Gandhi Before India (18 page)

Gandhi was reading the Natal newspapers, which came aboard daily, courtesy of the supply boats. He also got news of the mood on shore from letters sent by friends. An English lawyer wrote to Gandhi on
8 January that if he decided to come off the boat he would ‘be roughly handled’. In fact ‘the public feeling against yourself, and the landing of the free Indians … is so great that I begin to doubt if you will make it ashore.’ In Gandhi’s absence, the Englishman was assisting his clients, and asked him to send a cheque now to cover his fees. For it seemed quite likely that the
Naderi
and the
Courland
would be forced to return to Bombay with their passengers, who were so unwelcome in Natal.
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The ships had been moored offshore for some twenty days. In Durban, a ‘European Protection Association’ was formed to resist the Asiatic invasion. The Association’s first meeting was held on 10 January. When one speaker said that the ‘mouthpiece’ of the Indians ‘was a gentleman of the name of Ghandhi [
sic
]’, a voice from the crowd interjected: ‘Don’t say a gentleman’. A rumour spread that Gandhi was cowed by the protests; one newspaper even claiming that ‘some of the officials who visited the vessels this morning report that Mr Gandhi and the Indians on board are in a state of “funk”, and several were pleading to be taken back to India direct.’

On 11 January, a reporter of the
Natal Advertiser
went on board the SS
Naderi
to interview the captain. There were, he found, 356 passengers on board, including ‘infants in arms’; and contrary to the fears on shore, there were no artisans among them. To the question, ‘How do the passengers look upon Gandhi?’ the captain answered: ‘There is not a man on board these ships who knew Gandhi until they landed here. I never heard of him either, and only read his pamphlet during my quarantine.’
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The next day the reporter obtained an interview with Gandhi himself. The lawyer refuted the rumours that there were blacksmiths and carpenters on board, and that he was importing a printing press. Most of the passengers were Natal residents, returning after a holiday in India. The newcomers were traders, shopkeeper’s assistants, and hawkers. And he had ‘absolutely nothing whatever to do’ with bringing these other passengers to Natal.

Gandhi drew attention to the wider Imperial dimensions of the controversy. ‘Every Britisher is agreed,’ he remarked,

that the glory of the British Empire depends on the retention of the Indian Empire and on the face of this, it looks very unpatriotic of the Colonists
of Natal, whose prosperity depends not a little on the introduction of the Indians, to so vigorously protest against the introduction of free Indians. The policy of exclusion is obsolete, and Colonists should admit Indians to the franchise and, at the same time, in points in which they are not fully civilized, Colonists should help them to become more civilized. That, I certainly think, should be the policy followed throughout the Colonies, if all the parts of the British Empire are to remain in harmony.

‘What is your object in coming back?’, the reporter asked. Gandhi replied,

I do not return here with the intention of making money, but of acting as a humble interpreter between the two communities [of Europeans and Indians]. There is a great misunderstanding between the two communities, and I shall endeavour to fulfill the office of interpreter so long as both the communities do not object to my presence.’
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Durban has a superb natural harbour, a stretch of sheltered water nestling between a strip of land known as the ‘Point’ and a wooded hill known as the ‘Bluff’. There was a bar of moving sand at the harbour’s entrance; this was an impediment to big ships, but in other ways contributed to the safety of the harbour. When the port was first established, the depth of water over the sandbar was only four feet at low tide. Over the decades, dredging had increased the depth, but in 1897 it was still impossible for ocean liners to enter with ease. So they dropped anchor out at sea, transferring their passengers and cargo on to smaller vessels that then negotiated the bar to enter the harbour within.
⁴⁴

On 12 January 1897, the authorities finally allowed the ships from India to send their passengers ashore. The captains of the
Naderi
and
Courland
were asked to commence landing operations the next morning. The decision was prompted by appeals by the Viceroy in India and the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London, who warned that the agitation in Natal had put a question mark on imperial harmony in the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria’s reign.
⁴⁵

Word of the compromise – or capitulation – reached the white protesters in Durban. On the morning of the 13th, they began streaming down from the town to the Point, marching in groups defined by trade – the railwaymen together, then the blacksmiths, the carpenters, the mechanics, the shop assistants, the tailors, the bricklayers, and finally
a number of unaffiliated whites referred to in the newspaper reports as the ‘general public’. More than 5,000 Europeans had responded to the call. There was also a ‘native section’ of about 500 Africans; a dwarf was appointed to lead them, who (to the whites’ delight) ‘marched up and down in front of their ranks officering them, while they went through a number of exercises with their sticks, and danced and whooped.’
⁴⁶

Hearing of the demonstration, the Attorney-General of Natal, Harry Escombe, rushed down to the Point. Escombe was a little man; to make himself heard, he climbed on top of a heap of logs and sought to pacify an increasingly angry crowd. The passengers on the two ships, he said, were innocent men (and women and children) who did not know of the strong feelings in Natal. He urged the crowd to be ‘quiet, manly and resolute’, to abjure ‘haste and hysterics’, and to have trust in their Government. Natal was and would remain a white colony. An early session of Parliament would be convened, to pass legislation keeping out Asiatics. Escombe’s pleas were answered with shouts of ‘Send the Indians back!’ and ‘Bring Gandhi ashore, let him come here for all the tar and feathers!’

Escombe again urged the crowd to disperse peacefully. This was the sixtieth year of Queen Victoria’s reign and ‘in the autumn of her life it should never be said that anything which took place in Natal caused the least sorrow or sadness in the heart of that great Sovereign.’ The appeal to Imperial honour had some effect, for the crowd began to quieten down, and slowly, to melt away.
⁴⁷

Through the day, boats carrying passengers from the
Naderi
and
Courland
came over the sandbar into the harbour. As a gesture of appeasement, the owners had run the Union Jack up at the head of the ships. The passengers quietly disembarked and made their way into the Indian areas of the city. Kasturba and the children were now safely ashore, but Gandhi was still on the
Naderi
, where he had been joined by his friend, the Durban solicitor F. A. Laughton. The Attorney-General had sent word that it might be better for Gandhi to come ashore after dusk, but Laughton did not like the idea of his ‘entering the city like a thief in the night’. In any case, things appeared to have quietened down on the Point; the whites were said to have dispersed, and it seemed safe for them to land.
⁴⁸

The boat carrying Gandhi and Laughton came ashore shortly before
five in the afternoon. As it crossed the sandbar, the passengers would have seen, on the right, the city of Durban; and on the left, the long, low, wooded hill known as the Bluff. Behind them lay the mighty ocean. This was a striking landscape, which at other times might have been savoured for pleasure. But now, with the Bluff on one side and a hostile city on the other, and the ocean and his homeland receding further into the distance, Gandhi may well have had the feeling of being hemmed in.

As their boat was landing, some white boys loitering about recognized the Indian barrister. They sent word to the remnants of the retreating crowd, who hurried back to the Point. Laughton and Gandhi hailed a rickshaw and were about to step into it, when the boys laid hold of the wheels. The barristers tried to get into another rickshaw, but, sensing the mood, the driver was unwilling to take them. Gandhi and Laughton decided to walk on with their luggage. From the Victoria Embankment they walked northwards on Stanger Street, with a crowd of ever greater numbers following them, hissing and jeering. Then they took a turn towards West Street. When they neared the Ship’s Hotel – as its name suggests, a place favoured by seamen – Gandhi and Laughton were surrounded, and the former set upon. The Indian became ‘the object of kicks and cuffs, while mud and stale fish were thrown at him. One person also produced a riding-whip, and gave him a stroke, while another plucked away at his peculiar hat.’

Gandhi was beaten, but not bowed. Blood was flowing down his neck, but ‘eye-witnesses state that he bore himself stolidly and pluckily through the trying ordeal.’ He was rescued from the mob by a white lady, who used her parasol to keep away the attackers. She was the wife of the long-serving Superintendent of Police, R. C. Alexander. Alerted by some Indians, a posse of constables arrived to relieve Gandhi – and Mrs Alexander. Superintendent Alexander himself followed soon after.

The policemen safely conveyed Gandhi to Parsee Rustomjee’s store in Field Street, locking the doors from the inside as they entered. Outside, the crowd continued to bay for (more of) Gandhi’s blood. Superintendent Alexander, now joined by the deputy mayor, urged them to disperse. But more and more whites began to gather around the store; they constituted ‘a compact mass of anti-Gandhites’.

According to a reporter on the spot, the crowd ‘told the Superintendent what a fine fellow he was, and also exactly their
modus operandi
of dealing with Gandhi. They had a barrel of treacle quite close, and if the
Superintendent would only confide Gandhi to their care, they would undertake that he should be handed back safe and sound, if treacled and sticky.’ Then they began to sing a song beginning with the words, ‘We’ll hang old Gandhi on a sour apple tree.’

Alexander, thinking on his feet, devised a plan to spirit Gandhi to safety. He went into the store and made Gandhi exchange his clothes for the uniform of a government peon. Gandhi’s face was blackened and covered with a muffler. Then, escorted by two detectives, Gandhi took a side door out of the house, which led into Parsee Rustomjee’s godown, from which the trio escaped into the street and hopped into a carriage that conveyed them to the police station.

A little later, Alexander himself emerged, to tell the crowd that Gandhi was not inside. He invited a deputation to go in and check. Three members of the mob went into Rustomjee’s store, and ‘reappeared with the intelligence that wherever Gandhi was he could not be found in that building.’

By now it was late evening. It had begun to rain. As the shower intensified, ‘the ardent desire of the crowd to see Mr Gandhi began to wane, and in its place a desire arose to find a more comfortable place to discuss the situation than in the middle of a somewhat sloppy road in front of an Indian store in the rain.’ So the crowd finally dispersed. Where they went the reports do not tell us. It was probably a place which served refreshments other than tea.
⁴⁹

On 15 January, the
Natal Mercury
carried an editorial entitled ‘After the Demonstration’. This accepted that the attack on Gandhi was ‘an undignified and unmanly act’. It then proceeded to lay the blame on the victim:

Mr Gandhi has himself been very largely at fault. He has raised the passions of the people, and knowing this he ought to have been better advised than to attempt to come through the very centre of the town immediately in the rear of a demonstration he had been largely instrumental in creating.
⁵⁰

This editorial brought forth a long defence of Gandhi and his motives by F. A. Laughton. When the
Naderi
and the
Courland
lay marooned at sea, noted the barrister, the white press and public of Natal had accused Gandhi of many horrible things. They claimed that ‘he had dragged our
reputations through the gutters of India, and had painted them as black and filthy as his own face’. They claimed ‘he was engaging himself on board the quarantined ships in getting briefs from passengers against the Government’. It was alleged that he was in a funk, too afraid to come ashore; according to one rumour, he was ‘sitting on the deck of the
Courland
in a most dejected mood’; according to another, ‘he was stowed away in the lowest hold.’

In the time he had known Gandhi, Laughton had ‘formed a very high opinion of him’. He found Gandhi to be ‘both in legal matters and on the Asiatic question, a fair and honourable opponent’. He was well qualified to ‘hold the position of leader in a great political question in which his countrymen take as much interest as we do, and who are as much entitled to ventilate their political views as we are’. Now, when he had been repeatedly represented as a ‘cowardly calumniator’, Gandhi decided to come ashore, so as to ‘vindicate himself before the public’, so that ‘he should not give his enemies an opportunity of saying that he was “funking it”.’ Instead of waiting till nightfall, Gandhi chose to ‘face the music like a man and like a political leader, and – give me leave to say – right nobly did he do it’. As a fellow barrister, Laughton decided to accompany the Indian, and ‘to testify by doing so that Mr Gandhi was a honourable member of a honourable profession’. Laughton acted as he did ‘in protest against the way in which he [Gandhi] had been treated, and in the hope that my presence might save him from insult’.

Laughton ended his remarkable letter by asking his city and race to tender an apology. ‘Durban has grossly insulted this man,’ he insisted:

I say Durban, because Durban raised the storm and is answerable for the result. We are all humiliated at the treatment [of Gandhi]. Our traditions concerning fair play appear to be in the dust. Let us act, like gentlemen, and, however much against the grain it may be, express regret handsomely and generously.’
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