Mahatma Gandhi, page 18
A white man—one never knew whether he was a Boer or an Englishman—entered the compartment where Mohandas was seated comfortably feeling the exquisite freshness of the mountain air, and noting the ways, the voices, of these westerners settled in the heart of the African wilds. They were different from the Europeans he had known, but yet not really so. One might as well be on any wide Scottish countryside. They seemed sturdy and somewhat fierce but they were civilised after all. The white passenger having looked at Mohandas Gandhi jumped out of the wagon in a hurry, and returned with the guard.
‘You will have to go and sit in the van.’
‘Why?’ said Mohandas, with as much fear as sweetness in his voice. ‘Why, I hold a first-class ticket.’
‘For ought I care you might hold a ticket to heaven, but you must get out. This man wants to travel in the compartment.’
‘I don’t object to his travelling. There is room for him here, and for many others as well.’
‘I have no time to waste.’
‘I will not leave.’
Here the guard called a constable who, in turn, threw the luggage down and pushed Mohandas out of the compartment. The white man got in. All was right now. The laws were upheld. But who made the laws? And did such laws truly exist?
And in the whole jostling humanity that evening there was not one man or woman who could feel the agony of an anguished young Indian, son of a former Prime Minister of Porbandar, a barrister-at-law at the Grays Inn, London, the beloved child of his mother, who had come as legal adviser in this far off land—legal adviser to a merchant prince like Dada Abdulla—there was no one to listen to his cry. Would the gods hear? Would God hear?
Mohandas went into the waiting room hoping to find some solace in rest and sleep. But no sleep would come, and it was bitterly cold. He could, of course, go and fetch his luggage. It was left behind on the platform where it was thrown. There was an overcoat in the trunk. But fear and pride forced Mohandas not to venture out. Anyway, what could happen to him? Pneumonia? Was there a God? If so, why this world of humiliation, of injustice? Was not Mohandas at least as well educated as any of those white men, and certainly more than most? Was he not ever courteous to the Zulu or the Boer? Why then this plight of man—not only the young Indian barrister’s plight but the suffering of all men, of man as such. There’s a brotherhood of the sorrowful as there’s a brotherhood of the joyous. For in the intensity of suffering as in the intensity of joy, we slip beyond ourselves somewhere, and feel the feel of every other. Or so it seems. The edge of sorrow and the beginnings of joy are one and opposite. The ambivalence of man is at the circumference. There is none at the centre. It is. Is is. Is.
The look of ‘things’ changes with subterranean changes in you. So the world is illusory. Where are you, then? What is you, I? And the ‘I’, is this what one calls God? Then what is an Indian? A Boer? The Zulu, the Englishman? What?
This was the most creative experience of his life, Gandhiji said almost half-a-century later. And he went out of it a new man.
After all, Harishchandra walked this truth wherever he wanted, in his palace or to his crematorium. And so did Dharmaraja. And Bhishma. There is no problem, then, except that there is no problem. This reconversion (or rebirth) indicated the wherewithal of the free. Not that man will be free. Man is free.
For in the history of civilisation each God or hero wanted his cauldron of blood. Each Odin or Chengiz needed his millions of dead. Unless man goes beyond God, he will never go beyond history. God—the European or the Asiatic—we make him as we grow.
So on that night at Pietermaritzburg at the train station—something important happened to history. There was a man—neither black nor white, yellow nor brown—there was a man who was just suffering under the aegis of no God he could name or even know. One has to be alone to find one’s God. The British Empire was ending here at Pietermartizburg (for Natal was still mostly British) and the Boer Republic started on the other side of the frontier. You changed gods as you changed trains—and in between was the engine—changing station, you shivered in your fright and mountain cold. The day Lenin knew his beloved brother was hanged changed the face of history. On that June night at Pietermartizburg was Gandhism born, and the two face each other before civilisation. For one to whom History (or Marx) is God. For the other to whom Truth is God. They are not irrevocable positions, they only function at different levels. The historical man would create his paradise on earth. The truth-seeker will go beyond man and be sacrificed.
Mohandas now walked out to send telegrams to the wide awake world. The world indeed was so differently aspected now. Objects seemed to escape their dimensions and affirm a newer reality. Even the colour of earth and sun seemed different. One had changed perspectives, as if one were fresh and young and in a subtler universe. For the universe grows with one’s growth and dissolves with the ego’s dissolution. The inner and the outer pilgrimages thus are one.
Of the telegrams sent, one went to Dada Abdulla and the other to the Manager, Natal Government Railway. And Mohandas went back to the waiting room and sat for an appropriate answer. It would come.
Indian merchants, as soon as they had heard from Dada Abdulla of the anguished traveller, went to his immediate rescue. But the tragedy was now no more a personal tragedy. It was as if the tragedy was a part of a law, a cosmic principle that had to be reckoned with. It was not that Sita, the wife of Sri Rama was prisoner of the ten-headed Ravana, the King of Lanka. It was the sheer incomprehensibility of this event. That Ravana, the great monster, once the worshipper of Shiva, who had shaken with his austerities the very trident-bearer, Lord of the Himalayas, Shiva Himself, such Ravana’s fervour—that Ravana had to have ten heads and be the Sita-enticing demon, this was the tragedy. But when the understanding came, that Ravana’s fervour translated into a quick demand for liberation, and meant he had to be born a monster and die at the hands of Sri Rama himself—then one wholly understood. This is the nexus of tragedy. Not that Sita is prisoner of Ravana—yes, of course, she is, but that Ravana’s liberation came from Sita’s imprisonment. If not what would Hanuman have been—he the monkey-messenger and fighter who saw Sita under the Ashoka tree and finally set fire to Ravana’s capital. Everybody is a Hanuman—the monkey and will build the bridge to the island of Lanka, destroy the devout ‘enemy,’ and, freeing Sita, bring her back in an aerial chariot of flowers. Thus the law. (Evil is only a roundabout way of affirming good.) For the affirmation of evil as an indicator of good leads one beyond the good and the evil—and thus liberation. There is, in fact, no personal tragedy, as such, for any man. All sorrow is the ignorance of its implication of joy. The suffering of Pietermaritzburg was an indicator that man will be free. So that when the Indian merchants of Pietermaritzburg beheld Mohandas Gandhi, it was to discover a young man sorrowful but with an inward radiance. Something had happened to the young man that nobody could name.
Once Mohandas went into the city of Pietermaritzburg all the well-to-do Indians gathered around him. What happened to you, brother? Oh? Only this—well, that happens to us every day. What else can one do? We are ignorant people. We come here to make money. We make money, and gobble down the insults. After some time it seems as simple as a boil on the face. It comes and goes. Allah is great.
This was too simple an argument. Something must be done about it all. It must change. It will change. Let us change it, shall we?
The Manager of the Natal Government Railways, Durban, had wired back; a berth was reserved for Mohandas Gandhi up to Charlestown for that very evening. With trepidation but with a new burning faith in himself, Mohandas boarded the train and reached Charlestown the next morning without drama. At Charlestown, however, they had to take a coach. The coach could seat only five at a time. What will one do then with this coolie, however well he might be dressed, and though he may bear a first-class ticket?
‘You missed your reservation yesterday. There is no seat,’ so spoke the agent.
‘But I have a seat. Look at this ticket.’
‘Yes, you have a ticket, I see. But you cannot take this coach.’
‘I have this ticket. I have a right to the seat.’ Mohandas was affirmative but not vehement.
‘Well, we’ll see. You can sit on the box next to the Hottentot servant.’
‘Give me a seat is all I ask.’
Mohandas was now accommodated on the box seat next to the coachman. The ‘leader’ of the coach, a big and grumbly man sat inside, where Mohandas should have. Fear possessed Mohandas Gandhi—to be in this far-off countryside amidst strange and rather cruel looking people, and to have no one to come to his rescue. Such are the ways of God. Let us pray and hope. Hé Ram, Hé Ram, he started saying to himself.
In the afternoon, however, a crucial situation arose. The burly Boer leader needed to have a few puffs—he wanted to smoke. It could not be done inside the coach. Therefore he had to go up to his own official seat. What will one do with this coolie barrister then?
The ‘leader’ laid a cloth at his own feet.
‘Sit here. Now we can go.’
‘No, I will not sit there. I have a right to a seat inside.’ But he did not want to fight.
‘Here is one for you,’ shouted the ‘leader’ and boxed Mohandas so fiercely Mohandas almost fell on the ground. He held on however to a railing of the carriage, while the Boer went on hitting and kicking him.
‘I clung to the brass rails,’ ‘Gandhiji wrote later, ‘of the coachbox . . . determined to keep my hold even at the risk of breaking my wrist bones.’ The white passengers, at first indifferent, now separated them, and finally with Gandhi in his legitimate seat and the Boer next to the Hottentot, the coach finally reached Standerton. The Boer leader never seemed to stop swearing and threatening what he would do at the end of the journey. ‘My heart was beating fast within my breast, and I was wondering whether I would ever reach my destination alive.’ Nothing happened, however. Other Indians met Mohandas at the end of this journey, and he was taken away to their homes, and once again Mohandas heard all the woes of the community. ‘Oh, only this! Of course we are not educated. But this happens to us every day.’
From Standerton he reached the Vaal River, the boundary between Natal and the Transvaal, without any further incident. That night he reached Johannesburg by another coach. He spent the night with some friendly Indians. Mohandas Gandhi read through the railway regulations. There was no mention anywhere that a coolie could not travel first class.
From Johannesburg to Pretoria is only thirty-seven miles. The railway journey was a quick one. How about getting the proper ticket? ‘I am an Indian Barrister,’ wrote Mohandas to the station master. ‘I always travel First Class. I hope you have a ticket for me. Since there is no time for reply, I shall present myself to you before the train starts. Yours truly, etc.’ So his host and a few others went to the station. The impeccably dressed Indian barrister asked for a first-class ticket. The station master, a Dutchman, and not a Boer, gave it to him, and said, ‘Good luck to you’, and winked and gave a friendly smile. Now Mohandas entered the carriage and sat himself down. There was only one other passenger—a white one—but there was no drama. The drama seemed over.
In the middle of the journey, however, the guard came to examine the tickets. Seeing a coolie in the first class compartment, he became red with anger. ‘Get out and sit in the van!’
‘No I will not. I have a first class ticket.’
‘You might have any ticket you like, but a coolie must travel in the van!’
‘I have studied all the rules of the railways. Nowhere do they mention it.’
‘I won’t argue with you. If you won’t listen I will have you pushed out!’
‘No,’ protested the white passenger. ‘He is quite harmless. Why do you want to do that to him? He has a first class ticket. He will do no harm to me.’ The passenger was an Englishman.
‘In that case, please yourself!’ shouted the guard, banging the door behind him. What can one do with such behaviour, and he a white man? Strange indeed are the ways of us humans! But it was now a peaceful journey through the flat veld, quiet, open and ingrown—the railway running through it all with civilised reliability, then suddenly it turned down a bend and rushed whistling down to Pretoria, the proud new capital of the Boers.
* * *
Pretoria in the nineties of the nineteenth century was just a sprawling little town, a frontiersmen’s capital with low wooden houses, wide streets spreading between them, and with sidewalks and long avenues. A broad, squat house with a round roof on it, and being nothing different from any other except two artificial lions at the veranda steps, and the sentry at the door, was the home of President Paul Kruger. Affable, large and bearded, he was a kind father, Oom Paul, to all—a pioneer who had faced the wilds and the Hottentots and the vile trickery of the Englishman to establish here a government worthy of his Christian forebears. A new Jerusalem this would be after all these treks—the Englishman put in his place, the Hottentot and the Zulu in theirs, and the Coloureds after all were never a people, being neither black nor white they belonged to none. The Indian merchant was a busy nobody who made his pile and slept on it. Who could or should worry about them? Among God’s ordinances, the Hindu had no place. He existed just enough to show he does not exist.
Into this isolated universe arrived Mohandas Gandhi, the coolie barrister—he arrived to give legal help in a small court case between two Indians. Among two non-legal entities a fight is no matter. The coolie barrister would settle into his dirt and his murky ways, and persuade himself into the rightness, nay, the righteousness of whatever the white man’s law would impose. There was already, as we have seen, a white man’s lawyer engaged for the case by Dada Abdulla. Mohandas Gandhi was just to look into the accounts, read the correspondence in the devil’s own tongue, Gujarati, and advise the lawyer accordingly.
A.W. Baker, the attorney, was an excellent man. Belonging to the African General Mission, he was as intent on conversions as on moneymaking. Having no colour prejudice whatsoever he welcomed Mohandas Gandhi with warmth and hope—hope that a new convert, and a high-class Hindu at that, may be in the making. Baker found a room for the Indian barrister in a white woman’s house—Gandhi was to pay thirty-five shillings a week. And between his ventures into accounts and the Gujarati correspondence, Mohandas had plenty of time to examine the new land, and its religion, Christianity.
‘Why don’t you become a Christian, Mr. Gandhi? There’s salvation only through Jesus Christ.’
‘So it might be,’ answered back Mohandas Gandhi. ‘After all, God has guided me here. I should not however think of embracing another religion before I fully understand my own.’
But he went to Baker’s church. There everybody prayed that ‘the new brother who has come amongst us . . . may the Lord Jesus who has saved us save him too.’
There were a few Quakers too among the assembly. They invited him to tea. Mr. Coates, a Quaker, and he became warm friends. They met often and discussed the religion of Jesus Christ passionately. Books were given for Mohandas to study incontrovertible documents to prove that Jesus was the only saviour. But the arguments were not really convincing. If compassion was Jesus’ greatest gift, the Buddha with his love for all creation—and not only for mankind but for trees and animals—seemed to be a great prophet. If sacrifice was the greatest proof of Christian greatness, the sacrifices of the Hindus seemed so much more lofty. Until the other day the Hindu woman burnt herself on her husband’s pyre. Yet Christianity, especially the Sermon on the Mount, had a very special fragrance of its own. It brought Mohandas Gandhi again and again to the church. And one day Mr. Coates, the Quaker, went straight into the problem.
‘Those beads you have at your neck, Mr. Gandhi, do you believe in them?’
‘Believe in them? As a matter of fact I have never thought of it to this day. My mother gave them to me with love and I wear them. That is all. The necklace has nothing to do with my religion.’
‘If so it’s only a superstition.’
‘May be it’s so, who knows?’
‘How can you live with such a superstition? Come, let me break it for you.’
‘No, thank you, Mr. Coates. As I told you, my mother gave it to me with love. Unless it breaks of its own accord, I will not throw it away. Thank you all the same for your deep concern for me. I appreciate your sincere feelings for me.’
Meanwhile, one day while Mohandas was passing by the President’s House something unexpected happened to him. The sentry at the President’s gate, seeing a dark man on the pavement, gave him a rollicking kick. The coolie barrister fell yards away—so unexpected was this act, and so frail the offender. Mr. Coates was passing by on his horse. In good Dutch he reprimanded the sentry and told him who the victim was. The sentry seemed surprised and shamefacedly apologised.
