Gandhi Before India (32 page)

The sentiments of those present at the Empire Theatre were endorsed by their long-time supporter in London, Dadabhai Naoroji. As a Gladstonian liberal, Naoroji believed in the politics of gradual and incremental reform. His communications were generally couched in the most understated language. But this new Ordinance in the Transvaal prompted a scathing letter to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. Calling it a ‘wanton insult’ to his countrymen, a man who had been a rare brown Member of the Mother of Parliaments remarked that

it is most galling to think that in British territories if [the great England cricketer of Indian extraction] Prince Rangitsinhjee [
sic
] wanted to enter the Transvaal he should have to apply for a permit and then in order that he might have a glass of beer he should have to apply cringingly to the Government for exemption from the Liquor ordinance [under which Indians were not allowed to buy alcohol] … Is this the way in which the most Liberal Government that the Empire has seen for years will protect weak and helpless members thereof?
²⁶

Back in South Africa, the threat of passive resistance was being held in reserve. For the moment, Gandhi would follow his friend Gregorowski’s advice and make a personal appeal to the authorities in London. With him would come Haji Ojer Ally, a businessman active in social work in Johannesburg. They were booked to leave for the United Kingdom in early October. A few days before they departed, the Empire Theatre, the venue of the great meeting of 11 September, was gutted in a fire.

On 2 October 1906, Mohandas Gandhi entered his thirty-eighth year. He spent his birthday in a train travelling across the veld, from Johannesburg to Cape Town. On the evening of the 3rd, he boarded the SS
Armsdale
for the voyage to the United Kingdom.

Gandhi’s companion aboard train and ship, Haji Ojer Ally, was a Gujarati born in 1853 in Mauritius. He studied and worked on that island before migrating to South Africa, where he ran a water bottling plant in Cape Town, later shifting base to Johannesburg. Here he branched out from business into community work, opening a ‘Hamidia Islamic Society’ whose special focus was the education of Muslim youth. He was married to a Malay lady, with whom he had eleven children.
¹

In Cape Town, under the more liberal franchise of that province, H. O. Ally had been both a municipal and parliamentary voter. (Gandhi, arriving in Natal after the reforms leading to Responsible Government, was neither.) ‘Though not a finished speaker or an accomplished scholar,’ wrote Henry Polak, ‘[Ally] had a very good command of the English language, as well as of Urdu, a powerful voice, and was possessed of a considerable degree of rough eloquence.’ He was also partial to the dramatic gesture – while speaking on the jail-going resolution of 11 September, he did so with a Union Jack draped around his shoulders.
²

In all respects Gandhi and Ally were a study in contrast. The Hindu was dressed in sober Western clothes, while the Muslim wore flowing Oriental robes and a colourful turban. Gandhi was thin and small-made, Ally tall and grossly overweight. Unlike the lawyer, the merchant was not believed to have taken a vow of celibacy.

These differences emerge quite starkly in Gandhi’s account of their voyage together. On board, Ally ate fish for lunch, and fish and
sometimes meat for dinner. He also drank tea and ginger ale, and smoked continuously. Gandhi, on the other hand, fed himself on milk, bread, potatoes, stewed fruit and fresh air. The Muslim merchant was reading Amir Ali’s
Spirit of Islam
and Washington Irving’s
Mahomet and his Successors
. The Hindu lawyer was brushing up on his Tamil, reading a history of Gujarat and a report on ‘alien immigration’, and composing his dispatches for
Indian Opinion
.

The SS
Armsdale
docked at Southampton on 20 October. The same day, Gandhi gave two interviews to the press. Speaking to the London correspondent of an Indian newspaper, he said the act proposed by the Transvaal Government was ‘much more rigorous and severe’ than earlier legislation. Speaking to a British journalist, Gandhi said restrictions on Indian immigration into the Transvaal must be ‘on such terms as are not humiliating, and do not interfere with the liberty of those already settled in the country.’ ‘Mr Gandhi states that the Indians are greatly stirred over the matter,’ noted the reporter, ‘and are prepared to go to gaol rather than submit.’
³

The day after Gandhi landed, he visited the family of his friend Henry Polak. They lived on Grosvenor Road, in Canonbury, North London. ‘Nothing surprised me, as you had prepared me for everything,’ wrote Mohandas to Henry, adding. ‘Otherwise to meet your sisters and your brilliant father would have been a most agreeable surprise. Both the sisters are really most lovable, and if I was unmarried, or young, or believed in mixed marriage, you know what I would have done!’
⁴

The same day, Gandhi wrote to his nephew Chhaganlal making a more neutral case for interracial living. Albert West’s sister had chosen to join him in South Africa. Gandhi thought this ‘a wise step’. ‘We do want some English ladies there [at Phoenix],’ he told his nephew. ‘Do please make the best use possible of her. Let your wife and other ladies mix freely with her, and let her feel that there is no distance between her and us, and make her as comfortable as possible … Each party has very strong points for the other to imbibe.’
⁵

While Miss West prepared for an austere life among abstemious Indians, Gandhi himself was billeted at the Cecil, one of London’s most luxurious hotels. For a visiting delegation, the hotel afforded respectability and a London address that was credible as well as convenient, within walking distance of Whitehall and Charing Cross railway station.
⁶
Gandhi’s first few days in London were spent writing letters on
the Cecil’s notepaper, addressed to Members of Parliament and newspaper editors whom he hoped to win over to the Indian case. The letters were typed by a Miss Lawson, who had been sent by Polak’s father to act as Gandhi’s assistant. They referred to H. O. Ally and himself rather grandly in the third person, as in ‘I shall be obliged if you would kindly grant the Deputation an interview …’

Meanwhile, unknown to Gandhi – and Ally – their claims to represent the Transvaal Indians were being challenged. ‘It appears that there are two sections among the British Indians in the Transvaal,’ wrote the Colony’s Governor to the Secretary of State. One group was represented by Gandhi and Ally, while the other ‘denies that these two gentlemen have any mandate to represent them.’ The Governor himself was ‘unable to determine [the] relative strength of the two sections.’
⁷

The opposition to the deputation was led by a man named C. M. Pillay, a Tamil who had lived in Johannesburg from before the Anglo-Boer War. In November 1902 – when Gandhi was still in India – Pillay helped draft a petition which daringly asked that the Indians in the Transvaal be

allowed to come and go freely; that they may trade, buy and sell unhindered and unmolested; that they may acquire, own, and dispose of landed property, without limit, clog, or undue obstacle; that they may, by inter-position of their rulers, be preserved from any differentiation in laws, or restriction of person in government, or in treatment; that they may in no way be curtailed of their liberty or freedom …

The petition went on to demand Indian representation in legislatures and municipal boards. It was signed by twenty-two people, a majority of whom were Tamils.
⁸

Two months after this, Gandhi had arrived back in South Africa. Now based in Johannesburg, he quickly became the main channel through which Indian demands were articulated. This irritated C. M. Pillay, who saw the lawyer’s rise as a consequence of the support, financial and moral, of Gujarati merchants. When, in March 1904, the white press carried reports on the unsanitary habits of Indian shopkeepers, Pillay wrote to say that whereas the Tamils from the Madras Presidency were ‘immune from infectious diseases of all kinds’, the ‘Bombay Bunnias … are the most filthiest classes imaginable.’ Until about 1890,
the Indians in the Transvaal were largely Tamils, but then merchants from Bombay and Gujarat arrived to spoil the show. Because of these Gujaratis, claimed Pillay, the

Indian community in general … are made to suffer for the criminal perversity of a section whose chronic antipathy to cleanliness, fanatical adherence to superstition in its grossest form, and mammon worship is a most prolific source of contagious disease of the most virulent form.
⁹

Pillay signed his letter ‘late Secretary, Indian Congress, Pretoria and Johannesburg’. One does not know how many members his branch of the Congress had. At any rate, by 1906 Gandhi’s British Indian Association was clearly in the lead when it came to advancing the community’s cause. The rivalry was personal, but also communal. As a Tamil, Pillay spoke a different language from Gandhi and the Gujarati merchants. He may also have been originally from a different class, for his name suggests that his forefathers came to South Africa as indentured labourers.

When the ‘deputation’ proceeded to London, Pillay made common cause with his fellow Tamil William Godfrey, a doctor from Natal now based in Johannesburg. The doctor’s rift with Gandhi was of more recent origin. Active in the British Indian Association, Dr Godfrey had been a featured speaker in the mass meeting held in the Empire Theatre on 11 September. He had hoped to be on the ship to London; however, when the BIA thought it wise to send a merchant as well, this left room for only one English-speaking professional, who, of course, had to be Gandhi.

On 15 October, as the SS
Armsdale
made its way across the ocean, William Godfrey and C. M. Pillay sent a letter to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. This claimed that Gandhi and Ally had no mandate to represent the Indians; and added for good measure that the lawyer was a ‘well known professional agitator who has made money out of his work’. Gandhi was accused of having ‘caused an estrangement between Europeans and Indians’; and Ally of being a pan-Islamist whose allegiances were to the Sultan of Turkey rather than the British Crown.
¹⁰

The petition sent by Pillay and Godfrey had more than a hundred names attached to it. Gandhi’s alert (and loyal) friend Henry Polak sought out its signatories. What he found was not edifying. A Tamil owner of an Indian laundry, persuaded by Godfrey that his omission from the delegation represented an affront to the Tamils, had placed
a blank sheet of paper in front of forty-five of his workers, and got them to affix signatures and thumb-impressions. Told by Polak that his action had undermined Indian unity, the laundry-owner now disavowed the petition.
¹¹
Two of Godfrey’s brothers, who had been Gandhi’s friends and clients in Natal, wrote to
The Times
disassociating themselves from their sibling. The British Indian Association wired the Secretary of State to say that Gandhi and Ally were their authorized representatives, and that the ‘entire Indian community indignantly repudiate[d]’ a campaign based on Godfrey’s ‘personal animus’.
¹²

In London, the man who was at once the larger and lesser member of the deputation had fallen ill. The exact symptoms are unknown; but over-indulgence seems to have been the cause. Ally was rushed from the Hotel Cecil to Lady Margaret Hospital in the town of Bromley, ten miles south-east of Charing Cross. The hospital had been founded in 1903 by Josiah Oldfield, Gandhi’s old friend and flatmate from his student days. It was run on strict vegetarian principles, with treatment by diet replacing treatment by drugs. No meat or fish was permitted, nor any alcohol either. The food was cooked with coconut oil, then rather scarce in Britain.
¹³

Gandhi wrote to Oldfield urging him to see Ally every day – ‘Your presence alone would be inspiring and cheering.’ He added that ‘expense is of no consideration’. To Ally himself Gandhi offered this explanation of his ill-health: ‘I am superstitious enough to say it was due to the cigar.’ His recovery might be ‘retarded by even one puff of the deadly cigar – such is my strong conviction regarding nicotine’. The next day Gandhi wrote to his compatriot in similar vein: ‘I beseech you to keep yourself religiously away from cigars. Certainly, have as much as you like of the hubble-bubble’ (which, with its tobacco diluted through water, presumably was less harmful). ‘Follow Dr Oldfield’s instructions implicitly,’ urged Gandhi. ‘I am certain that no other doctor could restore you to health with the same amount of despatch as Mr Oldfield.’

The last was said with some conviction, for Gandhi was consulting the same doctor himself. Back in the days when he was practising law in Bombay, Gandhi told Oldfield, he had lost his sense of smell; now he had chronic catarrh. He asked whether his friend could treat him, or instead recommend a throat specialist. Another ailment was related to
their shared passion and lifestyle choices. ‘I think it was when I was carrying on a fruit-and-nut diet experiment,’ wrote Gandhi, ‘that I damaged my teeth. I believe that I had permanently damaged two molars and I thought that I was going to lose one of them on board. I certainly tried hard to pull one out but I did not succeed. Would you see them or do you want me to go to a dentist?’ Although they were old friends, if Oldfield was to attend to either complaint Gandhi insisted on paying his professional fees.
¹⁴

On 31 October, Gandhi wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Elgin, requesting an appointment for a delegation consisting of himself, Ally and some well-placed Englishmen; a statement of the Indian case was attached. The meeting was scheduled for 8 November. Since Elgin was a former Viceroy, Gandhi asked some members of the Indian Civil Service to join the delegation. Since he was also a senior British politician, the former MP Dadabhai Naoroji and the serving MP M. M. Bhownaggree were asked to come too. Gandhi went three times to the House of Commons to meet the Liberal MP Harold Cox, who eventually also agreed to come.

In the first week of November, Gandhi had several meetings with a radical and somewhat raffish Indian he knew would never fit into any formal delegation. His name was Shyamaji Krishnavarma. Twelve years older than Gandhi and also from Kathiawar, Krishnavarma had studied at Oxford and been called to the London Bar. Back in India, he held a series of jobs in the Kathiawari principalities before returning to England in 1905.

Krishnavarma thought the Indian National Congress too loyalist by far; what he stood for was complete emancipation from British rule. He established an ‘India House’ at Highgate in London (not far from the cemetery where Karl Marx was buried), which served as a hostel for students and a forum for debate. Students who lived here took a pledge that they would not work for the colonial bureaucracy when they returned home. Krishnavarma also published a journal called
The Indian Sociologist
, which argued the case for freedom for subject peoples. His greatest English supporter was the socialist and anti-imperialist H. M. Hyndman.
¹⁵

Gandhi knew of Krishnavarma’s work, for it had been written about in
Indian Opinion
. Now they met in London, where, to begin with at any rate, the younger man was intrigued by the older man. He was impressed
by his learning – Krishnavarma knew Latin, Greek and Sanskrit – and somewhat intimidated by his passion. On successive Sundays, Gandhi passed up invitations to the Polak household in order to debate Indian issues with him. As he wrote to Polak
père
, ‘the Pandit of whom I spoke to you and I have not finished the whole of our discussion, and as it is rather important I am afraid I must deprive myself of the pleasure’ (of meeting the father and his charming daughters).
¹⁶
Later, in a report to
Indian Opinion
, Gandhi summarized the character and credo of his new friend in these words: