Gandhi Before India (45 page)

Joseph Doke, now back in South Africa, had resolved to write a life of his friend, and thus to tell a story of struggle and sacrifice that must and would triumph, a story based in part on what Doke had seen and in part on what the subject could or would tell him. On the last day of September he wrote to Gandhi begging him to

try and not get confiscated and deported or any thing of that kind – if you can help it just now. I have a thousand questions to ask – on any one of which of course the welfare of the British Empire depends. I want to know why the Indians recalled you from India by cable [in 1902]. I want to know whether the Durban people gave the Indian stretcher-bearers a good send off when they went to Colenso and Spion Kop, and did the work done on the battle fields make them more friendly to you? I want to know all that happened since, and especially I want a good cabinet photograph of yourself – without your hat. So don’t get caught!
²²

In contrast to Doke’s wishes, Gandhi had now decided that he must more actively challenge the Government to arrest him. Gathering a group of Natal Indians, he crossed the Transvaal border on 6 October, and was detained at Volksrust. When asked to produce his registration certificate he said he had none. He was remanded to Volksrust prison, from where he sent a written message to
Indian Opinion
, reminding its readers that ‘this campaign knows no distinctions of Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Christians, Bengalis, Madrasis, Gujaratis, Punjabis and others. All of us are Indians, and are fighting for India.’
²³

On the 14th, Gandhi and those who had crossed the border with him were brought before a magistrate in Volksrust. Gandhi told the judge that ‘he took sole responsibility for having advised them to enter the Colony.’ He added that ‘he was quite prepared to suffer the consequences of his action, as he always had been.’ He was convicted and fined £25, or, in default of payment, sentenced to two months imprisonment with hard labour.
²⁴

The news of Gandhi’s arrest was communicated by word of mouth across the Transvaal. The telegraph carried it to London, where, a mere
two days after he was convicted, a protest meeting was held in Caxton Hall. Present in London at this time were some celebrated Indian nationalists. One, Lajpat Rai, said that ‘Mr Gandhi, in his gaol, had the satisfaction of knowing that he was making history.’ Another, Bipan Chandra Pal, said that ‘every stroke of Mr Gandhi’s hammer on the stones meant a stroke on the shackles which bound their country; every piece of stone severed from another piece by that hammer was a link that removed [Indians] from the chain that bound them to the Mother Country’ [i.e. England]. To a great burst of cheering, the Bengali radical continued: ‘Go on, brother Gandhi.’

Rai and Pal were two of the three main leaders of the Swadeshi movement; the third was Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The trio were known with affection and admiration as ‘Lal, Bal and Pal’. That Gandhi was so extravagantly praised by Lal and Pal in London (Bal was then in jail in India) testified to his rising stature in the national consciousness. His actions in the Transvaal were appreciated both by the established and the emergent nationalists. Thus one of the resolutions at the Caxton Hall meeting was seconded by the radical student leader V. D. Savarkar; another by the young art critic and historian Ananda Coomaraswamy.
²⁵

Back in the Transvaal, a meeting was held on 18 October to condemn Gandhi’s arrest. Some 1,500 people from all over the colony came to the Hamidia Hall. Two black flags were flown at half-mast, to mark the sacrifices of the compatriots in jail. The main speech was by A. M. Cachalia. The Government hoped that by arresting their leader the movement would collapse. Cachalia dismissed this as a ‘fallacy of the first order’. With Gandhi in prison, he said, ‘each one of us must be prepared to play the leader.’

Harilal Gandhi also spoke at this meeting. ‘The day his father was arrested was a festival day for him,’ said the son, ‘but he could not help feeling how ridiculously the latter had been charged and punished. Asking a man who has been practising in South Africa for 13 years to give his identification particulars was nothing short of cowardice.’
²⁶

Naturally, the white press in the Rand viewed Gandhi’s arrest somewhat differently. In giving Gandhi only two months in jail, said the
Star
of Johannesburg, ‘the Transvaal Government has been unduly lenient towards the malicious activities of the leader of the Asiatic movement’. ‘Far better it is that the gaols should be crowded,’ remarked the paper,
‘than that the native population – already somewhat unsettled on the Rand – should be tempted to emulate the tactics of their coloured brethren from the Far East’.
²⁷

Gandhi was sent to Volksrust Prison, to join (among others) his old Durban friend Parsee Rustomjee. It was the month of Ramadan, so the Muslim prisoners were fasting. In any case, with the preponderance of mealie pap at meals there ‘was incessant grumbling about food’. These grumbles reached the ears of Joseph Doke. The good Christian called on the Director of Prisons, telling him that mealie pap was abhorrent to Hindu prisoners, who were mostly vegetarian; as well as to Muslims, since the animals from whom the fat was extracted were not killed in the prescribed fashion.
²⁸

To fulfil the sentence of ‘hard labour’, the prisoners were taken every morning to a field with stony soil which they had to dig with spades. The work was new to Gandhi, and he found his hands were soon covered in blisters. ‘It was difficult to bend down, and the spade seemed to weigh a
maund
.’
²⁹

After ten days, Gandhi was moved to Johannesburg, where he was to appear as a witness in a court case. He was taken by train in a third-class compartment. When he disembarked, with his escort, at the city’s Park Station, he was noticed by a group of Tamil hawkers. They watched, with fascination and not a little dismay, as their leader – clad in convict’s garb of jacket with a numbered badge, short trousers and leather sandals – was marched out of the station and into the road outside. The warder accompanying Gandhi offered him the option of taking a cab to the prison (for which he would have to pay) or walking. The prisoner chose to walk, climbing up the hill with his bags. He was followed, at a respectful distance, by the Tamils, until he disappeared into a prison on whose entrance was carved the motto, ‘Union Makes Strength’.
³⁰

The Tamil hawkers conveyed what they had seen to Henry Polak. Polak issued a statement claiming that the treatment of Gandhi was reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition, which likewise marched its victims ‘clothed in bag-shaped yellow garb’ through the town before disposing of them.
³¹
He also sent an angry telegram to L. W. Ritch in London, who passed on the complaint to the Colonial Office. They, in turn, wrote to the Transvaal Government asking if it was correct that
‘Gandhi was marched through the streets in convict dress’. The charge was admitted, but qualified by the claim that when conducted from the station to the prison, Gandhi did not have to wear handcuffs, and ‘when in Court as a witness he did not appear in prison clothes.’
³²

In Johannesburg Prison, Gandhi was put with convicts serving time for murder and larceny. He felt ‘extremely uneasy’, more so when an African and a Chinese ‘exchanged obscene jokes, uncovering each other’s genitals’. For comfort he read the copy of the Bhagavad-Gita he had brought with him. His mood improved when Polak came to visit, and when Kallenbach sent a supply of bread and cheese.

On 4 November Gandhi was taken back to Volksrust. Seeing him enter the train in prison uniform, the hawkers on the platform ‘were filled with tears’. Word of his journey got around, so that en route, at Heidelberg and at Standerton, Indians met him with supplies of food, which his escort allowed him to accept.

Shortly after moving back to Volksrust Prison, Gandhi heard from Albert West at Phoenix that Kasturba had suffered a haemorrhage. The doctor attending her was not sure she would survive. West suggested that Gandhi pay his fine and join her. He answered that this would be ‘impossible’, since ‘when I embarked upon the struggle I counted the cost. If Mrs. Gandhi must leave me without even the consolation a devoted husband could afford, so be it.’

Kasturba’s illness had once more brought to the fore the competing claims on Gandhi’s life. The obligations of family clashed with the demands of the struggle. Kasturba and he had now been married for more than twenty-five years. They had, in the emotional as well as sexual sense, always been true to one another. Perhaps because of their periodic, extended separations, Kasturba deeply cherished their time together. Rajkot, Bombay, Durban, Johannesburg, Phoenix – in all of these places she had lived with him and for him, but never really felt at home. Not fluent in English, reserved by nature, forbidden by custom and tradition to seek out strangers on her own, Kasturba was comfortable in, and comforted by, the company of her children and her husband. The children were with her, mostly, while her husband was mostly absent. And so, all through their time in South Africa, it was her husband’s company and attention that she craved most.

Her love was reciprocated. Yet unlike Kasturba, Gandhi had more
than his family to look out for or answer to. Asked to choose – as he was here – Gandhi would place the interests of the community above those of his own wife. He explained both the dilemma and his choice in a letter that Manilal could read to her. He told Kasturba that since he had ‘offered my all to the satyagraha struggle’, he could not cut short his sentence by paying the fine. He asked however for a daily bulletin on her health, and then added these words of encouragement and consolation:

If you keep courage and take the necessary nutrition, you will recover. If, however, my ill luck so has it that you pass away, I should only say that there would be nothing wrong in your doing so in your separation from me while I am still alive. I love you so dearly that even if you are dead, you will be alive to me. Your soul is deathless. I repeat what I have frequently told you and assure you that if you do succumb to your illness, I will not marry again.
³³

This is a letter of an unusual and perhaps unexpected tenderness. According to custom and tradition, part of the duties of a Hindu wife was to make sure that she did not predecease her husband. This prospect must have worried Kasturba; so too, perhaps, the prospect of Gandhi taking a second wife. His own father had done so, and while his first wife was still alive. Hence Gandhi’s assurances, here made (as he notes) not for the first time.

Gandhi was released from Volksrust on 12 December, having completed his term. Before he left the prison, he presented a kindly warder with an inscribed copy of Tolstoy’s
The Kingdom of God is Within You
.
³⁴
When he reached Johannesburg, he was met at the station by a crowd of 300, mostly Indians, but also including Henry and Millie Polak, Joseph Doke, and Sonja Schlesin. As ‘he jumped from the train, Mr Gandhi was garlanded amidst terrific cheers’. He was then carried shoulder high to the mosque in Fordsburg, where he spoke briefly to a ‘most orderly’ crowd of some 1,500 people.
³⁵

While Gandhi was in prison, meetings in solidarity were regularly held at the Hamidia Mosque in Johannesburg. In the last week of November, ‘practically the whole Indian community in Johannesburg’ turned up for a meeting outside the mosque. The Chinese leader Leung Quinn spoke first. The star turn, however, was A. M. Cachalia, the Gujarati
trader who was now chairman of the British Indian Association. Cachalia first quoted Booker T. Washington, who said the black man had to do better than the white man to get any recognition. He then provided a robust defence of satyagraha. Some Europeans feared that the Indians’ avowal of passive resistance would provoke the Africans to adopt similar methods, and proceed from there to violent protest. Cachalia thought this preposterous – ‘surely passive resistance,’ he said sarcastically, ‘was not the spark that set ablaze the Natal rebellion of 1906. Rightly or wrongly, it was their sense of injustice that caused that outbreak.’

In Cachalia’s opinion,

Men do not proceed from passive to active resistance. The passive resister is higher in the moral scale, and in that of human development than the active resister … Passive resistance is a matter of heart, of conscience, of trained understanding. The natives of South Africa need many generations of culture and development before they can hope to be passive resisters in the true sense of the term. Meanwhile, they will be what robust men are – grateful for justice done them, resentful of injustice, and in the latter case they will probably seek their remedy irrespective of example, until the difficult lesson of non-resistance to evil is learnt. But surely our critics would be better advised to urge the natives to substitute for the rifle and the assegai the peaceful methods of the passive resister, and better advised still if they removed the need of any resistance whatsoever … by doing justice though the heavens fall.
³⁶

Cachalia saw, much more clearly than Gandhi, that the roots of native discontent lay in discrimination and expropriation by Europeans. His speech manifested a sure grasp of the thought of Gandhi’s own mentor, Tolstoy. And it provided a compelling defence of non-violence as the most moral means of challenging injustice.

As the Indians went in and out of jail in the Transvaal, there was a significant development among their compatriots in Natal. They now had a second weekly newspaper, complementing Gandhi’s
Indian Opinion
. Named
African Chronicle
, this was edited by a Tamil named P. S. Aiyar, who had come out to Durban in 1898 and married a local girl. Despite its name the new paper, like Gandhi’s own, gave little coverage to ‘African’ issues. Rather, it was a vehicle for the Tamils of Natal, who did not
feel wholly represented in or by
Indian Opinion
, which now carried articles in English and Gujarati only.