by inch, and it is because of that inherent belief that I delight in calling myself
a scavenger, a spinner, a weaver, a farmer and a laborer.” Here he echoes his half-jesting suggestion to his biographer Doke, twenty years earlier in Johannesburg, that the first study of his life could be titled “A Scavenger.” On another occasion, he’d say that “uplift of Harijans”—a term meaning “children of God” he tried to popularize for untouchables—first struck him as an idea and a mission in South Africa. “
The idea did occur to me in South Africa and in the South African setting,” he told his faithful secretary
Mahadev Desai. If he was referring to his political life—to actions he took in the world and not simply to values he’d come to hold inwardly—there’s little in all Gandhi’s South African experience besides the 1913 campaign that could stand as a basis for the assertion.

Talk of scavengers and other untouchables is not the vocabulary of class struggle used by a revolutionary like Mao Zedong. But it’s radical in its own terms—its own Indian terms—and makes the link between the struggles he later waged in India against untouchability and the strikes of indentured laborers he found himself leading, despite obvious misgivings, in 1913 in the coal-mining district of northern Natal.

Long before he thought of deploying the indentured in his struggle, Gandhi was alive to their oppression. When he made it a cause, he didn’t make explicit the connection, the overlap, between the indentured and the untouchables. Still, he had to be aware of it. It was a subject generally to be avoided, but all Indians in South Africa knew it was lurking in their new world. They had mostly come to South Africa as indentured laborers, or were descended from indentured laborers. And
most indentured laborers were low caste; the proportion of those deemed to be untouchable seems certain to have been significantly higher in South Africa than in India, where it was estimated, at the time, to be about 12 percent nationally, as high as 20 percent in some regions. One of the appeals for the indenture system made by recruiters who canvassed for volunteers in South India and on the Gangetic plain had been that it could lighten the load carried by oppressed laborers held to be outcastes. Crossing an ocean, even on a contract of indenture, made it easier to
change one’s name, religion, or occupation: in effect, to pass. Even if these remained unchanged, caste could be expected to recede as a touchstone and social imperative in the new country. Yet it was there. Because Gandhi himself was liberated on caste issues, he could finally conceive of leading indentured laborers, just as it came easily for him to conceive of Hindus and Muslims, Tamils and Gujaratis, as one people in the setting of an immigrant community where they were all thrown together as they seldom were in India.

At this point in South Africa, the political Gandhi and the religious Gandhi merge, not for the first or last time. At the end of his life, just before India’s independence and in its aftermath, a heartsick Mahatma would verge on seeing himself as a failure. He saw Hindus and Muslims caught up in a paroxysm of mutual slaughter, what we later learned to call “ethnic cleansing.” Untouchables were still untouchable in the villages, where they mostly dwelled; the commitment to liberate them as part of the achievement of freedom, which he’d tried to instill among Hindus, seemed to have become a matter for lip service, whatever new laws proclaimed. No individual, no matter how inspiring or saintly, could have accomplished the wholesale renewal of India in only two generations, the time that had passed since Gandhi had started to conceive it as his mission while still in South Africa. It was there, Gandhi later wrote in his summing-up,
Satyagraha in South Africa
, that he’d “
realized my vocation in life.”

Those who depend on what he called “truth force” were “strangers to disappointment and defeat,” he claimed in that book’s last line. Yet here he was, at the end of his days, expressing chronic disappointment and, sometimes, a sense of defeat. He’d had more to do with India’s independence than any other individual—in declaring the goal and making it seem attainable, in convincing the nation that it was a nation—but he was not among those who celebrated that day. Instead, he fasted. The celebrations were, he said, “
a sorry affair.”

In our own time, the word “tragedy” inevitably gets tagged to any disastrous event. A highway pileup or a killer tornado that claims lives, a shooting binge in a post office or an act of terrorism—all will promptly be labeled “tragic” on the evening news as if tragedy were simply a synonym for calamity or baleful fate. Naipaul once wrote that
Indians lack a tragic sense; he didn’t specifically mention Gandhi in that connection, but probably, if asked, he would have. Yet in the deeper meaning of the
word—connecting it to character and inescapable mortality rather than chance—there’s a tragic element in Gandhi’s life, not because he was assassinated, nor because his noblest qualities inflamed the hatred in his killer’s heart. The tragic element is that he was ultimately forced, like Lear, to see the limits of his ambition to remake his world. In that sense, the play was already being written when he boarded the steamship in Cape Town in 1914.

“
The saint has left our shores, I sincerely hope forever,” wrote his leading South African antagonist and occasional negotiating foil,
Jan Christian Smuts, then the defense minister. An “unwelcome visitor” at the beginning of his long sojourn, a “saint” at the end but obviously still unwelcome, it wasn’t easy to say what Gandhi had accomplished beyond his remarkable self-creation and the example he’d set. A top British official worried that he might have shown South Africa’s blacks “
that they have an instrument in their hands—this is, combination and passive resistance—of which they had not previously thought.” It would be years before that hypothesis would be seriously tested.

But for Gandhi himself, South Africa had been more than an overture. Between his arrival and his departure, he’d acquired some ideas to which he was committed, others that he’d only begun to try out.
Satyagraha as a means of active struggle to achieve a national goal belonged to the first category; satyagraha involving the poorest of the poor fit the second. These were what he carried in his otherwise meager baggage when, finally, he came out of Africa.

Another conceivable variation on this theme—struggle not only involving the poorest but specifically for their benefit—never quite materialized in South Africa. It would prove even harder to conceive of in the circumstances of the India to which he returned.

To understand how Gandhi’s time in South Africa set him on his brilliantly original, ultimately problematic course, we need to delve deeper into some of the episodes that made up this long tryout, to see how his experiences there shaped his convictions, how those convictions shaped a sense of mission and of himself that was close to fully formed by the time he headed home for good.

V
. S. N
AIPAUL’S
WORDS
were intentionally surprising, even startling. What a way to describe the iconic figure in a loincloth whom the Cambridge-educated Nehru called “
the quintessence of the conscious and subconscious will” of village India. How could Gandhi be at once “the least Indian” and “the quintessence” of the country’s deepest impulses? I was newly arrived in India toward the end of 1966 when I came upon Naipaul’s line. For me it was the most memorable in his scorching, sometimes hilarious first book on India,
An Area of Darkness
, published in 1964. It spoke to Gandhi’s time in South Africa, to the question of how it had shaped him.

I’d landed as a correspondent in New Delhi, coming from South Africa via London myself, just as Gandhi had in 1915, which may suggest why I was susceptible to the flattering argument that outsiders saw the country more clearly than its most sophisticated inhabitants. In the first generation after independence, it was insolent if not heretical for any Indian, especially one born in Trinidad and resident in London, to argue that India’s father figure, its beloved Bapu, as he was called in his ashrams and beyond, had come into his own overseas—in Africa, of all places—and had been forever changed by the traumatic but unavoidable experience of having to look on his motherland through what had become foreign eyes. In other words, the way Naipaul himself saw India. The writer was blunt. He didn’t waste words; that was an essential part of his genius. Basically, he was saying that Gandhi was appalled by the country he’d later get credit for liberating. It was the social oppression of India and its filth—the sight of people blithely squatting in public places to move their bowels and then, just as blithely, leaving their turds
behind for human scavengers to remove—that accounted for the Mahatma-to-be’s reforming zeal. “
He looked at India as no Indian was able to,” the young Naipaul wrote; “his vision was direct, and this directness was, and is, revolutionary.”

Naipaul found supporting evidence in the
Autobiography
, a book he would continue to mine every decade or so for new insights into “the many-sided Gandhi.” In this earliest excavation, he concentrated on a visit by Gandhi to Calcutta on a return home in 1901 that he’d originally intended to make permanent. Gandhi doesn’t know it yet, but he still has a dozen years ahead of him in South Africa. Within a year, he’ll allow himself to be summoned back from India. This is the pre-satyagraha Gandhi, still only thirty-two, the writer of lawyerly petitions to remote officials, not yet a leader of mass protests. Gandhi is in Calcutta—now called Kolkata—to attend his very first annual meeting of the Indian National Congress, a movement he’d one day transform and dominate but that, at this stage, hardly knows his name.

Naipaul doesn’t waste words on context, but a little helps. Calcutta, at the start of the last century, is “the packed and pestilential town” Kipling described, but it’s also in those days still the seat of the viceroy, capital of the Raj, “second city” of the empire, and capital as well of an undivided Bengal (a Muslim-majority area by a thin margin, taking in the entire Ganges delta including all the present Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal). Not just that, it has been an important seedbed of Hindu
reform movements and is now on the verge of a period of ferment that might be called prerevolutionary. In these respects, it’s India’s St. Petersburg. A political newcomer, Gandhi has been granted a scant five minutes to speak about the situation Indians confront in far-off South Africa. In nobody’s eyes but his own is the arrival of this lawyer, lately from Durban, a big deal. He’s as central to the proceedings as a delegate from Guam or Samoa at an American political convention.