The Essential Gandhi (10 page)

Thus, if I could not accept Christianity either as a perfect or the greatest religion, neither was I then convinced of Hinduism’s being such. Hindu defects were pressingly visible to me. If untouchability could be a part of Hinduism, it could be but a rotten part or an excrescence. I could not understand the [reason for] a multitude of
sects and castes. What was the meaning of saying that the Vedas [Hindu scripture] were the inspired Word of God? If they were inspired, why not also the Bible and the Koran?
¹⁷

[Gandhi recoiled from the competitiveness of religions. He also disliked the competitiveness of lawyers. His client and the opposing party were relatives, and the cost of the litigation, dragging out for more than a year, was ruining both. Gandhi suggested a compromise out of court. An arbitrator who heard the case decided in favor of Gandhi’s client, Dada Abdulla Sheth. Now a new problem confronted Gandhi. The opposing party, Tyeb Sheth, was called upon to pay thirty-seven thousand pounds—i.e., about eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars—and costs. This threatened him with bankruptcy. Gandhi induced Dada Abdulla to permit the loser to pay in installments stretched over a very extended period.

In preparing the case, Gandhi learned the secrets of bookkeeping and some of the fine points of law. Above all, it reinforced his opinion that settlements out of court were preferable to trials.]

 … My joy was boundless. I had learnt the true practice of law. I had learnt to find out the better side of human nature and to enter men’s hearts. I realized that the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder. The lesson was so indelibly burnt into me that a large part of my time during the twenty years of my practice as a lawyer was occupied in bringing about private compromises of hundreds of cases. I lost nothing thereby—not even money, certainly not my soul.
¹⁸

[The lawsuit settled, Gandhi returned to Durban and prepared to sail for India. He had been in South Africa almost twelve months. Before his departure his associates gave him a farewell party. During the festivities someone handed him the day’s
Natal Mercury
and in it he found a brief item regarding the Natal government’s proposed bill to deprive Indians of their right to elect members of the legislature. Gandhi stressed the necessity of resisting this move. His friends were ready but they were “unlettered, lame”
¹⁹
men, they said, and powerless without him. He consented to stay a
month. He remained twenty years fighting the battle for Indian rights. He won.]

[Natal in 1896 had 400,000 Negro inhabitants, 50,000 whites and 51,000 Indians. The Cape of Good Hope Colony had 900,000 Negroes, 400,000 Europeans and 10,000 Indians. The Transvaal Republic had 650,000 Negroes, 120,000 whites and about 5,000 Indians. Similar proportions were to be found in other areas.

Indians or no Indians, the whites were a permanent minority in South Africa. But the Indians were thrifty, able and ambitious and they worked hard. Given normal opportunities, they became rivals of the whites in business, agriculture, law and the other professions.

Is that why the Indians were persecuted?

The Dutch, who first settled South Africa in the sixteenth century, brought their slaves from Malaya, Java and other Pacific islands. They were concentrated in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The British arrived much later. In Natal they found they could grow sugar cane, tea and coffee. But the Negroes were reluctant to work for them. Arrangements were accordingly made for the shipment of indentured laborers from India.

The first Indian contract workers landed in Natal in 1860. They came from India voluntarily or, frequently, involuntarily and not knowing where they were going. Many were untouchables snatched from semi-starvation. The system tied them to private farms for five years. They were given free board and lodgings for themselves and their families, and ten shillings, or about three dollars, a month in the first year, and an additional shilling, or twenty-five cents, a month each year thereafter. At the end of the five years the contractor paid their passage back to India. He did the same if they remained another five years as free laborers. In numerous cases, the indentured laborers chose to become permanent residents.

When Gandhi had been in South Africa just over a year—on August 18, 1894—these conditions were altered. At the end of the first five-year period, the indentured laborer had to return to India or agree to be a serf in South Africa forever. But if he wished to stay as a free workingman, he had to pay an annual tax of three pounds for himself and for each of his dependents. Three pounds was the equivalent of six months’ pay.

This aroused a storm, at the center of which stood Gandhi.]

We organized a fierce campaign against this tax.…

 … It ever remained the determination [of the Natal Indian Congress] to get the tax remitted but it was twenty years before the determination was realized.…

But truth triumphed in the end. The sufferings of the Indians were the expression of that truth. Yet it would not have triumphed except for unflinching faith, great patience and incessant effort. Had the community given up the struggle, had the Congress abandoned the campaign and submitted to the tax as inevitable, the hated impost would have continued to be levied from the indentured Indians until this day, to the eternal shame of the Indians in South Africa and of the whole of India.
²⁰

[In three years in South Africa, Gandhi had become a prosperous lawyer and the outstanding Indian political figure. He was widely known as the champion of indentured laborers. He addressed conferences, drafted memorandums to government ministers, wrote letters to newspapers, circulated petitions (one was signed by ten thousand Indians), and made many friends among whites, Indians and Negroes. He published two pamphlets:
An Appeal to Every Briton in South Africa
and
The Indian Franchise, An Appeal
.

“Appeal” was the key to Gandhi’s politics. He appealed to the common sense and morality of his adversary.]

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by the humiliation of their fellow-beings.
²¹

[Gandhi’s struggle in South Africa did not aim to achieve “equality” for the Indians there, as he wrote to the Editor of the
Natal Mercury
.]

 … You have said that the Indians want social equality with the Europeans. I confess I do not quite understand the phrase but I know that the Indians have never asked [British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain] to regulate the social relations between the two communities, and so long as the manners, customs, habits and religions of the two communities differ there will, naturally, be a social distinction. What the Indians fail to understand is why that
difference should come in the way of the two living cordially and harmoniously in any part of the world without the Indians having to accept a degradation of their status in the eyes of the law. If the sanitary habits of the Indians are not quite what they ought to be, the Sanitary Department can, by strict vigilance, effect the needed improvement. If Indians have not got decent-looking stores, licensing authorities can soon turn them into decent-looking ones. These things can be done only when European Colonists, as Christians, look upon the Indians as brethren or as British subjects, look upon them as fellow-subjects [of the British Empire]. Then, instead of cursing and swearing at the Indians as now, they would help them to remove any defects that there may be in them and thus raise them and themselves also in the estimation of the world.
²²

[Though there was only slight visible evidence, as yet, of the great Gandhi of history, he had proved himself an effective leader and an excellent organizer. His Indian co-workers felt acutely, and he could not fail to see, that without him the struggle for Indian rights would collapse, or at least lag.

Gandhi, accordingly, took six months’ leave and went to India to fetch his family.

Arrived in the homeland in the middle of 1896, the twenty-seven-year-old man with a mission engaged in furious activity. In Rajkot, he spent a month in the bosom of his family writing a pamphlet on Indian grievances in South Africa.]

 … It had a green cover and came to be known afterwards as the Green Pamphlet. In it I drew a purposely subdued picture of the conditions of Indians in South Africa. The language I used was more moderate than that of the two pamphlets which I have referred to before [
An Appeal to Every Briton in South Africa
and
The Indian Franchise, An Appeal
—both written in South Africa], as I knew that things heard of from a distance appear bigger than they are.

Ten thousand copies were printed and sent to all the papers and leaders of every party in India.…

To get these pamphlets ready for posting was no small matter. It would have been expensive too, if I had employed paid help for preparing wrappers, etc. But I hit upon a much simpler plan. I gathered together all the children in my locality and asked them to volunteer two or three hours’ labor of a morning when they had no school. This they willingly agreed to do. I promised to bless them and give them, as a reward, used postage stamps which I had collected. They got through the work in no time. That was my first experiment of having little children as volunteers. Two of those little friends are my co-workers today.

Plague broke out in Bombay about this time and there was panic all around. There was fear of an outbreak in Rajkot.… I offered my services to the State … and I was put on the committee which was appointed to look into the question. I laid especial emphasis on the cleanliness of latrines and the committee decided to inspect these in every street. The poor people had no objection … and what is more, they carried out the improvements suggested to them. But when we went to inspect the houses of the [rich], some of them even refused us admission, not to talk of listening to our suggestions. It was our common experience that the latrines of the rich were more unclean.…

The Committee had to inspect the untouchables’ quarters also. Only one member of the Committee was ready to accompany me there.… That was the first visit in my life to such a locality. The men and women there were surprised to see us.…

“[You] won’t mind if we inspect your houses?” I asked.

“You are perfectly welcome, sir. You may see every nook and corner of our houses. Ours are no houses, they are holes.”

I went in and was delighted to see that the insides were as clean as the outsides. The entrances were well-swept … and the few pots and pans were clean and shining. There was no fear of an outbreak in those quarters.
²³

[From Rajkot Gandhi went to Bombay to arrange a public meeting on South Africa. Meanwhile he nursed his sister’s husband, who was ill, and later moved the dying patient into his own room.]

My aptitude for nursing gradually developed into a passion, so much so that it often led me to neglect my work, and on occasions I engaged not only my wife but the whole household in such service.

Such service can have no meaning unless one takes pleasure in it. When it is done for show or for fear of public opinion it stunts the man and crushes his spirit. Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served. But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service which is rendered in a spirit of joy.
²⁴

[The Bombay meeting was a tremendous success. Gandhi continued his mission, traveling to Poona and Madras.]

The affection showered on me by most of the friends I met and their enthusiasm for the cause were so great that, in spite of my having to communicate with them in English, I felt myself entirely at home. What barrier is there that love cannot break?
²⁵

[In Calcutta, Gandhi attempted to enlist the support of newspapers for his campaign. But often the editors kept him waiting or refused to see him.]

However serious a grievance may be in the eyes of the man who suffers from it, he will be but one of the numerous people invading the editor’s office.… How is the editor to meet them all? Moreover, the aggrieved party imagines that the editor is a power in the land. Only he knows that his powers can hardly travel beyond the threshold of his office. But I was not discouraged. I kept on seeing editors of other papers.…

Mr. Saunders, editor of
The Englishman
, claimed me as his own.…

 … What Mr. Saunders liked in me was my freedom from exaggeration and my devotion to truth. He subjected me to a searching cross-examination before he began to sympathize with my cause,
and he saw that I had spared neither will nor pains to place before him an impartial statement of the case even of the white man in South Africa, and also to appreciate it.

My experience has shown me that we win justice quickest by rendering justice to the other party.
²⁶

[A cable from Natal, South Africa, recalled Gandhi to cope with an emergency—the opening of a hostile parliament. He rushed back to Bombay where, with his wife, two sons and the widowed sister’s only son, he boarded the S.S.
Courland
. The S.S.
Naderi
sailed for Natal at the same time. The two ships carried about eight hundred passengers.