Gandhi & Churchill (29 page)

Gandhi always felt uncomfortable with the term “
passive
resistance” because it implied passivity or even weakness—in a word, unmanliness. “If we continue to believe ourselves and let others believe,” he wrote later, “that we are weak and helpless and therefore offer passive resistance, our resistance would never make us strong.”
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He even ran a contest in
Indian Opinion
to coin a better term for his movement, offering a prize for the winner. His cousin Maganlal, who was living at Phoenix Farm, suggested
sadagraha,
which in Sanskrit meant “firmness in a good cause.” Gandhi amended that to
satyagraha,
or “firmness for truth.” “The word ‘satya’ (Truth),” he would write much later, “is derived from ‘sat’ which means being. And nothing is or exists in reality except Truth. That is why Sat or Truth is perhaps the most important name of God.”
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As for
graha,
in Gandhi’s mind the word signified much more than just “firmness” or “fortitude.”
Satyagraha
or “truth force” (later “soul force”) implied bringing manly strength and discipline to a nonviolent cause. By “fostering the idea of strength, we grow stronger and stronger every day.”
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Gandhi saw his campaign as an active spiritual force that would reshape the Indian community in every respect. It would shatter the old bonds of distrust, weakness, and division, fostered by years of colonial domination, and weld Indians together again in love and truth. And every day it would again project this muscular new moral presence onto the political and social landscape. The South African Indian would be someone to be reckoned with, even feared, by his white enemies.

Resistance as spiritual empowerment; spiritual empowerment as a spark for social transformation. That was the formula for success that Gandhi chose for his first satyagraha campaign in 1907 and that he would follow ever after. By joining that movement, he proclaimed, the Transvaal Indian “will be regarded as a hero and acclaimed by all India”—for India was never very far from his thoughts and actions, even in South Africa.
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By April Gandhi felt ready to formally launch his campaign against the registration law. Through mass meetings organized over the summer, he tried to summon up again the fiery spirit of the Empire Theater meeting and the sense of expectation and liberation. Posters went up around Johannesburg calling for a boycott of the permit office: “Loyalty to the King of Kings—Indians be Free!” (Gandhi was careful to include Christian imagery in his campaign, even calling Jesus “the first passive resister.”) The British Indian Association sponsored marches, pickets, and speeches. One Muslim merchant declared he would rather hang than submit to the new law. Anyone who did submit and allowed himself to be fingerprinted, Gandhi told readers of
Indian Opinion
in July, “will have forsaken his God,” and “his honor will have been lost.” Again he held up the example of the English suffragettes: “When Women Are Manly, Will Men Be Effeminate?”
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The government extended the July 31 registration deadline to October 31, then to November 30. Only eleven Indians out of thirteen thousand submitted registration certificates. Neither the threat of losing their trading licenses, nor the threat of expulsion, could make the Indian merchants of Pretoria and Johannesburg back down.
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For his campaign really to catch fire, Gandhi felt all he needed was someone willing to go to jail for refusing to register.

He turned to Ram Sandara Pandit, a Hindu priest, thirty years old and married with two children, and one of Gandhi’s picket organizers. On November 8 the government arrested him for reentering the Transvaal with an expired registration certificate. Gandhi defended Sandara in court, saying he had disobeyed the law in order to obey a higher law. The prisoner was sentenced to a month in prison, which led Gandhi to write ecstatically in
Indian Opinion,
“[Ram Sandara] Pandit has opened the gate of our freedom.”
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Gandhi visited his protégé in prison, interviewed him, and praised him as a hero. He even organized a poetry contest on the theme of satyagraha and self-sacrifice. When Ram Sandara was released in December, Gandhi led a procession through the streets and placed a garland of flowers around the young man’s neck. But then two weeks later the government threatened to rearrest Sandara unless he either registered or left the colony. The wretched man took his wife and children and fled to Natal.
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Gandhi was furious. The man celebrated as a hero was now denounced as a coward and a traitor. Gandhi warned his other followers: “O God, preserve us from the fate of Ram Sandara!” It was the start of a pattern that would become all too familiar to Gandhi, of followers who embraced his principles in a moment of enthusiasm, then proved unable to summon up the stern moral fiber to sustain them. In fact, over the years all his satyagraha campaigns would exhibit the same dynamic: a sudden explosion of almost hysterical support at the start would quickly dwindle away into inaction, even disillusion and retreat, when the goal failed to materialize. Once those in authority caught on, Gandhi’s threat of civil disobedience turned out to be a less powerful weapon than it first appeared.

Meanwhile, with registrations at a standstill, the Transvaal government decided to take tough action. Days after Ram Sandara Pandit fled, it arrested the entire leadership of the British Indian Association and ordered Gandhi to leave in forty-eight hours or face the same fate. Gandhi responded by attending a public meeting in Johannesburg the day the ultimatum ran out. On January 10 he was sentenced to two months in jail. The first of Gandhi’s many imprisonments was about to begin.

Prison was a grisly experience.
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Two other prisoners in his cell, a Chinese and a black, spent the time playing with each other’s genitals. More than once Gandhi had to stay awake all night to avoid homosexual rape. What he termed “unnatural vice” was endemic in prison, including among the warders, and the filth and squalor were repulsive. But he had with him a copy of Tolstoy’s
The Kingdom of God Is Within You
and comforted himself by reciting some verses by his teacher Raychandbai: “The sky rings with the name of the Invisible, I sit rapt in the temple, my heart filled with gladness.”
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Meanwhile, his satyagraha movement was collapsing. More than two thousand of his followers had been arrested. And as imprisonment become a real prospect, not just a theoretical possibility, Pretoria and Johannesburg’s merchant elite began to desert. Gandhi learned that Indians were “losing their courage…Those who went to jail lost their nerve in a few days.”
³³
Before his entire campaign evaporated, he and other leaders agreed to a secret meeting with the Transvaal’s colonial secretary, General Jan Christiaan Smuts, to work out a face-saving compromise.

The agreement they reached on January 28 was a strange one for a man who had once argued that the most degrading part of the Black Act had been its use of fingerprinting. Now in exchange for the release of all prisoners, Gandhi promised that all Indians would agree to be fingerprinted—but
voluntarily,
rather than in obedience to the law. When Gandhi was released from jail on the twenty-eighth, he told his followers they had won. “A reasonable man would have no objection to being fingerprinted,” he told them. The central issue had been the compulsion, not the fingerprinting itself. Gandhi argued that the government had yielded on that point, so that Indians could now register “with honor.”

Some, especially his wealthy friends, breathed a sigh of relief. But others were outraged at what they saw as Gandhi’s betrayal. He had given the government precisely what it wanted and called it victory. The angry passions Gandhi had summoned up against the Black Act were now turned on him. Some even said that General Smuts had bought his surrender for £15,000. Gandhi ignored the rumors. The general had said that if anyone still objected to being fingerprinted, they would not be forced to; Gandhi believed him. “A satyagrahi is never afraid of trusting his opponents,” he declared. But it was Gandhi’s own followers he had to be wary of.
³⁴

On February 10, 1908, Gandhi took a walk to the Johannesburg registration office in order to be the first to be voluntarily fingerprinted and registered as a resident Asian. A man stopped him, a tall Muslim Pathan named Mir Alam, a mattress maker who had done business with Gandhi and had been active in the satyagraha campaign.

“Where are you going?” he asked Gandhi in a cold tone.

“I am going to take out a registration certificate,” Gandhi replied, and offered to take Alam with him. Instead, Alam struck him across the face. Gandhi went sprawling, slicing open his face on the sharp rocks on the ground. Alam started kicking him and was joined by three or four others, cursing and shouting. Finally Gandhi’s friends managed to push them away, carried him to a nearby shop, and called for a doctor.

When Henry Polak arrived, Gandhi’s face was a bloody pulp—the cuts across his forehead required several stitches. One eye was swelling shut, and his upper lip was split open and bleeding. He had several cracked ribs. Polak and the rest urged him to go to a hospital, but a kindly and sympathetic white minister, Reverend Joseph Doke, took him in as a houseguest instead.

Doke would come to play a key role in Gandhi’s life. For the time being, however, Gandhi was too hurt to move. He had to complete his registration in bed, including the fingerprinting, although his arms and hands were swathed in bandages. He had finally done what he saw as his duty as a gentleman.
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But his reputation was in tatters, his movement nonexistent. Ironically, Gandhi’s effort to unite the Transvaal Indians had worked. In March 1908 it would have been hard to find a man more universally despised than Mohandas Gandhi. On March 5 he was again assaulted in a mass meeting in Durban. The lights went out, a shot was heard, and an irate Pathan charged the platform with a cudgel. The police had to escort Gandhi to safety, “amid much booing and hissing.” The next day, when he met with local Pathan leaders, they told Gandhi he had betrayed them. Indeed, many of his former Muslim friends in South Africa never forgave him.
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His plans, his efforts, everything had failed. All Gandhi could cling to was his most cherished faith, as he put it, “that all activity pursued with a pure heart is bound to bear fruit, whether or not such fruit is visible to us.”
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In March 1908 that fruit was not visible to anyone else. Even Gandhi did not know that it was almost in his grasp.

As Mohandas Gandhi nursed his wounds in Johannesburg, Winston Churchill was wallowing in his bath in his bachelor pad in Bolton Street, wondering how to dispel his boredom. It was in his bath that his friend and secretary Edward Marsh found him on that late March afternoon in 1908. Marsh had to remind him they were expected at a dinner party in Portland Place hosted by the woman writer and activist Lady St. Helier. It was on the tip of Churchill’s tongue to say no, but at Marsh’s urging he finally got dressed and went to the dinner party where he met the woman who would be his wife for the next fifty-five years.
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He had actually met Clementine Hozier four years earlier, but the encounter had made little impression on him. Since his breakup with Pamela Plowden and his mother’s marriage, women played almost no part in his thoughts. One who did cross his path was Violet Asquith, daughter of the Liberal politician, who first met him a luncheon party in 1906. He lamented to her how old he had become (he was thirty-one) and how lamentably short human life was. “We are all worms,” he said finally, after a long diatribe against mortality. “But I do believe I am a glowworm.”
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Churchill and Violet Asquith (later Violet Bonham Carter) became lifelong friends but never more than that. Clementine Hozier was a different matter. Twenty-three years old, with thick reddish-brown hair and large dark green eyes, she captivated Churchill. She was descended from a Scots family with roots reaching back to the twelfth century. Her parents were divorced. By the standards of the time, she was an ardent feminist and pro-suffragette. Her politics were distinctly to the left of Winston’s. Nonetheless “he pursued Clemmie with the same single-mindedness that he did everything else.”
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Not even his defeat in a by-election in April (he soon found another safe Liberal seat, in Dundee in Scotland) could divert him from his courtship. They married in September at Blenheim, then left for an Italian honeymoon. “We have been happy here and Clemmie is very well,” he wrote to his mother from Venice. “We have only loitered and loved—a good and serious occupation for which the histories furnish respectable precedents.”
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For both Churchill and Gandhi, their wives would be the single most important persons in their lives, not excluding their children. Certainly Gandhi’s marriage was colored by the male-centered hierarchical rules of his Hindu background, while Churchill’s had the more intimate flavor of Late Victorian domesticity. (He and Clementine called each other “Kat” and “Pug.”) However, both marriages were deep and abiding lifelong partnerships.

For Churchill, family life would serve as a refuge from the storms of politics and public life. For Gandhi, by contrast, family and marriage became living extensions of his politics. He would subject the long-suffering Kasturbai to his constant pet experiments and changes of diet and lifestyle as his own thoughts were changing and evolving, sometimes in bizarre directions. Kasturbai learned to put up with his vow of
brahmacharya
as she would everything else, with patient stoicism and unconditional devotion. She willingly joined in his satyagraha campaigns, even going to jail. Over time she became Gandhi’s emotional mainstay. When she died in 1944, a disciple noticed “a part of Bapu [Gandhi’s nickname] departed” with her.
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