THE GREAT SATYAGRAHA CAMPAIGN of 1913 is a conspicuous milestone on Gandhi’s road, a biographical episode that can’t be lightly passed by. The campaign became his model or prototype for effective political action. Had it never occurred, the spiritual pilgrim into whom he’d transformed himself might never have had the fortitude—or spirit—to reach for mass leadership in India. Yet in the angry, fractious white politics of the Union of South Africa, then in its infancy as a nation-state, satyagraha was little more than a sideshow—at most, a temporary distraction. The status of Indians, Smuts would later say, was “an entirely subordinate question.” He meant that rights for Indians could not be disentangled from the larger question of rights for blacks, and that rights for blacks were simply unthinkable. “The whole basis of our system in South Africa rests on inequality,” he said with an easy candor that may now seem brazen but, at the time, took for granted the self-evident soundness of his reasoning.
In the political history of white South Africa, 1913 doesn’t stand out as the year that Indians marched for the abolition of a now-forgotten tax. It was the year that the Boer War generals then governing the country clashed among themselves over South Africa’s proper place in the British Empire and over which whites specifically should hold power in the land. Smuts and his prime minister, Louis Botha, embraced the British program of “reconciliation,” implying unity between Afrikaners and English-speaking whites as well as continued deference to Whitehall on imperial and international issues. Under the slogan “South Africa First,” which really meant Afrikaners first, another faction wanted the Boer War’s losers to defer to no one and to embark on a more rigorous program of racial segregation. The Nationalists, as they would call themselves when they broke away in November that year, would prove to be the wave of the future until a greater nationalism, that of the suppressed African majority, finally came crashing in.
In 1913, white restlessness and infighting weren’t confined to the former generals at the top. The foundations of the new industrial society, based on the hugely profitable gold mines, had been severely shaken by a brief general strike by white mine workers in July; six months later, white railway men called another. In the first strike, involving nascent trade unions and, so it was alleged, allied anarchist conspirators, thousands of white miners took over the center of Johannesburg. They set fire to the railway station and to the offices of The Star, a newspaper known for following the line of the mine owners. They next turned their attention to the Rand Club, the stuffy preserve of those same interests. This was class warfare, but on behalf of whites only. (The same color-coded radicalism, a decade later, during another supposed general strike, would express itself in a priceless slogan adapted from Marx and Engels: “Workers of the world, fight and unite for a white South Africa.”)
In 1913, Smuts had yet to build his army. The former Boer commander had to rely on two regiments of mounted imperial—that’s to say, British—troops to suppress the strikers, some of whom would have fought in the Boer War, under his or Botha’s command, against those same regiments. The troops saved the Rand Club, killing twenty-one strikers, but couldn’t contain the rioting, which stopped only when Botha and Smuts arrived personally on the scene without a security escort and succumbed to the miners’ demands. It was “a deep humiliation,” Smuts said.
It’s in this period of turmoil—between two whites-only general strikes, as the governing party started to break apart—that Gandhi launched his campaign, which he later chronicled as if it had happened in a vacuum, as if the land had been inhabited by only Indians and white autocrats. His numerous biographers have generally followed his lead, paying little or no attention to the South African context. It wasn’t that Gandhi failed to register what was going on. He wrote a long piece for Indian Opinion summing up the whites versus whites class struggle. Using what the editors of his collected writings helpfully footnote as “a Gujarati saying,” he said it was a mountain being made out of a mustard seed. (Student of the New Testament that he was, Gandhi himself probably knew it was Matthew 17:20.) If the spectacle of white unrest had any implications for South African Indians, he failed to spell them out. But by then, in a steady stream of telegrams from Phoenix to ministers and members of the white Parliament, he’d already started to threaten a new round of passive resistance if the government held firm on the three-pound head tax and on its restrictive new immigration bill, which seemed to turn virtually all Indians into “prohibited aliens.”
As if these grievances weren’t enough, yet another controversy burst out following a judicial ruling in Cape Province that traditional Indian marriages—Hindu, Muslim, and Parsi—had no standing in South African law, which recognized only weddings performed by judges, other officials sanctioned by the state, or Christian clerics. This meant all Indian wives, except a small number of Indian Christians, were living out of wedlock and all their children were illegitimate in the eyes of the law of their adopted country, further undermining their already tenuous residence rights.
The marriage question helped jolt Indians in South Africa out of the despondency and resignation that seemed to have settled on the community during the years of Gandhi’s withdrawal to Tolstoy Farm. Mass meetings were held in Johannesburg in April and May, though Gandhi himself, now back in Natal, was absent. The marriage issue even made an activist out of Gandhi’s hitherto-retiring wife, according to an account he gave at the time. “Then I am not your wife according to the laws of this country,” he quoted Kasturba as saying in April after the matter had been explained to her. “Let us go to India.” Her husband replied that they couldn’t back off the struggle. She then volunteered to join it by courting arrest. Or so the story went in his telling. The idea of women doing that hadn’t previously occurred to Gandhi. Soon he had a female flying squad ready to follow Kasturba to jail, on his signal. “We congratulate our plucky sisters who have dared to fight the Government rather than submit to the insult,” he wrote after forty Johannesburg wives signed a petition to the interior minister that was probably drafted by Gandhi himself (certainly not by Kasturba, who was illiterate).
Part of Gandhi’s inspiration for his earliest passive resistance campaigns had come from the example of suffragette demonstrations he’d witnessed in London. That example may have had something to do with his openness now to the idea of Indian women courting arrest, which was novel to the point of being countercultural. It was also a sign that Gandhi was beginning to think tactically and politically again. His attention had been diverted first to Tolstoy Farm and then, after his return to the Phoenix Settlement at the start of the year, to proselytizing for his latest discoveries in matters of health and diet. In thirty-three weekly installments, ending in August, Gandhi held forth in Indian Opinion on the efficacy of cold baths and mud packs, on the danger of vaccination against smallpox, and on the perils of sexual indulgence. But even before winding up the series, he dropped hints that the next campaign wouldn’t be a simple reprise of the last. “I have sketched out an elaborate program which I have not the time to set forth here,” he remarked in a letter to Hermann Kallenbach at the end of April. Two months later, in another letter to his confidant, he says he’s “resolving in my own mind the idea of doing something for the indentured men.” The scholar Maureen Swan seizes on this sentence as a harbinger, a turning point. “Never before,” she writes, “had Gandhi addressed himself to the Natal underclasses.” But what was that “something” he was thinking of doing? And did doing it for the indentured entail or even imply, in his early strategizing, that it might also be done with them? In letters and articles written in the months leading up to the 1913 campaign, there’s nothing besides these suggestive but vague sentences to hint that it might have. But fifteen years later, when, back in India, Gandhi got around to writing his own narrative of the period, everything fell tidily, retrospectively, into place. Here, without acknowledging that he’d dodged pleas to join an earlier campaign against the head tax, he says the “insult” to Gokhale and, by extension, all Indians over the tax issue had thrown open the door to mobilizing the indentured.
“When this tax thus fell within the scope of the struggle,” Gandhi wrote in a second autobiographical volume, Satyagraha in South Africa, “the indentured Indians had an opportunity of participating in it … thusfar this class had been kept out of the fray.” It’s reasonable to read this as acknowledging they had been “kept out of the fray” as a considered choice made by none other than himself. Though the indentured were illiterate, he then recalled, they turned out to understand issues better than he’d have imagined. How many of them would actually join in, he goes on, remained a mystery to which he had no clues. From this we can surmise that the idea of calling out the indentured may indeed have lodged in Gandhi’s mind months before the campaign kicked off in September, but he had little confidence they’d respond.
There’s circumstantial evidence that a turning point in his thinking may have come in the days leading up to the violent white miners’ strike in Johannesburg, which broke out on July 3, soon after Gandhi dropped his tantalizing aside to Kallenbach about “doing something for the indentured.” Gandhi had then traveled up to Johannesburg on June 30 for negotiations on his long-pending, or rather slow-fading, compromise with Smuts. The government was too preoccupied with its own dissension and the rising white militancy on the mines for those talks to go anywhere. But Gandhi stayed on, settling down in Kallenbach’s Mountain View house for a week or so. On consecutive days, Kallenbach dutifully noted in his diary, they then went to lunch at the home of Thambi Naidoo, the Tamil leader who’d proved himself to be Gandhi’s single most dedicated satyagrahi; on the third day, they took dinner there. Kallenbach tells us nothing else; and there’s no other record. But these meals are unusual enough to command attention. The fussy ascetic that Gandhi had become by 1913 had long since ceased to dine out, even in vegetarian households. And even when he’d had a social life of sorts, it had been largely with his European friends and soul mates, not the Naidoos. Three days in a row suggests these could have been meals with a purpose, an impromptu satyagraha summit or skull session—what today might be called a retreat.
An impression has lingered in the oral tradition of South African Tamils that Thambi Naidoo sometimes had to press his leader to lead. Could this have been such an occasion? On July 5, the day of the shootings by the troops guarding the Rand Club, Gandhi and Kallenbach walked into town from Mountain View and back. Kallenbach takes terse note of the shootings, saying only that there were “many more deaths.” That evening he and Gandhi have “another long discussion.” Did it involve the day’s events? We’ll never know. At roughly the same time, Botha and Smuts arrived on the scene downtown and, unable to do anything else, bowed to the workers’ demands. Word of their retreat would have gotten around, even without the burned-out and crippled Star to spread it. The idea that the Boer War generals had bent under pressure couldn’t be contained.
Could the example of the white mine workers have served as Thambi Naidoo’s “mustard seed”? He wouldn’t have had to be told that indentured Indian mine workers in the coal districts of Natal were mostly Tamils. Given the fact that his meetings with Gandhi in Johannesburg coincided with the rising of the white working class there, it’s not far-fetched to think that he drew some inspiration from the white proletariat. What we do know is that on October 11, when eleven Indian women—ten of them Tamils, including Thambi Naidoo’s wife—courted arrest by illegally crossing into Natal from the Transvaal border town of Volksrust, they were accompanied by Naidoo; and when they reached the coal-mining center of Newcastle two days later and implored the Indian miners to strike, Naidoo was still their guide. The Natal Witness, published in the provincial capital of Pietermaritzburg, identified Thambi Naidoo as the “ringleader.”
Gandhi had used the threat of a strike by the indentured to badger the government. Just two weeks earlier he’d written to the minister of the interior warning that “the step we are about to take … is fraught with danger.” That step, as the letter defined it, involved “asking those who are now serving indenture and who will, therefore, be liable to pay the £3 tax on completion of their indenture, to strike until the tax is withdrawn.” In the immediate aftermath of the strike he also acknowledged there had been a “plan” to send the Tamil women to Newcastle to agitate among the indentured Tamil coal miners “and persuade them to go on strike on the issue of the £3 tax.” The signal for the start of the walkout was to have been Gandhi’s own arrival in town, some days afterward, once the women had prepared the way. “But the mere presence of these women,” Gandhi wrote, “was like a match to dry fuel … By the time I reached there Indians in two coal mines had already stopped work.”
Arriving in Newcastle October 1913, at the start of strikes on the coal mines (photo credit i5.1)
Gandhi had solemnly warned the interior minister: “It may be difficult to control the spread of the movement beyond the limits one may set.” Here we see in action the passive-aggressive in passive resistance. Years later, writing as memoirist rather than activist, he said he’d been “as much perplexed as I was pleased” by the early outbreak of the strikes. “I was not prepared for this marvelous awakening,” he recalled. In his mind, though he’d hatched the movement and foretold its spreading, he was not responsible for the course it now took. Responsibility, he’d say, lay with the government for rebuffing his reasonable demands for the removal of the head tax as promised. This can be interpreted as self-delusion, opportunism, or cunning, all of which were part of the leader’s makeup in shifting proportions. It can also be interpreted as political genius. Gandhi may actually have been surprised that things worked out as he’d warned the authorities they might. But he had no hesitation exploiting the outcome he’d foreseen, even if he hadn’t fully believed his forecast.
After the strikes, possibly in Durban (photo credit i5.2)
He was not therefore a prisoner of events when he arrived in Newcastle on October 17, 1913. For the first time in his life, he found himself the leader of a mass movement. In Durban recently, Hassim Seedat, a lawyer whose avocations include the study of Gandhi’s life and the collection of Gandhi materials, showed me a photograph of Gandhi as he disembarked that day. In it, the advocate turned leader is once again in Indian dress as he’d last been in Zanzibar, ten months earlier, bidding farewell to the homeward-bound Gokhale. The point of the costume change was to stress his identification with the indentured by adopting their garb. Hermann Kallenbach, his architecture practice now on hold, was there to greet him. He’d arrived the day before and had already gone on mine visits with Thambi Naidoo. Natal’s attorney general reported that “a Jew Kallenbach … appears to be agitating.”
Gandhi immediately called for the walkout to be extended to collieries still in operation. The strikes quickly spread beyond the mines. GANDHI CAUSES TROUBLE, a headline over a Reuters dispatch from Newcastle announced the next morning on the front page of The Natal Witness of Pietermaritzburg. “A peculiar position has arisen here,” the dispatch began. “Hotels are without waiters and the mines are without labor.”
As the message spread beyond the two collieries that had already shut down, the roster of closed mines lengthened: Ballengeich, Fairleigh, Durban Navigation, Hattingspruit, Ramsey, St. George’s, Newcastle, Cambrian, and Glencoe. Within a week, all nine had been at least partly crippled by the walkout of indentured Indian mine workers. Two thousand strikers were believed to be waiting for their leader’s next command.
Most of the strikers were still in mine compounds, still being fed by their increasingly anxious employers, still refusing to work. The strike next spread to Durban, where most services halted as indentured Indian bellmen, waiters, and sweepers, municipal menials of all sorts, stopped working. Thambi Naidoo was eventually arrested in a railway barracks in the process of enlisting even more indentured workers, threatening the shipment of coal to the gold mines and ports.
For a week, Gandhi himself was a self-propelled whirlwind, in constant motion from meeting to meeting, rally to rally, riding up and down the rail line he’d had his first fateful venture on in 1893. From Newcastle he traveled to Durban, where he faced a meeting on October 19 of restive Indian businessmen who made up the leadership of the Natal Indian Congress, the organization he once spearheaded, whose charter he’d single-handedly drafted, in whose name he’d sent all his early pleadings to colonial and imperial authorities. Frightened by the radical turn in Gandhi’s movement that his call to the indentured seemed to represent, the Congress passed what amounted to a motion of no-confidence, effectively expelling him. (A Gandhian rump soon regrouped as the Natal Indian Association.) The leader had lost the support of most, though not all, of the Muslim traders who’d been his original backers, but he had little time now to mend fences.
Not surprisingly, it was P. S. Aiyar, the maverick editor of African Chronicle, who gave doubts about Gandhi’s new course their most cantankerous expression. “Any precipitate step we might take in regard to the £3 tax,” he wrote with some foresight, “will not be conducive to improving the lot of these thousands of poor, half-starving people.” Aiyar urged Gandhi to call a national conference of South African Indians and heed any consensus on tactics it reached. Gandhi brushed the suggestion aside, saying he could accept the idea only so long as the result didn’t conflict with his conscience. This was too much for Aiyar. “We are not aware,” he erupted, “of any responsible politician in any part of the globe making such a stupid reply.” In effect, he said, Gandhi was presenting himself as “such a soul of perfection … [that his] superior conscience was pervading everywhere.”
No such sideline mutterings could slow Gandhi now. From Durban he shot back to Newcastle to tour some mine compounds, then scooted off to Johannesburg to rally white supporters, then went back again to Durban to face the owners of the mines. In six days, he spent at least seventy-two hours on trains. Everywhere, in speeches and written statements, he held out hope for an early end to the disruptions, even as his lieutenants worked to draw more indentured laborers into the still spreading protest. The aims of the strikers, soothing passages in his written statements and speeches seemed to say, couldn’t be more modest; all the government needed to do was honor its pledge to banish the head tax, and fix the marriage law while they were at it. The workers were not striking for improved working conditions, he told the mine owners. The quarrel was not with them. Nor was it political. “Indians do not fight for equal political rights,” he declared in a communiqué to Reuters really meant for the authorities. “They recognize that, in view of existing prejudice, fresh immigration from India should be strictly limited.”
Despite all these signals and assurances, some of the mine executives voiced their deepest fear: that in addition to calling out his indentured countrymen, he’d seek, finally, to widen the stoppage by involving African workers. Gandhi denied having any such intention. “We do not believe in such methods,” he told a reporter from The Natal Mercury.
John Dube’s Ilanga, reacting to the Indian strikes, slyly took note of white fears that Africans might follow this example. The first of several commentaries ended with a Zulu expression that can be translated, “We wish you the best, Gandhi!” or even, “Go for it, Gandhi!” Later, when it seemed likely that the agitation might gain some privileges denied Africans from a white Parliament simultaneously engaged in passing the egregious Natives Land Act, an undertone of resentment crept in.
By October 26, the leader had landed back in the coalfields. All the women he’d dispatched to the area to win over the indentured had by then been arrested and sentenced to prison terms of up to three months, including his wife—along with scores of strikers identified by mine supervisors as “ringleaders,” many of whom would eventually be deported back to India—but an unfazed and completely focused leader was now ready to stay put with the strikers, to take over as field commander of what The Star, in a small headline, sneeringly mislabeled MR. GHANDI’S ARMY. In the next eleven days, until he himself was finally locked up on November 11, Gandhi would have his most prolonged and intense engagement with indentured laborers in his two decades in South Africa.
Within a day of his return to Newcastle, Gandhi hit on a tactic for bringing the conflict to a head. It involved forcing the authorities to contemplate mass arrests, far beyond the capacity of the prisons to hold those it detained. With this end in view, Gandhi urged the miners to leave the compounds and court arrest by marching across the Transvaal border at Volksrust. It was “improper,” he said, for them to be consuming the rations of the mining companies when they had no intention of working until the head tax had been abolished. Another point probably counted for more but was left unstated: as long as the strikers were at the mines, there was a danger they could be sealed off in the compounds, limiting the possibility of communication and further mass action. On October 28, the first batch of marchers set out from Newcastle in the direction of the provincial border. The next day Gandhi himself led another two hundred from the Ballengeich mine. The procession, according to a tabulation he made later, reached five hundred, including sixty women, voicing religious chants as they marched: “Victory to Ramchandra!” “Victory to Dwarkanath!” “Vande Mataram!” Ramchandra and Dwarkanath were other names for the gods Rama and Krishna, heroes of the great Hindu epics. The last cry meant “Hail, Mother!” or, more specifically, Mother India, fusing high-flown religious and political connotations. “They struck not as indentured laborers but as servants of India,” Gandhi wrote. “They were taking part in a religious war.”
With Kallenbach, during 1913 strikes. Gandhi’s secretary, Sonja Schlesin, center. (photo credit i5.3)
By November 2, about two thousand miners and other indentured laborers had assembled at Charlestown, the Natal railway terminus, where the young Gandhi had boarded a stagecoach on his first journey to the Transvaal in 1893. Charlestown is thirty-four miles from Newcastle, mostly uphill, sometimes steeply. Here a reporter for the Sunday Times found Gandhi in shirtsleeves in “the evil-smelling backyard of a tin shanty … sitting on an upturned milk case.” Next to him was a galvanized tub “full of an unsavory concoction which I took to be soup,” also sacks containing hundreds of bread loaves. The future Mahatma, working with “incredible rapidity,” was serving as quartermaster, cutting the loaves into three-inch hunks, then, according to this description, digging with his thumb a small hole into each hunk, which he then filled with coarse sugar as the men filed by in successive batches of a dozen strikers each.
It’s a picture to fix in the mind: Gandhi, in the thick of his struggle, feeding his followers—described by another reporter on the scene as “consisting mostly of the very lowest castes of Hindus,” plus “the merest smattering of Mohammedans”—with his own hands. That a certain proportion of the strikers (maybe 20 percent, maybe more) were once considered untouchable in the Tamil villages from which they originally hailed is no longer, for Gandhi, something to be remarked upon. In his own mind, feeding them one by one in this way is basic logistics, not a display of sanctity. But for however many hundreds or thousands who received their food directly from his hands, he set a new standard for Indian leadership, for political leadership anywhere. Later he wrote that he’d made serving food in Charlestown his “sole responsibility” because only he could persuade the strikers that portions had to be tiny if all were to eat. “Bread and sugar constituted our sole ration,” he said.
On November 5, he tried to get through to Smuts in Pretoria by phone in order to give him one last chance to renew his pledge on the tax. By then, Smuts was flatly denying that there had ever been such a pledge. Gandhi was curtly rebuffed by the minister’s private secretary. “General Smuts will have nothing to do with you,” he was told. Then and now, the provincial border consisted of a little stream on the edge of Volksrust. (Under majority rule, names have changed. What was Natal is now KwaZulu-Natal; that portion of the Transvaal is now Mpumalanga.) The geography of this hinterland was familiar to Gandhi, who’d been arrested in 1908, at this same point, for crossing the same provincial border without a permit.
On the morning of November 6, shortly after dawn, he set out from Charlestown with 2,037 men, 127 women, and 57 children. Gandhi told them that their destination was Tolstoy Farm, a distance of about 150 miles. A small police detachment was waiting for them at the border, but the “pilgrims,” as Gandhi had taken to calling them, swarmed across. Volksrust’s Afrikaners, who’d threatened to fire on the marchers, looked on passively as the procession passed through the town in regular ranks. Their first encampment was eight miles down the road. There, that night, Gandhi was arrested and taken back to Volksrust to appear before a magistrate who granted the retired barrister’s professionally argued request for bail. The sequence of arrest, arraignment, and bail was repeated the next day, so twice in two days he was able to rejoin the marchers. On November 9, with the procession already past the Transvaal town of Standerton, more than halfway to Tolstoy Farm, their leader was arrested for a third time in four days. Denied bail this time, he was hauled back to Natal where, two days later in Dundee, yet another coal-mining town with a British antecedent, he was found guilty in a small whitewashed courtroom—still in use in the postapartheid era—on three counts relating to his having led indentured laborers out of their mine compounds and out of the province. As always, Gandhi eagerly pleaded guilty to each charge. The sentence—welcomed by Gandhi, who was never truer to his principles than when he found himself in the dock—was nine months of hard labor.
Strikers march into the Transvaal at Volksrust (photo credit i5.4)
If the authorities calculated that the detention of Gandhi and his Jewish lieutenants, Polak and Kallenbach, would be enough to break the back of the strike, they soon discovered that it had a momentum all its own. The indentured mine workers from Natal got within fifty miles of Johannesburg before a mass arrest could be organized. They had to be reminded by Polak that satyagraha ruled out active resistance to arrest. It took two days to pack them into three special trains that were waiting for them in the town of Balfour. Unlike Gandhi, the authorities made no provision for feeding the strikers, who were immediately prosecuted when they got back to Natal for the statutory crimes of abandoning their workplaces and illegally crossing the provincial border. They were then sentenced to hard labor underground at the mines, which had been conveniently certified as annexes to the overflowing Newcastle and Dundee jails—“outstations,” they were called—with their white foremen deputized as warders. Hard labor meant there would be no pay for the six months the sentences would last. Beatings with sticks and sjamboks, whips made out of rhino or hippo hide, were among the methods used to herd the strikers back to work.
At the Ballengeich mine, the source of the first coal miners to march with Gandhi, the indentured laborers had been absent from the compound for nearly two weeks by the time they were returned. Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai, two South African scholars who have written a comprehensive account of the repression that followed the strike, offer the testimony a laborer named Madhar Saib later gave to the so-called protector about his encounter with a white mine captain named Johnston: “He gave me strokes with a sjambok on the posterior, the Kaffir policeman holding me by one of my hands. He then told me to go to work … [then] tripped me with his foot and I fell down, whereupon he placed his foot on my throat and gave me another stroke which caught me on the penis. When I urine it hurts.”
Having discovered that hunger and exhaustion wouldn’t be enough to break the strikes, the authorities had now determined on a crackdown. “Any government worth its salt would put its foot down,” said Smuts, noting with scathing accuracy that the demand for the repeal of the head tax on former indentured workers had been “an afterthought” for Gandhi. His elevation of the head tax as an add-on to his earlier list of demands, Smuts said in a telegram to the mine owners, was a political maneuver “intended to influence Natal Indians, to whom the real grounds which he started the passive resistance movement, and which never included this tax, do not appeal.”
The mine owners, disillusioned by the losses they’d suffered after listening to Gandhi’s sweet talk, were now pressing for action. The Natal Coal Owners Association said the time had come for the strikers to be arrested. Taking their cues, editorial writers demanded to know why the government’s response had been so feeble. The Star, which never bothered to dispatch a reporter to the scene, called on it to end its “shilly-shallying” in an editorial that ran under a headline that shouted COOLIE INVASION. How was it possible, the newspaper asked, that “a handful of fanatics, however conscientious,” could get away with preaching “defiance of the laws of the Union”?
Adding to the gathering pressure for a crackdown was the spread of the strike’s seeming flood tide even after Gandhi and his lieutenants had been locked up, even after the Natal strikers had been shipped back to the coal mines as not merely indentured laborers but prisoners of the state. From the coalfields in the hinterland it now reached the sugar lands on the Indian Ocean coast, leading at the height of the harvest season to a seemingly spontaneous succession of walkouts from the plantations and sugar refineries where indentured Indians still amounted to three-quarters of the workforce, taking in places where Gandhi had never campaigned.
The first walkout from a sugar estate appears to have come on November 5, at Avoca on the north shore, not far from Phoenix. By November 8, sugar refineries on the south shore had been hit, and by the middle of the month, when a stoppage by Indian street cleaners, water carriers, household servants, railway men, and boatmen briefly paralyzed Durban, there were probably more than ten thousand indentured Indians on strike in the province. In Durban, the strike was “practically universal,” the chief magistrate reported on November 17. Sporadic incidents of sugarcane fields being set ablaze spread panic among the planters, some of whom bundled their wives and children off to safer precincts in the city.
The authorities now found themselves spread thin. Detachments of British troops had to be rushed from as far away as King William’s Town in the Eastern Cape and Pretoria. At the height of the unrest, Durban found that its only detectives who could speak Hindustani or Tamil had been dispatched to Dundee to work on the case against the imprisoned Gandhi, who by then had been moved to Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, where Indians were basically banned. Rajmohan Gandhi suggests that this was done “so that no Indian could see Gandhi or carry messages from him.”
The impression that this resistance and strife in the sugar country was spontaneous, that Gandhi the prisoner had willed or organized none of it, seems plausible on its face. How and when could he have done so? Nevertheless, there are scattered hints that the idea of calling out the plantation workers had crossed his mind. Before his own arrest on November 10, Hermann Kallenbach said as much in an interview in Johannesburg. “The leaders of the movement will not have the least compunction about asking all Indians on the sugar plantations to come out,” he was reported to have said, at least two weeks before any had done so. The Indians could “get work on the farms anywhere,” the report of his musings continued, “because they were more intelligent than the natives.” In five years at Gandhi’s side, the architect appears not to have learned how the indenture system, with its binding contracts, operated, or what he was supposed to think about the mental capacity of Africans. Perhaps his words were just bluster, intended merely to add to the pressure on the authorities. Nevertheless, Vahed and Desai found evidence that Gandhi’s followers in the newly formed Natal Indian Association were sufficiently on top of events, despite the spreading turmoil, to ship food to striking laborers on a north-coast sugar estate after their employers had cut off rations.
The plantation to which the food aid was shipped happened to be at Mount Edgecombe, where Gandhi had encountered the African leader John Dube under the auspices of its owner, Marshall Campbell, eight years earlier. Campbell had been sympathetic to Gandhi’s movement up to this point. He’d given a lunch honoring Gokhale the previous year; he was also a consistent opponent of the three-pound tax on former indentured workers. After his release from prison, Gandhi would write to him to say how sorry he was that Campbell’s plantation was one of the first hit. He’d told his supporters in Durban, Gandhi’s letter said, that “your men should be the last to be called out,” acknowledging plainly enough that before being jailed, he’d been in on a discussion of tactics for extending the strike to the coastal sugar lands. “Had I been free and assisted in calling out the men,” Gandhi told Campbell, “I must freely admit that I would have endeavored to call out your men also; but, as I have already stated, yours would have been the last estate.”
For Campbell the letter was a last straw. His estates had seen weeks of turmoil. Gandhi’s fine words about nonviolence were contradicted, he replied, by “grave threats of personal violence made by persons whom I believe to be your agents.” Campbell writes as one who’s sure of his facts. He’d actually been away from Natal and is relying on the testimony of his son William, who was relying in turn on that of his youngest brother, Colin. “The men will not listen to anybody but Ghandi [sic] or the gun,” William wrote to his father who stopped short of calling Gandhi a hypocrite but lectured him severely on the harm done to defenseless Indians he was purporting to lead:
You have admittedly started a movement which grew … till it was entirely beyond your control, and has culminated in riot, turbulence, and bloodshed, and the sufferers in this carnival of violence have been, and will be the ignorant laborers … and the intelligent Natal Indians … More and more of those you lead are realizing the weakness of your policy … and are coming to the conclusion that to use a large body of, in the main, contented but ignorant people … as a tool for procuring political rights by which most of them will never benefit, even if they are attained … is not a policy dictated by wisdom and far-sightedness.
In a second letter noticeably less apologetic than his first, Gandhi replied with the perfunctory distress of a field commander who has been informed of civilian casualties in an operation he ordered. Passive resistance, he reminded Campbell starchily, was the community’s “only weapon.” Obviously, its use over a wide area would have caused “much greater suffering” than earlier satyagraha campaigns. It could not have been otherwise. As he said in his first letter to Campbell, “In all our struggles of this nature, the innocent as well as the guilty suffer.”
Neither Gandhi nor the plantation owner makes the slightest allusion to the role played by Campbell’s son Colin in the deadliest of the confrontations at Mount Edgecombe. The account eventually accepted by a magistrate acknowledged that the violence had its origins in an attempt by the younger Campbell to force the striking laborers back to work with the support of mounted police. It also acknowledged that Colin Campbell drew his revolver and fired four shots. By his own testimony—accepted without question by the police, the magistrate, and the white press—the shooting came when he was already under attack; because his horse was agitated, he said, his shots went wild. Indians testified that he fired the first shots, killing an indentured worker named Patchappen, one of eight Indians killed or mortally wounded on the morning of November 17, and wounding another. Though Gandhi later mourned indentured workers who lost their lives in such confrontations as martyrs, he refrained from laying blame only on the side of the whites. On his farewell tour of South Africa a half year later, making his final rounds on Natal’s north coast, he sounded as if he’d come to accept some of the elder Campbell’s strictures. Fighting with sticks and burning fields of sugarcane were not passive resistance, he told an audience of indentured cane workers, according to a paraphrase of his remarks that ran in Indian Opinion. If he’d not been in jail, he’d “have repudiated them entirely and allowed his head to be broken rather than permit them to use a single stick against their opponents.” It wasn’t a point Gandhi often made on his farewell tour, which took on a triumphalist air, but it may have lodged in his consciousness. Later, in India, much to the dismay of his lieutenants in the nationalist movement, he regularly put the brakes on satyagraha campaigns at the first sign that the discipline of nonviolence was giving way.
The tone of Campbell’s letters had been patronizing in a colonial way but not as hostile as might have been expected, considering all that had gone on at Mount Edgecombe. The Indians had refused to cut sugarcane for two weeks before the shootings. Local planters soon were calling for a show of force by mounted police to contain the agitation. Within a couple of days, bands of striking indentured laborers were reported to be roaming the neighborhood, armed with clubs and the long, razor-sharp knives used for cutting cane, stopping at residences of planters and their white managers to demand that Indian house servants come out and join the struggle. Or so the Durban newspapers reported.
A detachment of police, “both European and Native, galloped to Mount Edgecomb” from neighboring Verulam on November 17, The Natal Advertiser said. The “native police … quickly got in among their natural enemies,” meaning the indentured Indians, until they had to be restrained. The Africans were armed with assegais, or spears, and the heavy Zulu war club known as a knobkerrie, a carved staff ending in a bulbous hardwood head that could be wielded like a medieval mace.
In reports by journalists and officials on clashes on the mines and in the sugar lands in these weeks, a standard story line unfolds. The forces of law and order are portrayed as restrained as long as they’re kept under firm white command. The Indians are easily agitated, soon beyond reason, uncontrollable, nearly crazed, even when confronted by a well-armed constabulary with drawn firearms. The Indians fought with sticks and stones, the reports said; a handful are described as brandishing cane knives. These themes are regularly reflected in headlines in the English-language press. POLICE SHOW EXEMPLARY PATIENCE, the Transvaal Leader assured its readers, even as COOLIES RUN AMUCK.
Here’s a judicial commission’s eventual explanation of why Indian strikers had to be gunned down in the clashes at Mount Edgecombe: “The Indians were very excited and violent, and so determined were they that, though one of their number had been killed and several wounded … they had not been intimidated.” A failure to use firearms, the commission concluded on the basis of testimony by militia officers, “might eventually have led to greater bloodshed.” Ballistic evidence, it maintained, contradicted testimony by Indians who said the first shots had been fired by Campbell’s son. The mounted police had to be called out, it explained, to deal with laborers committing the crime of disobeying a lawful order to return to work.
The police, members of the South African Mounted Rifles, had been “overwhelmed in numbers by the coolies” who charged “with all the suddenness characteristic of the Asiatic variableness of temper,” the Transvaal Leader told its readers, hewing to the official line. The commission that looked into the Mount Edgecombe clashes also looked into a disturbance on November 21 at the Beneva Sugar Estates near Esperanza, where four strikers were killed after a display of Indian “variableness” forced the police to choose between using their weapons and leaving unarmed whites, including nearby women and children, “at the mercy of an excited crowd of almost two hundred Indians.” The indentured cane cutters, in the official account, had resisted a police order to march to a nearby magistrate so they could be charged with desertion in an orderly way. Instead, they’d fallen supine and lain on their backs. “Get off your horses and come cut our throats,” one of them unaccountably cries out in the official version, which the commissioners easily swallowed. When the police then approach on horseback, a seemingly possessed Indian leaps to his feet and smacks a trooper’s horse with a stick, so hard that the animal falls down. Then, as the troopers withdraw, some with their revolvers unholstered, they’re pursued by laborers with sticks. A witness told Reuters the Indians fought like “dervishes.”
The Indians are regularly described as demented or nearly so, but when press accounts and official judgments get down to explaining the origins of the violence, it’s always the same story. On the sugar estates, as well as the mines, clashes had less to do with the “variableness” of the Indian temper than with orders to police and military units to use force in rounding up “ringleaders” and charging them with desertion if that was what it took to break the strike and get the indentured Indians back to work. With foremen on the mines and estates deputized as warders and given authority to swear in Africans as “special constables,” the line between law enforcement and vigilantism soon blurred. An indentured laborer named Soorzai sought refuge at the Phoenix Settlement, having run off from a nearby plantation where he’d been thrashed. He soon died. In all of Natal only one white, a planter named Armstrong, was later charged with having gone too far. Seemingly at random, he’d picked out two Indians—neither in his employ, both Muslims, one said to be an imam—and had two of his African workers tear off their clothes, then hold them while he beat them repeatedly with sjambok and fists. Later he pursued the two already-battered men, repeating the whole performance not once but twice. The Armstrong case caught Fleet Street’s attention. Downing Street then requested a report. Eventually, Armstrong was fined a hundred pounds. He was trying, he testified before sentencing, “to teach the whole tribe a lesson.”
The reports on the crackdown that reached London also reached India, where the viceroy, Lord Hardinge, took it upon himself in a speech in Madras to voice India’s “deep and burning sympathy” for Gandhi’s followers “in their resistance to invidious and unjust laws.” The viceroy followed the speech up with a cable urging a judicial commission to look into the shootings. Since the indenture system couldn’t have existed without the Raj’s agreement, the viceroy’s intervention carried weight. The British governor-general in South Africa, more or less the viceroy’s opposite number on this other side of the Indian Ocean, reacted furiously. Lord Gladstone—youngest son of the Victorian prime minister—praised the “great forbearance” of Botha and Smuts and fumed in a cable to London over “official credence being given to outrageous charges.” The governor-general wanted nothing less than the viceroy’s dismissal. By the time of this clash in the stratosphere of the empire, the strike was all but over. By December 10, according to official statistics relayed to London, 24,004 “coolies” were back at work, 1,069 in jail, only 621 still striking. (Of those counted as strikers, some may have found themselves suddenly jobless and therefore vulnerable to deportation. Employers were now hiring Africans to fill jobs Indians had held. At the Model Dairy, a popular Durban café, “white girls” had replaced Indian waiters who struck.)
None of this was conveyed to the man who’d started it all. By his own description, instead of the hard labor to which he’d been sentenced, Gandhi was enjoying a respite in the special-status quarters reserved for him in the Bloemfontein jail. Most of his spare time, he wrote, was being devoted to the study of Tamil, the language of most of the indentured strikers, which had been eluding him for more than a decade. The spillover of the strike from the coalfields to the sugar lands combined with the bad press his response had won Smuts at home and abroad—for its initial restraint among his domestic critics, then, in London and elsewhere in the empire, for the shootings and floggings that the crackdown entailed—led him to recognize that this tussle with Gandhi had spun out of his control, that it had become too costly. He needed a face-saving way to back down and found it in the proposal for the judicial commission, which had two tasks, judging from the outcome. One was to whitewash the shootings, the other to propose a settlement forthcoming enough to close the book on Gandhi’s satyagraha campaigns in South Africa.
Within a week of the viceroy’s speech, the commission composed of three white men (one a longtime antagonist in Durban of Gandhi and the Indian community) had come into existence. Within a week of its appointment, it recommended that Gandhi, Kallenbach, and Polak be released, though they had nearly eight months to go on the sentences they’d received for lighting the fuse on the strikes.
Gandhi emerged from his five weeks of a meditative life in prison in a fighting mood. He didn’t at first grasp that his campaigning days in South Africa were already at an end, that he was now only a month away from being able to claim victory in his struggle. Freed in Pretoria on December 18, he spoke that evening to supporters at the Gaiety Theater on Kort Street in Johannesburg. He said he’d miss the solitude and peace of jail, the opportunity it gave him for reflection. But he was ready to resume “the work on which he was engaged when he was convicted.” Two days later, back in Durban, he told The Natal Mercury he’d seek “re-arrest and re-imprisonment” unless the judicial commission were enlarged to include “appointments from the European nationality known to possess no anti-Asiatic bias.” That might not seem a huge demand; he wasn’t asking, after all, for anything so precedent shattering as the appointment of an actual Indian to the panel considering the grievances of Indians; he was saying simply that Indian sentiments ought to be respected by at least some of its members. But in the Union of South Africa in 1913, it was a radical proposal, one the government instantly slapped down.
A day later he appeared at the Durban racecourse with his head shaved, dressed again like an indentured Indian laborer—a long loose kurta worn over baggy pants—before a crowd much larger than any he could have drawn in the city before the heroic march and his jailing. Bouquets were thrust into his hands, full-throated cheers engulfed him. There may still have been pockets of dissenters, especially among the merchants in the old Natal Indian Congress, but the size of the crowd—around six thousand, the largest he’d ever faced—made it clear that the conspicuous erosion of support for Gandhi among Natal’s Indians in the months and years before his last campaign had now been more than reversed. If not unchallenged, he was once again clearly preeminent. The march had been the crowning experience of his time in Africa; this rally now crowned the march.
Gandhi used it to prepare his supporters for more struggle, urging them to get “ready again to suffer battle, again to suffer imprisonment, to march out … to strike, even though this may mean death.” He explained that he’d put on the garments of a laborer in mourning for those who’d been shot down. The bullets that killed the indentured, he said, had pierced his heart too. So went the Mercury’s lengthy summary of his remarks. “How glorious it would have been if one of those bullets had struck him also, because might he not be a murderer himself … having advised Indians to strike?” Here he was, possibly for the first time, certainly not for the last, anticipating the end he’d meet thirty-four years later. “The struggle for human liberty,” by Gandhi’s now standard definition, was “a religious struggle.” At this point, the newspaper’s white reporter interpolated the throng’s cries of “Hear, hear” in his account. It was a struggle, said Gandhi, “even unto death.”
Despite his play on the word “murderer,” the leader here is as solemn and free from self-reproach as a head of state laying a wreath at a war cemetery. He’s offering a demonstration of what he had been saying about satyagraha ever since 1906, even before he coined the word: that the resistance he offered might provoke violence even, or especially, if it succeeded in maintaining the discipline of nonviolence, that it demanded “self-suffering” and, sometimes, martyrs. Gandhi is saying that he himself might eventually be among them. He’s not saying that the indentured laborers who fell in the Natal shootings paid too high a price or expressing much concern about the indentured who survived who were now back at the plantations and mines, if anything, even poorer and less free. Calling it a religious struggle took care of all that. As always, he was not speaking in sectarian or communal terms. He was too much of an ecumenicist to imply that it was a Hindu struggle, or a Hindu and Muslim struggle, or a struggle against people who happened to be Christians. He called it a religious struggle because of the sacrifice his followers, his satyagrahis, were prepared to make. It was another way of insisting that their motives were pure and disinterested, that they rose up not for themselves but for a future in which they might or might not have a share. If Gandhi ever thought of the possibility, even probability, that the indentured might have an actual stake in the strike—that some of them may have realized that their futures in South Africa could turn on the rollback of the head tax—he never found public words for the thought. Satyagraha was self-sacrifice, in his view, not self-advancement.
Gandhi is showing himself at this moment of symbolic near triumph and practical near stalemate to be anything but tenderhearted. He’s an unconventional politician, but what he’s saying is quite conventional for a leader in a conflict that remains unresolved. With the usual melodrama, he’s saying that if more deaths were needed, Indians stood ready to pay the price. A couple of weeks later, reflecting on the death in jail of a seventy-year-old indentured laborer named Hurbatsingh, Gandhi elaborated on the theme. “I saw that it was no matter for grief if an old Indian like Hurbatsingh went to jail for India’s sake and died while in prison,” he said. It was a kind of fulfillment.
In donning the garb of the indentured and vowing to eat only one meal a day for as long as “this religious struggle” continued, he did more than declare himself to be in mourning. He completed the synthesis he’d been seeking throughout his two decades in South Africa between his public role and his questing inner self. The well-tailored attorney who went on retreats with Christian missionaries and immersed himself in Tolstoy had evolved step-by-step over those years into the leader of a movement that could capture mass support and, however fleetingly, international attention in an age when mass communications still depended on the printing press and the telegraph. As he’d later say himself, he’d found his vocation. His ongoing self-creation was now more or less complete.
Part of it was a new regard for the poorest Indians, which in South Africa meant the indentured. Soon he’d be scolding them again on their “addictions” to meat eating, tobacco, and drink. But fresh out of jail, he was “astonished,” he wrote in a cablegram to Gokhale, “at the unlooked-for ability shown by indentured Indians without effective leadership to act with determination and discipline.” They had shown “unexpected powers of endurance and suffering.”
He still had to deal with the reality of white-ruled South Africa. The outcome would not be clear-cut. Gandhi put on the clothes of the indentured, downtrodden, and outcaste, but they formed only a small portion of his audience at the Durban racecourse. He could speak of them and for them, but, mostly, he wasn’t speaking to them. His words wouldn’t reach thousands who’d followed his lead without ever having heard or glimpsed him and who now were doing hard time back on the mines and the sugar estates. They’d chanted religious and patriotic slogans when they marched to the Transvaal, so he had some basis for calling it a religious struggle. And he’d never promised to deliver a change in their living standard or terms of employment. It was a point he later illustrated with an anecdote drawn from the early days of the march, offered as a kind of parable. One of the strikers had asked Gandhi for a hand-rolled cigarette known as a bidi. “I explained that they had come out, not as indentured laborers, but as servants of India. They were taking part in a religious war and at such a time they must abandon addictions such as drinking and smoking … the good men accepted this advice. I was never again asked for money to buy a bidi.”
In assigning to the strikers a purely religious motive for their rising—and assuming for himself sole authority to declare when the movement had attained its ends—Gandhi was short-circuiting normal politics, including protest politics. In the perspective of his long life, of the struggles he had yet to undertake, this too could be called typically Gandhian. One day soon he’d leave South Africa, and those who’d followed him there would be left with his word that something important had been achieved, left with the pride of having stood up and having not been cowed when they answered his call. Not a small thing, most of them may well have concluded. Meanwhile, while the leader was being lionized at the racecourse, prosecutions of his followers were continuing across the province. On the day of his release, thirty-two passive resisters, including five women, had been sentenced to three months in jail for illegally entering the Transvaal.
With Gandhi’s resurgence, the readership of P. S. Aiyar’s African Chronicle took a dive. Among Indians there was no longer much of a market for sharp, independent criticism of the leader. Still Aiyar battled on. Of the Durban speech, he wrote: “Mr. Gandhi’s performance of penance is a poor consolation for those who have lost their bread winners and dear ones.” Called on to end his carping, the editor vowed he’d “keep silent when he is in the grave and even there too our spirit will not be dead.”
As the calendar turned to 1914, Gandhi made a show of boycotting the judicial commission but slipped comfortably into renewed negotiations with Smuts. Before long the outlines of an agreement foreshadowed in their discussions became the commission’s formal recommendations. Under this latest compromise the three-pound head tax on former indentured laborers would finally be scrapped; the marriage law would be amended to make room for traditional Indian marriage customs except polygamy as practiced by Muslims, which would be neither legalized nor banned; immigration would be eased for a relatively small number of Indians with a record of prior residence in South Africa; and a tiny number of “educated” Indians would be admitted so that the color bar would not be absolute. In broader—but hopelessly vague—terms was the government’s formal pledge that the laws would be administered justly. In little more than a month after Gandhi’s release from jail, he and Smuts reached their latest and last accord. By the end of June, the white Parliament had enacted the Indian Relief Act. Gandhi then declared his eight-year, on-and-off satyagraha campaign ended. The new law, he said, was a “magna carta for Indians” (the same phrase he’d used twenty years earlier to characterize Queen Victoria’s more sweeping proclamation, which now counted for nothing in the new Union of South Africa). Continuing on his verbal binge, he also termed it “a charter of our freedom” and “a final settlement.”
Soon he was having to amend, if not swallow, such high-flown words as dissenters like P. S. Aiyar pointed out how far short of the legal equality for which Gandhi had once struggled his “final settlement” now fell. What had been true before the last campaign remained true afterward: not only would Indians still be without political rights, but they’d still require permits to travel from one South African province to another; still not be allowed to settle in the Orange Free State or expand their numbers in the Transvaal, where they’d still have to register under what Gandhi once decried as the “Black Act”; and they would still be subject to a tangle of local laws and regulations saying where they could own land or set up businesses. Nothing in the Indian Relief Act relieved the situation of indentured laborers still under contract who’d been the main body of strikers and marchers.
Nevertheless, the indenture system itself was clearly on its last legs. Natal had stopped importing contract laborers from India as early as 1911. The only way to keep the system going, then, was to persuade those still working off their indentures to sign new contracts when their five-year commitments were up. Now the head tax no longer figured in such deals, no longer hung over the heads of the indentured. It may be said that Gandhi deserved a measure of credit for India’s eventual decision in 1917 to shut the system down altogether by halting the shipment of indentured laborers to island colonies like Fiji and Mauritius, which had continued recruiting them after South Africa stopped, that his campaigns in South Africa had helped force the Raj’s hand by arousing indignation among Indians. But the end of the indenture system hadn’t ever been one of the declared aims of those campaigns.
In a farewell letter to South African Indians, Gandhi conceded there were unmet goals, which he listed as the right to trade, travel, or own land anywhere in the country. These could be achieved, he said, within fifteen years if Indians “cultivated” white public opinion. On political rights, his farewell letter looked to no distant horizon. This was a subject to be shelved. “We need not fight for votes or for freedom of entry for fresh immigrants from India,” it advised. “My firm conviction is that passive resistance is infinitely superior to the vote,” he told the Transvaal Leader. Speaking here was the Gandhi of Hind Swaraj who frankly scorned the parliamentary institutions for which most Indian nationalists thought they were fighting. Finally, he had to concede that the “final settlement” was not really final. While “it was final in the sense that it closed the great struggle,” he rephrased himself, awkwardly blurring the operative adjective, “it was not final in the sense that it gave to Indians all that they were entitled to.”
Smuts, who’d allowed himself to hope that he’d shelved the “Indian question” for the foreseeable future, considered Gandhi’s reformulation a betrayal of their understanding. Gandhi couldn’t express himself with his usual plainness on the question of how final the “final settlement” was because his “truth,” in this instance, wasn’t simple: the struggle had to end because he was leaving; he’d gotten all he could get. No one said it in so many words, but his departure was part of the deal.
White public opinion continued to harden, and Gandhi’s rosy forecasts proved far off the mark. The situation of Indians in South Africa got worse, not better, after he turned his attention to India. They were no better than second-class citizens and often less than that. Under apartheid, Indians were more relentlessly ghettoized and segregated than ever before, though never as severely oppressed and discriminated against as Africans. It took sixty years before they could travel freely in the only country nearly all of them had ever known, more than seventy years before the last restriction on Indian landholding had been repealed. Equal political rights came eventually—a full century after Gandhi first sought them. In the years immediately following his departure, the white government dangled promises of free passage and bonuses to induce Indians to follow him home. Between 1914 and 1940, nearly forty thousand took the bait. Immigration had been halted, but the number of Indians continued to rise by natural increase. And naturally, then, the vast majority had only faint hand-me-down memories of the mother country. In 1990, as the apartheid system was collapsing, the Indian population of South Africa was estimated to have passed one million. In Nelson Mandela’s first cabinet, four of the ministers were Indian.
Though the future for the next several generations of South African Indians would prove bleak, the leader himself was almost free. His very tentative plan had been to sail directly to India with an entourage of about twenty and settle in Poona (now spelled Pune) in western India so as to be near the ailing Gopal Krishna Gokhale. They had an understanding that Gandhi would keep a perfect silence on Indian issues for an entire year (as Gandhi put it, “keep his ears open and his mouth shut”). Gandhi now offered to nurse Gokhale and serve him as secretary. But Gokhale headed for Europe, specifically Vichy, in hopes that the waters there might be good for his failing heart. He asked Gandhi to meet him in London.
All he had to do before sailing for Southampton was complete a round of farewells. In Johannesburg, Mrs. Thambi Naidoo, who’d had the courage to go to the mines in Natal to appeal to the indentured mine workers to strike before Gandhi arrived on the scene, was said to have fallen over in a faint when her husband rose at a dinner and asked his old comrade-not-in-arms to adopt the four Naidoo sons and take them with him to India. She’d not been consulted. Gandhi thanked the “old jailbirds” for their “precious gift.” As his departure day neared, the indentured laborers with whom he’d marched became a preoccupation. He ended his farewell letter to the Indians of South Africa by penning these words above his signature: “I am, as ever, the community’s indentured laborer.” In Durban, he addressed indentured laborers as “brothers and sisters,” then pledged: “I am under indenture with you for all the rest of my life.”
Speaking for the last time to his most loyal supporters, the Tamils of Johannesburg, Gandhi concluded by dwelling on matters of caste. The Tamils had “shown so much pluck, so much faith, so much devotion to duty and such noble simplicity,” he said. They’d “sustained the struggle for the last eight years.” But after all that had been acknowledged, there was “one thing more.” He knew that they had carried over caste distinctions from India. If they “drew those distinctions and called one another high and low and so on, those things would be their ruin. They should remember that they were not high caste and low caste but all Indians, all Tamils.”
It’s impossible at this distance to know what had prompted this admonition on that occasion in that setting, this hauling into the open of a question even Gandhi had mostly allowed to recede for much of his time in South Africa. Had some Tamils on the great march, or even at this farewell gathering, shown their fear of ritual pollution? Or was he thinking ahead to what he would face in India? The exact connections are hard to pin down, but in a more general sense they seem obvious. For Gandhi, the phenomenon of indentured labor, a system of semi-slavery, as he branded it, had fused in his South African years with that of caste discrimination. Whatever the underlying demographic facts showing the proportions of high caste, low caste, and untouchable among the indentured, these were no longer two things in his mind but one, a hydra-headed social monster that still needed to be taken on.
Finally, on the dock in Cape Town, as he was about to board the SS Kinfauns Castle on July 18, 1914, he put a hand on Hermann Kallenbach’s shoulder and told his well-wishers: “I carry away with me not my blood brother, but my European brother. Is that not sufficient earnest of what South Africa has given me, and is it possible for me to forget South Africa for a single moment?” They traveled third-class. Kallenbach brought with him two pairs of binoculars to use on deck. Gandhi, seizing on them as a gross self-indulgence, a backsliding into luxury by his friend, tossed them overboard. “The Atlantic,” Rajmohan Gandhi, his grandson, writes, “was enriched.” Fatefully, the Kinfauns Castle docked the day after the outbreak of a world war. Kallenbach moved with the Gandhis into a boardinghouse for Indian students and, in preparation for a new life with Gandhi in India, tried to concentrate on his Hindi and Gujarati studies. Gandhi sent off letters to Pretoria, New Delhi, and Whitehall, searching for a chink in a bureaucratic wall that threatened to keep him from realizing his dream of having the Jewish architect at his side in India. No one was willing or able to authorize a German passport holder to take up residence there in wartime. The viceroy wouldn’t run “the risk.” Gandhi delayed his own departure, but still the door stayed slammed. Eventually, Kallenbach was detained in a camp for enemy aliens on the Isle of Man, only to be returned to East Prussia in a prisoner swap in 1917. It was 1937 before the two men met again. “I have no Kallenbach,” Gandhi lamented in his fifth year back in India.