Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (19 page)

This is usually portrayed as the logical and inevitable culmination of Gandhi’s opposition over nearly two decades to the indentured labor system and to the tax—now called by Gandhi “the blood tax”—which had been adopted in 1895 as a means of forcing indentured laborers to return to India at the end of their contracts, or reenlist by signing a new contract.

The story is more complicated. The original proposal had been to put a head tax of twenty-five pounds on each former indentured laborer, a
levy that exceeded his annual income and therefore would be impossible for him to scrimp together. Gandhi himself had drafted the original protest lodged by the
Natal Indian Congress, and after the issue had been carried to the imperial authorities in Whitehall, the tax had been reduced to three pounds on each man, woman, and child, onerous still for workers who counted themselves fortunate if they earned a pound in a month. Collection over the years had been spotty, but as fines piled up on former indentured laborers who failed to pay, white magistrates took this as a pretext for jailing them on contempt charges. Early on, no one was more eloquent in calling attention to the plight of the indentured and former indentured than Gandhi. “
To a starving man there is virtually no home,” he wrote in 1903. “His home is where he can keep body and soul together.” By this standard, Natal was a more plausible “home” than the impoverished Indian villages the laborers had fled.

But indentured laborers were never a preoccupation of Gandhi’s during his Transvaal years. They and their sufferings were located in Natal, generally removed from his field of vision. When a group of second-generation Natal-born Indians started to agitate in Durban for the removal of the tax in 1911, the absent Gandhi, in retreat on Tolstoy Farm, seemed impervious to appeals for his support. Perhaps he calculated that in throwing his weight behind a new movement with new demands, he might sink his chances for the already pending deal with Smuts. Or perhaps, egotistically, he now sensed a challenge from younger would-be leaders. Whatever his motives, he plainly didn’t have any liking for the prime mover of the agitation against the tax. This was
P. S. Aiyar, the rambunctiously independent editor of
African Chronicle
, whose own attitude to Gandhi—as expressed in print in his weekly paper—ran an unpredictable gamut from reverential to critical and from critical to wrathful.
Indian Opinion
carried a brief item mentioning the formation of a committee to launch a campaign against the head tax, with Aiyar as secretary. The movement against the three-pound head tax then lurched on for months with petitions and meetings, the sorts of things Gandhi’s paper routinely recorded when they bore on Indian interests. But Aiyar’s committee garnered no further mention in its pages. Afterward, Polak apparently made the mistake of writing something favorable about Aiyar to Gandhi, who replied: “
In spite of your remarks in one of your letters, I still very much distrust Aiyar’s good faith. He is a man of the moment. He will write one thing today, and just the opposite tomorrow.” In addition to showing how unaccustomed the Johannesburg Gandhi could still be to criticism coming not from whites
but from one of his own, the letter proves he was a reader of
African Chronicle
.

Aiyar’s agitation never got very far. He seems to have had little organizing talent and no stomach for the sort of personal sacrifice that could land him in jail. But his agitation did put the tax issue back on Gandhi’s mind.
The most Gandhi had been hoping for was the repeal of the tax on women, not as a result of Indian agitation, but as a gesture by Smuts to show the good faith of whites. It was an idea they’d apparently discussed. Gandhi was unreceptive to ideas about a more active approach. The possibility of his starting a movement of his own against the tax was suggested to him by the editor in that period of
Indian Opinion
, an Englishman named
Albert West. But that would have meant leaving Tolstoy Farm and coming to Durban. It was late 1911, and Gandhi wasn’t ready for that. Uncharacteristically, he shrugged off the suggestion. “I am not just now in a position to feel the pulse of the community there,” he wrote. “
If I felt like being free to head the movement, I should plunge without a moment’s hesitation, but, just now, I am not in that condition at all.” Maybe West should start a movement himself, he countered, an unlikely suggestion for him to offer the Englishman. But if he does, he “should not in any way clash with what Aiyar is doing.” Apparently, Aiyar had been seeking support from West or Gandhi or both. Gandhi referred to “the Aiyar correspondence,” which he returned to West, saying he didn’t want to keep it. Still, he couldn’t let the matter drop.
A week later he wrote to West again asking him to collect statistics on the tax that might be used to steer white opinion, so that passive resistance on the issue could be avoided.

For nearly a year Gandhi then remains at Tolstoy Farm doing basically nothing about the three-pound tax after writing a flurry of pieces on the subject in
Indian Opinion
, which were notable mostly for their failure to allude to the sputtering campaign in Durban. Aiyar, who’d only recently described Gandhi as “our revered and respected leader” and “that selfless, noble soul,” first fumes, then burns.

The maverick editor had stood by the aloof and absent leader when he came under attack from a swami named Shankaranand, recently arrived from India, who couldn’t abide Gandhi’s emphasis on harmony with Muslims. The supposed holy man was getting a hearing from local Hindus, showing how easy it could be for a newcomer to reignite communal tensions, despite Gandhi’s wishful boast that they’d been surmounted by Indians
in South Africa under his leadership. Hindus needed “
an absolute Hindu as their leader instead of a Tolstoyan,” the swami had
preached, putting himself forward. Aiyar instantly rose to Gandhi’s defense. He wrote that the newcomer had shown himself to be a politician “sheltering himself under the cloak of a hermit.” If the swami imagined he could “step into the shoes of Mr. Gandhi,” he said, “it is our pleasant or unpleasant duty to say this is an impossible dream.”

Just ten months later Aiyar accused Gandhi and
Indian Opinion
of having done “all in their power to smother the £3 tax committee.” In full cry against “the great sage of Phoenix,” the
African Chronicle
editor now used his pages to assert, bitterly but not implausibly, that the movement he’d tried himself to start had gotten no recognition from Gandhi “simply because it did not emanate from him.” His fulminations became uncontrollable. His invective is something to behold. He railed against Gandhi’s “cosmopolitan followers,” an obvious allusion to the Jewish backgrounds of Polak and Kallenbach, whom he derided as the leader’s “trusted Prime Ministers.” Why, he asked, baring his own disappointment and apparent jealousy, had Gandhi found it so hard to depend on Indians?

“
Mr. Gandhi may have been a good man prior to his assuming the role of a saint,” Aiyar eventually reflected, “but since he has attained this new state by himself without being ordained by a holy preceptor, he seems to be indifferent though not callous to human sufferings and human defects.” By the time this was written at the start of 1914, seven months before Gandhi sailed from the country, the final satyagraha campaign had briefly brought Natal’s mines and plantations to a standstill, and the abolition of the head tax—the issue Aiyar himself had struggled to bring to the fore—was about to be secured by the man who’d become his nemesis. By then thoroughly alienated, the editor plainly felt that Gandhi had stolen his issue and the portion of glory that might have been his due.

The turning point came on November 14, 1912, when Gopal Krishna Gokhale, toward the end of his South African tour, had an audience with the former Boer commanders Louis Botha and Jan Smuts in the prime minister’s office in Pretoria. Gokhale had campaigned in India for the abolition of the indenture system. He grasped the practical and symbolic importance of the tax that had been designed to drive former indentured laborers back to the impoverished villages in India from which they’d fled. He told the two Afrikaners that it was ineffective, unjust, poisoning relations between India and South Africa, and therefore ought to be scrapped. Eager to please, offering no defense, they left their visitor with
the impression that they would do the political work necessary to win over Natal’s whites. Gokhale thought this amounted to a commitment.

It’s not impossible that Gokhale had this exchange on his own initiative, but it’s more likely that Gandhi, who was at his side every day of the tour, put him up to it.
Though they’d agreed that the meeting with the ministers would go better if Gandhi, their old antagonist, were not present, they’d spent the previous evening together prepping for the encounter.
Some days earlier,
P. S. Aiyar also had a chance to lobby Gokhale in public and private on the three-pound head tax despite, so he wrote, the “jolly good care” taken by the Gandhi “clique” to insulate the visitor from gadflies like himself. Possibly Aiyar’s persistence on a subject that, as he said, “has been dear to me since a considerable length of time” counted for something after all. In any event, the Gandhi of Tolstoy Farm who didn’t feel free to “plunge” into an agitation against the tax a year earlier was now on the verge of returning to Natal. If he was not exactly spoiling for a fight, the prospect of getting the question resolved at the top must have appealed to him as a way of trumping the irritating Aiyar and, more important, as a demonstration that he’d never given up on an issue of such magnitude to the poorest Indians.

Beyond the clash of egos and considerations about his reputation in India, there was the issue itself.
Fifteen years after the fact, Gandhi would write that a “fresh fight” would have been necessary to abolish the head tax even if Smuts had honored his end of the original compromise, in which it hadn’t featured at all. Nothing indicates that he felt that combative at the time. In fact, with conspicuous remorse, he would soon acknowledge that he and other free Indians had shelved the issues of indenture and the head tax for too long. “
Are we not to blame for all this?” a distraught-sounding Gandhi would ask, after returning to Natal and reviewing the prison sentences meted out to former indentured laborers prosecuted for walking out on their contracts or not paying the head tax. “We did not hear the cry for help at our own doors! Who can tell how much of the burden [of guilt] we have to bear? It’s enjoined by all religions that we should share in the suffering that we see around us. We have failed to do so.”

The Gandhi who returned from Johannesburg to Phoenix came to this realization reluctantly. He didn’t seize the tax issue. It can almost be said to have seized him. But it was the right issue, after all, for the climax of his last act in South Africa. If he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life battling for equal rights there, he could at least try to keep faith with
the indentured. Everything he’d learned—about caste and untouchability, about “high and low,” about the dignity of physical labor—had armed him for the struggle. Originally, it was mostly book learning, the earnest barrister’s distillations from Tolstoy and Ruskin. Now, after the experiences of war, jail, and Tolstoy Farm, the long hikes across the veldt with Kallenbach to and from the city center at dawn and sometimes twilight, the detachment from family as commonly defined, the lawyer and petitioner had given way to the spiritual pilgrim with a strategy of mass action.

As a memoirist, Gandhi had, like many writers in our own day, the knack of total recall for conversations that had occurred a decade or two earlier. As if he’d taped it, he has Gokhale telling him following his session with Botha and Smuts: “
You must return to India in a year. Everything has been settled … The £3 tax will be abolished.”

“I doubt it very much,” Gandhi has himself replying. “You do not know the ministers as I do. Being an optimist myself, I love your optimism, but having frequent disappointments, I am not as hopeful in the matter as you are.”

“You must return to India within twelve months, and I will not have any of your excuses,” Gokhale says again in his version.

In some such way, the stage was set once Smuts rose in the white Parliament in April 1913 to present his latest attempt to codify his supposed agreements with Gandhi and Gokhale. The head tax would no longer have to be paid on Indian women and children, but it would be retained for indentured men who did not re-indenture or repatriate themselves at the end of their contracts: in other words, men who tried to assume some of the attributes of freedom. The minister said there had never been a commitment to abolish the tax totally. Gandhi said this was an insult to Gokhale and, therefore, to India. Without great confidence that it would amount to much, he began to plan his final South African campaign.

T
HE GREAT SATYAGRAHA CAMPAIGN
of 1913 is a conspicuous milestone on Gandhi’s road, a biographical episode that can’t be lightly passed by. The campaign became his model or prototype for effective political action. Had it never occurred, the spiritual pilgrim into whom he’d transformed himself might never have had the fortitude—or spirit—to reach for mass leadership in India. Yet in the angry, fractious white politics of the Union of South Africa, then in its infancy as a nation-state, satyagraha was little more than a sideshow—at most, a temporary distraction.
The status of Indians, Smuts would later say, was “an entirely subordinate question.” He meant that rights for Indians could not be disentangled from the larger question of rights for blacks, and that rights for blacks were simply unthinkable. “The whole basis of our system in South Africa rests on inequality,” he said with an easy candor that may now seem brazen but, at the time, took for granted the self-evident soundness of his reasoning.

In the political history of white South Africa, 1913 doesn’t stand out as the year that Indians marched for the abolition of a now-forgotten tax. It was the year that the Boer War generals then governing the country clashed among themselves over South Africa’s proper place in the British Empire and over which whites specifically should hold power in the land. Smuts and his prime minister,
Louis Botha, embraced the British program of “reconciliation,” implying unity between Afrikaners and English-speaking whites as well as continued deference to Whitehall on imperial and international issues. Under the slogan “South Africa First,” which really meant Afrikaners first, another faction wanted the Boer War’s losers to defer to no one and to embark on a more rigorous program
of racial segregation. The
Nationalists, as they would call themselves when they broke away in November that year, would prove to be the wave of the future until a greater nationalism, that of the suppressed African majority, finally came crashing in.