Gandhi Before India (65 page)

Gokhale then spent a few days resting at Tolstoy Farm. On the 6th Gandhi and he left for Natal. They stopped at the smaller mining and plantation towns, such as Newcastle and Dundee, before arriving in Durban on the morning of the 8th. A crowded meeting was attended by very many Indians, ‘who, at least for that night, felt that the Town Hall really belonged to them and that they enjoyed the rights of citizenship’. Among those who spoke was F. A. Laughton, KC, he who had bravely stood by Gandhi when the white mob attacked him in 1897.

The next day, Gokhale presented the prizes at a sports meeting and then heard grievances against the £3 tax. Some sixty individuals filed up, one by one, and spoke of how their inability to pay the tax had led to their imprisonment. They were heard by a crowd of several thousand, who had come from the outlying districts by train, cycle, cart, wagon or on foot. The testimonies were offered in Tamil and Gujarati, and then
translated for Gokhale’s benefit, the narration often interrupted by cries of ‘Shame! Shame!’.
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On Sunday, 10 November Gokhale and Gandhi visited the Ohlange Industrial School and ‘spent some time discussing the Native question with the Rev. John Dube’. The students sang Zulu songs for the visitors.
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Later that week Gokhale returned to the Transvaal. On Thursday 14 November he travelled to Pretoria to meet the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior. General Botha had followed Gokhale’s progress through the country with dismay. He was offended that the Indian leader had not come to see him soon after landing. That Gokhale was warmly received in most places did not please him either. Gokhale’s statements, grumbled Prime Minister Botha to the Governor-General, had raised ‘false hopes among our Indian population’. They had ‘put up the backs of our European population – Dutch as well as English-speaking, and made them more than ever opposed to any kind of concession’. But, said Botha to the Governor-General, he would still ‘meet him in the most reasonable spirit’.
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Gokhale had asked that Gandhi be allowed to come with him, but the request was refused.
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Meeting the ministers, he urged the abolition of the £3 tax and the admission of a select number of educated Indians to the Transvaal.

The next day Gokhale and the Prime Minister independently met the Governor-General, Lord Gladstone (a son of the great Liberal prime minister, who had served as home secretary before coming out to South Africa). Later, Gladstone sent London this report: ‘As regards the £3 tax, the Prime Minister told me that he thought it would be possible to meet Mr Gokhale’s views, though there might be strong opposition in Natal. From what Mr Gokhale said I gathered that the Prime Minister had given him a satisfactory assurance.’ The Governor-General was also hopeful that the Immigration Bill would finally be passed in an acceptable form. He was ‘convinced that the Prime Minister and General Smuts are sincerely anxious to put it through’.
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Gokhale came away from these meetings convinced that the Indians’ demands would be met. ‘You must return to India in a year,’ he told Gandhi. ‘Everything has been settled. The Black Act will be repealed. The racial bar will be removed from the immigration law. The £3 tax will be abolished.’
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In a farewell speech in Pretoria, Gokhale appealed to ‘the better mind of the two communities, European and Indian’. To the former he said, ‘the Government must exist for promoting the prosperity not of the European community only, but of all its subjects.’ To the latter he said, ‘your future is largely in your own hands.’ He hoped that a struggle of the kind waged in the Transvaal between 1907 and 1910 would not have to be fought again. But ‘if it has to be resumed,’ said Gokhale, ‘or if you have to enter on other struggles of a like nature for justice denied or injustice forced on you, remember that the issue will largely turn on the character you show, on your capacity for combined action, on your readiness to suffer and sacrifice in a just cause.’
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Overlapping with Gokhale’s trip to South Africa was the visit of a rather more obscure friend of Gandhi’s. This was Maud Polak, who had managed to travel to South Africa after all. She had come to study the Indian situation at first-hand – the better to aid her lobbying work in London – and perhaps also to spend time with Mohandas Gandhi. She succeeded in the first endeavour but not in the second.
Indian Opinion
reported her movements – a tea party for her in Johannesburg on 14 October, another on the 19th, both hosted and attended by women, Europeans as well as Indians. Then she crossed over to Natal, where she spent two weeks, speaking to labourers and merchants, and attending at least two parties in her honour.
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Her arrival and stay in South Africa was drowned out by the visit of Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Gandhi himself was criss-crossing the country with his mentor, and appears to have hardly seen Maud at all. Whether this was by accident or design the sources do not say.

In London, Gokhale had been impressed by Maud Polak’s commitment; now, in South Africa, he was even more impressed by Sonja Schlesin, a young woman who worked for Gandhi without having a romantic interest in him. In his travels through Natal and the Transvaal he met many among Gandhi’s friends and associates – those who ran his journal and his ashrams, those who went to jail with him, those who raised money for him. Having seen them all, and seen some admirable social workers in India and England too, Gokhale told Gandhi, ‘I have rarely met with the sacrifice, the purity and the fearlessness I have seen in Miss [Sonja] Schlesin. Amongst your co-workers, she takes the first place in my estimation.’
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Gokhale spent his last weekend in South Africa at Tolstoy Farm. On the evening of 17 November, he left Johannesburg by train for the Portuguese port of Lourenço Marques. Gandhi and Kallenbach accompanied him. At a reception in the town hall, Gandhi used the chance to flog his ideas on diet, health and religious pluralism. He said he

remembered Lourenço Marques when it had the reputation of being a malarious place, but it was almost superfluous to drink the health of the European guests in a town so admittedly healthy as the town was to-day. They also had partaken of a vegetarian, non-alcoholic repast – these things were also considered consistent with good health. He considered the gathering unique; they had with them Christians, Jews, Hindus, Mahomedans, and Parsees.

The British Consul General, speaking next, ‘referred to the trouble this same Mr Gandhi had given to the Consulate in days past [with regard to permits, etc.], but he remembered that the proposer of the toast had also done good service to the Empire during the [Boer] War, and after all loyalty was the chief thing’.
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Gokhale now proceeded, his disciples in tow, to Dar-es-Salaam by ship. On board, Gandhi promised Gokhale that he ‘would not leave for I[ndia] without making arrangements for the work in S[outh] A[frica] to be carried on in my absence. Most probably the management of affairs will be left in Polak’s hands.’
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En route, they stopped at Zanzibar. The island had an active Indian community, who, it turned out, knew all about the satyagraha in South Africa, and its leader, whose struggle deeply resonated with them. ‘Remarkable how the men’s faces light up when they hear the name “Gandhi”,’ wrote Kallenbach in his diary, ‘and how eager they are to shake hands.’
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There was one last public meeting in Africa, this ‘the largest gathering Indians at Dar-es-Salam have ever had’,
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before Gokhale took leave of his companions and headed east to Bombay. The next day, Gandhi wrote to Gokhale that ‘I want to be a worthy pupil of yours. This is not mock humility but Indian seriousness. I want to realize in myself the conception I have of an Eastern pupil. We have many differences of opinion, but you shall still be my pattern in political life.’ After this expression of qualified devotion, he continued:

One word from the quack physician. Ample fasting, strict adherence to two meals, entire absence of condiments of all kinds from your food, omission of pulses, tea, coffee, etc., regular taking of Kuhne baths, regular and brisk walking in the country (not the pacing up and down for stimulating thought), ample allowance of olive oil and acid fruit and gradual elimination of cooked food – and you will get rid of your diabetes and add a few more years than you think to your life of service in your present body.
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In a month spent in each other’s company, Gokhale and Gandhi must have made manifest their many differences of opinion – with regard to the respective merits of petitioning versus protest, modern versus traditional civilization, allopathic versus naturopathic systems of medicine. Speaking to Gandhi, watching him at work among his compatriots, Gokhale nonetheless came away with a distinctly elevated view of his protégé’s personality and achievements. In a public meeting on his return to Bombay – held on 13 December – Gokhale said Gandhi was ‘without doubt made of the stuff of which heroes and martyrs are made. Nay, more. He has in him the marvellous spiritual power to turn ordinary men around him into heroes and martyrs.’ He told the assembled Indians of Gandhi’s sacrfices, of how he built up the movement in South Africa, and how he inspired others to follow him. Some among the several thousand satyagrahis who went to jail at his behest were established traders and professionals, but the bulk, observed Gokhale,

were poor humble individuals, hawkers, working men and so forth, men without education, men not accustomed in their life to think or talk of their country. And yet these men braved the horrors of gaol-life in the Transvaal and some of them braved them again and again rather than submit to degrading legislation directed against their country … [T]hey were touched by Gandhi’s spirit and that had wrought the transformation, thus illustrating the great power which the spirit of man can exercise over human minds and even over physical surroundings.

Gokhale defended Gandhi against his critics at home and abroad. Some radicals thought Gandhi should have argued for an ‘open door’ policy, whereby Indians could freely migrate to South Africa. But, said Gokhale, it was precisely ‘the fear of an indiscriminate influx which haunted the European mind’. The demand for free migration would
have made ‘the Europeans more implacable in their determination to get rid of the Indians at all costs and the eventual expulsion of the Indians from the [South African] sub-continent would only have been hastened by such a move’. He claimed that the ‘theoretical rights’ that Gandhi had so valiantly fought for ‘would no doubt steadily grow more and more into rights actually enjoyed in practice, but that was a matter of slow growth and it depended on a large measure upon the improvement of their position in India itself.’
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Saints, it appears, could or should be pragmatists as well. Thus argued Gokhale, in whose view Gandhi’s distinctive combination of personal saintliness and social meliorism was necessary to safeguard the position of Indians in South Africa.

Gokhale’s visit, important in itself, also helped consolidate Gandhi’s position within the community. That the great Indian leader placed himself entirely in Gandhi’s hands, that Gandhi accompanied him wherever he went, that Gandhi’s public words of praise for Gokhale were often answered by Gokhale’s public words of praise for Gandhi – none of this was lost on the varied audiences in Natal, Transvaal and the Cape.

Gokhale’s endorsement of Gandhi irritated and angered the Durban journalist P. S. Aiyar. For some time now, Aiyar had pressed for a more prominent place for himself. In his call for attention he had attacked Gandhi’s followers, but not, as yet, Gandhi himself. As late as June 1912 he was writing that while Swami Shankeranand was ‘the leader of the reactionary group’ among Indians, ‘Mr Gandhi is and has been recognised as the leader of the progressive party’.
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When Gokhale arrived in South Africa later in the year, and Gandhi was always at his side, Aiyar was not pleased, although he was not yet willing to confront Gandhi directly. An essay of November 1912 started by expressing ‘the highest admiration and respect for Mr Gandhi’, while claiming there was nonetheless ‘a considerable body of opinion outside the Transvaal which do not apparently fall in line with all his views and conclusions’.

Aiyar then set out his own view of the Indian predicament in South Africa. As inheritors of an ancient civilization, they could not allow themselves to be submerged by ‘materialistic western civilization’; nor, however, could they identify with the ‘savagery’ of the Africans. The way forward was to ‘improve themselves on their traditional lines of
civilisation. For doing so, they must have social and commercial intercourse with the country of their origin’. This continuous intercourse was what the proposed Asiatic Act forbade.
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Aiyar’s position was not dissimilar to that held by Gandhi before the Anglo-Boer War, when he had likewise argued for equal rights for all British subjects, which implied the free movement of Indians into (and across) South Africa. As white attitudes hardened, however, Gandhi modified his stand, now asking only for guaranteed rights of residence and work for Indians
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in South Africa. That was what he asked Lord Milner for in 1904, and what he had asked General Smuts for between 1906 and 1911.

Aiyar also grumbled that Gokhale’s itinerary in South Africa was dictated by Gandhi and company. The journalist was able to get only a half-hour appointment with the visitor, which left him deeply dissatisfied. Gokhale told him that the demand for free immigration and free movement was impractical, and the further demand for an Indian franchise highly premature. Aiyar wrote bitterly that ‘instead of endeavouring to find a remedy to put our countrymen on our legs he [Gokhale] simply evaded to tackle the real and lectured on the maintenance of European civilisation and praised Mr Gandhi as a wonderful personage and all ended there.’
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