Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (9 page)

On October 26, 1895, he’s said to have visited shanties near the Point Road where Indian dockworkers and fishermen lived, collecting only five pounds. (Point Road, the thoroughfare he first traveled on landing in Durban, has lately, in the new South Africa, been renamed Mahatma Gandhi Road, a well-meant tribute that has discomfited local Indians, given its reputation for prostitution.) The next weekend he ventured north with some Congress members to the sugar country, but, barred
from speaking to laborers at the Tongaat estate, he concentrated on local Indian traders. A British estate owner was asked by a magistrate in Durban to report on Gandhi’s activities. The planter was no clairvoyant. This is what he wrote: “
He will cause some trouble I have no doubt, but he is not the man to lead a big movement. He has a weak face.”

Gandhi’s real attitude to the indentured in this period is made plain by the arguments he advanced on the first of his losing causes in South Africa: that of protecting the voting rights of literate, propertied Indians. Such Indians, he wrote in December that year, “
have no wish to see ignorant Indians who cannot possibly be expected to understand the value of a vote being placed on the Voters’ List.”

If the thought of following Tolstoy’s teaching on his brief foray to the sugar country on Natal’s north coast so much as crossed his mind, it hadn’t yet carried him to the conclusion that he needed to do physical labor with his own hands. Nor, it seems, did he try again to penetrate the plantations, having failed the first time. So for anyone looking for the origins of his passion on untouchability—so evident by the time he reaches Calcutta in 1901—the Balasundaram case sheds little light. The most that can be said is that it might have helped set the stage for his next revelation, which came not from actual encounters with poor Indians but from finding himself on the short end of an argument with whites. At virtually the same time, probably no more than a few weeks after the gardener’s arrival in his office, Gandhi the lawyer and petitioner was pulled up short by an editorial in a Johannesburg paper called
The Critic
.

The editorial chews over Gandhi’s first venture in political pamphleteering, an open letter to the members of the colonial legislature in Natal, published at the end of 1894. In it, Gandhi took on “the Indian question as a whole,” asking why Indians were so despised and hated in the country. “
If that hatred is simply based upon his color,” the twenty-five-year-old neophyte wrote, “then, of course, he has no hope. The sooner he leaves the Colony the better. No matter what he does, he will never have the white skin.” But if the hatred was a result of misunderstanding, then maybe his letter would spread some appreciation of the richness of Indian culture and the thrifty hard work that made Indian citizens so useful. The case was different, Gandhi conceded, with indentured laborers, imported by the thousands on starvation wages, held under bondage, and lacking anything that can be described as “moral education.”
In finely honed understatement, so understated it probably
passed over the heads of most white readers, Gandhi writes: “I confess my inability to prove that they are more than human.” He’s saying: Sure, they’re unsanitary and degraded, but what can you expect, given the conditions in which you confine them? Maybe the image of Balasundaram, the only indentured laborer he’d met up to that point, flitted through his mind.

The Critic
seizes on that argument and turns it around. It was the caste system and not the laws of Natal that condemned Indian laborers to be “a servile race,” it said. “
The class of Hindoos which swarms in Natal and elsewhere is necessarily of the lowest caste and, under the circumstances, do what they will, they can never raise themselves into positions which command respect, even of their fellows.” Gandhi, the newspaper said, should “begin his work at home.”

It’s Gandhi’s authorized biographer and longtime secretary, Pyarelal, who brings this passage to our attention. That may mean he has come upon a clipping Gandhi—a great hoarder and indexer of clippings all through his career—had saved from his South Africa days.
Or, since Pyarelal was at Gandhi’s side for nearly thirty years, from boyhood on, it may also mean that he has discussed the editorial with the man he called his “Master.” Pyarelal is given to flowery hyperbole. But writing of the editorial in
The Critic
, he seems sure of his ground as he describes an epiphany:

The shaft flung by an English editorial writer in Johannesburg would become a fixture in Gandhi’s own arsenal of arguments. (“
Has not a just Nemesis overtaken us for the crime of untouchability?” he would ask in 1931. “Have we not reaped as we have sown? … We have segregated the ‘pariah’ and we are in turn segregated in the British colonies … There is no charge that the ‘pariah’ cannot fling in our faces and which we do not fling in the faces of Englishmen.”)

Gandhi would testify that the point made by the editorial writer in Johannesburg was one he regularly had to confront. “
During my campaigns in South Africa, the whites used to ask me what right we had to demand better treatment from them when we were guilty of ill-treating the untouchables among us.” Whether the point was made routinely or just once, it left a permanent impression.

Ultimately, he did “begin his work at home,” if under “his work” we include his Tolstoyan preoccupation with sanitation and the cleaning of latrines. He returned to India in 1896 with the aim of gathering his family and bringing it back to
Durban. Soon after he arrived in Rajkot, there was an outbreak of
plague in Bombay. Put on a sanitation committee in Rajkot, he made the inspection of latrines his special task. In the homes of the wealthy—and even in a Hindu temple—they were “
dark and stinking and reeking with filth and worms.”
He then went into the untouchables’ quarter: “the first visit in my life to such a locality,” he acknowledged. Only one member of the committee was ready to go along. It turned out the untouchables had no latrines. “Latrines are for you big people,” they told him, or so Gandhi recalled. They relieved themselves in the open, but, to his surprise, they kept the hovels where they lived cleaner than the more substantial homes of their social betters. Henceforth for Gandhi, sanitation and hygiene were at or near the top of his reform agenda.

The first overt sign that he has started to connect his passion for latrine cleaning with his convictions about untouchability crops up back in Durban, a year or so later. By his own account, Gandhi turns vicious in an argument with his long-suffering wife, Kasturba, over the emptying of a chamber pot. Here for the first time we find the categorical imperative of “body labor,” derived from Tolstoy, brought into action against the very Indian practice of untouchability, which Gandhi has now learned to abhor on grounds that it undercuts the case he has been making for Indian equality in South Africa. The chamber pot in question had been used by
Vincent Lawrence, one of Gandhi’s law clerks, whom he describes as “a Christian, born of
Panchama
parents.” A Panchama is an untouchable. Lawrence had been recently staying as a houseguest in the lawyer’s two-story villa on Beach Grove, steps from Durban Bay. A submissive Hindu wife, in her husband’s portrayal, the illiterate Kasturba, normally called just Ba, had reluctantly learned to share with him the unspeakable duty of cleaning chamber pots. “
But to clean those used by one who had been a Panchama seemed to her to be the limit,” says Gandhi. She carries the clerk’s pot but does so under vehement protest, weeping and upbraiding her husband, who responds by demanding sternly that she do her duty without complaining.

“I will not stand this nonsense in my house,” he shouts, according to his own account.

“Keep your house to yourself and let me go,” she replies.

The future Mahatma is now in a fury. “I caught her by the hand, dragged the helpless woman to the gate … and proceeded to open it with the intention of pushing her out.” She then sues for peace, and he admits to remorse. Thirty years later he either doesn’t remember or chooses not to say who finally emptied the chamber pot.

Here we have a clear prelude to the Calcutta scene on which Naipaul fastened. It shows that Gandhi didn’t have to travel back to India to be confronted by the persistence of untouchability. He could bully his own wife on that score but must have known he had yet to convert her. As late as 1938, he erupts in a similar fury upon learning that Ba has entered a temple in Puri that still bars untouchables.
His pique becomes an occasion for a fast, and he loses five pounds. What’s somewhat unreadable, still, after the first incident in Durban, is the question of his own attitude to the very poor, the
Panchamas and other low-caste Indians oppressed by the practice he abhors. His Christian law clerk is too easy an example. He is educated, an upstanding citizen in a starched collar. What about the indentured laborers on the sugar plantations with whom he doesn’t mix, for whom he sometimes apologizes, those who fit a white man’s stereotype of a “servile race”? Does he care about them in only an abstract, self-regarding sort of way, because he objects to the impression they leave of Indians? Or does he actually care about them?

A few lines in the
Autobiography
suggest that a positive answer came during the Durban years. Gandhi, who developed what he describes as a “passion” for nursing while caring for a dying brother-in-law in Rajkot, started putting in an hour or two most mornings as a volunteer in a small charitable hospital. This brought him, he says, into “
close touch with suffering Indians, most of them indentured Tamil, Telugu or North India men.” But that’s all he says. It’s a remark made in passing. We don’t know how long this volunteer nursing went on, only that he counted it as good preparation for the Boer War, when the stretcher bearers he led sometimes nursed wounded British troops. These “body snatchers,” as they were called by the troops, were themselves mostly indentured laborers. It was the war, rather than the volunteer nursing, that actually gave him his most conspicuous engagement with the poorest Indians before the final satyagraha campaign in his last year in South Africa.

Of the eleven hundred stretcher bearers nominally under his command, more than eight hundred were indentured, recruits from the sugar plantations on a stipend of one pound a week (double what most of
them normally earned). The indentured, Gandhi makes clear, remained “under the charge of English overseers.” Technically, they were volunteers, but they’d actually been drafted as a result of an official government request to their employers passed along by the so-called protector of immigrants. Rounded up on the plantations where they were indentured, these “semi-slaves,” as Gandhi called them, were then marched off under the command of their usual overseers. It would be an overstatement, but not altogether inaccurate, to describe Gandhi as a convenient front man in this transaction. In a revealing passage, he later acknowledged he had nothing to do with recruiting most of the stretcher bearers: “
The Indians were not entitled to the credit for the inclusion of the indentured laborers in the Corps, which should rightly have gone to the planters. But there is no doubt that the free Indians, that is to say the Indian community, deserved credit for the excellent management of the Corps.”

Here again he’s plainly saying that “free Indians” are members of the community; Indian indentured laborers are not.
So while he has told us in the pages of the
Autobiography
that he was now recognized as “a friend,” a man who knew their “joys and sorrows,” his claim to have “got into closer touch” with the indentured with whom he served on the fringes of Boer War battlefields rings a little hollow. He speaks of no individuals, no incidents, just “a greater awakening amongst them,” a realization that “Hindus, Musalmans, Christians, Tamilians, Gujaratis and Sindhis were all Indians and children of the same motherland.” The awakening is “amongst
them
.” We can almost picture his captive audience nodding while he speaks, even though many of them—the
Tamils in particular—have no common language with him. But, as a matter of fact, we’re not sure he delivered such speeches at the time. More likely, these words are directed to a different audience, in a different place, at a later time: convinced Gandhians in India who follow from week to week the installments of his memoirs in his newspaper. Long after the events he relates, Gandhi the Indian politician shapes and reshapes the experience of Gandhi the South African lawyer in order to advance his nationalist agenda and values at home.

Part of that reshaping involves his memory of valor in the face of danger. The original understanding was that the Indians would not be exposed to battlefield fire and risks. But when the British found themselves falling back from a severe reversal, according to Gandhi, their commander paused to reopen the question with the Indians in the most tactful and sensitive way. “
General Buller had no intention of forcing us
to work under fire if we were not prepared to take such risk,” he wrote, “but if we undertook it voluntarily, it would be greatly appreciated. We were only too willing to enter the danger zone.” In later years, Gandhi habitually used martial metaphors to summon the valor of his volunteers for nonviolent resistance. Perhaps that’s what he’s doing in this passage. But the impression he leaves is exaggerated. He never met General Redvers Buller; it’s less than clear that the general knew his name. What he’s talking about are orders and dispatches issued in the commanding officer’s name. And his stretcher bearers never really operated on battlefields. They were at their greatest peril when, briefly, they were asked to carry their burdens over a pontoon bridge and pathways known to be in range of Boer artillery. But the guns remained silent, and no Indians were wounded or killed, even though the early Natal battles to which they were dispatched—Colenso in mid-December 1899 and Spion Kop a month later—quickly became charnel houses for the British, with the total of killed, wounded, and captured amounting to 1,127 in the first case and 1,733 in the second. The fact that not a single member of the ambulance corps fell to a Boer marksman or shell makes clear that their arduous, certainly stressful labors in the “danger zone” couldn’t have been all that dangerous.