3

Adventures in Natal

GANDHI’S BROTHER LAXMIDAS met him at the dock in Bombay. His return to India was to sadness, as his mother had died at the age of forty-one, shortly after learning of his success in his studies. The family had kept from him the fact of Putlibai’s death earlier in 1891, feeling there was no benefit in telling him while he was abroad. Now almost the first thing he said was ‘How is mother?’ Laxmidas at first avoided the question but later that evening Gandhi asked again. His grief, he said, was ‘even greater than over my father’s death’ but he was proud of the self-control that allowed him to act as if nothing had happened.¹

The family continued to suffer the excommunication from caste that Gandhi’s visit to Britain had brought them, but one section of the Modh Bania were prepared to readmit him once he had been through a ritual cleansing. Whatever they thought before he left, having an English-educated lawyer among them would do the caste group no harm. It had been Putlibai’s wish that he be readmitted so Gandhi acquiesced and his brother arranged the purification in the Godavari River; and for the next step, a dinner for all the elders of the caste whom Gandhi, stripped to the waist, served. Another section of the caste refused to readmit him, and he therefore continued to suffer a ban on visiting his in-laws. Kasturbai and their son Harilal had also been subject to this restriction in Gandhi’s absence, though they disobeyed it and visited her parents, doubtless with some level of secrecy. Gandhi declared he would either visit his in-laws openly and honestly or not at all, so it became not at all. He was never a very family-orientated man and so it was probably no great hardship to be forbidden to visit.

He makes little of his reunion with Kasturbai after the three-year absence. Nothing, it seemed, had changed between them; he had intended to teach her to read and write but again his need for sex at the times they were alone together intervened—‘my lust got in the way,’ as he put it. His attitude towards her was in some respects as bad as ever: ‘I continued my squeamishness and suspiciousness in respect of every little thing,’ he wrote; ‘once I went to the length of sending her away to her father’s house, and consented to receive her back only after I had made her thoroughly miserable.’² He seemed to have changed when she returned after a month, and the suspicions (and the lessons) ended. Perhaps he was merely preoccupied with other things. Their second son, Manilal, was born the year after Gandhi returned, in October 1892. He enjoyed becoming acquainted with Harilal, now almost four, and he took in hand his instruction and that of the other children of the household. He instituted a programme of physical exercise to ‘make them hardy.’

Laxmidas was proud that now Gandhi had returned, the family was going to move up in the world, and he wanted their living habits to match their aspirations. He had high hopes for his brother’s success; Laxmidas had many friends and a generous personality, and expected to get work for Gandhi via this wide social network. Gandhi’s journey and studies in London had cost nearly 13,000 rupees, far in excess of the 5,000 originally estimated. In addition, Laxmidas had spent freely in the expectation that his brother’s return would revive the family fortunes. He had attempted to create an English atmosphere in the house in Rajkot: tea and coffee were regularly served, and crockery, which had been for special occasions, was now in general use. New furniture had been bought. Gandhi’s arrival prompted other ‘reforms’ by Laxmidas including the introduction of cocoa and porridge and European dress.

Gandhi’s guilty secret was that he was actually a very poor lawyer: he was acutely aware of his lack of experience and of his general inadequacy. He had no confidence in his own abilities and felt he was ill versed in the ways of the world. A senior in the profession reassured him that it took no unusual skill to be an ordinary lawyer—common honesty and industry would suffice. He asked about Gandhi’s general reading and advised, sensibly, that it was meagre: he had no knowledge of the world, not even of the history of India. Gandhi did as he was told and read some books on physiognomy offering what passed for a scientific approach to human nature, but his plodding approach to learning would never change.

The brothers, had, moreover, overreached themselves in their efforts to make Gandhi a high earner. He had read Roman law in Latin and understood the common law of England but knew nothing of the law in Kathiawar. As a British-educated barrister, however, it was customary to charge ten times the fees of a locally educated man, who could do the job better. Gandhi therefore went to Bombay, studied Indian law and tried to obtain cases. Here he learned that a new barrister could wait five or more years before his career took off.

No briefs came to him and he was so fastidious as to refuse to employ touts to seek out work. To save money he walked to and from the courts, though he still had to maintain standards by keeping a household and wearing European dress. He again for a short time experimented with the ‘vital food’ advised by Arnold Hills—eating just raw fruit, nuts, grains and pulses. He attended the High Court in Bombay daily but did not have sufficient knowledge to follow the cases and would doze off. He tried to get work as a teacher, but without a BA he was at a disadvantage. He did some free work which built his confidence but his first appearance at court was a disaster. He was appearing for the defendant in the Small Causes Court; when the time came to examine the plaintiff’s witness, he recounted, ‘I stood up but my heart sank into my boots. My head was reeling and I felt as though the whole court was doing likewise. I could think of no question to ask. The judge must have laughed, and the vakils [court pleaders] no doubt enjoyed the spectacle.’³ Gandhi sat down and told the agent he could not conduct the case; he returned his fee and hastened away from the court in shame. He was not to go to court again until he had left India.

Gandhi could no longer justify the expense of keeping an establishment in Bombay and moved back to Rajkot, now working with his brother who had set up as a lawyer in partnership with more experienced man. Gandhi now worked drafting applications and other legal documents, in which capacity he was not obliged to address the court.

Gandhi’s indebtedness to his brother led him into the worst mistake of his professional life. When Laxmidas had been secretary to the heir to the throne of Porbandar he had overlooked the theft by the young man of some state jewels. Indian princes were not allowed to sequester the property of their state for personal use and the matter was being looked into by the British political agent Charles Ollivant. Gandhi had met Ollivant in London and had a passingly friendly relationship with him. Laxmidas seized on this and urged him to use his influence with the Englishman. Gandhi resisted, telling Laxmidas to submit a petition in the proper way—if he were innocent, he would be vindicated. Laxmidas persisted, telling Gandhi he did not know the world, and certainly did not know Kathiawar: ‘Only influence counts here. It is not proper for you, a brother, to shirk your duty when you can clearly put in a good word about me to an officer you know.’⁴

With reluctance Gandhi sought an audience with Ollivant, visited the important man in his office and reminded him of their acquaintance. He began to speak about the case. Ollivant resented even the suspicion that he could be prejudiced by a personal appeal: ‘Your brother is an intriguer,’ he said. ‘I want to hear nothing more from you. I have no time. If your brother has anything to say, let him apply through the proper channel’ Gandhi should have apologised and left but instead compounded the offence by continuing with his story. ‘You must go now,’ the political agent said, but Gandhi begged to be allowed to continue, whereupon Ollivant sent for his peon (attendant) who placed his hands on Gandhi’s shoulder and sent him out of the room.

Instead of reflecting on what had happened, Gandhi was outraged at his treatment and immediately sent a note saying: ‘You have insulted me. You have assaulted me through your peon. If you make no amends, I shall have to proceed against you.’ This foolishness elicited the response: ‘You were rude to me. I asked you to go and you would not. I had no option but to order my peon to show you the door. Even after he asked you to leave you did not do so. He therefore had to use just enough force to send you out. You are at liberty to proceed as you wish.’

Gandhi was miserable and confused as to his future path. What could he now do? His brother could not help, so he asked for the advice of a senior barrister, one Pherozeshah Mehta, who told him to do nothing—he would gain nothing by proceeding against the political officer, and could ruin himself. Gandhi took this good advice, but now he was really in a fix as most of his work in the region would be in the political agent’s court. He felt he had to get away from the poisonous atmosphere of Kathiawar.

While Gandhi was struggling with this question of how to make a living, Laxmidas heard of a Porbandar merchant firm, Dada Abdulla & Company, that had built up a business in South Africa and needed a barrister to help with a big case. The fee would be good, with first-class travel and all living expenses paid. Dada Abdulla, who was based in Natal while his brother ran the business in Porbandar, had a trading empire operating between India and South Africa where he ran his own fleet. Though barely literate, Abdulla had made his fortune several times over, notably in the gold rush of 1888–90 when he was able to buy gold at thirteen rupees to the pound. He needed a man such as Gandhi as an intermediary between his lawyers, who spoke no Gujarati, and himself (having only poor English). Gandhi, proficient in both languages, legally qualified and familiar with the trading milieu (he came from the Gujarati merchant caste, after all), was in the right place at the right time.

In April 1893 he set sail for Africa, leaving Kasturbai with Harilal, now five, and Manilal, just six months old. It was with some regret that he said goodbye to Kasturbai: the maturity he had developed in London was finally bearing fruit in his relationships, and they had been getting on better in recent months.

When the steamer reached Durban, the main port of Natal, he was met by the elderly Dada Abdulla, who viewed this smartly dressed young man in his frock-coat, striped trousers and black turban with some suspicion. Clearly, Gandhi was going to have to prove himself. He immediately noticed the contempt with which Indians were treated by Europeans in South Africa. The political manifestation of this contempt, rather than case law, was to underlie his major work here.

Asians were resented because they seemed an unstoppable force—there was an apparently inexhaustible supply of migrants from India and China; in South Africa their ability to live frugally and work hard meant they prospered, their supportive family structures providing the ideal setting for raising children. If the Europeans let them, they feared the Asians would soon outnumber the whites and outperform them economically. Neither the Asians nor the Europeans paid much attention to the native Africans who, at the end of the nineteenth century, were politically inchoate.

After a day or so spent settling in, Gandhi was taken by Dada Abdulla to the Durban court. When the magistrate saw that the young lawyer was wearing his Western dress with a turban, he told him to remove his headdress. Gandhi thought this a preposterous request, refused, and walked out of the court. Court reporters noted the event and Gandhi’s insistence on wearing his turban in court made headlines in the local press. His arrival was thus widely advertised within days of his setting foot in the country. It was not obvious to him how he should proceed in dealing with this matter—he wondered whether he should henceforth wear British dress entirely, but as Indian waiters and other serving people who had adopted Christianity did so, this would be seen to be breaking faith with those Indians who had retained their culture while in Africa. He therefore maintained his combination of frock-coat and trousers plus turban.

His grounding in Roman law served him well in South Africa where many of the laws were based on Dutch law, which had taken elements of Roman jurisprudence as its foundation. However, Gandhi knew nothing of accounts, the subject on which the case he was dealing with turned, so he bought a book and taught himself as much as he needed to know. Once he was up to speed, he was sent to Pretoria in the Transvaal where the case between Dada Abdulla and Tyeb Khan Mohammed was to be heard. Tyeb Khan Mohammed occupied in the Boer republic of the Transvaal the same position of trading seniority that Dada Abdulla had in the British colony of Natal.

In the 1890s, South Africa comprised four areas. The two British ones were the Cape Colony, which was self-governing under the Crown; and Natal which was a Crown colony. The two Boer republics were the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. There could be racial discrimination in any of these places, but for Indians the most severe was to be found in the Orange Free State, where they were forbidden to live. In the Transvaal they were tolerated, but poorly treated. When Gandhi was travelling to Pretoria, he was moving from a more or less tolerant British regime to a draconian Boer one. For the part of the journey that was by train, he travelled in a first-class compartment as far as Pietermaritzburg, the capital of Natal, at which point a European passenger boarded and sought two railway officials to have him taken along to the van compartment. As Gandhi would not leave voluntarily a compartment for which he had paid the appropriate fare, they summoned a policeman, who threw him out and his baggage after him. He still would not go to another, inferior compartment. The train left and he sat all night in the cold, dark station waiting-room; his overcoat was in his luggage but the railway officials had that, and he did not want to invite further insult by asking for it.

Gandhi had little experience of racial prejudice. Doubtless he met with some in London, but not enough to be worth remarking on in his letters or memoirs. In Britain foreigners were regarded with indifference or welcomed as physical representations of the breadth of the British Empire. They added to the colour and variety of London life; they were visitors who had come to enjoy and contribute and then to leave. Among the girls he met and at the Vegetarian Society Gandhi, far from being reviled, encountered curiosity to the point of fascination. His stay at the heart of empire had given him an experience of people of different types and backgrounds getting on together, of the tolerance and decency of cosmopolitan society. The British considered themselves the superior nation, their pre-eminence evinced by their imperial dominance. Whites so outnumbered non-whites that there was no perception of a threat. In South Africa, however, non-white people vastly outnumbered whites; white domination needed for its maintenance not just force but an ideology based on racial superiority. In South Africa Gandhi was witnessing, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, the creation of a unified racial state. The Boers, via the Dutch Reformed Church, had a thoroughly worked-out scriptural justification for their racial stratification of society, which to them had quite as much validity as, for example, the Hindu imposition of ‘untouchability’ on their society. The white masters could convince themselves that they were not perpetrating a system of injustice, but doing the work of God in keeping the races separate.

Indians fitted between the black African and white populations as racial and cultural intermediaries. They were Muslim businessmen (who were often referred to as ‘Arabs,’ though they were not), Indian Christians who were in the service industries, Parsi clerks, and Hindus who for the most part came as indentured labourers. Under this latter system an Indian workforce was imported to serve five years of tied labour. The arrangement came about because the Europeans found Africans unwilling to work for wages in the regimented fashion necessary for modern production, and the shortage of opportunities back in India led to many Indians remaining after their period of work. As this community grew and settled, a merchant class became attracted to the area, paying their own passage from India. However, because of the labouring origin of the community they were collectively called coolies.’ In South Africa Gandhi was not a man respected for his travels or his education or because he had been born into a family in public service; here he was a ‘coolie barrister.’

Gandhi debated the whole night at the Pietermaritzburg station whether he should forget this job and return to India, or whether he should go on to Pretoria, fighting for his rights. The hardship he experienced, he felt, was superficial, only a symptom of the deep disease of colour prejudice. Later he described his inner struggle as the one experience that had changed the course of his life: ‘My active non-violence began from that date.’⁵

In the morning he sent a telegram to the general manager of the railway, and to Dada Abdulla. Dada Abdulla also contacted the railway authorities and sent a message to Indian traders at Pietermaritzburg to go to the station to meet Gandhi. Dada Abdulla’s reputation was such that his will was done and Gandhi had a parade of traders visiting to give him comfort and tell him their stories of similar insults over which they had been unwilling to fight. In the evening the next train arrived with a first-class berth reserved for Gandhi—the protests had brought a result. Being the agent of a powerful man such as Dada Abdulla added practical power to moral indignation; it was a lesson well worth knowing.

When Gandhi arrived at Charlestown and proceeded on the next leg of his journey, which had to be by stagecoach as there was no rail link, he experienced another display of racism. First he was told, mendaciously, that his ticket was ‘cancelled,’ then when he stood his ground he was allowed to approach the coach but the conductor refused to allow him to sit inside. The conductor normally sat next to the driver but he gave this seat to Gandhi and sat inside the coach. When the coach stopped, however, the conductor wanted to smoke and ordered Gandhi down. ‘Sami, you sit on this,’ he ordered, telling his passenger to sit on the running-board.⁶ Gandhi refused to sit at his feet, but was prepared to sit inside. The conductor began to strike him and tried to drag him down. Now the passengers started to protest, thereby teaching Gandhi a valuable lesson—that injustice played out in public is likely to stimulate protests from the apparently disinterested. The passengers were prepared to allow Gandhi to sit with them rather than witness a beating. But rather than tolerate such a breach of racial protocol the conductor ordered a black servant who was sitting on the other side of the coachbox to sit on the footboard, and Gandhi took the servant’s place.

When he reached Johannesburg, in the Boer territory of the Transvaal, it was night. Gandhi called a cab and was taken to the National Hotel but they said they had no room. He went to the home of an Indian associated with Dada Abdulla’s company and was welcomed there, where more people told him tales of insult and unjust treatment. They laughed that he had expected the National Hotel to give him a room and told him that when he set off for to Pretoria he would have to travel third-class.

He ordered a first-class ticket and picked it up from the station master who, by chance, was a European but not a Boer and was not inclined to refuse him, but he could not speak for the railway guard. Sure enough, when the guard came to collect tickets in the first-class compartment he ordered Gandhi to go to third-class. Again, it was an ordinary passenger who protested, the only other person in the compartment, an Englishman who defended Gandhi’s right to travel first-class with the appropriate ticket.

In Pretoria, he again found trouble when seeking a hotel but a black American traveller directed him to one run by an American. He was allowed a room, but not to dine with other guests; he must eat in his room. Later, instead of a waiter arriving with his dinner, the patron came: I was ashamed of having to ask you to have your dinner here,’ he said. He had spoken to the other guests and none objected to Gandhi’s dining with them, so he joined them.⁷

These details of petty racial prejudice are worth noting because it was here that Gandhi observed the state as it functioned on the ordinary level. The problem was not so much major laws that oppressed a racial group in particular areas of life, but everywhere, every interaction between the whites and other races was oppressive—an oppression which was mitigated from case to case by decent people for whom such a state of affairs was clearly an abomination. Gandhi was personally offended, but more importantly he was morally outraged. Worse than this, he was ashamed of his Indian fellow sufferers for putting up with such treatment.

Gandhi showed himself an excellent lawyer in preparing the facts of Dada Abdulla & Co.’s case, which entailed the huge sum of £40,000. Having mastered the case, however, he realised that if it went to court it could ruin both the plaintiff and the defendant, Tyeb Khan Mohammed, who were relatives. Lawyers’ fees were devouring all their resources and their time was so occupied with the case that they could do little else. Gandhi successfully persuaded them to hand the case over to arbitration at which his client won (perhaps he would not have suggested arbitration if he had felt his client would lose). Gandhi then succeeded in negotiating an agreement between the parties which allowed payment by instalments, so the loser did not have to go bankrupt. He remarked joyfully: ‘I realised that the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder.’⁸ He would not find universal agreement on that assessment, but he received the respect of influential men in his community for his skills; he had become a person to whom others would listen.

His solicitor in the case (Gandhi was a barrister who would plead in court, having been prepared by a solicitor) was Albert Baker, a lawyer and director of the South African General Mission that worked to bring Africans to the Christian Church. Baker was a fundamentalist Christian of the best type: he believed salvation could come only by accepting Jesus as the son of God, but preached his doctrine with an indifference to colour or rank that transcended the divisions of South African society. Baker helped Gandhi to find a place to stay, and Gandhi, eager to learn about other religions, attended prayer meetings with Christians, who attempted to convert him—without success, though he read the books his new friends offered him. At this time he was said to have read about eighty books on religion.⁹

As he could be harassed by the police while out at night, a Quaker friend took him to meet the State Attorney Dr F.E.T. Krause, who had been called to the British Bar via the same Inn as Gandhi. He was sympathetic and gave his young colleague a letter saying he could be out of doors at all hours. He also introduced Gandhi to his brother, the public prosecutor in Johannesburg. Gandhi was thus creating a network via the law and his Christian friends that would prove invaluable in his work for the Indian community.

Gandhi writes that early in his life in Pretoria, while he was working on the Dada Abdulla case, he determined to get in touch with every Indian living there with a view to understanding their lives and improving them. ‘My first step was to call a meeting of all the Indians in Pretoria and to present them with a picture of their conditions in the Transvaal,’ he wrote.¹⁰ To this end, he made the acquaintance of his client’s adversary Tyeb Khan Mohammed, the most powerful Indian in the Transvaal—he does not suggest that such contact was unusual behaviour for a lawyer, which is an indication of what an unusual member of his profession he was.

So he called a meeting in June 1893 at the house of a Muslim whose acquaintance he had made. Most of those present were Muslim merchants, whom he urged to forget communal, religious and provincial distinctions in a common Indian interest. He stressed the idea that business and truth were not incompatible, and that religion and practical affairs should go hand in hand. In his first recorded moral preaching to what would become his community he declared that he was ‘awaken[ing] the merchants to a sense of their duty, which was twofold. Their responsibility to be truthful was all the greater in a foreign land, because the conduct of a few Indians was the measure of that of the millions of their fellow-countrymen.’¹¹ Secondly, they needed to clean up: he drew their attention to the Indians’ poor sanitary habits ‘as compared with those of the Englishmen around them’; and finally he urged them to learn English, offering his services to those few young men who wished to do so.

In other words he gave them a pep talk rather like those delivered by head teachers to their charges impressing upon them that they were ambassadors for their school or, in this case, for their nation, and that they had to set aside bad habits. Why they consented to be so addressed about the morality of their trade and of their daily lives is questionable. Curiosity must have played a part, about a man who had been educated in England and had been brought to South Africa in the expectation that his abilities would be useful. The fact that he was already in the confidence of the most powerful men in the community also helped him to gain an audience.

Gandhi offered a complete self-improvement package: moral uplift (truth in business), practical advance (sanitation) and education (learning English). It is telling that it was the British he wanted to impress with his raising of the living standards of his compatriots, rather than the Boers, in one of whose republics he was speaking. Perhaps he thought the Boers were too much of a hard case to crack whereas the British were more tractable and open-minded, or perhaps he was using ‘Englishmen’ as a generic term for ‘white.’

Doubtless Gandhi addressed the subjects he said he did. However, in his autobiography he omits any political context so as to make his engagement with the Indian traders entirely a matter of moral leadership; it is a characteristic of his biographical writing that it reflects his concerns at the time of writing, in this case the 1920s, rather than applying a historical perspective. His own writings and, even more strongly, later pictures of this period present South Africa as a tabula rasa before he began to make his impression upon it, as if he alone were able and willing to fight against the racial oppression of the Indians, who had apparently done nothing for themselves before his arrival. In fact there were already powerful Indian self-help organisations acting within the community, and there had already been some engagement in political activity.

As Gandhi told it, he became the reluctant hero of the next stage in the story of South African democracy. He had completed his work on the Dada Abdulla case and was to return to India. When he arrived in Durban, in Natal, he chanced to see a paragraph in a newspaper under the headline ‘Indian Franchise.’ It concerned a bill then before the House of Legislature of Natal which sought to deprive Indians of their right to elect members of the legislative assembly. At a farewell dinner given for him he drew this to the attention of Dada Abdulla, who replied: ‘What can we understand in these matters? We can only understand things that affect our trade. As you know, all our trade in the Orange Free State has been swept away. We agitated about it, but in vain... What can we know of legislation?’¹² He explained that the Indians had registered to vote in order to support Harry Escombe, a European lawyer who had worked as a legal adviser to Abdulla’s firm, and it was because of their involvement in this that moves had been taken to disenfranchise them.

It is clear that Dada Abdulla, despite protesting his lack of interest, did know something about the politics of South Africa. White settlers were resentful of the success of Indian traders, and Indians had consequently been expelled from the Orange Free State; they were understandably anxious about their position in Natal and the Transvaal. They did not need a Gandhi to tell them their future was uncertain. Dada Abdulla headed the Durban Indian Committee that met on an ad hoc basis to discuss subjects affecting the trading community. The year before Gandhi’s arrival the committee had sent a list of grievances to the Natal Colonial Secretary which had been dismissed out of hand. This may have accounted for apparent Indian indifference over the franchise bill—they knew there was no official regard for their opinions.

They were encouraged by Gandhi’s eloquence, however, and other guests joined in, begging him to stay—‘and we will fight as you direct us.’ The merchants seemed quite aware of the significance of the bill, which might well be a prelude to an attack on their commercial interests. Gandhi, as a currently unemployed lawyer who was fluent in English and Gujarati and well connected in the community among both the Indians and the English, was ambitious to make his mark. The traders offered him fees for his services, which he refused, saying he should take no fees for public work. This was a typically magnanimous gesture on Gandhi’s part but one that put all those for whose interests he worked in his debt, whereas accepting payment would have made him their servant.

Gandhi immediately displayed the organisational zeal and attention to detail that were to distinguish the next fifty years of his public life. The bill disenfranchising Indians was about to pass its second reading. He therefore first called for more time to prepare his case, sending a telegram to the Speaker of the assembly asking him to postpone discussion of the bill. The Speaker responded well to this audacious request and gave the Indians two more days. Gandhi then wrote a petition arguing that Indians ‘had a right to the Franchise in Natal,’ had it copied by hand and the merchants went out in their own carriages or hired vehicles to obtain as many signatures as possible. Newspapers printed the petition and responded positively to it. The bill went on to pass its second reading, but Gandhi counted it a victory that the community had been mobilised and organised a larger petition calling for the bill to be vetoed at its next stage. Teams of volunteers gathered ten thousand signatures for the new petition and presented it to Lord Ripon, Secretary of State for the Colonies. In response Ripon disallowed the bill for introducing a specifically racial distinction into the franchise, and another, murkily worded bill was passed which admitted to the rolls only voters whose native countries had the parliamentary franchise—Indians had only a municipal franchise in their homeland and so were excluded in South Africa.

Gandhi was persuaded to stay in Natal by his fellow countrymen, who implored and flattered him, and he finally consented. He continued to insist on receiving no payment for his public services but contended that he needed at least £300 a year to run an independent household. He felt he could not add to the credit of his community unless he lived in a style appropriate to barristers. He would stay if they guaranteed that income from legal work; about twenty merchants therefore awarded him a retainer, and Dada Abdulla furnished his new home, Beach Grove Villa, a two-storey house with an iron front gate and a veranda overlooking the beach in Durban.

Gandhi later claimed that he saw practice as a lawyer as ‘a subordinate occupation’ to public work but, having found his vocation in representing public protest movements, he still had to remain in practice to make a living. The Law Society of Natal opposed his application for admission to the Supreme Court as a barrister, but Gandhi had sensibly asked two Europeans for the necessary letters of recommendation to vouch for his good character. He had his application presented by the now Attorney General Harry Escombe, who had been an adviser to Dada Abdulla & Company and was Gandhi’s next-door neighbour at his new residence. The Law Society asked for further particulars about Gandhi, which were supplied, after which it continued to oppose his application. When it was finally heard the court declared it could see no distinction in law between whites and non-whites and allowed him admission. He was, however, asked to remove his turban and this time he was prepared to do it: it was one of those occasions when Gandhi compromised a small issue of principle in pursuit of the fruits of more important battles. His dress at this time included a European suit, a wing collar, a tie and polished shoes.

The Indian traders founded the Natal Indian Congress on 22 August 1894 to ‘cope with the legislative activity, of a retrograde character, of the first Responsible Government of the Colony with regard to Indians.’¹³ Though membership was open to ‘any person approving of [its] work’ the annual fee of £3 limited its membership to the relatively wealthy. Gandhi took to collecting the subscriptions and discovered the truism of voluntary organisations: that it is easier to extract money when there is an exciting event on which to focus; the maintenance of the organisation stimulated no such enthusiasm.

The Muslim traders had a community of interests in their businesses but Gandhi struggled to have them see their collective identity as Indians. The Natal Indian Congress had as one of its objectives the alleviation of the suffering of the indentured labourers, who were Hindus; Gandhi also urged his compatriots to accept that Christian Indians were Indians too. ‘I felt this class should be claimed as our own,’ he said; ‘did they cease to be Indians because they had become Christians?’¹⁴ Gandhi was only theoretically successful in his attempts to widen the remit of the Congress’s work. The organisation in fact emphasised protection for the trading and social status of Indian businessmen which meant they were an essentially conservative organisation that was not inclined to challenge the existing social order. The Congress had to ensure that traders continued to enjoy the privileges that their wealth and entrepreneurial abilities merited. By the same token the assumed racial inferiority of coloureds,’ those of mixed race, and of Africans was written into the traders’ attempts to maintain their own position.

Whether Gandhi appreciated these contradictions at the time is uncertain. Politically he recognised the divisions Europeans imposed on the society they ruled. As he said to an audience in 1896: ‘Ours is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy his wife with and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness.’¹⁵ He appealed to Lord Ripon, Secretary of State for the Colonies, not to allow the ill-treatment of the Indians, which would cause them to ‘degenerate, so much so, that from their civilised habits, they would be degraded to the habits of the aboriginal natives.’¹⁶ In writing about the Africans nearly thirty years later, in 1924, he would comment: ‘It is only vanity which make us look upon the Negroes as savages. They are not the barbarians we imagine them to be.’¹⁷

The spiritual equality among Gandhi’s nonconformist Christian friends contrasted with the inbuilt inequality of Hinduism, in which a person was born a Brahmin or an untouchable and had to live out his or her life according to the rules laid down for the respective groups. Gandhi later thought of his own racial humiliations as ‘the reward’ for untouchability. He remarked after an English barber in Pretoria had refused to cut his hair: “We do not allow our barbers to serve our untouchable brethren. I got the reward for this in South Africa, not once, but many times, and the conviction that it was the punishment for our own sins saved me from becoming angry.’¹⁸ He was certainly promoting an ecumenical approach to life, dining with Christians, Muslims and Parsis and even inviting an untouchable to live with him. It is notable that Gandhi thinks of himself as experiencing a humiliation as a punishment for the collective ‘sins’ of Hindus. Why should that have been, unless he felt himself marked out for some role as a man of destiny?

Another theme in his life, that of caring for the poor, now begins to be mentioned in his record whereas it had not been a feature earlier. Gandhi had previously, in Kathiawar, London and South Africa, been concerned with the middle class—first public servants, then lawyers, then merchants. ‘Service of the poor has been my heart’s desire,’ he remarks, not obviously relating this to any time period. He tells in his autobiography of how in 1894 as a twenty-five-year-old lawyer he received a visit from a Tamil indentured labourer who had been severely beaten by his employer who had broken his two front teeth. Gandhi, using the interpreting services of his clerk who was also a Tamil, sent the wretched man to a doctor who certified his injuries, then took him to a magistrate who issued a summons. Armed with this, Gandhi went to the man’s master, a leading European citizen of Durban, and gave him his options: to be prosecuted or to release the indentured servant from his employ. The European, doubtless amazed at Gandhi’s temerity, took the latter course and Gandhi found a decent European (no Indians kept indentured labourers) with whom the man could serve out his term.

The incident shows Gandhi’s commitment to taking the moral course of action in the public sphere—and his confidence that the British authorities would support him in a just case, which was an important part of his advocacy. He talks of indentured labourers now considering him as their friend and a stream of them pouring through his office, so he ‘got the best opportunity of learning their joys and sorrows.’¹⁹

The government in Natal attempted to impose an annual tax of £25 on indentured Indians who wished to stay in South Africa after their period of indenture had expired. The objective was to make it unprofitable for them to remain and prevent the further development of the Indian minority who, it was feared, were prospering in such a way that might threaten the small white community. The Natal Indian Congress opposed the tax at any level. Their opposition doubtless contributed to its reduction to £3 per adult, though it was still a bitterly resented imposition that was not remitted for almost twenty years. Much more in line with the Natal Indian Congress’s core concerns, as a middle-class pressure group, was the proposal by the government to introduce a bill ‘providing that no person of Asiatic race, birth or descent should be allowed to take out a licence for the purpose of trading as a storekeeper,’ which was dropped in 1894.²⁰

Gandhi, and the Indians in South Africa generally, had confidence in the justice of British rule. Believing it to be on the whole beneficial to the ruled, they sang the national anthem at their meetings. The Indians of Natal and the Transvaal sent an address to Queen Victoria on her Diamond Jubilee in 1897, drafted by Gandhi, which said, “We are proud to think that we are your subjects, the more so as we know that the peace we enjoy in India, and the confidence of security of life and prosperity which enables us to venture abroad, are due to that position.’²¹

Gandhi, as a citizen of more than one world, could see how the Europeans viewed the Indians: he remarked on ‘our indifference to the laws of hygiene and sanitation, our slowness in keeping our surroundings clean and tidy, our stinginess in keeping our houses in good repair.’²² This made him a rather more balanced nationalist than the many who remarked on the victimhood of their race or argued for the superiority of their own culture. He was also undergoing experiences that led him to question the accuracy of received notions about the superiority of the upper castes. When, briefly back in India in 1896, he volunteered to work on a sanitation committee at a time of plague in Rajkot, he found the standards of hygiene of the rich to be disgusting; the poor were at least prepared to improve their condition, while the homes of the untouchables were clean, however lacking in possessions.

Gandhi had a cook at Beach Grove Villa, various of his clerks boarded with him and he often had English and Indian guests, so his house was an embryonic form of the communities he was later to set up. His trusting nature was again exposed as a weak point when he invited Sheikh Mehtab, his old childhood friend, to live with him when Mehtab arrived in Natal. Gandhi took him in as a companion and effectively as manager of his household. He was always attracted to bad boys—he felt he could reform them. He does not seem to have been inoculated by his experiences in his youth against Mehtab’s sly character.

Gandhi took heed one day when Mehtab criticised an office clerk who was also staying at Beach Grove Villa, becoming suspicious of the clerk, who at the first suggestion of mistrust angrily left the house, and Gandhi’s employment. Gandhi’s cook took it upon himself to expose Mehtab. He fetched Gandhi from his office, not telling him why he wanted his master home early for lunch that day. When they reached the house the cook led him upstairs to Mehtab’s room. Gandhi knocked loudly on the door and Mehtab opened it—he had been having sex with a prostitute. Gandhi immediately cast him out, saying he would never have anything to do with him again. Mehtab threatened to ‘expose’ him, at which empty threat Gandhi said he would call the police. His former friend left. Gandhi was distraught: he felt that ‘in the attempt to reform him I was ruining myself.’²³ His final word on the ‘the long tale, pleasant as well as pathetic,’ of his relationship with Mehtab was that ‘he continued to worship me from a distance.’²⁴

Objectively, the offence was less serious than Gandhi made it out to be: sexual licence does not, as Gandhi seemed to think, denote an irredeemably vicious character; his response was extreme, as it usually was with sexual matters. It was the case, however, that in conservative South Africa it would have put him outside respectable society if he permitted his house to be used for assignations with prostitutes. There is also the element of miscegenation: the prostitute was probably African—Indian men vastly outnumbered Indian women in South Africa—so such sex would be doubly disparaged in the racial state.

Gandhi puts this episode of misplaced trust in a cosmic setting: ‘God came to the rescue... The cook had been almost a messenger sent from heaven.’ The wise cook (who, incidentally, was said to be very bad at his job) also left Gandhi’s employment, complaining that Gandhi was too easily misled. Doubtless for the same reason the innocent clerk, whom he had suspected, would not be reconciled with Gandhi even after he had apologised.

Gandhi resumed his experiments with ‘vital food,’ eating only raw vegetables, cereals, fruit and nuts until ill-health forced him to revert to a more sensible diet. He would always consider, though, that control of the needs of his body would lead to control of the outside world—a very dubious proposition. His sanctimonious streak irritated even those who had shown him friendship. At one time he had a standing invitation to have Sunday lunch with a simple Christian family who were good enough to accommodate his dietary requirements, yet he was still unable to resist exhorting their five-year-old son to vegetarianism: I spoke derisively of the piece of meat on his plate and in high praise of the apple on mine.’²⁵ This, together with his comparing Buddha with Jesus, unfavourably to the latter, led to their mutually agreeing he would visit them no more.

After three years in South Africa Gandhi returned to India for a visit, taking the opportunity of travelling by boat to Calcutta, for self-improvement as usual: he found an Urdu-speaker among the other passengers to help him learn the language, which was mostly spoken among the Muslims of India. He also bought a self-help book to teach himself Tamil so he could communicate with the Indians of the Madras area, from which most of the indentured labourers came.

Later on this journey, when he missed his train at Allahabad he characteristically used the time fruitfully and sought an interview with the editor of one of India’s leading newspapers, the Pioneer. He was impressed by Gandhi and said he would publish material on the Indians in South Africa, though he would not commit the paper to support the Indian cause there. Gandhi was pleased, asking for no more than a fair hearing; he believed the facts alone would win the argument. This meeting encouraged him to feel there was an audience for his work, and back in Rajkot he engaged in his first major writing project, a description of the conditions of Indians in South Africa; he took a deliberately subdued tone as he did not wish to be accused of exaggeration and he knew that distance would anyway lend power to his argument.

He had ten thousand copies printed of The Grievances of the British Indians in South Africa: An Appeal to the Indian Public, which became known as the Green Pamphlet from the colour of its cover. Gandhi had copies sent to every newspaper and party leader in India. For the work of wrapping the leaflets and addressing them he used the volunteer labour of his sons and local children. The Pioneer covered the leaflet, as its editor had promised, publishing an article based on it, that was picked up by Reuters news agency in London and distributed in a truncated form by them, to Natal among other places. It was Gandhi’s first appearance on the international stage, though it did not name him: ‘A pamphlet published in India declares that the Indians in Natal are robbed and assaulted, and treated like beasts, and are unable to obtain redress,’²⁶

With the active assistance of Pherozeshah Mehta, the barrister who had previously advised him and who was a leading member of the local authority the Bombay Corporation, Gandhi organised a public meeting in Bombay. Mehta, the dominant figure in nationalist politics, would be knighted for services to the British Empire in 1904. He advised the young man not to extemporise as he had intended, but to write out his speech and print it. Pherozeshah chaired the meeting and encouraged the still hesitant Gandhi to speak up. Eventually he gave the prepared speech to a supporter who was a fine orator, and the audience received it with enthusiasm. Gandhi travelled around India meeting influential people and educating them as to the conditions of Indians in South Africa. By thus working on behalf of the Natal Indian Congress he was demonstrating his qualifications for national campaigning when he returned more permanently to India. He made a point of meeting the two leading contenders for Pherozeshah’s position of pre-eminence in the nationalist movement: Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Gopal Krishna Gokhale. He found Tilak uncongenial but said he ‘fell in love with’ Gokhale who was impressed by Gandhi and assured him of his support.²⁷

He went on to Madras, impressing the Tamil people with his tale of the beaten labourer whose indenture he had transferred to a decent employer. In Calcutta he faced an uphill struggle in interesting people who felt they had troubles enough of their own. He was attempting to organise a public meeting in the city when he received a cable from Durban calling him back to South Africa.

He had returned to Rajkot where he had been reunited with his wife whom he had not seen for three years, and his two sons, to whom he was a stranger. With her eldest sister-in-law head of the Gandhi household, Kasturbai had been living as an inferior wife. She knew little of Gandhi’s life. Since she was illiterate he did not write to her; she would have heard his formal letters to his brother read out. From this she would have known that he was prospering and that from his successful law business he was able to pay off the debts incurred on his behalf for his education. His self-assurance and evident success must have pleased Kasturbai. He told her he was ready to take her back to South Africa with him and she would doubtless have been thrilled to know she was getting her own house at last, even if in another country.

Gandhi travelled with his wife, his sons and Gokaldas, son of his widowed sister, on the Courland, a ship owned by Dada Abdulla & Company; their passage was supplied by the owner, gratis. The most respected Asians in South Africa were Parsis, so Gandhi had his wife dress in the fashion adopted by Parsi women: a long sari, long-sleeved blouse, socks and shoes; the boys wore Parsi coats and trousers. Thus he hoped his family would be considered respectable. He had Kasturbai practise wearing shoes and socks on the deck of the ship from Bombay to South Africa, insisting she wore them all day, which she found onerous. He also taught them to eat with utensils, sitting at a table and coming to terms with the unaccustomed bland European food.

The crossing was stormy but Gandhi was a good sailor and he was able to move among the passengers, encouraging and comforting them. After eighteen days the Courland and another ship of Dada Abdulla’s that had shared the crossing arrived at Durban. Health officials came aboard and ordered that the ships be held in quarantine—this was standard procedure if a vessel came from an area where there had been plague. The ships’ captains and owners dutifully acceded, but after five days the quarantine was extended. It became clear to Gandhi from reports that reached him from Dada Abdulla & Co. that the bacillus being denied entry into South Africa was himself. The scaremongering story was that Gandhi was coming back bringing hundreds of new immigrants who would be fighting for their rights. The charges of racial discrimination laid in the Green Pamphlet had been circulated in Natal, initially because of the Reuters report based on the Pioneer article, but coverage continued with accounts of Gandhi’s speeches in India.

The government wanted to intimidate the immigrants into returning to India or, more realistically, keep them at bay until public attention had turned elsewhere. Huge meetings of angry whites were called in Durban, under the banner of organisations with names like the European Protection League and the Colonial Patriotic Union, which issued threats to Dada Abdulla & Co. to induce them to turn the ships around; there were even offers of compensation for the company if it did so. The quarantine lasted over the Christmas period. On Christmas Day Gandhi and his family were invited to dine with the captain. Gandhi made an after-dinner speech, talking earnestly on ‘Western civilisation’ when in fact the occasion called for a lighter touch. ‘I deplored the civilisation of which the Natal whites were the fruit, and which they represented and championed,’ he later remembered.²⁸

He bore heavily the burden of the danger he had brought to the company. He knew he had led the generous Dada Abdulla on a course that would oblige him to fight for principle, rather than simply trading, and he had jeopardised the lives of his own family and the other passengers, for threats were being made that the passengers would be drowned before the mob would allow them to land. Any pretence that the question was one of quarantine had long since passed; the quarantine officer admitted that he was receiving his orders direct from the government. Finally on 11 January 1897, after being detained for twenty-three days, the Courland and the Naderi were allowed to dock and the passengers to disembark. Crowds of white demonstrators assembled to prevent the immigrants coming ashore. Harry Escombe was able to disperse them only by giving an assurance that the ‘Indian question’ would be dealt with in an early session of parliament.²⁹

Gandhi had been advised by a message from Harry Escombe, who had no wish to see public disorder over Gandhi or the immigrants, that he should not himself disembark until dusk and that the port superintendent would escort him and his family home. Dada Abdulla & Company’s lawyer Frederick Laughton, however, suggested that Kasturbai and the children should go to the house of a Parsi friend, Jivanji Rustomji, while Gandhi and Laughton would enter the port on foot. He was concerned about the dignity of the enterprise and Gandhi’s pride was touched—he did not want to enter by stealth as if he were ashamed of the views he had put forward or afraid of his enemies.

So he went ashore with Laughton, but as soon as he did so some children recognised him and started shouting his name. Around half a dozen men joined them, Laughton hailed a rickshaw in which to escape, but the frightened rickshaw boy ran away.

The crowd quickly grew, Laughton was grabbed and separated from Gandhi, who was then pelted with stones and other missiles—someone snatched his turban and others kicked and pummelled him. He began to faint and caught hold of the railings in front of a house to steady himself but the blows kept coming. Jane Alexander, the wife of the Durban police superintendent, saw the commotion and, armed only with her parasol, stepped in between Gandhi and the mob to protect him, shouting ‘Cowards!’ at his assailants. As they could not harm him without harming her, the mob desisted.

An Indian who had seen the attack ran to the police station to alert them, and a police posse was sent out to escort Gandhi and disperse the crowd. Richard Alexander, the superintendent, suggested he take refuge in the police station but Gandhi, failing to understand crowd behaviour, declined the offer with ‘They are sure to quiet down when they realise their mistake. I have trust in their sense of fairness.’³⁰ So, escorted by police, he went in broad daylight to Jivanji Rustomji’s home where his wife and children were already waiting; doubtless, they greeted the sight of the bruised and bloodied Gandhi with horror.

The mob now knew where Gandhi was and as night drew on, a crowd gathered outside the Parsi merchant’s house as word spread of their target’s presence there. They called for Gandhi to be delivered to them, and threatened Rustomji. Superintendent Alexander arrived with reinforcements but realised the situation was beyond him, and feared the mob would raze the house to the ground. He sent a message to Gandhi that if he wanted to save Jivanji Rustomji’s house, and his own family, he should escape in disguise. Gandhi had been asked this twice before—by Harry Escombe when he was on the ship and by Alexander when they were passing the police station. Now Alexander had got the measure of the man: by appealing to his interest in protecting others, he finally had Gandhi do the sensible thing and lie low under police protection.

Alexander kept the crowds occupied by leading them in a song that went ‘Hang old Gandhi/On a sour apple tree,’ while inside the house Gandhi was dressed in a police uniform with a helmet improvised out of a tin pan held on his head by a shawl. Thus disguised and accompanied by two detectives he slipped out through a neighbouring warehouse, through the still violent crowd and into a waiting carriage. Once the superintendent had been informed of his safe arrival at the police station, he told the crowd that Gandhi had escaped them. When some refused to believe his story, Alexander invited them to appoint a few representatives to search the house. After submitting the hospitable Rustomji to this indignity, the mob at last broke up.

Harry Escombe later offered to prosecute Gandhi’s assailants, if he could identify them, but Gandhi refused, somewhat querulously telling Escombe that the crowd’s leaders were to blame as well as Escombe himself for failing to guide his people. Gandhi accused him of believing that he, Gandhi, had made statements exaggerating the reprehensible behaviour of the whites in Natal, whereas he should have waited for the evidence. Ignoring Gandhi’s charge, Escombe now saw a way to draw this ugly incident to a close. He told him that if he did not press charges it would help him in restoring quiet and enhance Gandhi’s reputation. Wily administrators such as Escombe were already learning to play Gandhi, appealing to his most ‘Gandhian’ instincts, which would also serve their interests.

Gandhi had not, from this adventure, grasped the message (though that is implicit in his later account) that discretion was the better part of valour and that he should have taken Harry Escombe’s advice and crept out of his friend’s house after dark. The proposition that sometimes the authorities act in the best interests of law and order was not one that he favoured. The moral he drew from the event was the typically Gandhian one that a public display of forgiveness to his attackers would be so remarkable that it would make the Durban Europeans ashamed of their conduct.

His decision not to prosecute had an immediate international effect: for the first time Gandhi came to the attention of the British Empire. In India, the Viceroy expressed concern at the attack on him; in London the Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain called for the perpetrators to be punished. In order to release Escombe from his legal obligations, Gandhi signed an affidavit to the effect that it was his own decision not to prosecute. In fact, the publicity gained was far in excess of what would have been garnered from a court case. The Natal newspapers gave Gandhi space to explain that he had had nothing to do with organising the two shiploads of immigrants, and most were anyway not staying in Natal but heading for the Transvaal. Most importantly, nothing he had said abroad was more inflammatory than anything he said, freely and repeatedly, in Africa itself. The attention he received gave some of the Europeans cause for reflection, and also attracted clients to his law practice.

Gandhi turned this public attention to good account by making an appeal for membership and funds for the Natal Indian Congress. His experiences in South Africa had allowed him to develop a dynamic model for campaigning organisations: they should not have permanent funds, he contended, because that leads such organisations to become institutional and not responsible to the public for whom they are set up. Instead, current expenditure should be funded from subscriptions voluntarily donated from year to year, thus obliging organisations to justify themselves continuously and restraining them from becoming bigger than the causes that gave rise to them.

The publicity surrounding Gandhi also stimulated the opposition, who successfully brought in the Immigration Restriction Bill and the Dealers’ Licences Bill to restrict immigration and trade, aimed primarily at Indians. The Dealers’ Licences Bill in particular affected the big merchants who were the only committed supporters of the Natal Indian Congress, which now came to revolve around court cases that challenged refusals to renew old licences or to transfer licences to new premises.

The Gandhi family soon moved from the hospitable Rustomji home to Beach Grove Villa which had been closed during Gandhi’s absence and where for the first time in her life Kasturbai was in charge of her own household and took the name Kasturba, which indicated her seniority. She was able to understand what a respected individual her husband had become; people were always visiting him for advice. But her home was not her own for long. Gandhi invited some of his law clerks to lodge with them, and even at one time took in a leprous beggar. The man had come begging and Gandhi, indulging his passion for nursing, dressed his wounds and invited him to stay, but his needs were greater than could be provided by an ordinary household and so he took him to a government hospital for indentured labourers. Later Gandhi would increase his health-care experience by volunteering at a small hospital for two hours every morning, leaving his routine legal work to an assistant.

Gandhi’s position would have allowed him to place his children in a European school, but he did not want to benefit from favours not extended to other Indians. He anyway regarded the mission schools as inadequate, and doubtless feared they might feed his children a spiritual diet of Christianity. He therefore did not send his sons to school but engaged an English governess. Not satisfied with her instruction, he attempted to teach the children himself, but came home too late in the evening or was expecting the boys to be up too early for such exercises to be adequately described as education. Harilal, at least, spent some time at boarding school when the family returned to India. Gandhi wrote in his Autobiography about his failure to have his children properly educated: ‘All my sons have had complaints to make against me in this matter.’ He was similarly chastised by friends over this aspect of his children’s upbringing, but he persisted in believing that if he had allowed them an education that other children could not have he would have ‘deprived them of the object lesson in liberty and self-respect that I gave them at the cost of literary training.’³¹ He thus convinced himself that he made the sacrifice of their education for their own spiritual sakes.

Kasturba found bowing to Gandhi’s moral principles intolerable, even as she tried to be an obedient wife. ‘I regarded myself as my wife’s teacher and so harassed her out of my blind love for her,’ he wrote. He had decreed that all residents of Beach Grove Villa must empty their own chamber pots, an activity that would never be undertaken (or even noted) by a Brahmin woman—an untouchable would deal with the family’s excrement. If the pots were neglected, Gandhi had decided that he and Kasturba would do it rather than ask a servant—presumably to shame the occupants in the house into carrying out this chore next time. One day a clerk, a Christian but of a family of untouchables, was newly staying with them. He did not know the house rules and left his chamber pot under his bed. Kasturba knew Gandhi would empty it, and the only thing worse than doing it herself was allowing her husband to so defile himself. She therefore carried the chamber pot down the stairs and emptied it, weeping with anger that her life had come to this.

Gandhi saw her, and was angry too: he wanted her to go about the task gladly. He called to her: ‘I will not stand this nonsense in my house.’ ‘Keep your house to yourself and let me go,’ she shouted back. Gandhi writes that he forgot himself, caught her by the hand and dragged her to the gate, opened it and intended to push her out. She cried out: ‘Have you no sense of shame? Must you so far forget yourself? Where am I to go? I have no parents or relatives here to harbour me. Being your wife, you think I must put up with your cuffs and kicks. For heaven’s sake behave yourself, and shut the gate. Let us not be found making scenes like this.’³²

He was ashamed, though of what is not clear—of his anger at a trivial domestic chore? That she had made him angry? Of his overreaction? He writes later of how ‘the wife, with her matchless powers of endurance, has always been the victor.’ He does not seem to have relented on the principle—perhaps he excused her doing night-soil duty in future, but there is no indication that he questioned the principle of a domestic regime so draconian as to touch on comedy: he was asking her not just to deal with faeces but to look happy about doing it.

As a lawyer Gandhi never defended falsity, refusing to be a willing party to deception. As this became known, judges tended to trust him, though over the course of his career he lost several thousand pounds in fees on account of rejected briefs. In addition, he felt it beneath him to sue for unpaid fees, which also cost him dear. Nevertheless, he soon became a successful lawyer with twelve staff, but this only made Gandhi feel more strongly than ever the pull of the spiritual, away from the life of luxury he was currently enjoying. His solution was to reduce household expenses so as to free up more money for public works. This started with dismissing the servants. He gives no indication that he considered alternative views: that wealth had its obligations and one of those was the employment of others; that he should allow other people to work at their own level to leave him the time to do public works that they respected; that he gave others pleasure in allowing them to serve him in the best way they could. For Gandhi, only the personal spiritual search mattered: the path to spiritual enlightenment led through small acts of self-reliance; the family was going to participate too, so Kasturba and the boys would also do household tasks.

Gandhi learned to do his own laundry, just as he had earlier learned to cut his own hair after being rejected by the English barber—as he put it, ‘I freed myself from slavery to the washerman, I threw off dependence on the barber.’³³ Some of his experiments in self-improvement were risible, such as his first attempt at hairdressing and over-starching his collars, but when he determined that a course was right he was impervious to ridicule.

During these years in South Africa Gandhi was reading the Theosophical Society’s English translations of the Upanishads, and (doubtless influenced by his Parsi friends) he read The Sayings of Zarathustra. He was also influenced by more popular works: Washington Irving’s biography of the Prophet Mohammed and his successors; and he reread The Light of Asia, Edwin Arnold’s fanciful poem on the life of Buddha, and the Koran in translation.

Leo Tolstoy’s didactic works influenced him particularly. He read The Kingdom of God Is Within You, which discussed the Sermon on the Mount and presented Jesus not as the figure of divine ransom for man’s sins but as a seer offering practical guidance on the way to live a spiritual life. Tolstoy was a significant model especially in the development of non-violence in his thinking. (Gandhi was not interested in Tolstoy’s superlative fiction, while the latter’s self-improving and spiritual work is not rated highly in the literary canon.)

Gandhi described himself as acting, in his early years in South Africa, as ‘agent for the Esoteric Christian Union and the London Vegetarian Society.’ He actively promoted the Union as representing ‘the unity and common source of all the great religions of the world’ and disparaged ‘the utter inadequacy of materialism which boasts of having given the world a civilisation which was never witnessed before’ but which had in fact given humanity ‘the most terrible weapons of destruction, the awful growth of anarchism, the frightening disputes between capital and labour, and the wanton and diabolical cruelty inflicted on innocent, dumb, living animals in the name of science.’³⁴ He recommended the Union as ‘a system of religion which teaches universality, and is based on eternal verities and not on phenomena or historical facts merely.’³⁵ He could see ‘unmistakeable signs of a return from the materialistic tendencies, which have made us so cruelly selfish, to the unadulterated esoteric teachings of not only Jesus Christ, but also of Buddha, Zoroaster and Mahomed.’³⁶

Gandhi does not seem to have come across (or at least been directly influenced by) the nineteenth-century internationalist religion Baha’i, which represents Krishna, Jesus, Mohammed and other religious figures as prophets of the one God. The monotheistic view of the divine, while acknowledging the contribution of the prophets of all religions, was common currency among thoughtful, spiritual people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While accepting the value of other religions and combing their literature for supportive texts, Gandhi also maintained a belief in the Hindu notion of the cycle of life and rebirth, and of spiritual improvement with the ultimate aim of moksha: escaping from the cycle of life and death. His restless search for spiritual improvement, including his experiments with diet and sex, was very much a Hindu preoccupation.

In May 1898 Kasturba had a third son, Ramdas. Gandhi assisted the doctor at the delivery—his quest for self-improvement had led him to study a book on childbirth. After this difficult birth Kasturba was confined to bed with anaemia, and Gandhi looked after her, their new baby and the older boys. A fourth son, Devdas, was born on 23 May 1900; the labour began quickly, there was no time to summon help, and Gandhi delivered the child himself. It was another difficult labour, and his witnessing Kasturba’s suffering contributed to his decision to have no more children. Gandhi had sufficient knowledge of contraception, garnered during his time with the Vegetarian Society in London, but he was also moved to believe that self-control was a finer means of preventing conception than other methods.

Later, he could not remember why he had developed an enthusiasm for chastity in marriage, except that it came to him when he was in South Africa. He moved towards a vow of chastity, known as brahmacharya (though the term encompasses a wider spiritual meaning, it is generally used to mean chastity). He believed he had been influenced in this by his communication with Raychandbhai, a Jain businessman with spiritual leanings whom he had met in Kathiawar after he returned to India from London, and with whom he corresponded. Gandhi’s letters from South Africa reflect the spiritual conundrums he was addressing: ‘What is the soul? Does it perform actions? Do past actions impede its progress or not?’ he wanted to know. ‘Is it possible for a person to know for certain, while he is still living, whether or not he will obtain moksha?’³⁷

He cites no particular exchange in which marital chastity was broached, but rather he pondered his relationship with his wife, as if the condemnation of ‘lust’ was already taken as part of the equation. ‘Did my faithfulness consist in making my wife the instrument of my lust?’ he asked. ‘So long as I was the slave of lust, my faithfulness was worth nothing.’ Kasturba’s opinion was not sought at this time; ‘she was never the temptress,’ Gandhi remarks. She had shown no great interest in sex and he gives no indication that he made any attempt at pleasing her. They started to sleep in separate beds, and Gandhi would go to bed only after he had exhausted himself with work. He still failed to maintain his self-imposed self-control, and did not take the brahmacharya vow for several years.

When he was discussing these thoughts thirty years later he revealed a spiritual dogmatism: ‘It is the height of ignorance to believe that the sexual act is an independent function necessary like sleeping or eating. The world depends for its existence on the act of generation, and as the world is the play-ground of God and a reflection of His glory, the act of generation should be controlled for the ordered growth of the world.’³⁸ This peculiar notion, that the control of sex influences the functioning of the world, had its roots in these first efforts at sexual renunciation in the late 1890s in South Africa; it was to have its bizarre culmination in India in 1947. Gandhi’s attempts to control his high sex drive and to condemn expressions of sexuality in others would bring his political activity into disrepute.

The causes of the Boer Wars lay within the conflicts between the two white tribes that had descended on southern Africa, displacing the Zulus who were the previous conquerors of the area. These were the Boers, of Dutch descent, who were fiercely protective of their independence, and the British, whose loyalty was to their Crown. The conflict was heightened by the Transvaal president Paul Kruger’s denial of political rights to newcomers who had been attracted by the discovery of gold in Boer territory. The white newcomers, mainly British, were permitted to work but were heavily taxed; they were also refused the franchise, which was based on a residency qualification that was continually raised so as to be beyond their reach. Thus Kruger attempted to further partition the racial state, subdividing it between the favoured whites who were of Dutch descent and Afrikaans-speaking and the English-speaking British whites.

Kruger’s forces attacked Cape Colony and Natal in September 1899. Gandhi had personal sympathy for the Boers out of respect for their independent spirit, but he sided with the British for a number of reasons. He had a genuine affection for them, and a belief in their generally benign influence. Despite instances of injustice, the rule of law and a belief in common decency were integral to the imperialists’ notions of themselves and their mission in creating and ruling the Empire. With the British, he could appeal to a common standard of fairness. He also felt that demanding rights as a British citizen involved obligations in times of war, and that accepting those obligations strengthened the Indians’ right to remain in South Africa. Further, he believed that India could achieve independence within the British Empire, so it was his duty to his people to stay friendly with them; the Boers could offer nothing in regard to India, only to give better treatment to Indians in their own lands, and they had shown no inclination to do even that.

There was a further reason why Gandhi wanted to serve the British interest in wartime: it was generally believed that the Indian was a coward who would not take risks or look beyond his immediate self-interest. Gandhi determined to challenge this, and he therefore created an ambulance corps recruited from the Indian community, and arranged training in nursing for volunteers. Both the Dada Abdulla Company lawyer Frederick Laughton and the Natal Attorney General Harry Escombe supported the plan, but the government of Natal, grateful though it was, informed Gandhi it had no need of their help.

The war went against the British in the early months, however, and it was quickly realised that Gandhi’s corps would be valuable. He had assembled some eleven hundred men under forty leaders, of whom he was one, with the rank of sergeant-major. They came from the Hindu, Muslim and Christian communities and were both free and indentured (the indentured came courtesy of their masters). They were not expected to work under fire, but during the disastrous action at Spion Kop in 1900 they were asked to recover the British wounded from the field and so worked within the firing line. They would march up to twenty-five miles a day, carrying the wounded on stretchers. The Indian merchants, who were the mainstay of the Natal Indian Congress, recognised a chance to demonstrate their worthiness as citizens and donated money to support the corps and to buy gifts for distribution to the wounded.

Vere Stent, a British journalist born in South Africa, recalled seeing the stretcher-bearers on the road from Spion Kop:

After a night’s work, which had shattered men with much bigger frames, I came across Gandhi in the early morning, sitting by the roadside eating a regulation army biscuit. Every man in General Buller’s force was dull and depressed, and damnation was heartily invoked on everything. But Gandhi was stoical in his bearing, cheerful and confident in his conversation, and had a kindly eye. He did one good... I saw the man and his small undisciplined corps on many a battlefield during the Natal Campaign. When succour was to be rendered they were there. Their unassuming dauntlessness cost them many lives.

This last comment is a journalistic flourish: Gandhi specifically states that none of his men took a bullet and that the Indians in the war ‘suffered hardly any loss of life.’³⁹

The corps was disbanded after six weeks, when the war took a different course and the commanders decided to wait for reinforcements rather than launch any further frontal attacks. Gandhi received the British Empire War Medal and the corps was mentioned in dispatches. This official recognition and the appreciation of the Indian volunteers by the soldiers led Gandhi to believe that they had entered a period of better prospects for the Indian community. When British victory was assured (after a war waged with exceptional brutality) the former Boer republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State were expected to liberalise their laws, thereby making conditions easier for Indians.

Thus after the war Gandhi felt he could leave South Africa because the Indians no longer needed his services and also—with typically Gandhian logic—because he was becoming too successful in South Africa and not following a spiritual path. His supporters in Natal lamented his impending departure at farewell meetings, where he was showered with gold, silver and diamond gifts. This caused a moral problem for Gandhi, as he had always argued that he worked for the community without remuneration. He suffered a sleepless night after he was presented with these gifts. He had simplified life in the family home, dispensing with ornaments and other non-essentials, so how could he now be seen wearing a gold watch or a diamond ring? He himself might decide to give the gifts away, but how could he persuade Kasturba who had been given, among other things, a gold necklace?

Ever the wily lawyer, Gandhi first converted the children to his way of thinking. He enlisted Harilal and Gokaldas who were thirteen and Manilal who was nine to persuade Kasturba. His wife knew his tricks, however, and said: ‘You may not need [the gifts]. Your children may not need them. Cajoled, they will dance to your tune. I can understand your not permitting me to wear them. But what about my daughters-in-law? They will be sure to need them. And who knows what will happen tomorrow? I would be the last person to part with gifts so lovingly given.’⁴⁰

Gandhi responded that when the time came for the children to marry they would be grown up and able to look after themselves. If their brides needed jewellery, she could ask him again then. At this she exploded: Ask you? I know you by this time. You deprived me of my ornaments, you would not leave me in peace with them. Fancy you offering to get ornaments for the daughters-in-law! You who are trying to make sadhus [itinerant holy men] of my boys from today! No, the ornaments will not be returned.’ When she asked what right Gandhi had to take a necklace given to her and he replied that it was given because of his work, she reminded him how she worked for him, particularly for the people he brought to the house: ‘You forced all and sundry on me, making me weep bitter tears, and I slaved for them.’

Eventually he ‘somehow succeeded in exhorting a consent from her,’ Gandhi wrote. His account of the event (the only one extant) is not written out of self-recrimination: he remarks that he never regretted the step of returning the gifts (in fact they were placed in a trust fund to be used for public work). Of course, nothing Kasturba said would have made the slightest difference: Gandhi had not only made up his mind, he had already drafted the deed of trust giving away the jewellery before he even spoke to his children.

While the event is of biographical interest, it is also of historical importance because it shows how Gandhi came to his decisions and the pointlessness of arguing with him: he assumed a position of absolute rectitude from the start, treating any objections as merely challenges to be overcome by greater acts of spiritual determination. The leaders of the Indian National Congress and representatives of the British government were later to observe this approach with some bewilderment.

When the renunciation of the gifts became known, it of course enhanced Gandhi’s stature in South Africa and also, more importantly, in India, where he was intending soon to make a splash at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress and propel himself into the forefront of Indian public life.

The family left for Bombay in October 1901.