The Essential Gandhi (13 page)

A variety of incidents in my life have conspired to bring me in close contact with people of many creeds and many communities, and my experience with all of them warrants the statement that I have known no distinction between relatives and strangers, countrymen and foreigners, white and colored, Hindus and Indians of other faiths, whether Moslems, Parsis, Christians or Jews.… I cannot claim this as a special virtue as it is in my very nature, rather than a result of any effort on my part, whereas in the case of Ahimsa [nonviolence], Brahmacharya [celibacy], Aparigraha [non-possession], and other cardinal virtues, I am fully conscious of a continuous striving for their cultivation.

When I was practising [law] in Durban, my office clerks often stayed with me, and there were among them Hindus and Christians.… I do not recollect having ever regarded them as anything but my kith and kin. I treated them as members of my family, and had unpleasantness with my wife if ever she stood in the way of my treating them as such.…
⁵⁰

[Among the weapons employed in the South African struggle was
Indian Opinion
, a weekly journal, which Gandhi helped found in 1903.] … 
Indian Opinion
was published in English and Gujarati.… Through … this paper, we could very well disseminate the news of the week among the community. The English section kept those Indians informed about the movement who did not know Gujarati, and for Englishmen in India, England and South Africa,
Indian Opinion
served the purpose of a weekly newsletter. [A] struggle which relies chiefly upon internal strength cannot be wholly carried on without a newspaper, and … we could not perhaps have educated the local Indian community, nor kept Indians all over the world in touch with the course of events in South Africa in any other way, with the same ease and success as through
Indian Opinion.…

As the community was transformed in the course of and as a result of the struggle, so was
Indian Opinion
. In the beginning, we used to accept advertisements for it. [Some] of our best men had to be spared to this.… Some of the good workers had to be set apart for canvassing and [collecting bills] from advertisers, not to speak of the flattery which advertisers claimed as their due. Moreover … if the paper was conducted not because it yielded a profit but purely with a view to service, the service should not be imposed upon the community by force but … only if the community wished. And the clearest proof of such a wish would be forthcoming if they became subscribers in sufficiently large numbers to make the paper self-supporting. [We] stopped advertisements in the paper. The community realized at once their proprietorship of
Indian Opinion
and their consequent responsibility for maintaining it.…

Just as we stopped advertisements … we ceased to take [private printing] jobwork in the press.… Compositors had now some
time to spare, which was utilized in the publication of books. As … there was no intention of reaping profits, and as the books were printed only to help the struggle forward, they commanded good sales.…

[The workers’] only care now was to put their best work into the paper, so long as the community wanted it, and they were not only not ashamed of requesting any Indian to subscribe to
Indian Opinion
, but thought it even their duty to do so. A change came over the internal strength and the character of the paper and it became a force to reckon with.… The community had made the paper their own to such an extent that if copies did not reach Johannesburg at the expected time, I would be flooded with complaints.… I know of many whose first occupation after they received [it] would be to read the Gujarati section through from beginning to end. One of the company would read it, and the rest would surround him and listen. Not all who wanted to read the paper could afford to subscribe to it by themselves, and some of them would therefore club together for the purpose.
¹

 … 
Indian Opinion
was an open book to whoever wanted to gauge the strength and the weakness of the community, be he a friend, an enemy or a neutral. The workers had realized at the very outset that secrecy had no place in a movement where one could do no wrong, where there was no scope for duplicity or cunning, and where strength constituted the single guarantee of victory. The very interest of the community demanded that if the disease of weakness was to be eradicated, it must be first properly diagnosed and given due publicity.…
²

[In one of the paper’s early issues, Gandhi told his readers:]

 … One thing we [the staff of
Indian Opinion
], have endeavored to observe most scrupulously: namely, never to depart from the strictest facts, and in dealing with the difficult questions that have arisen … we hope we have used the utmost moderation possible under the circumstances. [We] should fail in our duty if we wrote anything with a view to hurt. Facts we would always place before our readers, whether they be palatable or not, and it is by placing them constantly before the public in their nakedness that the misunderstanding
now existing between the two communities in South Africa can be removed.
³

 … I was inundated with letters containing the outpourings of my correspondents’ hearts. They were friendly, critical or bitter, according to the temper of the writer. It was a fine education for me to study, digest and answer all this correspondence.… It made me thoroughly understand the responsibility of a journalist, and the hold I secured in this way over the community made the future campaign workable, dignified and irresistible.
⁴

[In 1904, a few months after its founding,
Indian Opinion
was in difficulties, and to cope with them at first hand, Gandhi took a trip to Durban, where the journal was published. An Englishman named Henry S. L. Polak saw him off and gave him a copy of John Ruskin’s
Unto This Last
. Gandhi started reading it the moment the train left Johannesburg and read all night.]

That book marked the turning point in my life.
⁵

 … I discovered some of my deepest convictions reflected in this great book of Ruskin’s and that is why it so captured me and made me transform my life. A poet is one who can call forth the good latent in the human breast.…

The teachings of
Unto This Last
I understood to be:

The first of these I knew. The second I had dimly realized. The third had never occurred to me.
Unto This Last
made it as clear as
daylight for me that the second and the third were contained in the first. I arose with the dawn to reduce these principles to practice.
⁶

It was a habit with me to forget what I did not like and to carry out in practice whatever I liked.
⁷

I talked over the whole thing with Mr. [Albert] West [the British Editor], described to him the effect
Unto This Last
had produced on my mind, and proposed that
Indian Opinion
should be removed to a farm, on which everyone should labor, drawing the same living wage, and attending to the press work in their spare time. Mr. West approved … and three pounds was laid down as the monthly allowance per head.…

I do not think I took more than two days to fix up these matters with the men.…
⁸

[Gandhi bought a farm near Phoenix, a town fourteen miles from Durban. The presses and offices of
Indian Opinion
were transferred to the farm, and the magazine’s staff moved there too.

During 1904 and 1905, Gandhi, Kasturbai and their sons lived now in Johannesburg, now at Phoenix Farm. In both places, the problem of restraint and self-control preoccupied him. The year 1906 marked a crisis in Gandhi’s struggle with his passions.]