Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India Page 7

  The barbed shaft penetrated to the core of Gandhiji’s heart. The truth burst upon his heart with the force of revelation that so long as India allowed a section of her people to be treated as pariahs, so long must her sons be prepared to be treated as pariahs abroad.

  The shaft flung by an English editorial writer in Johannesburg would become a fixture in Gandhi’s own arsenal of arguments. (“Has not a just Nemesis overtaken us for the crime of untouchability?” he would ask in 1931. “Have we not reaped as we have sown? … We have segregated the ‘pariah’ and we are in turn segregated in the British colonies … There is no charge that the ‘pariah’ cannot fling in our faces and which we do not fling in the faces of Englishmen.”)

  Gandhi would testify that the point made by the editorial writer in Johannesburg was one he regularly had to confront. “During my campaigns in South Africa, the whites used to ask me what right we had to demand better treatment from them when we were guilty of ill-treating the untouchables among us.” Whether the point was made routinely or just once, it left a permanent impression.

  Ultimately, he did “begin his work at home,” if under “his work” we include his Tolstoyan preoccupation with sanitation and the cleaning of latrines. He returned to India in 1896 with the aim of gathering his family and bringing it back to Durban. Soon after he arrived in Rajkot, there was an outbreak of plague in Bombay. Put on a sanitation committee in Rajkot, he made the inspection of latrines his special task. In the homes of the wealthy—and even in a Hindu temple—they were “dark and stinking and reeking with filth and worms.” He then went into the untouchables’ quarter: “the first visit in my life to such a locality,” he acknowledged. Only one member of the committee was ready to go along. It turned out the untouchables had no latrines. “Latrines are for you big people,” they told him, or so Gandhi recalled. They relieved themselves in the open, but, to his surprise, they kept the hovels where they lived cleaner than the more substantial homes of their social betters. Henceforth for Gandhi, sanitation and hygiene were at or near the top of his reform agenda.

  The first overt sign that he has started to connect his passion for latrine cleaning with his convictions about untouchability crops up back in Durban, a year or so later. By his own account, Gandhi turns vicious in an argument with his long-suffering wife, Kasturba, over the emptying of a chamber pot. Here for the first time we find the categorical imperative of “body labor,” derived from Tolstoy, brought into action against the very Indian practice of untouchability, which Gandhi has now learned to abhor on grounds that it undercuts the case he has been making for Indian equality in South Africa. The chamber pot in question had been used by Vincent Lawrence, one of Gandhi’s law clerks, whom he describes as “a Christian, born of Panchama parents.” A Panchama is an untouchable. Lawrence had been recently staying as a houseguest in the lawyer’s two-story villa on Beach Grove, steps from Durban Bay. A submissive Hindu wife, in her husband’s portrayal, the illiterate Kasturba, normally called just Ba, had reluctantly learned to share with him the unspeakable duty of cleaning chamber pots. “But to clean those used by one who had been a Panchama seemed to her to be the limit,” says Gandhi. She carries the clerk’s pot but does so under vehement protest, weeping and upbraiding her husband, who responds by demanding sternly that she do her duty without complaining.

  “I will not stand this nonsense in my house,” he shouts, according to his own account.

  “Keep your house to yourself and let me go,” she replies.

  The future Mahatma is now in a fury. “I caught her by the hand, dragged the helpless woman to the gate … and proceeded to open it with the intention of pushing her out.” She then sues for peace, and he admits to remorse. Thirty years later he either doesn’t remember or chooses not to say who finally emptied the chamber pot.

  Here we have a clear prelude to the Calcutta scene on which Naipaul fastened. It shows that Gandhi didn’t have to travel back to India to be confronted by the persistence of untouchability. He could bully his own wife on that score but must have known he had yet to convert her. As late as 1938, he erupts in a similar fury upon learning that Ba has entered a temple in Puri that still bars untouchables. His pique becomes an occasion for a fast, and he loses five pounds. What’s somewhat unreadable, still, after the first incident in Durban, is the question of his own attitude to the very poor, the Panchamas and other low-caste Indians oppressed by the practice he abhors. His Christian law clerk is too easy an example. He is educated, an upstanding citizen in a starched collar. What about the indentured laborers on the sugar plantations with whom he doesn’t mix, for whom he sometimes apologizes, those who fit a white man’s stereotype of a “servile race”? Does he care about them in only an abstract, self-regarding sort of way, because he objects to the impression they leave of Indians? Or does he actually care about them?

  A few lines in the Autobiography suggest that a positive answer came during the Durban years. Gandhi, who developed what he describes as a “passion” for nursing while caring for a dying brother-in-law in Rajkot, started putting in an hour or two most mornings as a volunteer in a small charitable hospital. This brought him, he says, into “close touch with suffering Indians, most of them indentured Tamil, Telugu or North India men.” But that’s all he says. It’s a remark made in passing. We don’t know how long this volunteer nursing went on, only that he counted it as good preparation for the Boer War, when the stretcher bearers he led sometimes nursed wounded British troops. These “body snatchers,” as they were called by the troops, were themselves mostly indentured laborers. It was the war, rather than the volunteer nursing, that actually gave him his most conspicuous engagement with the poorest Indians before the final satyagraha campaign in his last year in South Africa.

  Of the eleven hundred stretcher bearers nominally under his command, more than eight hundred were indentured, recruits from the sugar plantations on a stipend of one pound a week (double what most of them normally earned). The indentured, Gandhi makes clear, remained “under the charge of English overseers.” Technically, they were volunteers, but they’d actually been drafted as a result of an official government request to their employers passed along by the so-called protector of immigrants. Rounded up on the plantations where they were indentured, these “semi-slaves,” as Gandhi called them, were then marched off under the command of their usual overseers. It would be an overstatement, but not altogether inaccurate, to describe Gandhi as a convenient front man in this transaction. In a revealing passage, he later acknowledged he had nothing to do with recruiting most of the stretcher bearers: “The Indians were not entitled to the credit for the inclusion of the indentured laborers in the Corps, which should rightly have gone to the planters. But there is no doubt that the free Indians, that is to say the Indian community, deserved credit for the excellent management of the Corps.”

  Here again he’s plainly saying that “free Indians” are members of the community; Indian indentured laborers are not. So while he has told us in the pages of the Autobiography that he was now recognized as “a friend,” a man who knew their “joys and sorrows,” his claim to have “got into closer touch” with the indentured with whom he served on the fringes of Boer War battlefields rings a little hollow. He speaks of no individuals, no incidents, just “a greater awakening amongst them,” a realization that “Hindus, Musalmans, Christians, Tamilians, Gujaratis and Sindhis were all Indians and children of the same motherland.” The awakening is “amongst them.” We can almost picture his captive audience nodding while he speaks, even though many of them—the Tamils in particular—have no common language with him. But, as a matter of fact, we’re not sure he delivered such speeches at the time. More likely, these words are directed to a different audience, in a different place, at a later time: convinced Gandhians in India who follow from week to week the installments of his memoirs in his newspaper. Long after the events he relates, Gandhi the Indian politician shapes and reshapes the experience of Gandhi the South African law
yer in order to advance his nationalist agenda and values at home.

  Part of that reshaping involves his memory of valor in the face of danger. The original understanding was that the Indians would not be exposed to battlefield fire and risks. But when the British found themselves falling back from a severe reversal, according to Gandhi, their commander paused to reopen the question with the Indians in the most tactful and sensitive way. “General Buller had no intention of forcing us to work under fire if we were not prepared to take such risk,” he wrote, “but if we undertook it voluntarily, it would be greatly appreciated. We were only too willing to enter the danger zone.” In later years, Gandhi habitually used martial metaphors to summon the valor of his volunteers for nonviolent resistance. Perhaps that’s what he’s doing in this passage. But the impression he leaves is exaggerated. He never met General Redvers Buller; it’s less than clear that the general knew his name. What he’s talking about are orders and dispatches issued in the commanding officer’s name. And his stretcher bearers never really operated on battlefields. They were at their greatest peril when, briefly, they were asked to carry their burdens over a pontoon bridge and pathways known to be in range of Boer artillery. But the guns remained silent, and no Indians were wounded or killed, even though the early Natal battles to which they were dispatched—Colenso in mid-December 1899 and Spion Kop a month later—quickly became charnel houses for the British, with the total of killed, wounded, and captured amounting to 1,127 in the first case and 1,733 in the second. The fact that not a single member of the ambulance corps fell to a Boer marksman or shell makes clear that their arduous, certainly stressful labors in the “danger zone” couldn’t have been all that dangerous.

  In describing these events, Gandhi cultivates the manly, modest voice of a leader who doesn’t want to boast. On a rereading, there comes to seem a touch of the mock-heroic in that voice as well; his small ambiguities seem more calculated than careless. Yet biographers make the most of them. Here’s Louis Fischer, one of the earliest and still one of the most readable, on the stretcher bearers: “For days they worked under the fire of enemy guns.” Pyarelal, the apostle turned biographer, describes Gandhi’s role in carrying General Edward Woodgate, the mortally wounded commander at Spion Kop, to the base hospital. “The agony of the General was excruciating during the march and the bearers had to hurry through the heat and dust.” Two months were to pass before Woodgate finally died from his wounds. It’s possible he was conscious as the stretcher or, more likely, curtained palanquin in which he was evacuated bumped along across the Tugela River valley for a little more than four miles to the base hospital at Spearman’s Camp, where General Buller had established his headquarters. Physical details of the evacuation are sparse in Gandhi’s account. Whether he accompanied the wounded commander for the whole distance is never entirely clear.

  Spion Kop was a strategic hilltop that Woodgate had led his troops to capture in the middle of the night, only to discover in the morning that he’d neglected to secure the highest ground. Their trenches were half-dug when the Boers opened fire. Recklessly standing outside the trenches, Woodgate was shot through the head as soon as the morning mist lifted. He had to be pulled into a trench filled with dead and dying Lancashire fusiliers, then evacuated to “the first dressing station” by a squad of his troops, next hauled down the hillside to a “field hospital” by British stretcher bearers before his body could be handed over to the Indians. The contemporaneous “Times” History of the War in South Africa has a detailed narrative of these events, even naming one Lieutenant Stansfield as head of the squad that got Woodgate’s body down the hill. The narrative doesn’t mention the Indians, nor did a young British correspondent who climbed the hill late in the day after “the long, dragging hours of hell fire” had wound down.

  “Streams of wounded met us and obstructed the path,” Winston Churchill wrote in his dispatch to the The Morning Post. “Corpses lay here and there. Many of the wounds were of a horrible nature.” At the base of the hill, “a village of ambulance wagons grew up.” Gandhi and Churchill were seldom again on the same side. They wouldn’t actually meet until a brief official encounter in London in 1906, which proved to be their only one. It’s intriguing to think they may have crossed paths at Spion Kop. What’s especially striking is the complete absence from Gandhi’s accounts of the picture Churchill described. Either he saw very little of it, or, somehow, the impression it left soon faded.

  Thirty educated Indians from Durban had been designated as “leaders” and given uniforms (paid for by the Muslim traders, none of whom volunteered). Leaders also got tents. The recruits from the ranks of the indentured had to sleep on open ground, often without blankets, at least in the early weeks. Gandhi was leader of the “leaders.” It’s never entirely clear that the leaders actually carried stretchers. In his several accounts Gandhi leaves the point vague. It’s at least as likely that they supervised the work, marching along and setting the pace (though Gandhi’s first biographer, Doke, came away from his interviews with the impression that his subject actually hauled stretchers). When it was all over, Gandhi wrote a beseeching letter to the colonial secretary noting that a gift of “the Queen’s Chocolate”—held out as more than a gift, a royal beneficence—had just been distributed to British troops in Natal. He asked that the chocolate go as well to the uniformed leaders of the ambulance corps who had served their brief tours without compensation. He made no request on behalf of the much larger number of indentured laborers whom he had not personally recruited. In the event, no Indians got “the Queen’s Chocolate.” The exchange makes a pathetic coda. The official replied stiffly. The chocolate was intended only for enlisted men and noncommissioned officers, he said; only for whites, he might just as well have said, for that’s how Gandhi, scrounging for some small recognition of common citizenship, no matter how symbolic, would have read it. Eight Indians, including Gandhi, got medals. None of the other stretcher bearers got any recognition except a letter from Gandhi himself accompanied by a modest unspecified gift.

  Vincent Lawrence, the outcaste clerk whose chamber pot had disgusted Kasturba Gandhi, was among the “leaders” sleeping in tents, which shows that for Gandhi the great social divide had become a matter of class, not caste. The idea of crossing that divide is presented only retrospectively. At the time he finds it remarkable that the stretcher bearers got along well with British soldiers they encountered, considering that the indentured laborers were “rather uncouth.”

  The fastidiousness is Gandhi’s. He’d not always be this fussy. Much later, in India, after he’d crossed the social divide, Gandhi adopted an untouchable girl as his daughter. She was named Lakshmi. Years after his death, when the writer Ved Mehta sought her out, Lakshmi described Gandhi’s obsession with the system of sanitation he established in his ashram: how his followers were trained to pass stool and urine into separate whitewashed buckets in a whitewashed latrine, then cover the stool with earth, eventually emptying the stool buckets in a distant trench, covering what was disposed there with cut grass, and then using the urine to rinse the bucket out. “Bapu had found a use even for urine,” Lakshmi said. Ved Mehta doesn’t indicate whether this was said with pride, irony, or some measure of each. Maybe she was simply matter-of-fact, in which case she sets an example for anyone trying to understand his thinking on such matters now.

  The ashram and the refinements of its sanitation system were still to come when Gandhi reached Calcutta in 1901. But the impulse to experience India as the mass of rural Indians did, more or less the way Tolstoy sought to experience the Russia his former serfs inhabited, was now breaking through. Perhaps the spectacle of South Indian Brahmans shielding themselves from pollution behind wicker walls was what triggered it. The boundaries of caste were obviously more firmly drawn in India, even in the precincts of the Indian National Congress, than they had been in South Africa. There, among the indentured at least, intercaste relationships, sometimes sanctified as marriages, were not uncommon, an
adaptation to a shortage of females resulting from the decision of colonial officials to import only two women for every three men. A laborer on a particular estate could hardly be sure of finding a mate from his specific subcaste and region there. He might not even care about these categories anymore. In a contemporary send-up of the recruiting agents for the distant plantations who operated in the most depressed parts of India, the promise that caste restrictions could be loosened or abandoned in the new land is part of the pitch of a “sweet-tongued talker.” In this lightly satiric version, the agent promises high wages, light workloads, and no priests “to call on you to conform to the customs of caste traditions.” The laborer will be able to eat, drink, or lie down “with any lass you may love and no one demurs or disputes your rights.”

  In fact, an 1885 judicial commission looking into conditions on the sugar plantations in Natal found “high-caste men married to low-caste women, Mahommedans to Hindus, men from Northern India to Tamil women from the South.” Later, when the contracts of indenture ran out, upwardly mobile ex-indentured Indians who’d elected to stay in South Africa and make a life there soon started to reerect the barriers that had been taken down. In 1909, fifteen years after Gandhi had first come forward as a spokesman for the Indians of Natal, twenty-nine Hindus sent a petition to the protector of immigrants, demanding the immediate dismissal of two Pariahs who’d been appointed as constables in their community. “These two Indians are sent out to execute writs,” the petitioners complained, “and at other times to search our houses … What we wish to point out is that if a pariah touches our things or makes an arrest we [are] polluted. They also put on airs.”