4

UPPER HOUSE

 

THE REVEREND DOKE, the first of Gandhi’s many hagiographers, took a snapshot of the pensive barrister as he recuperated in 1908 from his beating at the hands of the Pathans. His subject bears little resemblance to the Gandhi the world would come to know. Lean and slouching in casual Western clothes, he gazes past the lens with an expression that’s inward and contemplative, not kindly or twinkling in the manner of the loincloth-clad public man who’d evoke a mass following in India within little more than a decade. Yet he’d already laid out essential components of his thought and leadership strategy. Ecumenical and open-minded in his approach to religion and relations between sects of all description, loyal by his own lights to the British Empire and to values embedded in the British legal system, yet aggressive in his resistance to unjust colonial laws that system not infrequently upheld, the Johannesburg Gandhi now claimed the right to follow his conscience—what he would variously identify as his “inner voice” or, simply, “truth”—in every sphere of life. Yet he was still Gandhiji or Gandhibhai—the suffixes indicating respect for an elder or leader and fraternal feeling for a relative or friend—and not yet canonized as a mahatma, still engaged in self-creation, finding his way to a grounded sense of himself and his mission. In his own mind, we may infer, self and mission both felt incomplete as he closed in on his late thirties.

Celibacy as a spiritual discipline was now a preoccupation of his daily life but not, as yet, a theme of his public discourse; his interviews with his Baptist Boswell never, or so it appears from Doke’s book, got around to the delicate subject of brahmacharya. Probably the politician in him understood that this was the least appealing side of his evolving doctrine. He’d experienced sexual passion but could never condone it or, having made his choice, simply drop the subject. “Marriage is not only not a necessity but positively a hindrance to public and humanitarian work,” he’d later write. Those, like himself and Kasturba, who’d fallen into the coils of matrimony could save themselves by living together chastely as brother and sister. “No man or woman living the physical or animal life can possibly understand the spiritual or ethical.” Gandhi doted on children but regarded childbirth as prima facie evidence of a moral lapse. With distressing regularity, he’d nag his daughters-in-law and others close to him to mend their ways and not do it again.

His vegetarianism was still in his early Johannesburg years a matter of moral preference, hygiene, and heritage, but apart from eschewing meat and grinding his own grain, he hadn’t yet placed severe strictures on his diet, hadn’t yet arrived at the conviction that the curbing of one appetite was dependent on the curbing of another, that sexual abstinence and diet were closely linked. He still drank milk, still enjoyed spicy food in convivial settings. Such indulgences would soon be brought to an abrupt end. The vegetarian would try for a time to become a fruitarian, having concluded that milk, other dairy products, and most spices have aphrodisiac qualities; he’d also give up salt, cooked food, and seconds, eventually measuring his intake in ounces and thoroughly chewing each spare mouthful of carefully blended and pounded mush—lemons, honey, and almonds were usually part of the mix along with grains and leaves—in order to derive as much nourishment from as little food as possible. Mastication would thus become one of his many lesser disciplines and causes.

“Meagerness,” he’d later write, was the ethical standard by which diet should be measured, according to “God’s economy” and Gandhi’s own reading of a Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. That standard enjoined a perpetual “partial fast,” which would require “a grim fight against the inherited and acquired habit of eating for pleasure.” Grim was the word for it. A full meal, Gandhi would write, was “a crime against God and man … because the full-mealers deprive their neighbors of their portion.” There you have the Gandhi of 1933, not 1906. The rule-giving ashram dweller who’d finally decide that delicious food was an invitation to gluttony, who’d find wry satisfaction in being portrayed as a faddist and crank, who’d bring his conviction that less is more to his solitary repasts, had yet to make his entrance. He may have felt driven to distance himself from his wife and sons, but he was still a social being in the early stage of his Johannesburg years, when he is reported to have gone on picnics and ridden a bicycle.

The inner change is harder to trace with any exactitude in the six and a half formative years he spent in Johannesburg after witnessing the brutal reprisals against Zulus in Natal—a period that stretches from August 1906 to January 1913—but it’s at least as significant as the well-documented evolution of the public man. For five of those years he lived in the Transvaal without family. Gandhi insists in his Autobiography that he’d intended from the first to settle at Phoenix himself, give up his law practice, and support himself and the settlement through manual labor. But his emotional need for distance, for not being hemmed in by customary obligations, seems as obvious and important in anchoring him in Johannesburg as the ongoing satyagraha campaign against the Transvaal’s racial legislation. Gandhi treated the Transvaal as the main arena because that’s where the campaign against discriminatory legislation had been launched. If satyagraha was his most important “experiment with truth,” the Transvaal was now the favored workstation in his laboratory. His obligations to the local community were heavy; he was locked into a test of will with the white provincial government, personified by Jan Christian Smuts, the onetime Boer general, now provincial minister of the interior.

That’s all obvious. But the Transvaal was also where he needed or wanted to be for his own purposes. He could have made a case for basing himself in Natal, which by then was clearly the center of Indian life in South Africa. Its Indian community outnumbered the Transvaal’s by about ten to one (110,000 to 11,000 by 1908). He had established the Phoenix Settlement there. It was where Indian Opinion was edited and printed. Also, Natal was where nearly all Indians under the indenture system still labored, in conditions he’d described as “semi-slavery.” In fact, the number of Indians still under indenture in Natal in that period was more than three times the Transvaal’s total Indian population. And in those same years—before racial issues were nationalized with the creation in 1910 of the Union of South Africa—the legislative assembly in English-speaking Natal could hardly be said to lag in its drive to stiffen existing anti-Indian statutes and pass new ones.

With Gandhi mostly absent and looking the other way, the white political class of Natal proved itself to be at least as inventive in coming up with new racial measures and as relentless as the Afrikaans-speaking Transvaalers. The dueling white supremacists may have fought on opposing sides in the recently concluded Anglo-Boer War, but there was no choosing between them when it came to their mutual hostility to the idea of equal citizenship for the Indian minority. Colonial Natal was a place where the leading newspaper, The Natal Mercury, was happy to publish a letter signed with the nom de plume “Anti-Coolie.” The letter said it was a disgrace that Indian shops were allowed to do business in the center of Durban. (The Mercury continues to publish in post-apartheid South Africa. Today in its lobby, a larger-than-life-size portrait of Gandhi, matching an equally large portrait of Mandela, peers down on journalists and their visitors, a guardian angel blessing their endeavors.)

The Natal of Gandhi’s day had a pressing economic need for indentured Indian labor; so argued the plantation and mine owners whose mouthpiece the Mercury was. But it wasn’t ready to be outdone when it came to restrictions on free Indian immigration. Sir Henry McCallum, the governor to whom Gandhi had appealed for militia places for Indians in recognition of their service at the time of the Zulu rising, saw “no reason why we should be swamped by black matter in the wrong place,” just because of the demand for field labor. So a new immigration act, passed as early as 1903, in the immediate aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War, made it easy to bar any immigrant who couldn’t fill out an application in a European language to the loosely defined satisfaction of officials. Year after year, Indians were turned back on this basis by the thousands. Next came a municipal corporations act designed to eliminate Indian voting rights at the local level—the final disenfranchising step backward on what had been, fourteen years earlier, Gandhi’s first South African issue; and just as regularly legal screws were tightened to restrict licenses for Indian shopkeepers. Any indentured laborers or former indentured laborers—or their descendants in perpetuity—were classed for purposes of these acts as belonging to “uncivilized races.” In order to keep them that way, public funds were cut off for Indian secondary schools. Finally, in 1908, came a bill designed to make it impossible for any “Asiatics” to hold trading licenses in Natal after 1918, even those whose families by then would have been trading in the province for two generations.

Yet Gandhi remained stuck in the Transvaal, following his own path. In 1907 he came to Durban three times to address monthly meetings of the Natal Indian Congress. Each time he harangued his listeners on the need to support the campaign in the Transvaal. Only occasionally did he comment in his paper, usually from afar, on developments in Natal. By 1909, as the final diplomatic and parliamentary steps were being taken to form the new Union under an all-white Parliament—making it, in essence, a color-coded democracy for the white minority only—the Indian communities of the Transvaal and Natal sent parallel delegations to London to lobby on their parochial issues rather than the national one. Gandhi, whose influence in Natal was by then conspicuously waning, headed the Transvaal team.

Yes, he was preoccupied with the satyagraha campaign. But he was also working out a new sense of family in these years. “I fail to understand what you mean by the word ‘family,’ ” he’d written in 1907 to his elder brother Laxmidas not quite a year after he’d deposited his wife and sons at Phoenix. Laxmidas had complained that he was failing to meet his family obligations on two continents. “If I could say so without arrogance,” he now replied, “I would say that my family now comprises all living beings.”

He’d been sending money to his brother for more than a decade to pay off various debts and fulfill his role as the extended family’s primary earner, which he undertook when he sailed to Britain for legal training. Laxmidas had a continuing claim on his income, Gandhi now acknowledged. But there was a catch—he no longer viewed himself as having a personal income. He didn’t deny that his law practice still raked in money, only that he put it to his own use. “I use all the money that God gives me for the public good,” he explained breezily. Basically the “public good” in this context meant covering the losses of the weekly Indian Opinion and helping to keep the Phoenix Settlement afloat. (It would have been “both a loss and a disgrace,” Gandhi later wrote, if the paper had been allowed to die. “So I kept pouring out all my money until ultimately I was practically sinking all my savings in it.”) In effect, Gandhi was presenting a seemingly secular—some would say heretical—take on the traditional Hindu concept of the sannyasi, the religious wanderer who turns his back on the joys, distractions, and obligations of family life in order to devote himself wholly to spiritual discipline in the form of meditation and prayer. Self-invented, one of a kind, he henceforth presents himself as the sannyasi as social worker.

His own visits to the Phoenix Settlement in these years proved to be irregular and usually brief, so much so that they took on the air of royal visitations or command inspections. “One day news came that Gandhiji would be visiting Phoenix,” wrote Prabhudas Gandhi, a nephew’s son who grew up there. “The settlement became alive with excitement. The settlers began to tidy the press as well as their homes.” Prabhudas cannot remember “if Gandhiji ever stayed longer than a fortnight or a month.” Sometimes he “did not come for months,” and then it might be only for a matter of days. “I could stay there only for brief periods,” Gandhi himself acknowledges. Considering that he’d kept Johannesburg as his base of operations, it’s not altogether surprising that he didn’t drop in more often, or that his erstwhile Durban followers didn’t see more of him. The two centers, now an hour’s flight distant from each other, were twenty-four hours apart by rail in that era; he’d leave Joburg one evening, arrive in Durban the next. We don’t know exactly how often he made the trip, but it’s plain he didn’t make it as often as he might have. It’s a pattern that would recur in Gandhi’s life. Only sometimes would his travels be geared to the obvious needs of the movements that viewed him as their leader; frequently his whereabouts—in an ashram, on tour for a cause—would be dictated by a more personal agenda; his followers would understand that he was engaged with something else, or sense that he’d withdrawn. That sense began to spread among the Indians of Natal, especially among the Muslim merchant class whose members had been his earliest clients and supporters. They didn’t appreciate his remoteness, or understand his readiness to compromise with Smuts on the “Black Act” after preaching that it was a “do or die” issue. At his first meeting in Durban in 1908, another Pathan rushed the platform brandishing a club. Someone doused the lights, saving Gandhi from yet another beating.

Meanwhile, he was assembling a surrogate family in Johannesburg, where his following remained avid, especially among Tamils, originally from South India, whose difficult Dravidian language he’d periodically set himself to learning when immobilized in prison or on an ocean voyage. The most stalwart of the Johannesburg Tamils was a builder and trader named Thambi Naidoo who’d come to South Africa from the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, where his parents had been indentured. Naidoo was uneducated but spoke five languages (English, three South Indian languages, and the Hindustani of North India). Physically strong and quick-tempered, he’d be arrested fourteen times and serve ten jail sentences between 1907 and 1913 in the Transvaal satyagraha campaigns. According to Prema Naidoo, a grandson who became an elected city councillor in Johannesburg after the end of white rule nearly nine decades later, this patriarchal resister never fully recovered from blows to the head he took trying to protect Gandhi from the Pathans at the time of their 1908 attack, suffering dizzy spells for the rest of his life. “If Thambi Naidoo had not been rash and if he had been free from anger,” Gandhi later wrote, “this brave man could easily have assumed the leadership of the community in the Transvaal.”

 

Johannesburg attorney, with Thambi Naidoo (photo credit i4.1)

 

But Gandhi’s surrogate kin in this Johannesburg period didn’t turn out to be Tamils. They were Westerners, mostly nonobservant Jews, who like Gandhi had dipped into the murky waters of Theosophy. “Mine would be considered an essentially heterogeneous family,” he wrote in his Autobiography, referring to this period, “where people of all kinds and temperaments were freely admitted. When we think of it, the distinction between heterogeneous and homogeneous is discovered to be merely imaginary. We are all one family.” This was the ultimate rejection of caste, but Gandhi didn’t put it in those terms. By strictest Hindu standards, the Westerners in his circle, some of whom now joined his household, were untouchable; all black and white South Africans were.

In 1904, Gandhi had met Henry Polak, a young copy editor on The Critic, the newspaper, at Ada Bissicks’s vegetarian teahouse on Rissik Street, across from Gandhi’s law office. Polak, just turned twenty-one then and in his first year in South Africa, had been struck by a letter Gandhi had written to a paper on the wretched sanitary conditions in an Indian area where there had been an outbreak of plague. Their conversation ranged widely, and soon they discovered a mutual reverence for Tolstoy and shared enthusiasm for German nature cures involving mud packs. Months later Polak made John Ruskin another such enthusiasm, lending Gandhi a copy of the tract Unto This Last, which in one overnight reading on a train instantly inspired the idea of the Phoenix Settlement. It’s a eureka moment that says more about Gandhi and his activist reflexes than it does about Ruskin, who’d inveighed against the skewed values of industrial society, with its focus on capital formation and undervaluing of physical labor, but hadn’t imagined the founding of idealistic rural communes as a response. Gandhi, preoccupied with the costs of running Indian Opinion from Durban, instantly took that leap. Giving Ruskin’s ideal of sturdy husbandry a Tolstoyan twist, he found an answer to his immediate practical problem: he could save his paper by moving it to a self-sustaining rural settlement. In that instant the patriarch chose to be father to a whole community—later it would be a nation—so he gathered an extended family of followers, Westerners as well as Indians, nephews and cousins, and, finally, his own wife and sons. So when he wrote to his brother two years later about his redefinition of “family,” it was a fait accompli. Workers on the farm were expected to double as pressmen and simultaneously feed themselves. Hand labor, thereafter, would be the reflexive Gandhian answer to various problems, from colonial exploitation to rural underemployment and poverty. He would elevate it into a moral imperative.

Within a year of first meeting Gandhi, Henry Polak was living with the barrister’s family in a spacious rented house, graced by a deep upstairs veranda, in a then-upscale white Johannesburg neighborhood called Troyeville, where some neighbors objected to the proximity of an Indian family, possibly the only one within a couple of miles. Most Indians were relegated by law to a “location”—prefiguring the segregated townships and “group areas” of the apartheid era—at the other end of town. It’s noteworthy that the barrister gave no thought to moving in there, preferring to set himself up among whites, in a house suitable by their standards to his professional standing and income. Gandhi’s house still stands in what’s now a racially mixed, slightly rundown Troyeville, half a block down Albermarle Street from another house that mistakenly bears a plaque saying it’s the one where Gandhi lived. Polak was married there to an English non-Jew, Millie Downs, the day she arrived in South Africa at the end of 1905, with Gandhi as best man. “His voice was soft, rather musical, and almost boyishly fresh,” Millie told a BBC interviewer much later, recalling her first impressions of the Johannesburg Gandhi, who instantly welcomed her to his extended family. Months later Henry was dispatched to edit Indian Opinion, until Millie, whom he’d met at an Ethical Society meeting in London, decided she’d had enough of Phoenix and the dignity of rural labor. So the tables were turned later in 1906, when Gandhi, having moved out of Troyeville, returned without family to Joburg from the front of the so-called war with the Zulus and moved in with the Polaks, in a tiny house in a neighborhood called Belleville West. Later they shifted to an area called Highland, taking their revered boarder with them. Kasturba commented sourly from her place of exile in Natal that Gandhi treated Polak as his “eldest son.” In fact, he signed his letters to Polak “Bhai,” meaning brother.

Ba was obviously alluding to the sense of neglect their actual eldest, Harilal, was already feeling, had probably always felt, given that he’d gotten to live with his father less than two of his first eight years. When Harilal was married in Gujarat in 1906, shortly before his eighteenth birthday, a disapproving Gandhi had written from South Africa: “I have ceased to think of him as a son.” Several years later when a wealthy supporter made funds available so one of his sons could study in Britain as he had himself, Gandhi passed over Harilal, considered sending Manilal, his next born, but finally sent a nephew instead. He was giving up on Western ways and professions and wanted his sons to follow him in his transformation, gathering what education they could in Gujarati, rather than English, while doing manual labor at Phoenix and dedicating their lives to satyagraha and service. In a will drafted in 1909, he said it was his wish that his sons “should devote their lifetime” to Phoenix or similar projects. For a while Harilal bent every effort to win his remote, usually absent father’s approbation by proving himself the perfect satyagrahi; in the Transvaal campaign he went to jail six times, for a total of nineteen months in a twenty-seven-month period. Then, making a break, he set off on his own in 1911 for India, where, years later, the pathos of his intermittent rebellion culminated in alcoholic free fall and a short-lived conversion to Islam. Father and son had a meeting before he left Johannesburg. “He feels that I have always kept all the four boys very much suppressed … always put them and Ba last,” Gandhi wrote, offering a dispassionate summary of his son’s bitter complaint.

Clearly, he’d not put them first. Not putting them first was by then a matter of duty for Gandhi, even creed, as his 1906 letter to Laxmidas had shown. In fact, Gandhi had moved in with the Polaks just as Harilal arrived in Johannesburg without his new bride to join his father’s struggle. There was no room for Harilal in their little household, and he was soon sent down to Phoenix. When the arrival of a baby made quarters at the Polak residence too cramped for Gandhi’s modest needs, he moved in with the architect Hermann Kallenbach in what became, it can reasonably be said, the most intimate, also ambiguous, relationship of his lifetime.

“They were a couple,” Tridip Suhrud, a Gandhi scholar, said when I met him in the Gujarati capital of Gandhinagar. That’s a succinct way of summing up the obvious—Kallenbach later remarked that they’d lived together “almost in the same bed”—but what kind of couple were they? Gandhi early on made a point of destroying what he called Kallenbach’s “logical and charming love notes” to him, in the belief that he was honoring his friend’s wish that they be seen by no other eyes. But the architect saved all of Gandhi’s, and his descendants, decades after his death and Gandhi’s, put them up for auction. Only then were the letters acquired by the National Archives of India and, finally, published. It was too late for the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson to take them into account, and most recent Gandhi studies tend to deal with them warily, if at all. One respected Gandhi scholar characterized the relationship as “clearly homoerotic” rather than homosexual, intending through that choice of words to describe a strong mutual attraction, nothing more. The conclusions passed on by word of mouth in South Africa’s small Indian community were sometimes less nuanced. It was no secret then, or later, that Gandhi, leaving his wife behind, had gone to live with a man.

In an age when the concept of Platonic love gains little credence, selectively chosen details of the relationship and quotations from letters can easily be arranged to suggest a conclusion. Kallenbach, who was raised and educated in East Prussia, was a lifetime bachelor, gymnast, and bodybuilder, “having received physical training at the hands of Sandow,” as Gandhi himself later boasted. This was an allusion to Eugen Sandow, a strongman still celebrated as “the father of modern bodybuilding,” who turns out to have been a contemporary of Kallenbach’s in what was then called Königsberg (and is now the city of Kaliningrad in a Russian enclave on the Baltic fastened to Poland). Gandhi was preoccupied throughout his life with physiology, especially as it pertained to appetites, but never, it hardly needs saying, with bodybuilding. His taut torso—he’d weigh in later at 106 to 118 pounds, depending on how recently he’d fasted, on a frame of not quite five feet seven inches in height—would eventually become better known than Sandow’s. But in his heyday, it was the overdeveloped strongman who was the international pinup, the precursor of Charles Atlas and Arnold Schwarzenegger (becoming enough of a household name to pop several times into Leopold Bloom’s mind in Joyce’s Ulysses).

The son of a timber merchant, Kallenbach had served a year in the German army and then trained as an architect in Stuttgart before arriving in Johannesburg in 1895 at the age of twenty-four. He’d thus been in South Africa for nearly a decade when Sandow, who’d been discovered and turned into an international star by Flo Ziegfeld, brought his act, a form of male striptease, to Johannesburg in 1904. It’s hard to imagine Kallenbach, who’d yet to meet Gandhi, bypassing the chance to become reacquainted with his fellow Königsberger.

If not infatuated, Gandhi was clearly drawn to the architect. In a letter from London in 1909, he writes: “Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in the bedroom. The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed.” Cotton wool and Vaseline, he then says, “are a constant reminder.” The point, he goes on, “is to show to you and me how completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance.” What are we to make of the word “possession” or the reference to petroleum jelly, then as now a salve with many commonplace uses? The most plausible guesses are that the Vaseline in the London hotel room may have to do with enemas, to which he regularly resorted, or may in some other way foreshadow the geriatric Gandhi’s enthusiasm for massage, which would become a widely known part of the daily routine in his Indian ashrams, arousing gossip that has never quite died down, once it became clear that he mostly relied on the women in his entourage for its administration.

Two years later, the lawyer Gandhi drafts a mock-serious agreement for his friend to sign, using the teasing pet names and epistolary salutations that Gandhi, easily the wittier and more humorous of the two, almost certainly coined. Kallenbach, two years the younger, has come to be addressed as “Lower House” in the parliamentary sense (a jocular allusion, it seems, to his role as the source of appropriations). Gandhi is “Upper House” (and therefore gets to vote down excessive spending). Lower House can pronounce on matters of physical fitness and everything that’s literally down-to-earth on the communal settlement, known as Tolstoy Farm, they’d by then established. Upper House gets to think deep thoughts, strategize, and direct the moral development of his other half in this touching bicameral relationship. In the agreement dated July 29, 1911, on the eve of a trip Kallenbach is about to make to Europe, Upper House makes Lower House promise “not to contract any marriage tie during his absence” nor “look lustfully upon any woman.” The two Houses then mutually pledge “more love, and yet more love … such love as they hope the world has not yet seen.” By then, except for time subtracted by Gandhi’s jail terms in 1908 and trip to London in 1909, the two had been together more than three years.

Remember, we have only Gandhi’s letters (invariably starting, “Dear Lower House”). So it’s Gandhi who provides the playful undertone that might easily be ascribed to a lover, especially if we ignore what else his letters contain and their broader context. Interpretation can go two ways here. We can indulge in speculation, or look more closely at what the two men actually say about their mutual efforts to repress sexual urges in this period.

A 1908 letter from Kallenbach to his brother Simon in Germany, shortly after Gandhi moved in with him, shows that he’d been under his lodger’s influence for some time. “For the last two years I have given up meat eating; for the last year I also did not touch fish any more,” he writes, “and for the last 18 months, I have given up my sex life … I have changed my daily life in order to simplify it.” Later it is Kallenbach who points out to Gandhi the insidious tendency milk has to enhance arousal. Gandhi, ever the extremist in dietary experiments, extends the prohibition to chocolates. “I see death in chocolates,” he lectures Polak, who isn’t in this period involved in the food trials that Kallenbach readily undergoes. Few foods are so “heating,” meaning likely to stimulate forbidden appetites. He sends Kallenbach a verse on nonattachment to “bodily pleasures.” We have bodies, according to this message, in order to learn “self control.”

The Jewish architect from Kaliningrad on the Baltic and the Bania lawyer from Porbandar on the Arabian Sea first lived together in Orchards, one of Johannesburg’s older northern suburbs, in a house called the Kraal, a Dutch word originally for homestead, now broadly applied to rural African enclosures. The inspiration for the design was African as well. Kallenbach took the rondavel—a round thatched structure with thick clay walls, sometimes whitewashed—as his prototype for 15 Pine Street, where he cohabited with Gandhi for a year and a half; it still stands (and was recently purchased by a French company with plans to turn it into a tourist attraction, yet another Gandhi museum). It’s actually two rondavels, cleverly joined and set back behind a high fence with a sign, omnipresent these days on the walls and fences of the northern suburbs, warning intruders of an “armed response.” Obviously, the warning isn’t Gandhian. When he discovered that Kallenbach had appointed himself bodyguard and started packing a revolver after the Pathan attack, Gandhi insisted he get rid of it.

The couple then moved to an area called Linksfield, where Kallenbach was building a bigger house called Mountain View, over which Gandhi had predictable misgivings. One of his self-imposed missions in this period was to drill his housemate in the discipline of self-denial. He nagged him to rid himself of a new car and live up to the vow of poverty both had taken by slashing his personal spending. “My hope is that we will not this time have aristocratic simplicity but simple simplicity,” he writes before work on the new house has actually begun. For a time in 1910, they live on the building site in a tent. What he really wants, it emerges, is for Kallenbach to shut down his architecture practice—just as he at this point is preparing to give up the law—and return with him to a shared life of service at Phoenix. “It appears,” Gandhi writes hopefully in a laudatory profile of his companion in Indian Opinion, “that Mr. Kallenbach will gradually give up his work as architect and live in complete poverty.”

Kallenbach professes to be tempted, but he’s not yet sold. His office remains open and active. At one point he competes simultaneously for commissions on a new synagogue, a Christian Science church, and a Greek Orthodox one. Tolstoy Farm, all eleven hundred acres of it, which he purchased, is the big spender’s way of proving he’s serious about voluntary poverty. Both he and Gandhi write to the dying Tolstoy to tell him of their plans. The farm meets an immediate need confronting Gandhi. He now has a place to house the families of passive resisters who have gone to jail as part of the fading satyagraha campaign, a place where he can also train new resisters. Also, it’s a place where he can test the pedagogical and small-economy precepts he’d just propounded in the most important piece of sustained argument he would ever write, a tract called Hind Swaraj. The title translates as “Indian Self-Rule” or, more loosely, “India’s Freedom.” Gandhi dashed it off in ten days on a ship called the Kildonan Castle, sailing home in 1909 from his last futile attempt at lobbying in Whitehall.

In the form of a Socratic dialogue, this powerfully original little book encapsulates in one place his disappointment in the imperial system, the West in general, and modern industrial societies everywhere; also his rejection of violence as a political tactic; and his romantic feeling for the Indian village, of which he had, until then, little firsthand experience. His blanket rejection of modern ways includes modern medicine, lawyers (like himself), railroads (on which he’d rely for the rest of his life), and parliamentary politics (which Indian nationalists wanted for themselves). Capping its complicated and eclectic provenance is the surprising discovery that its immediate inspiration came not from Tolstoy or Ruskin but from the prolific Anglo-Catholic man of letters G. K. Chesterton, who, in a column in The Illustrated London News that Gandhi happened to see in London, asked what a real Indian nationalist, “an authentic Indian,” would say to an imperialist trying to establish British-style institutions and ways of thought under the Raj.

Life is very short; a man must live somehow and die somewhere,” the English writer’s authentic Indian declares in response to this rhetorical question. “The amount of bodily comfort a peasant gets under your best Republic is not so much more than mine. If you do not like our sort of spiritual comfort, we never asked you to. Go, and leave us with it.” In Hind Swaraj, the character Gandhi inhabits, called “the Editor,” steps forward as that authentic Indian. Chesterton hasn’t given Gandhi new ideas but has shown him how the ideas he has been gradually gathering to himself can be made to define a persona. What he does in these pages, he will soon do in life; the Editor will become the Mahatma who, twelve years later, in his first noncooperation campaign in India will act out one of the book’s themes. “The English have not taken India,” the Editor declares. “We have given it to them.” His answer is to “cease to play the ruled.” This is more than a foreshadowing of Gandhi’s later campaigns. It’s a declaration of their basic theme.

Although written as he sails to Cape Town from a failed mission to London bearing on Indian rights in the Transvaal, the words “South Africa” never show up in Hind Swaraj. In his own mind, he has already started to repatriate himself to India, where the tract was promptly branded subversive and banned. It’s actually more subversive of the pre-Gandhi Indian national movement, with its Anglicized leadership and imported values, than it is of British colonial rule. “Those in whose name we speak we do not know, nor do they know us,” its author, who has spent fewer than five of the previous twenty years in India, boldly asserts, implicitly setting a challenge for himself. But his critique can also be applied to the movement he has led in South Africa generally, particularly Natal. An explicit part of the purpose of Tolstoy Farm is to enable Gandhi and Kallenbach—the first person to be shown the manuscript of Hind Swaraj—to close the social gap among Indians that he has finally come to recognize. Six months after he returns from London, Gandhi drafts the first of his informal contracts with Kallenbach, setting up what amounts to a basic law for the new community. “The primary object of going to the Farm so far as K. and G. are concerned,” this document decrees, “is to make themselves into working farm hands.” Nearly a year later, in May 1911, with the farm up and running, Gandhi tells Polak: “I should like to slip out of the public gaze … to bury myself in the farm and to devote my attention to farming and educating.” The farming gives him a new appreciation for the aptitudes of Africans and Indians, like the indentured, who work the land. “They are more useful than any of us,” he writes in Indian Opinion, making an explicit contrast between field laborers and a second generation of white-collar Indian clerks that’s starting to criticize his leadership. “If the great Native races should stop working for a week, we should probably be starving.”

But it’s the school he runs six afternoons a week and every evening into which he pours most of his energy in the latter half of 1911. “That is my predominant occupation,” he writes to Kallenbach on September 9. The enrollment is small. Gandhi has one dietary requirement that helps keep it low. Students must commit themselves to a saltless diet, for he has discovered that salt “makes us eat more and arouses the senses.” Two decades later, in a notable demonstration of ideological flexibility, he’d declare salt to be one of life’s necessities, making it the focus of his single most successful exercise in militant nonviolence, the Salt March of 1930. Now, when he eases up on his stricture against salt at Tolstoy Farm, allowing it back into the diet in modest amounts, enrollment shoots up to twenty-five, eight of them, he notes proudly, Muslims. The curriculum includes a course in sandal making. Gandhi had sent Kallenbach to a Trappist monastery near Phoenix to learn the craft; the architect then taught the lawyer, and the lawyer then taught the students. Soon they’d turned out fifty pairs, he reported, one of which he sent to his political sparring partner Jan Smuts.

Tolstoy Farm, with Gandhi serving as schoolmaster and chief medical officer, was now for a time the foreground of his life; the fading satyagraha campaign against the racial legislation of the Transvaal receded into the background. Gandhi carried on a desultory negotiation with Smuts, now minister of defense and also mines in the new Union government, but his focus was on developing a curriculum using Indian languages and texts, as well as on diet and nature cures as wholesome alternatives to aggressive modern medicine. Kallenbach is more involved in these “experiments” than political foot soldiers like Thambi Naidoo or Polak who lead conventional married lives. His commitment to Gandhian values, as they evolve, seems wholehearted, not selective. He is more than an acolyte, less than an equal. Never, as far as we can tell, does he present an intellectual challenge to the spiritual explorer who has become his companion.

 

Kallenbach, 1912, striding (photo credit i4.2)

 

The original agreement specified that K. would live apart from the settlers and that G. would mostly stay with him. Then Mrs. Gandhi moves up to Tolstoy Farm from Phoenix for a period of more than a year. It’s not clear what effect this has. By then, Ba and her husband have been sleeping in separate quarters for more than five years. At Tolstoy Farm, they sleep on separate verandas, each surrounded by students from Gandhi’s school.

What’s easy to miss in accounts of Gandhi’s life at Tolstoy Farm is how powerful a factor his feeling for Kallenbach has become in the inward turning he has taken. Not only is he bent on reforming this partner, he strives to make their association permanent. The architect wavers. He is living life on two planes. While at Tolstoy Farm with Gandhi, he has also become a Zionist and a more observant Jew; he takes Gandhi to synagogue on Passover and introduces him to matzoh. Some weeks, in preparation for a move to India, he studies Hindi; other weeks, when he wonders how much of Gandhi’s time he’ll be able to own in a still unimaginable Indian future, he studies Hebrew in preparation for a new life in Palestine. On a day-by-day basis, the surest index to the architect’s changeable mood is which language he’s studying, Hindi or Hebrew. He’s disconsolate, if not jealous, when Gandhi lavishes admiration and time on someone else. Persisting, Gandhi puts up with all this for more than two years, all the time seeking to preserve their bond.

Kallenbach’s ups and downs can be traced in an appointments and account book he kept for 1912 and 1913, which can be viewed in the archive of Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, India. For the sake of frugality and fitness, Kallenbach and Gandhi made a regular practice of walking the twenty-one miles from the farm, near a rail stop called Lawley, to the center of Johannesburg, following a route across a great expanse of veldt that much later, in the apartheid era, was turned into the sprawling black township of Soweto. On each occasion, Kallenbach records the times. When he walks with Gandhi, often starting as early as 4:00 a.m., it takes a little more than five and a half hours to reach their respective offices in the center of Johannesburg; on his own, he usually manages to lop an hour off. On every single mention, Gandhi in these pages isn’t Upper House but “Mr. Gandhi.” The formality seems to acknowledge that their relationship, however it’s understood, isn’t one of equals.

Today Lawley still functions as a rail stop. Next to it sprawls a large postapartheid shantytown of corrugated metal and mud huts squeezed together on virtually every square foot of some long-defunct white farm. When an attempt was made to restore Tolstoy Farm and erect a memorial there, the squatters from the shantytown soon stripped the place bare. When I visited it in 2008 there was not even a sign. All that was left were some banked brick benches, the foundation of an old farmhouse, the well-fenced dwellings of a few white stakeholders who work at an adjacent brick kiln, some burned-over eucalyptus trees, and a few fruit trees, progeny perhaps of the scores Kallenbach planted a century ago, and, finally, a view across the townships and mining slime dams to a Johannesburg Gandhi would scarcely recognize.

In their day, Gandhi and Kallenbach continued to experiment with diet, limiting their daily intake at one stage to a single carefully rationed evening meal. And every month or so Kallenbach recorded another “long discussion” with Mr. Gandhi. Details are completely absent, but sometimes these conversations provoke resolutions on Kallenbach’s side to step up his Hindi studies and come to a decision on leaving his profession. Then someone else comes into the picture, competing for his soul mate’s attention, and a fresh shower of doubts rains down on him. The most personal and intriguing note in the diary is recorded on August 27, 1913, eight months after Gandhi has finally moved back to Phoenix. Tolstoy Farm has been wound up, Kallenbach is back at Mountain View, and Gandhi, on a visit, is staying with him. Then another of the Jews in Gandhi’s Johannesburg circle, Sonja Schlesin, his feisty secretary, shows up. By some accounts, it was Kallenbach who introduced Schlesin, seventeen years his junior, to Gandhi in 1905; their families had been close in the old country. But he has come to consider her high-handed in her claims on Gandhi’s time and, in some sense, to view her as a rival. “On account of Miss Schlesin’s coming to Mountain View walked alone to office,” Kallenbach writes. “Discussions about her brought about Mr. Gandhi’s vow. It has been an exceedingly trying day for me.”

If this entry were an ancient cuneiform inscription, it would hardly be more difficult to decipher. Is he alluding to Gandhi’s vow of brahmacharya, or the recent vow that led to a fast the previous month over some carnal doings that surfaced at Phoenix? (In Gandhi’s mind, there could be no such thing as innocent sexual play; earlier he’d complained about a case of “excessive tickling” at Phoenix.) Neither of those vows seems to be what Kallenbach has in mind. Probably he’s referring to a vow known only to K. and G. The context is obscure, but Kallenbach’s feelings, for once, leap off the page. Rivalries and jealousies of this sort would become chronic in Gandhi’s entourage in later years. But Kallenbach is special. In leaving Joburg, Gandhi appears to have left him behind, to have broken free. In fact, he made the move at the start of 1913 on the assumption that his dearest friend would eventually follow. Recognizing that Kallenbach is “on the fence,” he asks him in a tone that’s at once wheedling and passive-aggressive “to consider the joint life as we have lived it.” But the clearest clue to his feelings is this: in packing up his own things for shipment to Phoenix, it turns out, he has also packed and shipped Kallenbach’s books and tools. Upper House is wounded when Lower House requests their return; even then he doesn’t give up. As we will see, this isn’t the end. Kallenbach eventually plunges into Gandhi’s last and greatest satyagraha campaign in South Africa, then seems to pull back again, thrown off balance by Gandhi’s newfound fondness for a British clergyman, Charles F. Andrews. “Though I love and almost adore Andrews so,” Gandhi writes, “I would not exchange you for him. You still remain the dearest and nearest to me … I know that in my lonely journey through the world, you will be the last (if even that) to say good-bye to me. What right had I to expect so much from you!”

So much of what, we’re left to wonder. The answers can only be love, devotion, unquestioning support. In Gandhi’s words, Kallenbach was “a man of strong feelings, wide sympathies and childlike simplicity.” On another occasion, he complained of his friend’s “morbid sensitiveness,” meaning, it seems, his jealousy and susceptibility to other influences. Three months before he leaves South Africa, Gandhi again reassures his Jewish soul mate: “You will always be you and you alone to me. I have told you you will have to desert me and not I you.” Finally Kallenbach succumbs. He sails with Gandhi when he leaves the country with the intention, soon thwarted, of accompanying him all the way to India.

The several ties that bound Gandhi to the Transvaal—the satyagraha campaign, Tolstoy Farm, and Kallenbach—cannot easily be disentangled. But by January 9, 1913—the day Kallenbach jotted in his diary, “Mr. Gandhi and balance of Tolstoy Farm occupants left for Phoenix”—the strongest of these was the personal one to the architect. Only when it’s factored into consideration can Gandhi’s prolonged abstention from Indian politics in Natal be plausibly explained.

The timing of Gandhi’s departure from the Transvaal and his return to Phoenix had little or nothing to do with Indian politics in Natal, from which he’d been conspicuously removed for a decade. It was dictated by a pledge that his staunch admirer and presumptive guru, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, had wrung from him at the end of his triumphal five-week tour of South Africa in 1912. The Indian leader’s visit, organized with all the pomp and circumstance usually reserved in South Africa for visits by British cabinet ministers—a blur of public tributes, crowded procession routes, and civic receptions attended by dignitaries who in that era were, by definition, nearly all white—had brought Gandhi out of his retreat at Tolstoy Farm. At its end, when Gokhale sailed for home, Gandhi and Kallenbach accompanied him as far as Zanzibar. When Indian communities at East African ports along the way turned out to welcome the leaders, they found the lawyer from Johannesburg in Indian garb for the first time in southern Africa since the London-returned dandy wore a turban into a Durban courtroom, the day after he arrived from India, now nearly twenty years earlier. The older man (“whose eyes were always on me,” so Gandhi later wrote) used the time on board to talk earnest politics. “In these conversations Gokhale prepared me for India,” Gandhi said. When they parted in Zanzibar, Gokhale exhorted, all but commanded, Gandhi to prepare to put South Africa behind him within a year and come home to fulfill his destiny. Gandhi, it appears, promised to try. Back at Tolstoy Farm by mid-December 1912, it took him just four weeks to wind up that particular experiment with truth and move his base back to Phoenix. In his own mind, this was just the start of a longer eastward journey that had always been inevitable. “I shall be there when the time comes,” he’d written when the subject of his repatriation came up. His “inner voice,” it seemed, would help him know when his “withdrawal,” as he termed it in a letter to Kallenbach, should occur.

There was unfinished business he still needed to clear. Gandhi believed he’d reached a compromise with Smuts in early 1911 that would enable him to write finis to the satyagraha campaign that had been his ostensible reason for camping in the Transvaal. That was a year after South Africa’s first national government—all white, of course—had come into being. In truth, the compromise Gandhi had been ready to embrace would have made only a slight difference in the real circumstances of beleaguered Indian communities. The “Black Act” requiring Indian registration in the Transvaal would have been repealed by the new white Parliament (for whatever that was worth, now that practically all Indians had registered), and an immigration law that was explicitly anti-Asian would have been replaced by one that was seemingly nonracial in terminology, only implicitly and functionally anti-Asian. (By means, for instance, of literacy tests in European languages, with Yiddish being included on the list of languages in which an immigrant could be tested but not, of course, Hindi, Tamil, or any other Indian language.) Absurdly, as a gesture to the principle of equality, it would retain the provision from earlier drafts that six “educated” Indians (meaning Indians who’d followed an English curriculum) could be admitted to the Transvaal annually, a way around the likelihood that even Indians who were proficient by Western standards would still be effectively barred.

Seen in a broader context, as a second generation of Indians born in South Africa was beginning to do, the “compromise” didn’t promise much. If it went through, Indians would still lack a vote; their rights to own land or open businesses could still be subject to severe restrictions; the indentured labor system would be left standing; and educational opportunities for Indian children would remain entirely at the discretion of antagonistic white authorities. Still, for a few months in 1911, there seemed to be a deal. Then the government introduced bills supposed to embody the extremely limited aims of the Gandhi-Smuts bargain, and once the arcane language and obscure cross-references to provisions in other laws had been parsed, traced, and decoded, the only thing that was obvious was that Gandhi’s good faith had yet again been exploited. What one provision appeared to grant, another provision took away. If anything, the draft legislation worsened conditions for Indian residents and raised the barrier to immigration even higher. Threatening renewed resistance, Gandhi himself had now to acknowledge that the immigration reform over which he’d bargained had yielded a new “Asiatic Expulsion Bill.” New drafts were then promised, withdrawn, and promised again as the authorities waited him out, testing Indian resolve. Nearly five years after the start of satyagraha, he had nothing to show for the resistance his leadership had inspired. Indians had courted arrest and gone to jail more than two thousand times, serving sentences of up to six months at hard labor; some, like Thambi Naidoo and Gandhi’s son Harilal, doing so repeatedly. Hundreds of other resisters had been deported back to India. The world had fleetingly taken notice—India, especially—but the new white government had outmaneuvered Gandhi. Disillusion was building, especially in the Natal to which he returned at the start of 1913.

Then he did something remarkable, upping the ante. He added a new demand and put it at the top of his list, one that had more heft, that spoke directly and clearly to the central question of whether the Indian community in South Africa was to be regarded as temporary or permanent, a demand that carried radical implications, bearing as it did on the prospects of the poorest Indians, the indentured laborers of Natal who toiled in a system Gandhi had long since identified as “a substitute for slavery.” Seemingly all of a sudden, Gandhi made the abolition of Natal’s annual three-pound head tax on former indentured laborers the main object of the new satyagraha campaign he’d been threatening for two years.

This is usually portrayed as the logical and inevitable culmination of Gandhi’s opposition over nearly two decades to the indentured labor system and to the tax—now called by Gandhi “the blood tax”—which had been adopted in 1895 as a means of forcing indentured laborers to return to India at the end of their contracts, or reenlist by signing a new contract.

The story is more complicated. The original proposal had been to put a head tax of twenty-five pounds on each former indentured laborer, a levy that exceeded his annual income and therefore would be impossible for him to scrimp together. Gandhi himself had drafted the original protest lodged by the Natal Indian Congress, and after the issue had been carried to the imperial authorities in Whitehall, the tax had been reduced to three pounds on each man, woman, and child, onerous still for workers who counted themselves fortunate if they earned a pound in a month. Collection over the years had been spotty, but as fines piled up on former indentured laborers who failed to pay, white magistrates took this as a pretext for jailing them on contempt charges. Early on, no one was more eloquent in calling attention to the plight of the indentured and former indentured than Gandhi. “To a starving man there is virtually no home,” he wrote in 1903. “His home is where he can keep body and soul together.” By this standard, Natal was a more plausible “home” than the impoverished Indian villages the laborers had fled.

But indentured laborers were never a preoccupation of Gandhi’s during his Transvaal years. They and their sufferings were located in Natal, generally removed from his field of vision. When a group of second-generation Natal-born Indians started to agitate in Durban for the removal of the tax in 1911, the absent Gandhi, in retreat on Tolstoy Farm, seemed impervious to appeals for his support. Perhaps he calculated that in throwing his weight behind a new movement with new demands, he might sink his chances for the already pending deal with Smuts. Or perhaps, egotistically, he now sensed a challenge from younger would-be leaders. Whatever his motives, he plainly didn’t have any liking for the prime mover of the agitation against the tax. This was P. S. Aiyar, the rambunctiously independent editor of African Chronicle, whose own attitude to Gandhi—as expressed in print in his weekly paper—ran an unpredictable gamut from reverential to critical and from critical to wrathful. Indian Opinion carried a brief item mentioning the formation of a committee to launch a campaign against the head tax, with Aiyar as secretary. The movement against the three-pound head tax then lurched on for months with petitions and meetings, the sorts of things Gandhi’s paper routinely recorded when they bore on Indian interests. But Aiyar’s committee garnered no further mention in its pages. Afterward, Polak apparently made the mistake of writing something favorable about Aiyar to Gandhi, who replied: “In spite of your remarks in one of your letters, I still very much distrust Aiyar’s good faith. He is a man of the moment. He will write one thing today, and just the opposite tomorrow.” In addition to showing how unaccustomed the Johannesburg Gandhi could still be to criticism coming not from whites but from one of his own, the letter proves he was a reader of African Chronicle.

Aiyar’s agitation never got very far. He seems to have had little organizing talent and no stomach for the sort of personal sacrifice that could land him in jail. But his agitation did put the tax issue back on Gandhi’s mind. The most Gandhi had been hoping for was the repeal of the tax on women, not as a result of Indian agitation, but as a gesture by Smuts to show the good faith of whites. It was an idea they’d apparently discussed. Gandhi was unreceptive to ideas about a more active approach. The possibility of his starting a movement of his own against the tax was suggested to him by the editor in that period of Indian Opinion, an Englishman named Albert West. But that would have meant leaving Tolstoy Farm and coming to Durban. It was late 1911, and Gandhi wasn’t ready for that. Uncharacteristically, he shrugged off the suggestion. “I am not just now in a position to feel the pulse of the community there,” he wrote. “If I felt like being free to head the movement, I should plunge without a moment’s hesitation, but, just now, I am not in that condition at all.” Maybe West should start a movement himself, he countered, an unlikely suggestion for him to offer the Englishman. But if he does, he “should not in any way clash with what Aiyar is doing.” Apparently, Aiyar had been seeking support from West or Gandhi or both. Gandhi referred to “the Aiyar correspondence,” which he returned to West, saying he didn’t want to keep it. Still, he couldn’t let the matter drop. A week later he wrote to West again asking him to collect statistics on the tax that might be used to steer white opinion, so that passive resistance on the issue could be avoided.

For nearly a year Gandhi then remains at Tolstoy Farm doing basically nothing about the three-pound tax after writing a flurry of pieces on the subject in Indian Opinion, which were notable mostly for their failure to allude to the sputtering campaign in Durban. Aiyar, who’d only recently described Gandhi as “our revered and respected leader” and “that selfless, noble soul,” first fumes, then burns.

The maverick editor had stood by the aloof and absent leader when he came under attack from a swami named Shankaranand, recently arrived from India, who couldn’t abide Gandhi’s emphasis on harmony with Muslims. The supposed holy man was getting a hearing from local Hindus, showing how easy it could be for a newcomer to reignite communal tensions, despite Gandhi’s wishful boast that they’d been surmounted by Indians in South Africa under his leadership. Hindus needed “an absolute Hindu as their leader instead of a Tolstoyan,” the swami had preached, putting himself forward. Aiyar instantly rose to Gandhi’s defense. He wrote that the newcomer had shown himself to be a politician “sheltering himself under the cloak of a hermit.” If the swami imagined he could “step into the shoes of Mr. Gandhi,” he said, “it is our pleasant or unpleasant duty to say this is an impossible dream.”

Just ten months later Aiyar accused Gandhi and Indian Opinion of having done “all in their power to smother the £3 tax committee.” In full cry against “the great sage of Phoenix,” the African Chronicle editor now used his pages to assert, bitterly but not implausibly, that the movement he’d tried himself to start had gotten no recognition from Gandhi “simply because it did not emanate from him.” His fulminations became uncontrollable. His invective is something to behold. He railed against Gandhi’s “cosmopolitan followers,” an obvious allusion to the Jewish backgrounds of Polak and Kallenbach, whom he derided as the leader’s “trusted Prime Ministers.” Why, he asked, baring his own disappointment and apparent jealousy, had Gandhi found it so hard to depend on Indians?

Mr. Gandhi may have been a good man prior to his assuming the role of a saint,” Aiyar eventually reflected, “but since he has attained this new state by himself without being ordained by a holy preceptor, he seems to be indifferent though not callous to human sufferings and human defects.” By the time this was written at the start of 1914, seven months before Gandhi sailed from the country, the final satyagraha campaign had briefly brought Natal’s mines and plantations to a standstill, and the abolition of the head tax—the issue Aiyar himself had struggled to bring to the fore—was about to be secured by the man who’d become his nemesis. By then thoroughly alienated, the editor plainly felt that Gandhi had stolen his issue and the portion of glory that might have been his due.

The turning point came on November 14, 1912, when Gopal Krishna Gokhale, toward the end of his South African tour, had an audience with the former Boer commanders Louis Botha and Jan Smuts in the prime minister’s office in Pretoria. Gokhale had campaigned in India for the abolition of the indenture system. He grasped the practical and symbolic importance of the tax that had been designed to drive former indentured laborers back to the impoverished villages in India from which they’d fled. He told the two Afrikaners that it was ineffective, unjust, poisoning relations between India and South Africa, and therefore ought to be scrapped. Eager to please, offering no defense, they left their visitor with the impression that they would do the political work necessary to win over Natal’s whites. Gokhale thought this amounted to a commitment.

It’s not impossible that Gokhale had this exchange on his own initiative, but it’s more likely that Gandhi, who was at his side every day of the tour, put him up to it. Though they’d agreed that the meeting with the ministers would go better if Gandhi, their old antagonist, were not present, they’d spent the previous evening together prepping for the encounter. Some days earlier, P. S. Aiyar also had a chance to lobby Gokhale in public and private on the three-pound head tax despite, so he wrote, the “jolly good care” taken by the Gandhi “clique” to insulate the visitor from gadflies like himself. Possibly Aiyar’s persistence on a subject that, as he said, “has been dear to me since a considerable length of time” counted for something after all. In any event, the Gandhi of Tolstoy Farm who didn’t feel free to “plunge” into an agitation against the tax a year earlier was now on the verge of returning to Natal. If he was not exactly spoiling for a fight, the prospect of getting the question resolved at the top must have appealed to him as a way of trumping the irritating Aiyar and, more important, as a demonstration that he’d never given up on an issue of such magnitude to the poorest Indians.

Beyond the clash of egos and considerations about his reputation in India, there was the issue itself. Fifteen years after the fact, Gandhi would write that a “fresh fight” would have been necessary to abolish the head tax even if Smuts had honored his end of the original compromise, in which it hadn’t featured at all. Nothing indicates that he felt that combative at the time. In fact, with conspicuous remorse, he would soon acknowledge that he and other free Indians had shelved the issues of indenture and the head tax for too long. “Are we not to blame for all this?” a distraught-sounding Gandhi would ask, after returning to Natal and reviewing the prison sentences meted out to former indentured laborers prosecuted for walking out on their contracts or not paying the head tax. “We did not hear the cry for help at our own doors! Who can tell how much of the burden [of guilt] we have to bear? It’s enjoined by all religions that we should share in the suffering that we see around us. We have failed to do so.”

The Gandhi who returned from Johannesburg to Phoenix came to this realization reluctantly. He didn’t seize the tax issue. It can almost be said to have seized him. But it was the right issue, after all, for the climax of his last act in South Africa. If he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life battling for equal rights there, he could at least try to keep faith with the indentured. Everything he’d learned—about caste and untouchability, about “high and low,” about the dignity of physical labor—had armed him for the struggle. Originally, it was mostly book learning, the earnest barrister’s distillations from Tolstoy and Ruskin. Now, after the experiences of war, jail, and Tolstoy Farm, the long hikes across the veldt with Kallenbach to and from the city center at dawn and sometimes twilight, the detachment from family as commonly defined, the lawyer and petitioner had given way to the spiritual pilgrim with a strategy of mass action.

As a memoirist, Gandhi had, like many writers in our own day, the knack of total recall for conversations that had occurred a decade or two earlier. As if he’d taped it, he has Gokhale telling him following his session with Botha and Smuts: “You must return to India in a year. Everything has been settled … The £3 tax will be abolished.”

“I doubt it very much,” Gandhi has himself replying. “You do not know the ministers as I do. Being an optimist myself, I love your optimism, but having frequent disappointments, I am not as hopeful in the matter as you are.”

“You must return to India within twelve months, and I will not have any of your excuses,” Gokhale says again in his version.

In some such way, the stage was set once Smuts rose in the white Parliament in April 1913 to present his latest attempt to codify his supposed agreements with Gandhi and Gokhale. The head tax would no longer have to be paid on Indian women and children, but it would be retained for indentured men who did not re-indenture or repatriate themselves at the end of their contracts: in other words, men who tried to assume some of the attributes of freedom. The minister said there had never been a commitment to abolish the tax totally. Gandhi said this was an insult to Gokhale and, therefore, to India. Without great confidence that it would amount to much, he began to plan his final South African campaign.