Mahatma Gandhi, page 17
‘Tell Gandhi,’ he said, did Sir Phiroze, ‘such things are the common experiences of many barristers. He is still fresh from England and hot-blooded. He does not know British officers . . . He will gain nothing by proceeding against the Sahib, and on the contrary he will very likely ruin himself.’
‘This shock changed the course of my life.’ 3
Just at this moment of deepest despair, the hand of God showed itself. There was a firm at Porbandar which had important connections with South Africa (Porbandar had ancient contacts with Arabia, and for over a hundred years or so, with Africa). Dada Abdulla and Co. was a rich firm in Durban in litigation with another rich Indian firm in the Transvaal. They wanted legal help, especially from an Indian. Would the son of Karamchand Gandhi, just returned from London, go to Durban and help in the progress of the case? In fact, Mohandas Gandhi would not have to plead before the courts—he had just to give legal help with the documents, translate the letters from the Indian languages, etc. It was really a clerical job. It was not even well paid—a return boat-fare, and a fee of £105 was all that was promised.
‘This was hardly going there as a barrister,’ wrote Gandhiji. ‘But I wanted somehow to leave India. There was also the tempting opportunity of seeing a new country, and of having a new experience. Also I could send £105 to my brother and help in the expenses of the household. I closed with the offer without any haggling and got ready to go to South Africa.’ 4
* * *
The Republic of South Africa is, among the territories of the world, both geologically and racially, one of the most extravagantly endowed. The Zulus and the Boers, the Hottentots, the British and the Malays, the Coloured, the Indians, each a nation by themselves, with their customs, prejudices, and gods, had time and space to cut out their own bit of land, and if threatened in their liberties or customs, took to the trails like the Zulus did or the Boers, and night after night of going up the steep pathways and coming down mountainlands to the rich valleys, they started other nations, other empires, and thus each part of South Africa has a cragged and noble story to tell.
The hasty judgement of politicians often goes against history. To the Aryan invaders, the dasyus of India, dark and flat-nosed, were not a civilised people. The conqueror conquering, he automatically became superior—or so he thought. So, too, with the Dutch, the British. And just as today historians are beginning to uncover (another and more important fact) that it’s perhaps the Dravidian that’s the most civilised man of the Indian continent, maybe, history which has proved the first man among men to be an African, may yet prove through archaeology that other and more splendid civilisations have arisen in this vast and rich continent, with cities, temples, laws and noble, indecipherable texts; that the Zulu, the Bantu, and the Amharic peoples have perhaps said and done impressive things that historians have to catch up with, but not so history. Again there is in the geographical parallelism between the peninsula of Asia, which is India, and that peninsula of Africa, which is South Africa, something perhaps historically akin. Indeed, India’s Puranas—of unknown dates—seem to have known of this extraordinarily rich continent, high with the Moon Mountains, and the blue Nile—and maybe they even knew of the mysterious Mlanje heights and of the golden Nyasa. Indian divinities, too, from the Deccan and the Chera lands, did they not know of the great Unkulkulu and the Zimbabwe, of their hero gods and the lion-incarnates? Again the riches of India (which remember made for the very discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, and of the continent that Columbus landed on)—the same mineral wealth, gold and diamond (one should not forget, diamond was first mentioned, used, and sold by the Indians)—these are to be found in South Africa, have made South Africa. Then too are common the variety of birds, beasts and shrubbery. The descriptions that the Roman historians have left of India (and the Greeks as well) seem so much akin to the splendours of the elephant, the zebra and the giraffe, the orangutan and the hippopotamus, the lion, the great size of birds—one should think one was talking of Africa, for all wonder was ‘Ethiopic’.
Into this splendrous land came Mohandas Gandhi (leaving his wife and son behind), then just twenty-four years of age, carrying with him the multiple riches of India, recognised and unrecognised, with a thousand little understandings from the British—not just the long, dark frock-coat, his impeccable shoes and tie, yet also his British way of courtesy and independence. No sooner Mohandas Gandhi landed in South Africa than he discovered himself not only an Indian, but a subject of the British Empire. This was at once his pride and his tragedy. For South Africa was not British. It was British and Boerland and Zululand. Yet, looking back, one realised India was magnificently British. A British administrator may misbehave, and the might and complexity of the young British Raj could still drive Mohandas Gandhi out of India to seek employment elsewhere. Yet, Mohandas knew the British were otherwise. They had sound laws, a shy relationship with one another, dependable yet distant; on the whole they tried to be gentlemen. And Gandhi would be a gentleman in South Africa, and thus be true to what was noble and contemporary. Wherever anybody behaves a gentleman, automatically that becomes a civilised land—the land of the Aryas, the Aryavarta. 5 For an Indian all the world is Aryavarta and so the Englishman some sort of an Indian. Thus an Indian out of India becomes, as it were, an Englishman, the universal man.
When Dada Abdulla Seth, the great merchant from Durban welcomed Mohandas Gandhi at the docks, little did he realise the great event of history this meeting would unfold—not only to Africa and to India, but to the whole political structure of the world. For to behave like a gentleman in a British land but with fierce Boer traditions was to make one a slave or a gentleman. And with Krishna (of the Gita) behind one, one becomes not merely a gentleman but a gentleman of God, a templar, a holy warrior, an Aryaputra. The Dharma-performer of the Gita then is just one step removed from the office of being a gentleman—hence satyagraha, Smuts and the freedom of India, the decolonisation of the whole world. Thus the drama of the world was being enacted in the territories of South Africa, just as the colonies were at last getting more or less settled into their own. The moment of their fulfilment started the beginnings of their disintegration as well. The world will be free because India is going to be free. A new Zionism was in the air—all people will have their own Jerusalem.
Dada Abdulla Seth was a man of great wealth, courtesy, and humility. Like many Indian merchants of his time, especially Muslim, he had little learning but a great heart. He had large houses, many servants and clerks, and was lavish with his hospitality. In fact, Barrister Gandhi was not really necessary in the case he had filed in Pretoria against Mohammed Seth (another Indian merchant) for the recovery of a sum of forty thousand pounds. There were good white lawyers looking after the whole matter, and the idea of having an Indian helper was purely in the heads of his colleagues of Porbandar. But since Barrister Gandhi is come, he be thrice welcome! Yet this new arrival was a different type of Indian to any that Dada Seth had ever encountered. Mohandas Gandhi spoke faultless Gujarati (after all, a son of a former Prime Minister of Porbandar, the grandson of the famous Ota Gandhi himself)—even so the young Gandhi was also very much a sahib. He not only dressed in impeccable British manner, he also ate with fork and spoon. The only difference, however, was that Barrister Gandhi never touched meat or fish. Nor for that matter did he touch spices. He ate plain, boiled vegetables and English porridge, sometimes even fruit and raw vegetables, but never anything very complicated. The only Indian thing about him was his turban. It made him look what he truly was, that is, a coolie Barrister. Now the word coolie, Dada Seth enunciated and explained, had a particular meaning in South Africa. A coolie was not an Arab or a Persian or a Chinaman, a coolie was always a Hindu. For the Indian merchant here, being rich and being Muslim, could claim Arabic descent. The Parsi, though having settled in India, could claim Persian descent. Yet the poor peasant from some obscure South Indian village, he with his deep Dravidic traditions and layer after layer of religious sensibilities—his people having died of famine or of poverty, had hired himself as a legal slave for five or ten years to his Boer or British masters—he could not be anything recognisable. He could not be called a slave (the British Empire would tolerate no slaves on their territories)—so he became a coolie. A coolie is one who is bound to a master for a fixed period within which period if he escapes he is brought back under police escort for work or prison, but once he’d finished his contract, he could, if he cared, reengage himself in plantation work, or go out into the world a free man, but ever a coolie; that is one who would do menial or small jobs. It sometimes saved you from humiliations if you changed your religion and became a Christian and sported an European hat. In the eyes of everybody that was higher than the lowest but you could never reach the highest. So why not remain a coolie? And the coolies produced other coolies who went to school, read books, and became clerks in offices, shops, or later in the railways—minor jobs that needed a little education and much adaptability—and so you never had a large coolie colony. They, the coolies, had their own shops and temples, their own ‘locations’, they were befriended by the so-called Arabs and the Persians, but never equal to them—yet you know it was not so terribly bad. Suffering, after all, is man’s inheritance. What karma was it that made us come to this distant, forest-ridden Africa? We can still observe our festivals, marry our children according to Hindu rights, and when we go they will still give us a good funeral-fire, and feast.
Mohandas Gandhi was the first Hindu who came to Africa that was not a coolie. He was a British Indian gentleman. And this set more problems than politics or goodwill could resolve.
The first experience of such a problems was when Mohandas went as a visitor to the court at Durban. The magistrate had never seen such an educated Indian. For him, as to most Boers, the Indians were a semi-barbaric race. Gandhi was a barrister but an Indian barrister. He came with a frock-coat and tie to the court at Durban, but had a neat turban on his head. The magistrate said he, Mohandas Gandhi, could not be seated in the court of Durban with a turban on his head. Now, this could never happen in Great Britain. It cannot happen in India. It should never happen in the British Empire. Gandhi refused to remove his turban. So he walked out of the court. But the problem remained. He was a coolie barrister. What was he going to do in this God-forgotten country? Would he find God? Or rather would God find him?
The fact is we serve many gods. The gods of the Boer are different from the gods of the Bantu, as the British god is different from Sri Krishna or Sri Rama. The Boers were Dutch by extraction. They had once worshipped Odin, and the dark gods of Germanic forests. Civilisation and Christianity came late to them. Tacitus had said of them:
The Germans have no taste for peace; renown is easier won among perils, and you cannot maintain a large body of companions except by violence and war . . . It is always ‘give me the war-horse’ or ‘give me that bloody and victorious spear’. As for meals with their plentiful, if homely, fare, they count simply as pay. Such open-handedness must have war and plunder to feed it. You will find it harder to persuade a German to plough the land and to await its annual produce with patience than to challenge a foe and earn the prize of wounds. He thinks it spiritless and slack to gain by sweat what he can buy with blood.
But again the Zulu Cheka was a magnificent Tamberlane who destroyed townships, killed nations, and did not mind drinking man’s blood. The Hindu with his several thousand years of civilisation (and what do, after all, several thousand years mean in biological history?), when he went to his first forests, his gods too, Mariamma and Badakamma, came into existence. They asked too for blood sacrifices. The Calvinistic edge of severity among the Boers was only the Odinic demand for blood-rights. It was still the mood of the Valkyries. The supplications of the coolie were no different from what his demonology demanded. The Englishman was arrogant and uninvolved, he already belonged to the nineteenth century, or so he thought. He did not face his back to the forest, he could always step into a British gun-boat, his god was his flag. The Zulu and the Boer fled to the forest and would create other empires. The Hindu was totally lost in their midst. And there were mountain tops on which, as ever, the gods fought. One such drama took place on the heights of Pietermaritzburg. All the gods howled at each other, it would seem, in a unique drama of mankind.
For Barrister Gandhi, an Indian gentleman, left Durban on a nice bright day, with respectful adieus from Dada Seth and many of his countrymen, for Pretoria. Now Pretoria in those days could only be reached from Durban first by a stretch of railway—some seventy-five miles—to the frontier town of Charlestown. From there you took a stage coach, crossed over to the Boer Republic of Transvaal and thus on, shifting and shuffling, to Johannesburg. And once in Johannesburg, you take a train again, and reach the Boer capital of Pretoria. A magnificent journey by itself, full of high grasses, steep and treacherous mountains and finally the wide rolling veld—with quiet, sparse, new agglomerations, in which citizens solved one another’s problems with morality, probity and finality. The Boer Republic was courageous and clean, cruel and God-demanding. Kruger was the President of Transvaal, a rough and honest man who wanted to abide by his God, and be interfered with by no Englishman. The English never understood the Dutch God. Anyway, look at William of Orange! A new kingdom by the grace of God would now be established, and Kruger would be its hardy architect, its messiah and chief burgher. And, God willing, they would succeed.
High on the veld and surrounded by many green and rugged hills through which a cold wind blows, Pietermaritzburg, capital of Natal was founded long ago by the two Boers, Pieter and Maritz, who were fleeing from the persecution of the British. And once established, in its turn it became a British city like Cape Town, and capital of the crown colony. The Boers fled once again and across the Vaal to found with flag and Bible, their own republic, the Transvaal. They always revered their ancestors, the Voortrekkers.
The Boers brought out, as their fathers had done, their whitetilted wagons that could hold a family; they assembled their kine and their kindred; once more an exodus began, but an exodus now in thousands. Between 1836 and 1840, six thousand trekkers left the Cape for the unknown east and north. The very Trek of Treks was on—the Great Trek.
Perhaps the Boers were not less free under English rule than under the rule of the Dutch East India Company; perhaps they had, but for the slave business, prospered. They had trekked, however, in the old days, before ever the English came to the Cape, because each man wanted to do as he chose and not as others chose for him; because, in fact, those early Dutchmen had so learnt to hate any kind of government that, even on the Trek of Trek, they trekked away from one another.
They must have been a difficult people indeed to manage. Yet their pride in their achievements—the increasing pride of their descendants—is not unjustified.
They had prepared to face dangers, known and unknown, in the cause of independence, and they had greatly met them. They called themselves, they are called today, the Voortrekkers: those who went before. 6
The difference between the Britisher and the Boer by now was just this, the Englishman, since all was England, he was unafraid and could afford to be courteous, if not always gentlemanly. For the Boer who was neither Dutch nor Huguenot but a mixture of all including the Hottentot, this was their home, their own land, where they could practise their own dogmas. The English would always go back to England. But where was the Boer to go? He would, like the Zulu or the Hottentot, go elsewhere in Africa—and this continent is so large—and build other kingdoms or republics and lead his own ordained way of life. Further, his own religion told him there were some whom God has chosen—and you would not bear all this suffering and not be chosen by God, for look at the ways God showed his Grace, now by appearing through a voice in the mountains, now through a healing presence, and now through a pure Burgher authority. God was on their side. So God was not on the other, on the black side. Hence the Zulu and the Hottentot were going to be the Boer’s hewers of wood and bearers of water, to whom the Boer would be as father to the slave. There was nothing wrong in this scheme, for that is how God had ordained. The black man was somehow black, the white man was white, and between them there would be no other relationship than as between a man and his ox.
Now, if the fight was between the black and the white, between the Britisher and the Boer, the problem would be easily settled. Everyone knew the other’s propositions and positions, and thus arrangements could perhaps be made by which each one would mind his own business, as it were, the Boer the overlord of them all. But the Indian created a new problem. He was neither black nor white, civilised to the barbarian, and barbarian to the Boer, and withal British, being a subject of the beloved Queen Victoria, and Victoria herself not so far, so to say, for she too was a German by birth (was not her mother German?), and Dutch and German were brothers after all. The very word Dutch was very revealing. Then how solve this complex problem?
Though the Boers, driven by the British, had gone to settle in Transvaal so as to have their own republic, they also had another republic, the one of the Orange Free State, on the other side of the Vaal. Even so, the Boers had much to say in the Crown Colony of Natal. Of course, the British ruled here but the Boer could still have his way. Also, the Boer having preceded the British had left behind him an inheritance of actions and reflexes that had stayed. The Englishman might be courteous, but he demanded the same pound of flesh. If found wrong, however, he would apologise—but not so the burgher. The burghers could never be wrong, for, after all, by now history had proved them a people of God, the chosen tribe. The republics therefore prospered.
* * *
On this cold winter evening—it was in the month of June (1893) and in the Southern hemisphere it can be as cold then as December in the North—the train drew up at Pietermaritzburg. Mohandas Gandhi was travelling in his frock coat and striped trousers, and Bengali turban—every inch as distinguished as any first class passenger should be. He also seemed kind and deferential and polite. Pietermaritzburg being the capital of the State, many people got out, and others got into the train. But from Pietermaritzburg the train was going towards Transvaal and thus it was already, as it were, a Boer train. Do you think material things, trains, coaches, or cars do not change with circumstances, just as men do? Yes, they do. And you have just to look at the very way the railway line that goes hurry scurry through bramble and high brush, and down and breathless through the sonorous valleys, by solemn lone waterfalls, and now along vast and round sizzling terrified spaces, the way the engine exhausts its smoke in wild curls or short sweeps or the wagons hold one another with fearful tightness—or so it would seem—and, of course, the guard too behaves differently. The guard was taking the train to the Boer country. He was the guardian of all laws, the railways’ breath and speed, and magician of its destiny. So the guard too had to take his responsibilities. One was indeed entering totally different region of the human universe.
