Gandhi Before India (10 page)

On reaching Bombay, Gandhi rented a set of rooms in Girgaum, not far from the house where he had first met the Jain savant Raychandbhai. The High Court lay some three miles to the south, in the Fort area. One of a series of impressive neo-Gothic buildings, the Court was famed for its gabled roofs, its turrets and its size. The interior area was a colossal 80,000 square feet.
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Every morning the young London-trained lawyer walked to the High Court, climbed its long, curving staircase, and went in and out of its rooms. As he recalled, with disarming frankness, ‘often I could not follow the cases and dozed off’. The study of Indian law was ‘a tedious business’; he found it especially hard to come to grips with the Civil Procedure Code. No briefs came his way, perhaps because he was an indifferent speaker, as well as an outsider to the city. However, he did fight a case in the lower courts, and also made some money drafting a memorial for a farmer whose land had been confiscated.
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Mohandas Gandhi was in Bombay, off and on, from November 1891 to about September 1892. (His stay was interrupted by regular trips to Rajkot, which was an overnight journey by train.) Of his impressions of the city he left no record. Did he mix only with his fellow Modh Banias, or did he sample the emerging cosmopolitan culture of Bombay more widely? There was a very active Parsi and Gujarati theatre – did he go to any of its shows? On his way to the High Court he would have seen cricket being played on the Bombay
maidans
 – did he ever stop to watch a game?

Only one letter from Gandhi’s time in Bombay has survived. Written to a friend, it complains of the lack of work, and also of the fact that ‘the caste opposition is as great as ever’. A section of the Modh Banias
was holding out, still cross with Gandhi for crossing the
kala pani
to educate himself in London. ‘Everything depends’, said Mohandas,

upon one man who will try his best never to allow me to enter the caste. I am not so very sorry for myself as I am for the caste fellows who follow the authority of one man like sheep. They have been passing some meaningless resolutions and betraying their malice clearly in overdoing their part. Religion, of course, finds no place in their arguments. Is it not almost better not to have anything to do with such fellows than to fawn upon them and wheedle their fame so that I might be considered one of them?
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Unsuccessful in court, still spurned by his caste, Gandhi found succour in conversations with his new friend Raychandbhai. He visited him in his shop, where he was impressed with the ease with which the poet sat cross-legged on a cushion – so different from the Western way of sitting on a chair or sofa that Gandhi was himself now accustomed to. He was also struck by how indifferent Raychand was to his appearance. The men he met in court paid great attention to every aspect of their dress, yet this jeweller-thinker wore a simple
dhoti
and
kurta
, more often than not unironed. Once, their conversation turned to the subject of compassion towards other beings. Raychand said that while one could not do without leather, one must use it sparingly. Gandhi noticed a leather strip holding up the jeweller’s cap. When this was pointed out, Raychand took the piece off. The gesture impressed the disciple – here was a teacher, he thought, open to correction and even refutation.

Raychand told Gandhi that he must look beyond the conventions of his caste. Banias were ‘ever punctilious’ in small matters, such as not harming insects and not eating certain foods. Yet their compassion was circumscribed. And they were totally lacking in courage. Although the Bania’s sphere was business, said Raychand, he must also ‘possess the qualities of other castes’, learning hard work from the Sudra, fearlessness from the Kshatriya, a love of learning from the Brahmin.
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Failing to find regular work in Bombay, Gandhi returned home to Rajkot. He couldn’t, it seems, yet argue in court, but as a well-published writer (in the journal of the Vegetarian Society of London) he had the skill to draft memorials. Gandhi set up an office in Rajkot, which began to attract a steady stream of clients. He drafted petitions on their behalf,
chiefly to do with land disputes. This brought him an income of Rs 300 a month, adequate to maintain his family, which had now been augmented by the arrival of a second son, who was born on 28 October 1892 and named Manilal.
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To do freelance work in a small town rather than (as his London training had led him to expect) build a practice in the great city of Bombay was galling. That, for the first time in his life, he did not have to depend on loans from friends or family was small consolation. Fortunately, as the doors were closing in Kathiawar, an opportunity beckoned in South Africa. A family of Muslim traders from the Gandhis’ home town of Porbandar had established a successful business there. Known as Dada Abdulla and Sons, they had branches in Natal, the Transvaal and Portuguese East Africa, trading in a wide range of commodities. The firm’s seven shops in the Transvaal were managed by Dada Abdulla’s cousin Tayob Haji Khan Mahomed. In July 1890, Tayob’s family had purchased these shops for the sum of £42,500, payable in instalments. Early in 1892, the instalments stopped coming. Abdulla was now suing his cousin for the money still owed him, with interest added on. The sum asked for was about £24,700.
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British lawyers were appearing for Dada Abdulla in court, but there was a problem – the mechant’s own records were in Gujarati. Abdulla was in need of a lawyer who knew both his language and the language of the courts, and wrote to Laxmidas Gandhi asking whether his brother, the London-trained barrister, was prepared to come out and assist him. The firm would provide first-class return fare by boat, board and lodgings, and pay a fee of £105 besides.

Laxmidas discussed the proposal with Mohandas, to whom it greatly appealed. He ‘wanted somehow to leave India’, and here was ‘a tempting opportunity of seeing a new country, and of having new experience’.
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This statement, from Gandhi’s autobiography, may be rephrased in less euphemistic terms. The invitation from South Africa allowed him an escape from the political intrigues at home, and to earn a decent sum of money.

Dada Abdulla’s invitation to Mohandas Gandhi was possible, and feasible, only in the late nineteenth century. A Gujarati trader had followed the British Flag into South Africa, where there were modern courts run on modern lines. At the same time, another Gujarati had followed the Flag to its source, qualifying as a barrister in London. In the
1790s there would have been no Indian traders in South Africa; in the 1990s these traders would have been assimilated English-speakers. In the 1890s, however, the twin processes of globalization and imperialism brought together a Hindu lawyer from Porbandar and a Muslim merchant from the same town to work together in South Africa. Leaving his wife and family for the second time in less than five years, Mohandas Gandhi sailed from Bombay for Durban on 24 April 1893.

The first Indians had sailed for Natal thirty-three years before Gandhi did. They were a group of indentured labourers brought in to work on the sugar plantations. When, on 16 November 1860, the SS
Truro
reached Durban, a reporter from the
Natal Mercury
was at hand to record its arrival. The passengers who came ashore were

a queer comical, foreign-looking, very Oriental-like crowd. The men with their huge muslim turbans, bare scraggy shin bones, and coloured garments; the women with their flashing eyes, long dishevelled pitchy hair, with their half-covered, well formed figures, and their keen, inquisitive glances; the children with their meagre, intelligent, cute and humorous countenance mounted on bodies of unconscionable fragility, were all evidently … of a different race and kind to any we have yet seen either in Africa or England.
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The colony of Natal, on the south-east coast of Africa, was controlled by people of British descent. In the 1840s they had established dominance over the Boers; people of Dutch origin who then retreated to the interior. The climate and soil of Natal were ideal for growing sugar; the problem, however, was that Africans were unwilling to spare time from their fields to work as labourers. A public meeting of whites in October 1851 concluded that ‘it is impossible to rely upon the kafir population of this Colony for a permanent effective supply of labour’. So, from the late 1850s, the Natal Government sought to import labour from India. Recruiting agents were sent to the ports of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras; they, in turn, hired sub-agents to scour the countryside. The men picked up were ferried to the ports and put on ships sailing for Durban.

The coolies who came to Natal were indentured for five years. They could re-indenture for a further five years, and then claim a return voyage
home or stay on in Natal as (nominally) free men. On the plantation they were given housing, rations, a modest wage (ten shillings a month) and medical assistance. ‘Coolie immigration … is deemed more essential to our prosperity than ever. It is the vitalising principle,’ wrote the
Natal Mercury
in 1865. So it turned out: whereas the average annual production of sugar in the colony was less than 500 tons in the 1850s, in the 1870s it was close to 10,000 tons, and in the 1890s in excess of 20,000 tons. Sugar exports rose exponentially as a result of the import of Indian labour, increasing fifty-fold in the first decade of their introduction.

A large proportion of the migrants were Tamil and Telugu speakers from south India. Women labourers were also shipped from India, in the ratio of forty women to a hundred men. Brahmins and Muslims were discouraged, because they forbade their women from working outside the house. The recruits came mostly from the low or intermediate castes; at home, they had been agricultural labourers and small peasants. Others had worked as potters, barbers, carpenters and cobblers.

Indian labourers also found work on the Natal Government Railways and in the coal mines. While a steady stream returned home after the expiry of their indenture, others chose to stay on, to work as farmers, market gardeners, fishermen and household servants. By the time of Gandhi’s arrival, there were Indians in all parts of Natal, along the coast and inland, in towns and on plantations.

From the 1870s, a rather different class of Indians started entering the colony. These were traders rather than labourers, and came voluntarily. Since they paid their way they came to be known as ‘passenger Indians’. They came chiefly from the west coast, and from Gujarat in particular. Many were Muslims; variously of the Bohra, Khoja and Memon castes. Some traders were Hindu, and there were also a few Parsis.

The first Indian merchant in Natal was from Gandhi’s home town, Porbandar. A Memon named Aboobaker Amod Jhaveri, he had worked in Calcutta and Mauritius before moving to South Africa. In 1877 he became the first non-white trader listed in the
Business and Residential Directory of the Natal Almanac
. He ran stores in Durban, Tongat and Verulam, and chartered ships to transport commodities to and from India. Jhaveri’s success encouraged several of his cousins – among them
Gandhi’s future employer Dada Abdulla – to come to Natal and open businesses there.

These passenger Indians came to be known by the Natalians as ‘Arabs’, an inaccurate description they nonetheless avowed, for it helped distinguish them from their working-class compatriots. Some traders were based in Natal’s main city, Durban; others moved into smaller towns in the hinterland, servicing workers in the mines and plantations. Indian merchants worked longer hours and were generally more abstemious than their European counterparts. They also employed their own kinsfolk, cutting down further on costs. Over the years, they came to command an increasing share of the retail trade in the towns of Natal and beyond. In 1870, for example, there were only two shops owned by Indians in Durban; by 1889 there were as many as eighty-five. These merchants also invested in real estate, buying land and buildings which they then leased to tenants.

Some 340 labourers had arrived on the SS
Truro
in 1860. By 1876, there were an estimated 10,626 Indians in Natal. The figure for 1886 was 29,589; for 1891, 35,763. By now, they were almost as numerous as the Europeans, who in 1891 numbered 46,788 (there were an estimated 455,983 Africans). The Indians in this part of Africa were very heavily concentrated in Natal. However, a sprinkling of labourers and merchants had also moved south, to the Cape Colony; and west, to the Boer-controlled region of the Transvaal, where the town of Johannesburg was experiencing a boom based on the discovery of gold.
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The Natal Government had appointed a Protector of Indian Immigrants, whose job was to monitor their work and living conditions, and take account of complaints regarding their treatment. The report for 1892–3 noted that, as in earlier years, a large number of labourers had turned to farming and market-gardening on completion of their indenture. The Indians, wrote the Protector, ‘have, by industry and sobriety, succeeded in creating a very fair position for themselves in this Colony’. They formed a ‘prosperous, orderly, and law-abiding section of the population of the Colony’. Some 150 Indians were on the burgess rolls as taxpayers, and could vote in local elections.
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Mohandas Gandhi arrived in Durban on 24 May 1893, exactly a month after he had left Bombay. His ship had called en route at Lamu, Mombasa and Zanzibar. He was met at the quayside by Dada Abdulla, the
leading partner in the firm that had hired him, and taken to the merchant’s house. Abdulla lived in a small lane off Grey Street in west-central Durban, in the heart of what was an Indian, and more specifically a Gujarati, ghetto. Grey Street ran northwards from the Victoria Embankment and the harbour; whites lived on the stretch closer to the water, giving way to Indians further along the street. The lanes off Grey Street, on either side, harboured shops on the ground floor, with offices and homes above them. The names on the buildings – Jhaveri, Moosa, Mehta, Abdulla, Rustomji – indicated their owners’ origins in Western India.
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