Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India Page 8

  Today, five or six generations later, marriages between persons of South and North Indian extraction, not to mention Hindus and Muslims, are still likely to provoke family tensions in South Africa. Marital Web sites tend to be less pointed about caste requirements, however, than they still are in India, but there are sometimes veiled allusions. In marital ads in India today, there are occasional explicit references to Dalits, the preferred name for the former untouchables in recent decades. In South Africa today, such up-front, unashamed allusions to untouchability seem to be beyond the scope of marital ads aimed at the Indian minority. Untouchability is never mentioned. Except for a rare academic study, it may not have been acknowledged in print since a single mention a long lifetime ago in The Star of Johannesburg. The headline on a small article on June 18, 1933, nearly two decades after Gandhi left South Africa, said: UNTOUCHABILITY IN JOHANNESBURG REMOVED. The elders of the Hindu temple in a neighborhood called Melrose, the article said, had decided to admit untouchables to worship there, in response to a fast against the practice that the Mahatma had ended in India three weeks earlier. Without acknowledging it in so many words, the article thus confirmed that there had long been Indians deemed to be untouchable by other Indians in South Africa and that they’d been barred from the temple throughout Gandhi’s time there.

  Gandhi must have known this. But since it was not in the open, untouchability never had to be named as a particular target of his reforming zeal, much as he’d come to abhor it. Even if he had the impulse to launch a campaign among South African Indians against it, how could he have done so without reinforcing anti-Indian sentiments among whites or splitting his small community? Calcutta at the end of 1901 was a different story. At the Congress session untouchability was blatantly in the open as an unquestioned social practice. Not only did Gandhi see it with a foreign eye; he reacted.

  When the Congress ended, he stayed on in Calcutta for a month, lodging for most of that time with his political guru, Gokhale, and calling on prominent figures, including Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu reformer known to his followers as “the Seraphic Master.” An overnight sensation at the World’s Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in conjunction with the World’s Fair in 1893 when he was just thirty, Vivekananda had been hailed as a prodigy, even prophet, in some religious circles in the West. But when the colonial lawyer came to call, he was on his deathbed at the age of thirty-nine and not receiving visitors. There’s no way of knowing whether Gandhi wanted to talk about religion or India. For both men, these were never unrelated subjects. Vivekananda’s central theme was the liberation of the soul through a hierarchy of yogic disciplines and states of consciousness, starting with some Gandhi would later profess: nonviolence, chastity, and voluntary poverty. He also spoke scathingly about the involuntary poverty to which Indians by the millions were subjected, saying it was futile to preach religion to the Indian masses “without first trying to remove their poverty and their sufferings.” When Gandhi mentioned Vivekananda in speeches later, it was almost always to haul out a favorite quotation about the evil of untouchability. The swami could be down-to-earth as well as mystical. He condemned India’s “morbid no-touchism.” And, in the phrase Gandhi regularly used, he played on the official designation of India’s lowest and poorest as “depressed classes.” What they really should be called, Vivekananda said before Gandhi came on the scene, was “the suppressed classes.” Their suppression depresses all Indians, Gandhi would always add.

  On leaving Calcutta at the end of January 1902, Gandhi resolved to travel alone across India by train on a third-class ticket in order to experience firsthand the crowding, squalor, and filth that were the lot of the poorest travelers. With a rhetorical flourish but no direct reference to anything his Master said then or later, Pyarelal wrote that Gandhi wanted to bring himself “into intimate touch with a wide cross-section of the Indian humanity with whom it was his ambition to merge himself.” He bought a blanket, a rough wool coat, a small canvas bag, and a water jug for his expedition.

  His resolve to travel third-class from Calcutta may not have become as celebrated as his resistance to being expelled from a first-class compartment on the other side of the Indian Ocean nearly nine years earlier. But it’s not far-fetched to see it as a turning point that’s equally laden with portents. If he hadn’t crossed the social divide in his own mind and heart before, he did so now. It wasn’t a political gesture, something done to attract attention, for no one was paying him any except Gokhale, who, after reacting incredulously to the unheard-of notion of an upper-caste lawyer in third class, finally was touched by Gandhi’s earnestness, so touched he accompanied his protégé to the station, bringing him some food for the journey and saying, “I should not have come if you had gone first-class but now I had to.” That, at least, was the way Gandhi remembered his send-off. Gokhale’s admiration for his would-be apprentice, who was only three years younger, grew into a kind of reverence. “A purer, a nobler, a braver and more exalted spirit,” he would tell a crowd of Punjabis in 1909, while Gandhi was still in South Africa, “has never moved on the earth.”

  After that trip across India in early 1902, Gandhi made it a rule—it might even be called a fetish—always to travel third-class in India (even when, as sometimes happened in later years, the railway laid on entire cars and even trains for the exclusive use of his entourage, inspiring the poet Sarojini Naidu’s loving jibe: “You will never know how much it costs us to keep that saint, that wonderful old man, in poverty”). On this first outing, he found the noise unbearable, the habits of the passengers disgusting, their language foul. Chewing betel and tobacco, they “converted the whole carriage into a spittoon,” he said. Getting into “intimate touch” with Indian humanity proved to be a nasty experience, but, Pyarelal wrote, “in retrospect, Gandhi even enjoyed it.” Presumably he means that Gandhi got a kick out of the thought that he was doing something completely original for an aspiring Indian politician. In South Africa, he noted, third-class accommodations, used mainly by blacks, were more comfortable with cushioned rather than hard wooden seats and railway officials not as completely indifferent to overcrowding as they were in India. But in South Africa he had mostly traveled first-class until then. Merging with indentured Indians there wasn’t yet part of his program, and they weren’t often on trains; merging with blacks never occurred to him.

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  AMONG ZULUS

  FROM HIS FIRST MONTHS in South Africa, the young Mohandas Gandhi was acutely sensitive to the casual racism that dripped and oozed from the epithet “coolie.” Never could he get over the shock of seeing the word used as a synonym for “Indian” in official documents or courtroom proceedings; making that translation in reverse—defining himself on behalf of the whole community as an Indian rather than as a Hindu, Gujarati, or Bania—was his first nationalist impulse. Years later he could be freshly affronted by the memory of having been called a “coolie lawyer.” Yet it took him more than fifteen years to learn that the word “kaffir” had similar connotations for the people he occasionally recognized as the original owners of the land, the “natives,” as he otherwise called them, or Africans, or blacks.

  Gandhi is likely to have heard the term in India. Originally derived from the Arabic word for infidel, it was sometimes used by Muslims there to describe Hindus. Its range of meanings in the speech of white South Africans would have been new to him. In Afrikaans and English, whites used “kaffir” in a variety of compounds and contexts. The Kaffir Wars of the early nineteenth century were fought by white settlers against black tribes who inhabited territory known as Kaffirland or Kaffraria. Kaffir corn was the grain used in their mealie porridge and beer. Anything with the word attached to it was normally deemed to be inferior, backward, or uncivilized. In its most polite usage, as a noun, it signified a primitive being. When it came with a sneer, it amounted to “nigger.” Kafferboetie was an abusive term in Afrikaans for anyone who liked or sympathized with blacks; a fair translation was “nigger lover.” It was
something Gandhi was never called.

  Here he is in early 1908, reporting on his first experience of prison as an inmate:

  We were then marched off to a prison intended for Kaffirs … We could understand not being classed with the whites, but to be placed on the same level as the Natives seemed too much to put up with. It is indubitably right that Indians should have separate cells. Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized—the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals.

  Indians sentenced to hard labor were routinely placed in the same cells with blacks, an experience Gandhi would have himself the next time he went to prison, later that same year.

  Much happened in the eight months between these two prison experiences. Initially, he’d urged Indians to refuse to register in the Transvaal as the “Black Act” required; then he’d quixotically struck a deal with Smuts under which, as he understood it, Indians would register “voluntarily” and then, in recognition of their easy compliance, the law requiring them to do so would be repealed. As Gandhi saw it, the removal from the statute books of a racial law defining Indians as second-class citizens had to be welcomed even if little or nothing changed in their actual lives. Similarly, he would later demand changes in a law called the Asiatic Act (enacted in 1907 by the all-white new provincial legislature, as soon as self-rule was restored to the former South African Republic) that barred Indian immigrants to the Transvaal with no history of previous residence there. Gandhi wanted six, just six, highly educated Indians to be admitted annually as permanent residents, even if they had no ties to the territory. By Gandhi’s puzzling, legalistic standard, the admission of half a dozen Indians a year would cancel any suggestion that they were innately unequal and unworthy of citizenship. It could also be interpreted as a sly tactical maneuver designed to establish or, rather, insinuate a precedent or right, which is precisely why the new white government resisted the demand. “The spirit of fanaticism which actuates a portion of the Indian community” made it inadvisable, Prime Minister Louis Botha explained to a British official, suggesting it would be an invitation to further Gandhian resistance. What the prime minister really meant was that even six Indians a year—one every two months—would be enough to inflame whites, for whom, of course, there had never been numerical quotas or educational standards. It would violate one of their regularly proclaimed demands: that a lid be placed absolutely on the number of Indians. “Resolved,” a group calling itself the White League had formally declared as early as 1903, “that all Asiatics should be prevented from coming into the Transvaal.” In Botha’s view, that was reasonable, not “fanatical.”

  The registration issue came first; and for the first but not last time, Gandhi’s instinct for compromise, for sticking to a principle even if it meant gaining little in practice, confused and upset followers, to the point that he was waylaid and severely beaten on the day he himself went to register by burly Pathans, Muslims from the frontier area of what’s now Pakistan who’d been brought over during the war to serve in various noncombatant roles. The Pathans were quick to conclude that Gandhi’s supposed deal was a betrayal. The distinction between being fingerprinted voluntarily and being fingerprinted under duress was not apparent to them. Reacting in horror to the assault on their leader, who was now beginning to be recognized as a spiritual pilgrim as well as a lawyer and spokesman, the broader Indian community finally heeded his appeal and registered. But, in a further twist, the “Black Act” wasn’t repealed as he’d assured them it would be. A nonplussed Gandhi said he’d been double-crossed. As his grandson and biographer Rajmohan Gandhi observes, he then “for the first time permitted himself the use of racial language,” saying Indians would never again “submit to insult from insolent whites.” Satyagraha resumed with the aroused mass meeting at the Hamidia Mosque in Johannesburg, where, following Gandhi’s example, Transvaal Indians flung their certificates into the iron cauldron, where they were promptly doused with paraffin, set aflame, and incinerated.

  So Gandhi had no certificate to present when, in October, he led dozens of similarly undocumented Indians from Natal into the Transvaal border town of Volksrust, where, refusing to be fingerprinted, he was arrested and sentenced to two months of hard labor. Brought to Johannesburg under guard and wearing the garb of ordinary black convicts (“marked all over with the broad arrow,” in Doke’s contemporaneous description), the well-known lawyer was paraded through the streets from Park Station to the Fort, Johannesburg’s earliest prison, where he was tossed into an overcrowded holding cell in the segregated “native jail,” full of black and other nonwhite criminals. This too is commemorated: the skeleton of the old Park Station, all elegant fretwork and filigree open to the elements under a pitched metal roof, sits today as a monument on a bluff above the rail yards in downtown Johannesburg; the communal holding cell at the Fort has been converted into a permanent Gandhi exhibition where his reedy voice, recorded in an old BBC interview, can be heard complaining a dozen or so times an hour about being belittled as “a coolie lawyer.” The prison, where Nelson Mandela and many other political prisoners were subsequently jailed, has been converted into a museum preserving the memory of past oppression and struggle. Hard by its thick ramparts stand the open, airy chambers of South Africa’s new Constitutional Court, pledged to uphold a legal order guaranteeing equal rights for all South Africa’s peoples: an imaginative juxtaposition intended as an act of architectural restitution and rebalancing, meant to enshrine, not just symbolize, a living ideal.

  All that—the dedication of the new court building, the renaming of the prison precincts as Constitution Hill—came ninety-six years after Gandhi’s first imprisonment there in 1908. His experience, recounted to Doke and subsequently written up in Indian Opinion, more than confirmed his earlier fears. The future Mahatma was mocked and taunted by a black inmate, then by a Chinese one, who finally turned away, going to “a Native lying in bed,” where “the two exchanged obscene jokes, uncovering one another’s genitals.” Gandhi, who tells us that both men were murderers, admits to having felt uneasy and finding it hard to fall asleep for a while; the Baptist preacher Doke, with whom he spoke the next day, is instantly horror-struck. “This refined Indian gentleman was obliged to keep himself awake all night, to resist possible assaults upon himself, such as he saw perpetrated around him,” Doke writes. “That night can never be forgotten.” The man who didn’t have the experience is more vivid in this instance than the one who did, probably, we may surmise, because of the immediacy, the sense of looming violation, with which the badly shaken prisoner related it to him as compared to the cool indifference Gandhi attempted to affect two months later, when he got around to writing about that evening himself.

  On that second day in the holding cell at the Fort, as Gandhi was starting to use a prison latrine, so he later wrote, “a strong, heavily built, fearful-looking Native” demanded that Gandhi step aside so he could go first. “I said I would leave very soon. Instantly he lifted me up in his arms and threw me out.” He was not injured, Gandhi tells us, “but one or two Indian prisoners who saw what happened started weeping,” out of shame over their inability to defend their leader. “They felt helpless and miserable,” he says. Here again Gandhi doesn’t say how he felt. It was the fourth assault on his person in South Africa, the first by a black. Yet he writes about it only once, doesn’t dwell on it even then. He’s not shocked, he leads us to infer, not even surprised.

  Writing after the passage of two months, he draws a conclusion that’s not about jail life. It’s about ordinary relations between Indians and the black majority. “We may entertain no aversion to Natives,” he says, “but we cannot ignore the fact that there is no common ground between them and us in the daily affairs of life.” This time he doesn’t say “kaffirs.” But the sentiment isn’t conspicuously different from what a refined Brahman in that era—or, for that matter, most Banias—might have voiced about untouchables. Is that, as some Indian scholars suggested to me, really how G
andhi saw Africans, as people who should be deemed untouchable? In strict interpretation of caste, any non-Hindu or foreigner, white or black, is an outcaste by definition, unsuitable as a dining companion, or for partnering of a more intimate kind. Then and later, other South African Hindus found it natural to apply the strictures of untouchability to black servants, not allowing them to have contact with their food or dishes or persons. Gandhi himself had for years eaten with non-Indian vegetarians, all whites. At this stage in his life, he was actually living with a non-Indian, a Jewish architect of Lithuanian background by way of East Prussia named Hermann Kallenbach. So when we think it through, the question becomes this: whether, on account of race, he put hard-living, uneducated, meat-eating Africans in a separate category of humans from that of hard-living, uneducated, meat-eating Indian “coolies,” or the third-class passengers whose behavior appalled him on Indian trains; in other words, whether for him, race was a defining characteristic or, finally, as incidental as caste.

  It’s in this context that we must view Gandhi’s early reflections on jail life from the same year. I’ve not highlighted them because they’re especially shocking or revealing of his feelings about race. There are passages sprinkled among Gandhi’s writings of earlier years in South Africa that sound—in, as well as out of, context—even more condescending to Africans, sound, frankly, racist. As early as 1894, in an open letter to the Natal legislature, he complained that “the Indian is being dragged down to the position of the raw Kaffir.” Two years later he was still going on about “the raw Kaffir, whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a number of cattle to buy a wife, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness.” (The very proper young lawyer Gandhi then was plainly had no premonition of the day he’d teasingly vow to be “as naked as possible” himself.) In 1904, during an outbreak of plague in Johannesburg, he asks the official medical officer why the so-called Indian location—the area where the city’s Indians were mostly required to live—had been “chosen for dumping down all the Kaffirs of the town.” Hammering his point further, he declares what’s only obvious: “About the mixing of the Kaffirs with the Indians, I must confess I feel most strongly.” And there’s Gandhi the eager racial theorist who had written a couple of months earlier: “If there is one thing the Indian cherishes more than any other, it is purity of type.” And a couple of months before that: “We believe as much in the purity of races as we think they [the whites] do.”