5

The Army of the Poor

BOER LAWS THAT DISCRIMINATED against the British were rescinded in the wake of the Boer War, but laws discriminating against Indians were imposed. These were the fruit of the labours of a bright young administrator called Lionel Curtis, who was concerned about the apparent ascendancy of Natal Indians whose industry and accumulation of wealth were putting them within reach of equality with whites; to maintain the racial balance they had to be brought under control. Curtis had met Gandhi in 1903 when the latter had tried to convince the colonialist of the industry, frugality and patience of his countrymen. Curtis replied: ‘Mr Gandhi, you are preaching to the converted. It is not the vices of Indians that Europeans in this country fear but their virtues.’¹

Curtis was the imperial nemesis of Gandhi, a man whose ideas were to shadow him for the rest of his life. Characteristic of Gandhi’s best imperial opponents, Curtis was not a man without morality or vision but his version of these qualities was entirely different from that of the Indian. Just three years younger than Gandhi, he was brought up in an evangelical Christian family and was imbued with the conviction that the distinctions between religion and politics were false: public life must reflect spiritual truth. He was to write that he saw the British Commonwealth of Nations as ‘simply the sermon on the mount translated into political terms.’² As an Oxford undergraduate he had taken to trudging the roads in the guise of a tramp to learn the workings of the Poor Law, and later worked with the poor in the East End of London. He studied for the Bar at Gandhi’s Inner Temple and volunteered for service in the Boer War. After the war he determined to play a part in reconstructing the war-torn colonies and became one of ‘Milner’s kindergarten,’ the bright young men surrounding the outstanding colonial administrator Alfred Milner. Curtis moved rapidly through the ranks until in October 1905 he was given responsibility for Asiatic affairs. He had already submitted a lengthy report on the Transvaal Indians that was the basis of a draft of amendments to the Asiatic laws of the province in September 1906.

Curtis believed that unlimited Indian immigration would mean the end of a white South Africa, and his ideas of the moral ascendancy of Britain in the world were tied up with notions of the superiority of European civilisation. If there were too much Indian or any other kind of civilisation in the mix, the Empire could not work its moral magic. He had already proposed registration as an administrative measure, but without the force of law, and the Indians had accepted voluntary registration. Now, with the objective of tightly controlling immigration, he drafted a law that would require every Indian aged eight and older to obtain a new certificate of registration, to provide finger and thumb prints and other identifying features. The police could demand these documents at any time and could even enter private homes to inspect them.

The proposed law’s terms were offensive, and if unresisted they would be a major step on the road to complete segregation, even to segregated bazaars and the end of mercantile success in the Transvaal. The problem, as represented crudely by Jan Smuts’s son in his biography of his father, was that ‘The Indian people were breeding like rabbits and the country was fast becoming swamped by them’—so drastic action was needed, he said without irony, ‘to ensure that the country should remain white.’³

Gandhi studied the draft law, translated it into Gujarati and published it in Indian Opinion. His view was that the law was not merely oppressive in its conception but was ‘the first step towards hounding Indians out of the country, designed to strike at the very root of our existence in South Africa.’⁴ Gandhi discussed the ordinance with leading members of the Indian community, who shared his anxiety about it. They hired the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg to alert all Indians in the Transvaal to their plight.

The registration issue dealt a blow at the heart of the Transvaal’s elite Indian community, raison d’être—the right to trade freely. By drawing their families into licensing, it additionally offended against their deepest principles. An assault on wives was beyond the limits of acceptable despotism. Gandhi had asked merchants, petty traders and hawkers to close their businesses hours before the meeting was going to start so that the streets would be testimony to a dramatic event taking place. The meeting had the backing of the Transvaal British Indian Association and all the main Indian commercial interests.

Two community leaders, Haji Habib and Haji Ojer Ally, were the main attractions at the meeting on 11 September 1906. The theatre was packed with more than three thousand Indians who had come from all over the Transvaal. Habib, one of the leading Muslim residents in Johannesburg, called on God to witness that he would never bow to the projected new law and asked the audience to swear the same oath—that they would rather go to jail than submit to registration. ‘There is no disgrace in going to jail,’ he said. ‘Rather, it is an honour. Only a few people knew of Mr Tilak before he went to jail, today the whole world knows him.’⁵ Gandhi was put on the alert: making political resolutions was one thing, but if they brought God into the issue he must explain the meaning of their actions. He stood and addressed the meeting: ‘We all believe in one and the same God, the difference in nomenclature in Hinduism and Islam notwithstanding. To pledge ourselves or to take an oath in the name of that God or with him as a witness is not something to be trifled with... I hold that a man, who deliberately and intelligently takes a pledge and then breaks it, forfeits his manhood.’⁶ He set the oath in the context of personal sacrifice, saying that no majority at a meeting could bind people, that they must act as individuals and be prepared for the worst—for insult, jail, extremes of heat and cold and hard labour. He was appealing to the taste for martyrdom that he hoped would be in the breasts of his listeners, reformulating a political standpoint into a spiritual one—though Gandhi was not the first to introduce spiritual values into a political movement: the question of religious fealty had already been raised by the leaders of the Muslim merchants.

Reinvigorated by Gandhi’s statements, others spoke of the seriousness of the situation, and the audience stood with hands upraised and swore before God not to submit to the Transvaal Asiatic Ordinance if it became law. The seriousness of the pledge was emphasised in Indian Opinion: the Indian who submits to the law ‘will have forsaken his God. Secondly his honour will have been lost. Thirdly he will have incurred the curse of all India.’⁷

Gandhi had discussed passive resistance in the pages of Indian Opinion as early as December 1904. He had argued that if there were prosecutions for trading without a licence, the person prosecuted should refuse to pay any fines and, if necessary, go to jail: ‘There is no disgrace in going to jail for such a cause.’⁸ The issue of trading licences was not, however, the gut issue that could lead to heroic acts of personal sacrifice. The government was to hear the strength of the community’s feeling when a deputation saw the Colonial Secretary Patrick Duncan, and Haji Habib told him: ‘I cannot possibly restrain myself if any officer comes and proceeds to take my wife’s finger prints. I will kill him there and then and die myself.’ ⁹ The minister responded that the government was reconsidering its position on women, then said the clauses relating to women would be deleted.

This was seen by the community as its first victory. Although the government declared it had already decided to exempt women, this is unconvincing. Curtis was a man who tended to get carried away with his own ideas: probably the truth was that as soon as his ordinance was printed, more sober counsel prevailed, knowing that the registration of women would be inflammatory.

In keeping with the principle of making political representations at the highest level, Gandhi and Haji Ojer Ally went to London to put their case. They were aided there by Sir Mancherji Bhowanaggree (who had just lost his seat in the House of Commons in the Liberal landslide of 1906), by Dadabhai Naoroji and the British Committee of the Indian National Congress with whom Gandhi had previously established links. They met Lord Elgin, Secretary of State for the Colonies and Lord (then Mr) Morley, Secretary of State for India. They were given a polite audience and on their return journey received a telegram from Elgin saying he would not advise the imperial government’s consent to the Transvaal Asiatic Ordinance becoming law. This was the occasion of great rejoicing, but the victory was short-lived, as Elgin knew it would be. As part of the postwar settlement a large measure of self-government was to be conferred on the Transvaal on 1 January 1907, under which the powers of veto of the imperial power were severely limited. The Transvaal government’s second piece of legislation, after the budget, was the Asiatic Registration Act of March 1907.

Indians were supposed to register before 31 July, and on that day a mass meeting was held in the grounds of Pretoria’s mosque. Gandhi translated a speech in English from the government pleading with the Indians to see the administrations side of the matter: the European community had asked for the measure, it had been passed according to due process; further opposition would be futile but General Smuts (who was chief parliamentary spokesman in the now self-governing state) would look into representations regarding minor changes in the law. The meeting again affirmed their determined opposition.

The emphasis that Gandhi placed on character and spiritual strength was specific to his approach, but he had as yet no name for this new philosophy. He writes about the principle of satyagraha coming into existence before the word existed to define it. In early 1908 he held a competition among Indian Opinion readers to find a word to describe what they were doing—exerting moral force to oblige an opponent to comply. His favourite cousin (often referred to as his nephew) Maganlal won the competition with a combination of Gujarati words to make sadagraha—firmness in a good cause. Gandhi amended this, using the words for truth and firmness—sat and agraha, ‘firmness in the truth.’ The development of the philosophy of satyagraha in South Africa was his most important contribution to political thought. Though it is sometimes translated as ‘passive resistance,’ that is not what Gandhi wanted to convey. He felt there was nothing passive about what they were doing; moreover, a suggestion of passivity fed into notions of Indian indolence. Satyagraha was explicitly, in Gandhi’s eyes, a movement not about self-determination or racial equality but about ‘truth’ as defined by him.

It was interpreted by one of Gandhi’s most devoted followers thus:

There is a spark of divinity on every human breast. A satyagrahi tries to make this spark burn bright in the opponents breast by first making it do so in his or her own case. Satyagraha must therefore be based on truth and love. Suffering is undergone by the satyagrahi in order to make the opponent think and is never inflicted upon the opponent. Non-cooperation and civil disobedience in various forms, with readiness to cheerfully suffer the consequences of such action and as a last resort fasting, are the only tools that a satyagrahi has and can use. By inviting self-suffering the satyagrahi tries to make the opponent think and understand the satyagrahi’s point of view.¹⁰

Gandhi’s chief means of propagating this view was Indian Opinion. He was delighted that it had 3,500 subscribers at the height of the struggle, with a readership of many more, given that a single subscriber would read his copy out to a group of his compatriots. The success of the newspapers sales meant they could stop taking advertisements and the press could stop doing jobbing work; the spare capacity was used in the publication of books of moral worth. The paper was edited, after the sudden death early in 1906 of Nazar, by Europeans: Herbert Kitchin, Henry Polak and a Baptist minister, the Revd Joseph Doke. Doke was also to write the first biography of Gandhi, in 1909. Europeans, of course, could not be imprisoned under the Asiatic Registration Act and so the essential supply of information to the nation and to the world would not be broken by the victimisation of the paper’s staff.

Many of Gandhi’s supporters were Europeans: he singles them out for special praise in a chapter of his book Satyagraha in South Africa, perhaps because their support was inspired by anything but self-interest. As Gandhi was now without a home in Johannesburg he stayed with a German architect, Hermann Kallenbach, beginning a long process of introducing him to the path of renunciation. During the course of their friendship Gandhi persuaded Kallenbach to give up milk with him and to go on a pure fruit diet. Kallenbach became one of Gandhi’s best friends: they were in contact until Kallenbach’s death two years before Gandhi’s. He wrote to Kallenbach that he did not understand the German’s ‘extraordinary love’ for him—‘I hope I deserve it all’—later referring to it as love which is almost superhuman.’¹¹ He believed it to be proof of their having lived before in other bodies at a previous time and loved each other then. Kallenbach was later to sign an agreement drawn up with Gandhi that when visiting family in Europe he would travel third-class, spend no more money than would a simple farmer and not look lustfully at a woman. The agreement was ratified by ‘more love and yet more love’ between them, ‘such love as I hope, the world has not yet seen.’¹²

Kallenbach’s letters may have been even more affectionate; Gandhi described them as ‘charming love notes.’ He destroyed them as he knew Kallenbach would not want them read by anyone else—‘everyone considers that your love for me is excessive,’ he wrote.¹³ Kallenbach’s was the only portrait he kept on the mantelpiece in his bedroom when he was in London lobbying for the recognition of Indian rights by the imminent South African Union. There has to be a suspicion of a homoerotic attachment on the part of Kallenbach, who was two years younger than Gandhi and never married, but there is no evidence that his affection for Gandhi ever approached the physical.

Kallenbach introduced Gandhi to sixteen-year-old Sonja Schlesin as a potential secretary. ‘She is clever and honest, but she is very mischievous and impetuous,’ he told him. Gandhi remarked: ‘In a month’s time she had achieved the conquest of my heart. She was ready to work at all times whether by day or at night. There was nothing difficult or impossible for her.’ ¹⁴ Like Polak, Kallenbach and another early supporter, Herbert Kitchin, Schlesin was Jewish (though none of them, apparently, was observant, Polak was notable as a theosophist). Scrupulously principled, Schlesin took over the satyagraha movement’s finances when its leaders were in jail, and even controlled the direction of the campaign in those challenging times. Gandhi said she had ‘a character as clear as crystal and courage that would shame a warrior.’¹⁵ Office life did not always run smoothly. Gandhi once recorded: ‘Miss Schlesin in her folly started smoking a cigarette in my presence. I slapped her and threw away the cigarette... [She] wrote to me afterwards saying that she would never do such a thing again and that she recognised my love.’¹⁶

Schlesin had bobbed hair, wore a collar and tie and had a fiercely independent spirit—she went on to take an MA and made an attempt, with Gandhi’s help, to become the first woman to enter the legal profession in South Africa; he applied for her to become an articled clerk but, as a woman, she was refused. Schlesin also took courage from the suffragettes, saying in a speech to the satyagrahis: ‘Let me remind you of a similar crusade now being waged by my sisters in England. I refer to the suffragettes... Many have already suffered imprisonment, more are ready, nay eager, to do so. If delicately nurtured women can do this, will hardy men, inured to toil, do less?’¹⁷

The procedure of taunting the law and going to jail as a matter of political protest, followed by a celebration for the released martyr, had been tried and tested in Britain from October 1905 with the arrest of the first suffragettes. A large number of ‘prison volunteers’ had been arrested in London in February 1907 amid considerable publicity. The previous year Gandhi wrote with unstinting praise of the suffragettes: ‘Today the whole country is laughing at them, and they have only a few people on their side. But undaunted, these women work on steadfast in their cause. They are bound to succeed and gain the franchise, for the simple reason that deeds are better than words.’ ¹⁸ He covered their activities with enthusiasm in Indian Opinion. ‘Will Indian men be effeminate? Or will they emulate the manliness shown by English women and wake up?’¹⁹

The technique of obliging a foe to use superior strength in order to shame him, to gain a political end, was not specifically Gandhian. He had also taken wisdom from Henry David Thoreau’s work, finding himself entirely in agreement with the American’s standpoint that the best government is that which governs least; he also believed, with Thoreau, in the citizen’s duty of civil disobedience to unjust laws, in the value of non-violent resistance and of the simple life, thoughtfully lived. He repeatedly referred to Thoreau on civil disobedience and quoted approvingly in Indian Opinion such sentiments as ‘Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison... In a slave state prison is the only house in which a free man can abide with honour.’²⁰

In taking action against the Asiatic Registration Act permit offices were picketed to deter those who intended to take out permits, and some bullying ensued, though this was deplored by Gandhi. When it proved impossible for the government to register more than five hundred Indians, they made the mistake of arresting a leader in order to coerce the others into submission: a man called Ram Sundara, who had been a moving force in the erection of a Hindu temple in Johannesburg, was arrested and tried in a courtroom filled with spectators. He was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment, which was greeted by the community with rejoicing and a declaration of their own willingness to go to jail. Gandhi published a picture of him and a biographical sketch in Indian Opinion. While in prison he was sent in unaccustomed luxuries from outside and was feted when he was released. It was of particular importance to Gandhi that this was a Hindu martyr, applauded by the mainly Muslim traders.

Ram Sundara was not, though, Gandhi lamented, of good character and he later left the Transvaal rather than be re-arrested. Gandhi’s anger was untypically unrestrained: ‘Now the hypocrite has been unmasked, we have no hesitation in exposing him to our readers... Ram Sundara is dead as from today. He lives to no purpose. He poisoned himself by his own hand. Physical death is to be preferred to such social death.’²¹ Haji Ojer Ally was also to leave the Transvaal rather than be imprisoned. In a manifestation of those divisions in Indian society that were to torment Gandhi to his death, Ally reasoned that Gandhi’s coreligionists, the Hindu hawkers, would suffer less from the campaign than his own brethren the Muslim traders, who would be ruined. ‘Mr Ally could not continue to trust me fully because I was a Hindu,’ Gandhi commented bleakly.²²

Gandhi himself and other leaders were ordered to appear before the court at the end of December 1907, accused of non-registration, and called upon to demonstrate why they should not be removed. All were ordered to leave the country, all refused to do so by the prescribed time, and on 10 January 1908 appeared for sentence in a crowded court—a court in which Gandhi had previously appeared as counsel. He had heard of comrades having been sentenced to three months’ imprisonment with hard labour, and when he was allowed to address the court he pleaded that if men who had been so sentenced had committed an offence, he had committed a greater offence by calling on others to disobey the law and should therefore receive a greater punishment. The magistrate did not comply with this plea and gave him two months’ simple imprisonment.

Gandhi was ordered to put on dirty prison clothes and placed in a large cell where he cheerfully met other protesters; now he was in his element, surrounded by suffering satyagrahis. ‘Every one of us was firm in his resolution of passing his term in jail in perfect happiness and peace,’ he said.²³ From the second or third day after the imprisonment of the leaders, other prisoners arrived in large numbers: Indian hawkers had, as arranged, courted arrest by refusing to show their licences, in order to fill the jails. By the end of January some two thousand Asians had been jailed, mostly Indians, though the Chinese also resisted the Act under their own leadership.

In a Rand Daily Mail cartoon General Jan Smuts was portrayed as a desperado with a gun labelled ‘Asiatic Ordinance:’ threatening the saintly Gandhi who challenged him to do his worst, Smuts found that his gun would not work.²⁴

Gandhi used his time in prison to catch up on his reading: as well as the old favourites Ruskin and Tolstoy he read Plato on Socrates. For religious succour he followed a regime, perhaps somewhat self-consciously: the Bhagavad Gita in the morning and the Koran in English translation in the afternoon. In the evening he read the Bible to a Chinese Christian fellow prisoner.

After he had been in jail about two weeks he was visited by Albert Cartwright, editor of the daily Transvaal Leader and a man who had behaved fairly over the Indian cause and who had the ear of General Smuts. Cartwright came bearing the terms of a settlement from Smuts, the essence of which was that Indians should register voluntarily, then once the majority did so, the government would repeal the Asiatic Registration Act and take steps to legalise the voluntary registration. The draft was not, Gandhi was told, open to negotiation, though he wanted to make clear the condition that required the government to repeal the Act. The facts behind this compromise were that the movement was failing, some of its major leaders such as Ally and Haji Habib had left the colony, and hawkers had stopped working for fear of further persecution. By the end of December 1907 Gandhi had conceded that 511 Indians ‘have applied for registration as slaves’—this was not the stuff of which victories are made.²⁵

A few days later he was taken to see Smuts. Almost the same age as Gandhi and, like him, a British-educated barrister and a man of firm convictions, he had been Attorney General in the Transvaal, a general in the Boer War and had then returned to political life, still devoted to Boer rights. He received the prisoner well, reminding Gandhi that he too was a barrister and that he had known Indian students (this was as close as the austere Smuts came to small-talk). Gandhi said that Smuts assured him the Act would be repealed as soon as most had voluntarily registered and there was no further disturbance. Smuts later denied conceding this. As one commentator said, ‘Both Gandhi and Smuts manoeuvred well in muddy waters, and the compromise bought time for each.’²⁶ Smuts himself, showing genuine regard for Gandhi, later commented: ‘If Gandhi was right to consider his people, I had to consider mine.’²⁷ When they had finished talking it was seven in the evening, and there was Gandhi in Pretoria with not a single coin in his pocket; Smuts’s secretary gave him the fare to Johannesburg and he took the last train.

Arriving at Johannesburg, Gandhi went to the chairman of the Transvaal British Indian Association and called a meeting for late that night. Most Indians lived in the same area and a meeting was held in the grounds of the mosque, to which more than a thousand came. Gandhi explained the terms of the settlement and the community reacted with scepticism: they might not have been sophisticated in the political arts but they were knowledgeable about business dealings. They felt that if they registered voluntarily they would be surrendering their most powerful weapon with no gain—the right order of business was for the Act to be repealed, then for voluntary registration to take place.

Gandhi argued that they were not against some kind of registration, but against the stigma of non-voluntary registration. In the spirit of the new and powerful force which has sprung up in the community,’ he urged, ‘a satyagrahi bids good-bye to fear. He is therefore never afraid of trusting his opponent. Even if the opponent plays him false twenty times, the satyagrahi is prepared to trust him for the twenty-first time, for an implicit trust in human nature is the very essence of his creed.’²⁸

These were fine sentiments, but a Pathan who had always been true to the cause reminded Gandhi of his previous words, that the struggle centred on the obligation of giving fingerprints, an obligation only on criminals—so how did this fit with what Gandhi said today? Gandhi explained that the circumstances had changed: ‘What would have been a crime against the people yesterday is in the altered circumstances of today the hallmark of a gentleman.’²⁹ It is easy to see how the community might consider Gandhi had sold them out. Indeed, one challenged that Gandhi had been bribed by Smuts with £15,000 and declared he would never give his fingerprints or allow others to do so. Furthermore, he would kill the man who took the lead in applying for registration. Gandhi responded that he was free of thoughts of anger or hatred against any assailant. Finally, after hours of discussion, the meeting overwhelmingly endorsed the settlement. But this was not the last time Gandhi would raise the expectations of the community, broker a deal, then find them angry and feeling that he had let them down.

On the morning of 10 February 1908 Gandhi prepared to take out a certificate of registration, as it had been agreed that the leaders would be the first to register. As they left the association’s office one of the Pathans, Mir Alam, joined them. A few minutes from the Asiatic Registration office the powerfully built Mir Alam accosted Gandhi and one of his companions aimed a blow at him from behind. Gandhi fell to the ground exclaiming: ‘He Rama!’ (Oh God!) and was kicked by Mir’s companions in the face and ribs. When the other leaders around Gandhi tried to ward off the Pathans, they too were attacked until some European passers-by approached, at which point Mir Alam and his companions ran off but were caught by the Europeans and taken into custody by the police.

Gandhi was taken to a nearby office and a doctor stitched his wounds. He sustained injuries to his ribs, his upper lip, his left eye and forehead; he had been assaulted with an iron pipe and a stick as well as having been kicked. He called for the assailants to be released and asked the Registrar of Asiatics who had just arrived on the scene to bring the papers to him, as he had sworn to be the first to register—‘if I am alive and it is acceptable to God.’³⁰ He was taken to the home of Joseph Doke, who with his wife took him in and commanded him to rest. When they asked if Gandhi wanted anything, he asked for their little daughter to sing the hymn ‘Lead, Kindly Light.’ For the next ten days while Gandhi recovered, Doke’s house became a centre of pilgrimage for the Indian community ranging from hawkers to the chairman of the Transvaal British Indian Association.

When sufficiently recovered, Gandhi went back to Natal, where the terms of the Asiatic Registration Act did not apply. But here too Indians watched the progress of the movement, as it was feared that the repression in the Transvaal would soon be duplicated all over South Africa. Gandhi spoke at a meeting in Durban to explain the settlement, was again attacked, and again had to be rescued by Superintendent Alexander.

Gandhi’s supporters accompanied him to Phoenix, where he once more explained the settlement in the pages of Indian Opinion and contemplated the meaning of his satyagraha ideas when put into practice. Now the Indians had voluntarily registered, the government must repeal the Registration Act—but it did not. General Smuts left the Act on the statute book and introduced a measure validating the voluntary registrations, at the same time making further provisions for the registration of Asiatics that put them in a worse position than under the pre-war Boer regime.

Shocked, Gandhi called a meeting of his committee. They reminded him they had accused him before of being too credulous, of believing everything he was told, and now the community must suffer for his gullibility. He responded that his ‘credulity’ was in fact his trust in people, a test of his faith in satyagraha.

The community now set about resurrecting its protest movement. Gandhi wrote to Smuts, charging him with his breach of promise, but Smuts did not reply. Gandhi then met Albert Cartwright, the mediator, who perfectly well remembered that Smuts had promised to repeal the Act; but the most he could do—writing newspaper articles denouncing him—was as nothing to the politician. The European community who were Smuts’s constituency had no interest in calling him to account. Doubtless the general was also deferring to a higher truth, but one of different interpretation: his greater truth was the value of European dominance over the world, and in particular over ‘savage’ Africa, which was all part of God’s plan as well as being in the interests of human progress.

The Indians now had to divest themselves of the certificates of registration, which had been treacherously obtained, and they determined to do it in the most public way possible. A large cauldron was set up in the grounds of the Hamidia Mosque in Johannesburg on 16 August 1908, the day the new Asiatic Bill was to be carried through the legislature. The cauldron was to burn the certificates if the government did not relent. As thousands of Indians crowded around a telegram arrived from the government announcing their refusal to change their course of action. A cheer went up from the crowd and they proceeded to set fire to their certificates. It was a dramatic gesture that reached as far as the British press—a coup for Gandhi, as such colonial news was rarely covered in British newspapers.

Smuts continued the assault on the Indian community with such measures as the Transvaal Immigrants Restriction Act, which banned the entry of all who did not understand a European language, and proposals for a new consolidated immigration bill for the whole Union. Gandhi signed a provisional settlement with Smuts who promised to address Indians’ concerns in the next parliament; but he was not able to deliver, coming up against opposition particularly from the Orange Free State representatives who refused to tolerate any Indian immigration at all. Gandhi declined to include all South African anti-Indian legislation in his campaign, feeling such an approach would dull the edge of satyagraha.

The struggle was in danger of failing, however, because the government now declined to prosecute anyone over the Registration Act, so satyagraha was not producing the required element of suffering. The Immigrants Restriction Act gave an opportunity for Indians to challenge the law by declaring their intention to enter the Transvaal, then doing so and defying the government to prosecute. Of course, they had to be outside the Transvaal to start with, so Gandhi called on his Natal contacts. A group of Indians from Natal therefore entered the Transvaal, were arrested, ordered to leave, refused to do so and were duly imprisoned. Other Indians courted imprisonment by trading without a licence.

Gandhi suffered several periods of imprisonment during the campaign, including solitary confinement. The latter was more attractive to him than to some of the company he was obliged to keep, who were ‘wild, murderous and given to immoral ways.’ During a night in a crowded cell in Johannesburg two men threatened to rape Gandhi: they stared at the slight lawyer and mocked him, ‘exchanged obscene jokes, uncovering each other’s genitals.’ Gandhi stayed awake most of the night on guard.³¹ He elsewhere wrote that ‘many of the native prisoners are only one degree removed from the animal.’³² His passive resisters he said, took particular objection to being given garments stamped with N for ‘native’: ‘We could understand not being classed with the whites, but to be placed on the same level as the Natives seemed too much to put up with.’³³ He successfully lobbied for separate lavatories for Indians, and that Indians should never be ‘lodged with kaffirs,’ though some apparently preferred it as they could trade for tobacco and other items.³⁴ At this time Indian Opinion was running a series called ‘Story of a Soldier of Truth,’ which was Gandhi’s Gujarati translation of Plato’s Last Days of Socrates. He had started to publish a free translation of Washington Irving’s life of Mohammed in 1907 but had to stop because, however reverential he was, it gave offence to Muslims for Mohammed to be referred to in factual terms. Gandhi was still, after all his years of working with Muslims, failing to reconcile their world view with his own.

During his imprisonment from October to December 1908, Gandhi received a letter informing him that Kasturba was seriously ill: she was suffering frequent haemorrhages and losing so much blood that her life was in danger. But Gandhi declined to pay his fine, which would have permitted him to leave prison. He wrote saying he loved her, and begging her understanding:

Even if you die, for me you will be eternally alive. Your soul is deathless. On my part, I would assure you I have no intentions of marrying another woman after your death. I have told you this a number of times. You must have faith in God and set your soul free. Your death will be another great sacrifice for the cause of Satyagraha. My struggle is not merely against the authorities but against nature itself. I hope you will understand this and not feel offended.³⁵

In fact she pulled through and when he was released Gandhi travelled with her to Durban, where she underwent a curettage procedure. In her post-operative weakness the hospital doctor advised beef tea to redress her anaemia. Gandhi was against this and so, unremarkably for a traditional Hindu, was Kasturba. The doctor no longer wished to treat her if his regime was not going to be followed, so Gandhi took her back to Phoenix, where she was carried in a hammock the two miles from the station by men from the settlement.

Kasturba consented to be treated by Gandhi’s hydropathic methods, though she had no faith in his remedies. As usual, she also received the dubious benefit of her husband’s food fads. They argued about his proposal that she should give up salt and pulses in the interest’s of health; he believed that the weak-bodied should avoid pulses (he also believed chastity was promoted by saltlessness—it is not clear why he recommended this for Kasturba). He explained: ‘I suggested to her that she should give up vegetables and salt altogether. She should live on wheat and fruits only.’³⁶ Kasturba resisted this further restriction on her already limited diet, so Gandhi put moral pressure on her by vowing to renounce salt and pulses himself for a year; she begged him to change his mind but he felt he had achieved something by his vow and refused. She acquiesced, giving up salt and pulses (which at least did her no harm—she did recover). Gandhi considered this a triumph of satyagraha: he thus connected resistance and stubbornness in a domestic situation, for the achievement of a questionable goal, with political activism using the same techniques.

Kasturba may not have been the best patient, but neither did Gandhi have the tact of a born physician. ‘I again gently but rebukingly remarked,’ he confided to Kallenbach, ‘that she was sinful in her thoughts and that her disease was largely due to her sins. Immediately she began to howl. I had made her leave all the good food in order to kill her, I was tired of her, I wished her to die, I was a hooded snake.’ Reflecting on this scene, he remarked how she taught him the need for patience and self-sacrifice, but finally drew the moral: ‘You cannot attach yourself to a particular woman and yet live for humanity. The two do not harmonise.’³⁷

Fines and imprisonment having failed, the government resorted to deportations, first to other parts of Africa and then back to India. Some Indians lost land and property in these deportations, but many were former indentured labourers with no family or connections in their native land. Gandhi arranged for one of his co-workers to travel with the first batch of deportees and saw to it that sympathetic Indians received them on their arrival in India. They also managed to confound the government in cases questioning the legality of deportation, and the practice was stopped.

The cause was supported by donations from such benefactors as Ratanji Jamshedji Tata, who founded the Tata Iron and Steel Works, but needs were great and the destitution of the satyagrahis left the movement in a quandary. The families of those arrested had to be cared for. Gandhi decided the solution was to move the families to an ideal community such as Phoenix, the one he had established in Natal: in this way ‘public funds would be largely saved and the families of satyagrahis would be trained to live a new and simple life in harmony with one another.’³⁸ The new settlement needed to be near Johannesburg. In May 1910 Hermann Kallenbach bought a farm of more than 1,000 acres near the city and gave Gandhi the use of it, rent-free. It had a huge orchard, two wells, a spring and some existing accommodation.

Gandhi decided to call it Tolstoy Farm, so his new community was not only built on land owned by a European and based on principles propounded by Ruskin, another European, it was also named after a European. He had been corresponding with Tolstoy, calling the writer ‘the Titan of Russia’ and signing himself a humble follower of your doctrine.’ Tolstoy replied asking Gandhi to convey his fellow feeling to his ‘beloved brothers, the Indian workers of the Transvaal.’³⁹

Tolstoy Farm was less forbidding than Phoenix because of Kallenbach’s influence: Kallenbach could accept a degree of renunciation, but had no passion for mortifying the flesh in the search for the spiritual. Gandhi also found his experience here rewarding: ‘My faith and courage were at their highest in Tolstoy Farm.’ ⁴⁰

There were no servants: every job from fetching water to building accommodation had to be done by the settlers wherever possible. ‘The work on the farm was certainly harder than in jail,’ Gandhi remarked.⁴¹ He described his principles to a largely white audience at the Johannesburg Socialist Society, in 1910 comparing the ‘selfish, godless and hypocritical’ modern civilisation with that of the past. ‘In the days of ancient civilization,’ he paraphrased for Indian Opinion, ‘men were kind, God-fearing and simple and looked upon the body as a means of spiritual uplift. It is necessary to revert to the ancient way of life and for that purpose to adopt simplicity and village life.’⁴² Gandhi’s reading—unlike, for example, that of Nehru—encompassed little history. His notion of the past related not to a reality but to the Rama Raj (rule of Rama) of Hindu myth.

On Tolstoy Farm men and women were housed separately, and drinking and smoking were prohibited. Gandhi prevailed upon Christian and other women whose husbands were imprisoned to change to a vegetarian diet (though he assured them they might eat meat if they wished). The food was the simplest possible with a staple of rice, dal, vegetables and porridge. Mealtimes were fixed and all dined together in a row. After meals there were prayers with readings from the Hindu epic the Ramayana or Islamic texts. They dressed in labourers’ clothes—but the clothes of European labourers, not Indians—working men’s blue trousers and shirts that were imitated from the uniforms of prisoners. When they needed to go to Johannesburg they walked the twenty-one miles to save on rail fares, and learned how to make sandals so they did not have to buy shoes.

As usual with Gandhi’s experiments in ideal living, the education of the farm’s children was neglected and they were expected to take part in all the work around the farm. What semi-formal schooling the children did receive was after the morning’s labour and the midday meal, when even Gandhi said he found it hard to stay awake. Gandhi’s insistence on the importance of native tongue meant Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati and Urdu were taught, as was English, and the Hindus learned Sanskrit. Gandhi undertook to teach his limited Tamil and Urdu, and to pass on his high-school Sanskrit.

Gandhi had them pay little attention even to the textbooks they did have, self-confidently proclaiming: ‘I did not find it at all necessary to load the boys with quantities of books. I have always felt that the true textbook for the pupil is his teacher.’⁴³ He freely admits his own academic deficiencies, which were evident to others in his public life. Even speaking in Hindi his grammar was poor—an observer noted that Gandhi often got the genders of nouns wrong. When he offered to translate for Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the latter replied that Gandhi’s linguistic abilities were ‘an accomplishment on which you cannot exactly be congratulated.’⁴⁴

Gandhi liked to ‘experiment’ not only with his own self-restraint, but with that of others. ‘I sent the boys reputed to be mischievous and the innocent young girls to bathe in the same spot at the same time,’ he once said, having fully explained the duty of self-restraint to them. They bathed at a fixed time, and Gandhi would generally be present. He also had them sleep together on an open veranda, the boys, the girls and himself, with a distance of only three feet between their beds: ‘I made the experiment from a belief that boys and girls could thus live together without harm.’ ⁴⁵

Inevitably nature would assert itself and on this particular occasion there was some sexual banter between the boys and two of the girls, who were presumably developing physically. When it was reported to Gandhi he remonstrated with the young men, but was troubled about what to do with the girls. He wished to give them some physical sign as a lesson to them and a warning to the boys. ‘What mark should the girls bear?’ he wondered. He was awake all night worrying about it, then suggested they let him cut off their long hair. The girls refused, but Gandhi worked on the elderly women on the farm and got their support and finally the girls came round and he cut off their hair himself.

Gandhi’s eldest son Harilal had joined his parents in South Africa, in the company of his wife; he and his brother Manilal had thrown themselves into the cause and had been repeatedly imprisoned. Their enduring resentment at their lack of education was intensified when Gandhi accepted the offer of a scholarship to study in England from his old friend Pranjivan Mehta who had helped him during his first days in London, and instead of giving it to one of his own children (as Mehta had intended) gave it to his nephew Chaganlal. He chided Manilal: ‘Why does the idea of study haunt you again and again? If you think of study for earning your livelihood, it is not proper; for God gives food to all. You can get enough to eat even by doing manual labour.’⁴⁶ He wrote to Harilal: ‘I must advise you to shake off this craze for examinations. If you pass, it won’t impress me much. If you fail, you will feel very unhappy.’⁴⁷ He even refused funds for Harilal to go back to India when his wife and child had returned there. Harilal endured six periods of imprisonment between 1908 and 1911 in his father’s campaign.

When Chaganlal fell ill and failed to complete his studies, Gandhi was again in a position to choose a scholar to send to train as a lawyer. Harilal was again eager, but Gandhi again passed him over in favour of another young man. Gandhi understandably did not want to be accused of nepotism, but this seemed to be active discrimination against his own family. A flavour of the exchange between father and son can be gleaned from a letter to Harilal in March 1911:

There is nothing to be ashamed of in your being weak in mathematics and general literary education. You could have learnt them had I given you the necessary opportunity. The practical knowledge boys in India possess is not due to the education they receive in schools, but is due to the unique Indian way of life. It is due to the meritorious deeds of our ancestors that we find healthy standards of behaviour, thrift etc., around us, in spite of the repeated inroads of modern education, the immorality that we see among the people and their growing selfishness.⁴⁸

Harilal left the settlement to seek a future in India in May 1911, saying to his mother: ‘He just does not care for us, any of us.’ ⁴⁹ Gandhi noted his son’s accusation: ‘Unlike other fathers, I have not admired my sons or done anything specially for them, but always put them and Ba [Kasturba] last, such was the charge.’ ⁵⁰

In 1915 Harilal wrote a ‘half-open’ letter for limited distribution, charging his now fêted father with neglect of his family, and particularly with keeping his sons ‘ignorant’ by denying them education. Of himself and his brothers Harilal said: ‘You have treated us as a ringmaster would treat the beasts of the circus... You have spoken to us never with love, always with anger. In argument you have always used us with humiliating language: “You are ignorant... you lack understanding, you think you have reached the last frontier of knowledge.” Walking and moving, sleeping and sitting, reading and writing, you have kept us in constant fear of you. You have a heart of stone.’ The lot of Kasturba he felt, was worse.⁵¹

Another incident, near the end of the campaign when negotiations with the South African government were at a crucial stage, showed how seriously Gandhi treated matters of personal morality. His son Manilal and a woman at Phoenix called Jeki, the daughter of Pranjivan Mehta were found to have ‘fallen’ twice while Jeki’s husband was away in Fiji. Presumably they had sex. His reaction, as usual over sexual matters, was extreme: he imposed a seven-day fast on himself and vowed to have only one meal a day for the following four and a half months. Thus, he said, ‘Everyone came to realise what a terrible thing it was to be sinful.’⁵²

Manilal fasted with him. ‘He will, I hope, be able to bear the seven days’ fast,’ Gandhi said, ‘but if he dies in the process, it will not be a matter for regret.’⁵³ He further ordered Manilal to swear to a lifetime of celibacy and relented only in 1927, under pressure from Kasturba, when Manilal was thirty-five. Jeki he had fast, have her hair cropped, take off her jewellery and wear mourning as a sign of remorse. He wrote: ‘Never before have I spent such days of agony as I am doing now... The heart seems to have gone dry. The agony I am going through is unspeakable. I have often wanted to take out the knife from my pocket and put it through the stomach.’ ⁵⁴ Later he had Jeki sent away to her husband as she was ‘without pity, without remorse.’⁵⁵ There may be another element in his anguish over this affair: perhaps he was involving her in the experiments in sexual control that were later to dominate his life. He once wrote of the sleeping arrangements at Phoenix: “We were most of us here on the veranda sleeping side by side, Jeki was next to me.’ ⁵⁶ In one way he found the experience with Manilal and Jeki helpful in that he was able to perfect the technique of the long fast: he learned the necessity of drinking water even if it were distasteful, and the spiritual focus he gained by having theRamayanaread to him.

Gandhi’s troubled relationship with his family is one of the most difficult aspects of his already complex character. He once remarked of his sons: ‘They have better character than other boys. It is only when I judge them by a standard of my own that I find them lacking.’ ⁵⁷ Harilal had charged his father with preferring his nephews (second cousins, to be precise) to his sons; as the eldest son he felt he had a greater right to his father’s love than any other person. In fact it was precisely this relationship that ensured Gandhi would reject him. His disgust with sex sprang from his belief that he must control his strong sex drive or he could not accomplish spiritual greatness. His anger at his own father for his early marriage has to be seen in the context of his wish to be free from the things of the flesh. Thanks to that early marriage, Gandhi had become tainted by carnality before he knew his own mind. Before he could reject it, he was burdened by those things of this world—his wife and children. Later he developed an indifference to the product of sex, his children, as if they tied him to the earthly world as living symbols of his carnal nature, and were of no import. When they became sexual beings themselves, his revulsion was almost palpable.

The union of the four South African nations was the pressing national issue after the Boer War, promoted by such idealistic imperialists as the administrator Lionel Curtis. The union was to take place in 1910, and as the moment approached Gandhi again travelled to London to lobby politicians on behalf of the Indians, this time accompanied by Haji Habib (who had returned to South Africa). He was able to call on the services of a friendly peer, Lord Ampthill, a former acting Viceroy of India. The Transvaal premier Louis Botha informed the delegation he would compromise on the practical operation of the law but would not repeal the Asiatic Registration or Immigration Acts. He maintained his determination to have the new Union of South Africa a racial state, with the immigration door wide open to whites but opened only sporadically and under specific conditions to Asians. Lord Crewe, the current Secretary of State for the Colonies, faced with negotiating with Gandhi, declared he was ‘a quite astonishingly hopeless and impracticable person for any kind of deal, but with a sort of ardent, though restrained, honesty which becomes the most pigheaded obstinacy at the critical moment.’⁵⁸ Gandhi was still at this time using the language of assimilation and so would dress in a silk hat, a morning suit, a tie, smart shoes and socks.

When he wrote home from London he included a picture of some suffragettes with the approving message, ‘Many of the ladies in the picture have been to jail.’⁵⁹ He lost sympathy with them when they took to greater ‘militancy’ including attacks on property, but he gained from observing them, mentioning their exploits in almost every report he sent to Indian Opinion. The publicity value of sending women to jail may have occurred to him here, and he wanted to prepare his followers for the next stage.

Gokhale visited South Africa in October–November 1912, with some encouragement from the imperial government and a welcome by the South African authorities for this Indian moderate. The campaigner found the experience of Tolstoy Farm less than congenial, resenting their display of poverty which he thought of as ‘extremism,’ and he did not enjoy Gandhi’s and Kallenbach’s attempts to make him more comfortable by giving him a cot and a commode and bringing him food. ‘You all seem to think that you have been born to suffer hardships and discomforts, and people like myself have been born to be pampered by you,’ he said. ‘I will bear any amount of hardship but I will humble your pride.’ He talked pointedly of the ‘avalanche of half-baked ideas’ threatening to overwhelm India.⁶⁰ He had great admiration for Gandhi, however, telling an Indian audience: ‘Gandhi has in him the marvellous spiritual power to turn ordinary men around him into heroes and martyrs.’⁶¹

After a thorough briefing from Gandhi, Gokhale met with Smuts and Botha. He returned and gave Gandhi the result of the meeting: ‘You must return to India in a year. Everything has been settled. The Black [Asiatic Registration] Act will be repealed. The racial bar will be removed from emigration law. The £3 tax will be abolished.’⁶² Gandhi did not this time believe the assurances of the South African government—it was Gokhale’s turn to be gulled. Gandhi thanked him for his efforts. When he saw his ‘political guru’ off on 1 December 1912, he wore Indian dress for the first time since he was a child.

The state was now stepping up its attacks. The South African racial state was lumbering towards its apotheosis in the complete racial discrimination of apartheid (finally to be written into law in 1950). As part of this process the machinery of state in all its manifestations moved towards the creation of a racial dimension in every part of life. Thus the Supreme Court ruled in March 1913 that only Christian marriages were legal in South Africa; Hindu, Muslim and Zoroastrian (Parsi) marriages were void—an unconscionable insult to Indians. Now the women supporters of Gandhi, who had not previously courted jail, started joining the struggle actively—entering the Transvaal illegally, hawking without a licence and committing other offences, but the government declined to imprison them. A new immigration bill, published in April 1913, intended to erode existing rights even further.

Gandhi’s satyagraha campaign had not included the £3 tax to be paid by freed indentured labourers, which was a bitter imposition on the poorest class of Indians in Natal. Now that the government had promised Gokhale they would repeal the tax (a promise on which, true to form, it later reneged), he felt justified in including it in his demands. This would, for the first time, bring the vast mass of indentured labourers into the struggle—a not inconsequential matter at a time when Gandhi’s forces were not strong:—he wrote to Gokhale of a maximum of sixty-five or sixty-six and a minimum of sixteen on whom he could rely. This was hardly a mass movement. In keeping with this change in focus he closed Tolstoy Farm and concentrated his followers on Phoenix, as it was more sensible to engage over indentured labourers where they lived in Natal.

Underlying this change of direction were challenges to Gandhi’s leadership, following his failure to deliver on any of the issues favoured by his elite merchant backers: registration, the location of bazaars and free movement within South Africa. Gandhi was facing such accusations of failure that he refused to attend a meeting of the Natal Indian Congress as long as the secretaries who rejected his policies remained in office. At one public meeting he was actually blamed for the erosion of merchant rights over the years he had been active. With more justice, he was criticised for his increasing assumption of the mantle of leadership, his unwillingness to adopt alternative policies to those he had personally worked out, and his reliance on European lieutenants while passing over able Indians. A motion of no confidence was later passed on Gandhi by the Congress, but by that time he had already outflanked his opponents with dynamic action.

Declining in personal influence, with his back against the wall and a dwindling band of followers, opposed by his own movement and with the trading community unwilling to further sacrifice their livelihoods, Gandhi determined on ‘my final offering to the God of Truth.’⁶³ He decided to sacrifice all the settlers at Phoenix, men and women, excepting only a few needed to run Indian Opinion, and children under sixteen. As the campaign rolled on, in fact, one issue of the newspaper was published by the children, working alone. The satyagrahis were to court arrest in the most direct way possible.

He did not confide in Kasturba as he felt that merely to ask her was to command her, and she should court jail of her own volition. She was offended at his apparent lack of confidence, and insisted on joining the women’s ‘invading party.’ She and three other women were arrested for illegal entry to the Transvaal and imprisoned for three months. The effect on public opinion in India of women being imprisoned was electric. Other insults to the Indian community had been accepted as the lot of those who went abroad to find a new life. The insult to women implicit in the new interpretation of marriage and their imprisonment was more than the nation could bear. Channelled by Gokhale, numerous meetings rained outrage on the South African government.

The movement had its martyrs. Gandhi writes of Valliamma Munusamy, a sixteen-year-old girl who caught a fever in jail and died emaciated soon after release. In true martyr’s fashion she insisted, even knowing it would cause her death, that she was ‘ready to go to jail again.’ ‘Who would not love to die for one’s motherland?’ Gandhi reports her as saying—which, if the translation of her words is accurate, opens up the question of what she thought the struggle was about.⁶⁴ Did the poor of South Africa believe their sacrifices were for India?

Other women, mainly Tamils, went to the coal-mining centre of Newcastle and called on the indentured labourers in the mines to go on strike over the £3 tax. The strike was preceded by a public meeting addressed by a veteran satyagrahi, Thambi Naidoo, also a Tamil, who was able to play on the bitter resentment over the tax. The tax on former indentured labourers who wished to stay in Natal after their indenture was hated for what it was: a means to get rid of Indians who had come as labourers and intended after their period of indenture to make a life for themselves in South Africa; many were forced back to work again under contract. With these labourers, Gandhi had finally hit on a force that could be mobilised and tapped—much of his energy in this last campaign was engaged not in motivating the labourers but in restraining them.

Gandhi travelled to northern Natal and toured the striking mines where the labourers lived in compounds, their accommodation provided by the mine owners who had now cut off their electricity and water supplies. He decided to lead them out of the compounds, but his problem became how to feed and accommodate the hundreds of strikers. They had been living on the breadline so they had no savings.

The Indian traders gave food, though they did not want to support Gandhi publicly because they had trading relations with the mine owners. A Tamil Christian called Lazarus gave space on his small plot of land for the labourers to sleep. In one of his astonishing displays of confidence, Gandhi told the strikers to come to him with nothing except their clothes and blankets—he promised to supply food for them as long as the strike lasted. As word spread, hundreds of labourers with their wives and children carrying bundles of clothes on their heads flocked to Gandhi to sleep on the ground and receive meals from communal pots. Gandhi explained that his intention was to ‘march them to the Transvaal border to court arrest. We should be arrested on the way. This avoids the difficulties of lodgings, etc., and keeps the men going.’⁶⁵ So the machinery of the state was to be used to feed and house the strikers, thereby prolonging the strike.

The coal owners asked to see Gandhi and put to him their very reasonable argument: that the £3 tax was imposed by the government but the miners were striking against them. The strike was the only weapon the labourers had, Gandhi replied; he advised the owners to put pressure on the government to repeal the tax—which was, in fact, what they were already doing. Smuts’s policy was to wait and see, knowing that the need to look after the strikers was placing an enormous strain on Gandhi’s finances.

Gandhi now had upwards of four thousand strikers and dependants. He told them he could supply them with a pound and a half of bread and an ounce of sugar each per day; they must bear abuse and violence from the authorities, if arrested they must go quietly and bear the hardships of jail willingly. The labourers explained they were used to hardship, and from 28 October 1913 they marched with Gandhi at their head. Gandhi himself took part in all the necessary operations of the ‘army’: overseeing the sanitary arrangements, cooking and serving food. As a leader he was not only always visible to his followers, he was there taking part in the same activities that were expected of them. Such empathy was one of his finest leadership qualities. A journalist described the marchers as ‘an exceedingly picturesque crew. To the eye they appear most meagre, indeed emaciated; their legs are mere sticks but the way they are marching on starvation rations shows them to be particularly hardy... Mr Gandhi is looked upon with absolute veneration and is habitually addressed as Bapu [father].’⁶⁶

Gandhi wrote to assure the government that he and his labourers did not intend to settle in the Transvaal, but wanted to protest against the government’s breach of its pledge to repeal the £3 tax and ‘as a pure demonstration of our distress at the loss of our self-respect.’⁶⁷ The government was welcome to arrest them where they were, he added helpfully.

Gandhi had his seasoned satyagrahis posted on the route in advance to organise the food—people such as Hermann Kallenbach and Sonja Schlesin who as Europeans had some, but not complete, protection from arrest. In the town of Volksrust just inside the Transvaal border the local Europeans held a meeting at which some threatened to meet the Indians with bullets if they crossed over. Kallenbach bravely attended, despite the risk of personal violence, and put the Indians’ case. The procession passed through Volksrust in peace.

The police did not arrest the marchers but twice arrested Gandhi, though the march proceeded as planned and Gandhi each time received bail and rejoined the march, now closing in on Johannesburg. They were aiming to stop at Tolstoy Farm, but were arrested en masse at Balfour and placed on three special trains which took them back to Natal.

Finally Gandhi was arrested again, tried and sentenced to nine months with hard labour for inducing indentured labourers to leave Natal. In Volksrust jail he met Kallenbach and Polak, who had also been arrested. New satyagrahis were arriving in prison every day for crossing into the Transvaal. In Natal, where the trainloads of marchers had been taken, they were summarily tried and sent to jail. Now the government had a problem: imprisoning the strikers meant they could not go back to work even if they wanted to. The coal mines would have to close down, which would cripple the nation’s industry. The government now did the worst thing it could in the eyes of the world: it declared the mines to be prison outposts, their European staff to be warders, and forced the labourers underground. This was not, therefore, even indentured labour—it was slave labour. Gandhi’s strategy had forced the government to use its utmost power, to behave with extreme brutality to defend an unjust law with yet further injustice. Ideally, from Gandhi’s point of view, the suffering of the labourers was being played out on a world stage.

Following the lead of the miners, now labourers in other industries struck, starting with the workers on the sugar plantations in southern Natal. This led to further violence: mounted military police charged, armed police opened fire on the strikers. At one point in November 1913 the majority of Natal’s sixty thousand Indian workers were out on strike. There was no law against striking and the government’s actions were completely illegal. The Viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge, criticised the South African government for its handling of the protesters and so, more diplomatically, did the Colonial Office in London. Finally Smuts ordered the release of Gandhi, Polak and Kallenbach, then the rest of the satyagraha prisoners, and as a fig leaf for his embarrassed climb-down, set up a commission of inquiry that was guaranteed to find for the Indians while whitewashing the governments behaviour.

Gandhi now adopted another costume, for the first time following the example of his hero Tolstoy who had decided not only to live but to dress like a peasant. Instead of appearing as the Western-educated Indian lawyer in a combination of European and Parsi dress, Gandhi now wore a plain, knee-length white cotton tunic and the skirt-like lungi worn by labourers. He was barefoot and his head was almost completely shaven excepting for a patch on top, as a sign of mourning for the ten Indians who had been killed in confrontation with the police and for whose deaths he took responsibility. He was thus dressed when he waited outside Pietermaritzburg prison on 22 December 1913 to meet the women prisoners, including Kasturba, who had been visibly enfeebled by her ordeal. In all some 2,500 Indians, or nearly one-fifth of the resident Indian population of the Transvaal, went to jail, many of them several times.⁶⁸

Gandhi did not contribute to the fatuous process of the ‘commission of inquiry’ but was prepared to meet with Smuts and other members of the Union government. Smuts was by now preoccupied with a white railway workers’ strike over which he declared martial law. The European strikers made no pretensions to peaceful protest—they were willing to overturn the government if they did not get their way. Not wanting to gain from his opponent’s discomfort, Gandhi called off a march that was to be held to criticise the partisan composition of the commission of inquiry.

Gandhi seemed to enjoy his relationship with the European administrators, even when he was arguing against them. When he was in Pretoria Central Jail he spent some of his time making Smuts a pair of leather sandals, to show his lack of rancour. The general prized them; but when Gandhi left, Smuts remarked: ‘The saint has left our shores, I hope for ever.’⁶⁹

The commission did its job of whitewashing the government’s actions and proposing an acceptable climb-down. The Indian Relief Bill of 1914 abolished the £3 tax and cancelled arrears; non-Christian marriages were recognised. However, free movement across borders within South Africa was still restricted, registration was still required, and no more just administration of Indian commerce was introduced. Still, by 1914 Gandhi considered the satyagraha struggle that had begun in 1906 was completed, even though he was subject to severe criticism from former supporters who pointed out the differences between the objectives of the campaign and its achievements. On the positive side, over these years Indians had fostered a sense of community and pride in their background and were now a force to be reckoned with.

The white administrators and demonstrators who opposed the Indians were, of course, also expressing their rights in the context of the racial state, which Gandhi and his supporters showed no sign of opposing in its entirety. The Indian traders’ argument was that their race and financial status should guarantee rights to them, not that every Indian (or African) should have civic rights. Gandhi was pushing the racial state towards the form it was ultimately to take anyway: that of a buffer racial group of Indians and ‘coloureds,’ with intermediate rights, between the whites at the top and the blacks at the bottom.

The lack of concern in the campaign for the rights of the African natives was understandable in the circumstances, but unattractive. Gandhi showed sympathy for the rights of the Africans, but any more concrete alliance would have outraged the Europeans and would not have pleased Gandhi’s merchant constituency. His campaign had done some good for the Africans, however, in that it had shown not only that struggle against the South African regime was possible, but that, if the struggle were waged as a campaign against injustice, it would attract a fair amount of European support—a message that Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress would be able to put to devastating effect. This was Gandhi’s most important gift to the people of South Africa: the shaping of the racial struggle into a form that would attract maximum moral support.

It is hardly too much to say that, in common with many people who have to go abroad to seek their fortune, not least the merchants and labourers who formed his constituency, South Africa made Gandhi. In practical terms, his work for the Natal Indian Congress and the Transvaal Indian Association taught him how to run a political organisation; Indian Opinion taught him how to run a newspaper and Phoenix and Tolstoy Farm how to run a self-sufficient community. Financially, Gandhi made a good income from the law: he paid back the money he had spent on his London education nearly five times over from his successful South African law practice, so he felt himself free from family obligations.

In the eyes of others he had gained an international reputation, and his political techniques and skills were attracting comment. In India, he was to be given access to the higher levels of nationalist politics, something he had not achieved in 1902, before the South African campaign had raised his profile. In 1910 Gokhale even proposed him as president for that year’s session of the Indian National Congress.

But Gandhi would not have considered these his most important achievement: his spiritual progress was what mattered most to him. The speculative young man in London conducting experiments with food had found his own path and felt moved to instruct others. He had formulated the basic principles of satyagraha: of non-violence and of suffering for a cause. He had begun not only to practise but to promote celibacy; he had developed the ability to motivate large groups of people. In South Africa, Gandhi had found his constituency; many of his closest disciples were and would continue to be Christians and Jews. The people he got on well with were Western seekers after spiritual truth, who approved of the vision he was enunciating on his spiritual journey. Muslims were more resistant to his message, wanting to weigh the advantages of his approach against others; one assumes the Muslim traders were spiritually satisfied with the message of Islam and saw no benefit in further searching. Gandhi’s attitudes were grossly at variance with theirs: it was hardly possible not to notice that he was attempting to live as cheaply as possible, whereas the merchants’ objective was material prosperity.

Educated Hindus could respect him, but they did not want to follow him. He might receive support from wealthy Indians of either religion, but it was by motivating the poor that he would set the political world alight. His greatest success had come with the impoverished Tamil Hindu workers: almost by chance, the labourers of Natal had shown him the way.

On 18 July 1914, aged almost forty-five Gandhi gathered up his closest supporters and left South Africa for India after more than twenty years. He was now a mature man with a purpose.