Gandhi Before India (83 page)

Gandhi’s experiences in South Africa were astonishingly varied and always intense. Life in Durban and Johannesburg, at Phoenix and Tolstoy farms, in court and in jail, on the road and on the train, gave him a deeper understanding of what divided (or united) human beings in general and Indians in particular. Two decades in the diaspora gave him the eyes to see and the tools to use when he came back home. As writer, editor, leader, bridge-builder, social reformer, moral exemplar, political organizer and political theorist, Gandhi returned to India in 1915 fully formed and fully primed to carry out these callings over a far wider spatial, social and – not least – historical scale.

The South African years were crucial to Gandhi, and to the distinctive form of political protest that is his most enduring legacy to India and the world. From 1894, when the Natal Indian Congress was founded, until 1906, Gandhi and his colleagues relied on letters, articles, petitions and deputations to make their case. On 11 September 1906, the Indians of the Transvaal made a radical departure, when, in that mass meeting at Johannesburg’s Empire Theatre, they resolved to seek imprisonment if their demands were not met. Gandhi now travelled to London to give the older methods a last chance. He returned empty-handed. The following year he led hundreds of Indians (and some Chinese) in courting arrest by breaking the law.

In subsequent years, satyagraha took various forms: hawking without a licence, crossing colonial boundaries without a permit, refusing to provide thumb impressions when asked to do so, burning registration certificates that the law obliged one to possess and carry at all times.
The actions were individual and collective – first conducted by a person acting alone, then by a few people acting together, then, in the march across the border in November 1913, by thousands of people at once. These methods of civil disobedience lay in between the older method of petitioning the authorities and the rival method – then gathering ground in India – of bombing public places and assassinating public officials.

Gandhi was both a practitioner and a theorist of satyagraha. He planned his campaigns meticulously. Which law was to be broken when, by whom, in which place and in what manner – to these matters he gave careful attention and issued precise instructions. Before and after these campaigns he explained the wider moral and political significance of satyagraha. In letters, speeches, articles, editorials, and in his book
Hind Swaraj
, he explained why non-violence was more effective as well as more noble than the armed struggle to which some brilliant and courageous young Indians were more immediately attracted.

In August 1911, a time we may describe in retrospect as a lull between two storms, after one major satyagraha and before another,
The Times
of London carried a leader on ‘The Asiatic Problem in South Africa’, This summarized the campaigns of Indians in South Africa, conducted ‘under the guidance of Mr M. K. Gandhi, an able and tenacious leader’.
²³
The description was not inaccurate. For Gandhi was in 1911 essentially a
community
leader, who represented the interests of about 100,000 Indians in South Africa.

To be sure, given what we now know of the man and his impact on his country and the world, we may think the praise parsimonious. So, had they read
The Times
at the time, would some of Gandhi’s closest friends. The people of Porbandar, writing to Lord Morley in 1908, insisted that in the struggle led by their native son ‘the fate and future of India is involved’. Kallenbach, writing a few years later, thought history would place Gandhi alongside Tolstoy and Ruskin. Pranjivan Mehta went even further – he called his fellow Gujarati a ‘Mahatma’, the sort of spiritual leader born every few hundred years to rescue and redeem the motherland.

Kallenbach was Gandhi’s most devoted European friend; Mehta, Gandhi’s oldest and most steadfast Indian admirer. They would have followed their leader wherever he went, even down the path of armed struggle had he chosen that route instead. The moral force of Gandhi’s political method, however, was better appreciated by two men, one
Indian, the other European, whose personal affection for the man was matched by a sharp understanding of his political technique. In a speech in Johannesburg in November 1908, the trader A. M. Cachalia observed that ‘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.’ Speaking to a reporter in Durban in September 1910, Henry Polak observed that ‘our programme will remain, as it has always been, not one of violence or attempts to disturb, but one of suffering on the part of our people, who intend to go on enduring these hardships until they make the authorities ashamed of themselves.’

Gandhi’s own belief in the power and relevance of non-violent resistance was enormous, and unshakeable. As early as November 1907 – when the first protests against permits were taking shape in the Transvaal, and when he had not yet been jailed himself – he said of passive resistance that it ‘may well be adopted by every oppressed people [and] by every oppressed individual, as being a more reliable and more honourable instrument for securing the redress of wrongs than any which has heretofore been adopted’. Two years later, writing to Tolstoy from London, he went so far as to claim that ‘the struggle of the Indians in the Transvaal is the greatest of modern times, inasmuch as it has been idealised both as to the goal as also the methods adoped to reach the goal.’ Then, in June 1914 – on the eve of his departure from South Africa – he described satyagraha as ‘perhaps the mightiest instrument on earth’.

As I write this in August 2012, sixty-five years after Indian independence, forty-four years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the United States, twenty-three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, eighteen years after the ending of apartheid, and in the midst of ongoing non-violent struggles for democracy and dignity in Burma, Tibet, Yemen, Egypt and other places, Gandhi’s words (and claims) appear less immodest than they might have seemed when he first articulated them.