A regular stream of new works explores
the seemingly inexhaustible complexities surrounding Gandhi’s life
and times. Writers inside and outside of academia continue to find
new meaning to Gandhism.
They are too numerous to discuss in a
book that seeks mainly to explore a new context for Gandhi’s South
African years from 1893 to 1914.1 The focus of the
book is the religious and cultural orientation of his compatriots,
which has received little or no attention by scholars; and, given
that almost every account on Gandhi considers the South African
years as being crucially important to his later development, this
new dimension seeks to add to our understanding of the making of a
social reformer.
The vast majority of the earlier works
tended to see Gandhi’s South African years as an extension of
traditions in India. One example of this approach is the work of
Pyarelal Nayar, his one-time secretary, who became one of his most
prolific biographers. He began a multi-volume project that
placed Gandhi within the context of other significant political and
social reformers in nineteenth-century India from Ramakrishna
Paramhansa and Swami Vivekananda to swadeshi (patriotic
self-reliance) protagonists like Mahadeo Govind Ranade (1842-1901),
Bal Gangadar Tilak (1856-1920), and Gopal Krishna Gokhale
(1866-1915) reacting to British imperial rule.2 D.
G. Tendulkar’s eight-volume work also falls in that category.3
A more recent example is the work of Bhiku Parekh which made Gandhi
the heir to the ecumenical concept of yugadharma within the Hindu
philosophical and religious traditions in India.4
Maureen Swan’s Gandhi: The South
African Experience virtually ignored Gandhi’s Indian background
to place him in the South African context and to present him as
being ever mindful of opportunities to break into the Indian
political scene. Swan denied Gandhi’s centrality as she argued that
politics in Natal and the Transvaal were “crucially shaped by the
social and economic stratification of the Indian population.”
Stressing their materialist interests, she argued that the Indian
merchants, petty traders, and educated white-collar workers dictated
to Gandhi a conservative approach in the 1890s and early 1900s. Swan
maintains that the early Gandhi had become a mere hired
representative of the merchants who needed a full-time organizer.
His legal training, his fluency in Gujarati and English, and his
political views rendered him suitable. Gandhi was at best
“cautiously and selectively reformist.” Later he became a
revolutionary “only to the extent that the technique of mass passive
resistance implied elements of a revolutionary style.” It was only
in 1913 that Gandhi became a mass leader. Swan is critical of
Gandhi’s failure to even consider including in his political
movement the African masses whose oppressive conditions were worse
than those of Indians.5
While Swan’s work was influenced by
Marxist scholarship and the antiapartheid movement of the 1970s and
1980s, others sought to find meaning in the wake of the apartheid
regime’s demise in the 1990s. As India reestablished diplomatic ties
with post apartheid South Africa, Gandhi was being re-appropriated
for cementing the foundation of the relationship between the two
countries. The second high commissioner to South Africa,
Gopalkrishna Gandhi who is a direct descendant of Gandhi, paid
tribute to “the roles of Mahatma and Madiba” in creating
“transcontinental mutuality” when he presented his credentials in
August 1996. Mandela in turn praised M.K. Gandhi for laying “the
foundations of a modern liberation movement.”
E.S. Reddy’s Gandhiji’s Vision of a
Free South Africa pointed to the symbolically important role
Gandhi played in India after leaving South Africa.6
Rajmohan Gandhi had a whole chapter on South Africa’s race relations
in his book on Gandhi.7 Most significantly, The
South African Gandhi: An Abstract of Speeches and Writings of M. K.
Gandhi, 1893-1914 edited by Fatima Meer reproduced
documents with commentaries by leaders across the new political,
social, and economic spectrum, including Mandela, in an attempt to
reassess Gandhi’s historical role and its relevance for the new
South Africa.8
Gandhi in South Africa: Principles
and Politics was intended to show the significance of Gandhi’s
South Africa experience in his later political life in India. A
seminal essay by A.J. Parel argues that Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909)
would not have been possible without the historical and intellectual
contexts provided by South Africa.9 Parel
reproduced Hind Swaraj with a detailed introduction and illuminating
footnotes.10
This is the historiographical context
within which this book seeks to expand the understanding of the
South African Gandhi. It examines the cultural and religious
traditions Indians brought with them to South Africa in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the extent to which
Gandhian politics interfaced with them. It is not surprising that
religion and culture should be significant among the early Indians.
They articulated their world through culture, which broadly is
defined as an ensemble of shared values and practices. There is
close connection between culture and religion. Thus, Muslims debated
about the best way that they could transmit ilm through their
madressas to ensure that their children grew up with proper
knowledge of Islam. Members of a caste organization, to take another
example, talked among themselves about a code of conduct to ensure
cohesion within the narrow confines of their cultural legacies and
assimilated as much of the outside world as they needed to survive.
Progressive-minded Hindus established Bhagavad Gita study groups so
that they could gain a deeper understanding of its spiritual message
beyond popular forms of religious rituals. We searched for
activities that signified values transplanted from India. Migration
studies are replete with instances where immigrant communities
recreated the worlds they left behind in their new environments.11
This study is ethnographic in nature, but our sources did not allow
for thick descriptions of cultural and religious explanations.
Rather, it points to the existence of practices that show how
important they were in defining Indian identities and determining
behavior in the early years. Indeed, many of these practices have
persisted among succeeding generations of Indians as segregation and
apartheid further racialized citizenship and heightened a sense of
ethnic separateness.
Racial attitudes
emerged around transformations in Natal colony’s political economy.
In pursuing many forms of livelihood, Indians came into conflict and
competition with Whites and Africans over land, labour, and commerce
in the public and private sectors. It is in this three-way
relationship that identities of all the groups were shaped. Zuluness
was being defined even as the Indians began arriving, and White rule
was coming into sharper focus as laws were passed in the
1890s and 1900s to restrict the trade, immigration, and political
rights of Indian immigrants. The process spawned racial animosities.
When the Natal Mercury responded editorially to a printed
circular by Gandhi in which he defended Indians, it argued
self-servingly that there was good reason to dislike the Indian
presence in the colony. This dislike, it continued, was shared by
the African; the “contempt of the coolie was even greater [among the
Africans] than the
Europeans.”
This study will explore some of the
sources of differences and conflict around Indian communal
activities. By 1910, Indians numbered 147,000, which, while it was
only one-tenth of the total White South African population, had
grown from 30,000 in 1890. It was under these circumstances that
“Indianness” as a basis of transmigrational politics came into
being. Gandhi was its chief promoter responding to the way White
rule determined the place and role of subordinate groups. He founded
the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) in 1894 to unite the Indians. Gandhi
pointed out that as “Indians” they should seek protection in the
imperial doctrine of legal equality.
Gandhi’s strategy connected South
Africa to India as both were part of the British Empire. While his
Indianness had wider imperial application, it denoted otherness and
separateness in the South African context. Fully aware that White
rulers intended to exclude from the system the indigenous peoples,
Gandhi argued that “Indians” could indeed claim greater affinity
because of their illustrious historical past. By contrast, the
indigenous populations, referred to variously as “Natives” and
“Kaffirs,” displayed no such advanced levels of development.
Indianness at the very least implied that it was therefore unfair to
lump the Indians with the “Kaffirs.” Gandhian politics helped to
embed Indianness into the racialized ethos of emergent White
supremacy in South Africa.12
The fact is that Indianness concealed
a multitude of identities extant among the Indian migrants who
settled in South Africa, and the important question is how Gandhi
negotiated the differences and in turn was influenced by them. There
are various strands of that identity as Indians were divided in
terms of class, religion, language, and caste. They were
either Hindus or Muslims, spoke Bhojpuri if they came from the
Ganges valley, Tamil and Telugu if they came from the southern parts
of India, or Gujarati if they came from the western part of India.13
Hundreds of bodies emerged around caste, culture, religion, and
language. Appendix 1 lists close to 140 bodies organized around
culture and religion in contrast with about 25 that were secular in
nature. Groups that incorporated culture in its broadest sense
determined the ethnic dimensions of the Indian experience and shaped
Gandhi’s world view.
Religion was the strongest base around
which Indian migrants organized their lives. Old world institutions
and images were recreated. Indians built shrines, temples, and
mosques. Among the earliest were the traditional Hindu temples that
dotted the Natal coastline. In their Hindu world, gods were
everywhere, and Indians constructed visual images to remind them
that they are part of everyday life. They afforded them darshan—that
is, the seeing eyes of the gods they worshiped were always upon them
for protection. Seeing and being seen by the gods was indeed an act
of worship among the Hindus. Rituals such as mantra-chanting,
bell-ringing, conch-blowing, and fire-lighting became essential
ingredients of religious worship. The outside of the temple
articulated for them the plenum of life; and the inside directed
them to the source of all life. So, Hindu migrants to Natal created
these images and formed temple and cultural organizations to give
them direction.
Muslims and Christian Indians, the
other two important religious groups, were equally active in
organizing themselves around mosques and churches. Most of the
Muslims were Sunnis, yet in time, the Shi-ites would also come to
play a role. All of them observed eight festivals fundamental to
Islam. Muslim
devotional music known in the Sufi tradition as qawwali
(devotional songs) was sung in praise of God, Prophet Mahomed, and
the Fourth Caliph, Ali. As for the Christian Indian community,
Anglican and Catholic organizations were likely active as well,
although we did not uncover evidence to show this. They used the
networks of relations with Chennai (Madras) to help build
communities in South Africa. These bodies often brought out educated
Christian Indians from the southern parts of India, where
Christianity had made an early introduction, to help in running
state and church schools. In the 1890s and 1900s, Christian Indians
produced an educated elite that was to play a substantial role in
Natal public life.
Indians maintained contact and
communication with their ancestral homeland. Friends and family were
remembered. The Makanjee brothers in Durban requested donations for
road paving for villages like Karadi, Matvad, Samapur, Dandi,
Kothamadi, and Pethan in the Jalalpur district. Morar Dalla in Cape
Town appealed for funds to help the library in Khadsupa in the same
district. The Durban darjees decided in 1909 to write to the
panch (council of elders) in Navsari for guidelines about expenses
at social functions like weddings. Sometimes disputes were resolved
through institutions with which the Indians were familiar. In
Verulam, a dispute between husband and wife over money matters was
resolved by a panch organized by Babu Talwantsingh and others. In
appreciation of its role, the husband and wife donated over £7 to
Verulam “dharmastan.” Another such dispute in Malvern was resolved
between two quarreling Indians. The
panch
met on September 4, 1910, with Ambaram Maharaj as chairman.14
Concern for those in India showed up
most particularly in times of natural disasters.
Such was the case in 1900 when famine struck Northern and Western
India affecting 5.5 million people. The Indian Famine Relief Fund in
Natal collected
£4886,
contributed in the following way:
£3022
by Whites,
£1760
by Indians, and
£103
by “natives.”
South Africa’s
Indians identified with movements in India. One example of this was
the swadeshi movement. P.A. Moodaly headed this
movement, which had branches in Durban and other major cities. There
are numerous instances when others expressed support for the
movement. In his talk to the Sanathan Dharma Society in
Pietermaritzburg, Satyendrakumar Bannerjee linked swadeshi to
education and unity. Various other individuals also addressed the
issue in Johannesburg, Pietermaritzburg, Stanger, Tongaat, and
Kimberley.15
Of particular importance is that such appeals were being made before
Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj in which swadeshi values are at the core of
the pamphlet. By 1910, there were many instances when Vande Materam,
the patriotic song that was composed by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya
and later adopted as India’s national anthem, was sung at the start
and end of meetings.
This India-connected orientation is to
be found in the remittances that Natal Indians regularly made to
their families. The Protector’s Office, established in the early
1870s to monitor the activities of indentured Indians, kept careful
records of money sent through this official channel. Money was sent
also through the Post Office, and from the figures available for the
1900s, the amounts were substantially larger than those remitted
through the Protector’s Office. In 1877,
£97
was remitted through the Protector’s Office. Since then it steadily
rose to
£280
in 1880,
£754
in 1883, and
£901
in 1884. There was a
decline over the next six years but steady increase thereafter. In
1901, the amount was
£2060.
The fluctuations were connected with the state of the economy in
Natal, and of course, the number of people who availed themselves of
the Protector’s Office for this service. A total of over
£37,000
was remitted from 1863 to 1910.16 Money sent
through the Post Office was quite substantial in the years for which
we have information. The total remitted for four years between 1907
and 1910 was
£249,340.
Much of this was “Arab” (Indian merchant) money. In 1901, for
example, the amount of
£105,889 was made up
substantially of money remitted by wealthy merchants.17
Returning Indians
also took with them large sums of money and jewels. For example, the
Protector recorded that in 1908,
£22,016
cash and
£8696
in jewels was taken out by Indians. In one case, a man and his wife
had so many jewels that an inquest was ordered. Sewsaran Kahar and
his wife Suhodree possessed jewels worth
£256.
In question was a diamond in their possession. Depositions were
taken from people who knew them, including the jeweller in Natal who
had made many of the pieces. While nobody could say where the
diamond came from, goldsmith Mody Sonar itemized all the pieces of
jewellery that he had made. In the end, they were cleared of any
wrong-doing. Protector L.H. Mason, who conducted the investigation,
summed up, “It is no uncommon thing to see Indian woman parading
almost daily dressed in velvets and most expensive silks, adorned
(particularly on special occasions) with jewels of very considerable
value, and there are at present time Indian women in this town
possessing jewels over the value of
£500
each.”18
The connectedness with India is well
illustrated in a twenty-one-part story written in Gujarati in 1911
in the Indian Opinion. The story is in the form of a dialogue
between accountant Udayshanker who had been in Durban for six years,
and his school friend, Manharam, who came from the same village as
he, and who had just arrived in Durban as a new immigrant. The
dialogue raises contemporary issues in India and South Africa and
provides useful incidental information. One of the more important
details to emerge from the story is the extent to which networking
was used in immigration and jobs. So, not only did Manharam come on
the advice of Udayshanker, but he was carefully guided every step as
he made his way to Natal. Once in Natal, Udayshanker helped him to
find a job as a bookkeeper with an established trader, namely Hoosen
Mahomed Company, an importer of cloth from Madras and elsewhere. The
salary that Udayshanker helped to negotiate was £50 per year.
Udayshanker had left behind a wife,
daughter, and an aging father. He had resisted bringing them out to
Natal, but was overcome by guilt and remorse when he received a
letter from his father and his wife who reminded him of his duty,
and he decided to return to India. When Udayshanker departed, those
who came to see him off included kolis, dhobis, darjees, Brahmins,
and Muslims. His friends gave him gifts for their
relatives
in India.19
While Indian
migrants were strongly tied to their ancestral land, they also
engaged in making a new home for themselves. Indians were adapting
as they made Natal and South Africa their home. There are several
indicators for this. Indians began investing money in the Natal
Government Savings Bank. In 1885, there were 172 depositors with a
total savings of
£2,819,
and this number steadily increased in the next two decades. In 1900,
there were 936 depositors with
£23,362
to their names, and in 1908
they numbered 2,043 with
£41,760
in deposits.20 Sports
is another indicator of adaptation. The annual general meeting of
the Griqualand Football Club in Kimberley reported the club’s
participation in the interstate Sam China Cup competition which had
started in 1904.21 The Mayville Indian Football
Club in Durban was founded in 1904.22 There were
reports of the activities of other sporting bodies: Overport Cricket
Club, Malvern and Seaview Cricket Club, Durban Stella Football Club,
Pietermaritzburg Natal Railway Football Club, Rander Anjuman Roshan
Achhta Cricket Club, Rising Star Cricket Club, Rander Mehfil
Sultania Cricket Club in Ladysmith, Ladysmith Indian Football,
Durban Hindu Cricket Club, and Hamidia Cricket Club in Johannesburg.
A deputation raised the issue of the lack of sporting facilities for
Indians with the mayor of Pietermaritzburg.23
Indians followed other sports such as boxing and cycling.24
Education significantly factored in
transformations that were shaping the world of immigrant children.
They were being schooled through a system that was essentially South
African. The syllabi required reading in English from standard
texts.
While Indians built their own schools
and ran them, they also demanded the creation of government schools.
Government schools built to cater for White children generally
opposed accepting Indians. The Natal Prime Minister said in 1897,
“There was great difficulty in defining colour, but the government
would as far as possible keep the separate races in separate
schools.”25
In 1884, children made up less than 25
per cent of the Natal Indian population, while in 1906 the
percentage had jumped to 37 per cent of the total. Formal
education developed slowly. Indians were scattered far and wide
across the colony so that schools were not within easy reach of all
who were eligible. In 1877 there were only 8 pupils. In 1880,
there were eight schools with 196 pupils. Three years later, the
numbers stood at eighteen schools and 1011 pupils. In 1884, there
were twenty-four schools and 1371 pupils. In 1885 there were three
Board Schools catering for 295 pupils, and twenty-two Aided Schools
serving 1275 pupils. Of the total of twenty-five schools, five were
run by groups affiliated to the church. There were thirty-three
teachers, most of whom were educated in Chennai. The average salary
for teachers was £60 per year, and the salary of teacher assistants
with sixteen years of experience was raised from £24 to £50. In
1899, the Natal government spent over twelve shillings for an Indian
child as opposed to over seventy-nine shillings for the White child.26
Despite the steady growth of schools,
the children of indentured Indians were still being neglected. One
of the individuals who spoke on their behalf at an official
educational commission hearing in 1909 was Swami Shankeranand, an
advocate of reform Hinduism then visiting South Africa. He argued
for “free and compulsory” education with primary education in the
vernacular and English to be used in the fourth standard.27
Many others argued for the inclusion of vernacular
education. When the government schools did not respond, they decided
to organize it through their respective communities.28
The emphasis on vernacular languages is also apparent from the items
kept by various libraries established and run by Indians. The Durban
Indian Public Library made available seventy-five newspapers in
English for its readers at the beginning of 1907; there were also
forty to fifty in Gujarati, Hindi, Tamil, and Urdu.29
These, then, are some of the
parameters within which Gandhi acted. Much has been said about the
impact of his forceful personality on others.30 He
spoke English with great clarity of thought and command of details.
When he used Gujarati, he was totally at home in the idiom of his
native tongue. He was given to using adages which native speakers
knew and understood. The passion of his convictions often led him to
ignore the points raised by his critics, and he was selective in
what he chose to write or not write about them. He declined to
reproduce the testimony presented by M.C. Anglia at the 1914 Solomon
Commission in Indian Opinion after he received an angry
letter from the NIC secretary requesting him to do so. Satyagraha
in South Africa records in detail his activities in South
Africa, but there are few references by name to the people who
disagreed with him. Gandhi was a phenomenal collector of newspaper
cuttings—all of them are to be found in the SN series at Sabarmati
in Ahmedabad. He was therefore well informed and chose to ignore
those persons he believed irrelevant to his own convictions.
There is a remarkable transformation
in Gandhi between 1906 and 1909, and this was to play an important
role in the strategies he would use in 1913 and 1914. He carried out
his tasks with “great skill and finesse” in his 1906 visit to London
as one of the two members of the delegation. He met and talked
with militants like V.D. Savarkar (1883-1966), read William
Mcintyre’s Ethical Religion which deeply influenced him, and
took great interest in the passive resistance campaign waged by the
Nonconformist churches in England and Wales to the Education Act of
1902. By the time of his second visit in 1909, he had little faith
in the imperial government and questioned the value of modern
civilization. He admired the ideas expressed by Edward Carpenter in
Civilization: Its Cause and Consequence. Gandhi shared a
platform in 1909 with Savarkar on the occasion of the Dussera
festival celebrating the victory of Rama over demon Ravana. Gandhi
spoke of Sita as embodying virtue, patience, and nonviolence as he
reaffirmed his belief in passive
resistance,
while Savarkar stressed Durga’s violent slaying of Ravana and
physical force.31
On his return voyage, he wrote Hind
Swaraj, which Anthony J. Parel correctly describes as “an
indispensable tool for the study of Gandhi.” It is worth quoting
Parel in full, “… by 1909, Gandhi had integrated all the essential
ingredients of his political philosophy into a coherent whole,
ingredients that were derived from East and West. He had by then
acquired a definite philosophical vision which enabled him to assess
the relative significance of things that concerned him—the problem
of the self, of the Indian praja, the nature of Indian nationalism,
the modern industrial civilisation, colonialism, the extreme
selfishness of the Indian middle class, racialism, the spectre of
rising violence in India and the legitimation of terroristic
violence by extreme nationalists. It is from that vision that the
basic argument of Hind Swaraj emerges.” Swaraj was the rule
of the self by the self. Self-rule could be acquired through
self-control: temperance, chastity, truthfulness, freedom from
possessiveness and greed, courage or the capacity to overcome fear,
including the fear of death. “Such inner experience of self-rule
enables the citizens to reinforce their political ethics by their
aesthetic feelings, their political action by political symbols.”32
These are the values he sought to
inculcate at the Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm. In Hind
Sawaraj he said, “If everyone will try to understand the core of
his own religion and adhere to it, and will not allow false teachers
to dictate to him, there will be no room left for quarreling.”
By 1912, he had developed a strong bio-moral dimension to his
thinking. He wrote a series of articles in 1913 covering everything
from proper diets to remedies for burns and scorpion bites to the
control of sexual lust. He prescribed remedies for many ailments,
but addressed one central question, namely, how people in search of
freedom should cope with bodily “inadequacies.” If one learned to
control the senses, one prepared oneself for political independence.
He hoped to teach Indians the value of self-control as a test that
they were indeed masters of their own destiny and thus deserving of
the respect of alien rulers who lorded over them, and thus also of
political freedom. In essence, Gandhi argued that those who were
chaste and in control of their bodies had the potential to be their
own masters.33 Joseph S. Alter’s Gandhi’s Body
argues that Gandhi melded “together lessons from the Gita, Bible,
Koran, teachings of Christ, Krishna, and Buddha. Cosmology, biology,
theology are connected with filth, faith, and food. Diet reform is
connected to his vision of politics, that is village democracy.” For
him, “the ashram [was] a kind of staging ground and local laboratory
for experimentation in large-scale sociopolitical reform.”34
While many scholarly works examine the
sources of Gandhi’s satyagraha in South Africa, none has carefully
examined the religious and cultural makeup of South Africa’s Indians
as a factor. Gandhi says little about it in his own writings, and
yet he was intimately connected with the community of Indians who
shared values that helped to shape his ideas. Gandhi may have
articulated the broad outlines of his ideas, but they also sprang
from the communities themselves. If India was ever at the center of
Gandhi’s thinking, it was also so for his compatriots. The South
African Indians were intimately connected to India in a variety of
ways. Of particular interest in this study is how he drew from the
cultural and religious diversity of the people.
Given the focus of this study, it
draws heavily from two newspaper sources, namely Indian Opinion
and
African Chronicle. In Satyagraha in South Africa,
Gandhi said that at its height around 1906 to 1908, the Indian
Opinion had 3500 subscribers. But the newspaper was passed
around, and his estimate was that as many as 20,000 readers had
access to its contents. Indian Opinion reported widely on cultural
and religious activities, and this study has drawn freely on them in
chapters 3 and 4.
The columns in Indian Opinion
reflect the context Gandhi helped to create. Between April 1910 and
October 1912, for example, the newspaper used the cultural medium of
poems in Gujarati and Urdu. It published twenty poems that were
either religious or heroic. Ambaram Maharaj’s refined poetry drew
heavily upon Hindu religious symbols. In one of the poems, he sang
the praises of those who had been to Mecca, stressing the essential
oneness of the message in the scriptures of Hindus and Muslims. He
was seeking to build bridges between the two, and in that way served
Gandhi, even if, as one suspects, the learned Brahmin did not agree
with Gandhi’s interpretation of Hinduism. Sheik Mehtab recited
popular verses in praise of people in the satyagraha movement even
though he never joined the NIC. He wrote a
ninety-two-line
ghazal paying tribute to over twenty individuals involved in the
movement.
The other
newspaper, the African Chronicle, consisted of four pages in
English and eight pages in Tamil around 1908. A year later, the
ratio was eight to eight. It reported on organizations such as Hindu
Young Men’s Association and Hindu Young Men’s Society. It was
particularly strong on reporting on cultural events relating to
Tamil-speaking immigrants and promoted the study of Tamil as a
language. The Tamil
Panchangam appeared regularly after the Tamil New Year in
April 1910. In addition, African Chronicle focused on
education, indentured conditions, and religious festivals like the
Mohurram and Thai Poosum (Kavady). Occasionally, it reproduced guest
articles by Swami Shankeranand. Like the Indian Opinion, it
also focused on patriotic events and nationalist leaders in India.
But unlike Gandhi’s paper, it gave space to the debate of those who
held extremist views regarding British rule in India, as was the
case in the June 1909 issue. V. Chattopadhyaya’s criticism of Leo
Tolstoy was published in its April 2 and 4, 1910, issues. It also
reported in March 5, 1910, the arrest of Professor Parmanand who had
visited South Africa in 1905 for his alleged connections with a
militant Shyam Krishnavarma (1857-1930) who was critical of Gandhi’s
passive resistance. In chapter 2, we examine the imperial
setting specifically with reference to Africans. While Gandhi’s
earlier attitudes toward Africans are filled with prejudices, it is
his strong identification with the British and the action he took in
South Africa to show his support that was open to misperception.
Gandhi did not create racial divisions. Natal’s political economy
played a significant role in shaping racial attitudes and
identities. In chapters 3 and 4, we turn to a detailed
examination of the cultural and religious dimensions of the Indian
experience. They reflect strongly a point of connectedness with
things Indian, thus defining a unique form of South African
Indianness. Under those conditions, how should one see Gandhi’s
South African experience? How much did those conditions shape
Gandhi’s politics in South Africa? These are some of the issues in
which we see Gandhi emerge as a social reformer in chapter 5. In
chapter 6, we explore the last phase of passive resistance in which
he had to deal with dissension even as he used his creative energies
to mobilize masses of Indian supporters. The important point of this
study, as we say in the concluding chapter, is that Gandhi’s ideas
matured within the culturally and religiously diverse makeup of his
compatriots. In India, Gandhi would simply expand on what he learned
and experienced on his road to mahatmaship.
References
-
Some recent works: Gandhi and
South Africa, edited by Shanti Sadiq Ali, New Delhi: Hind
Pocket Books, 1994; Joseph S. Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex,
Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000; Burnett Britton,
Gandhi Comes to South Africa, Canton, Maine: Greenleaf
Books, 1999; Yogesh Chada, Gandhi: A Life, New York: John
Wiley & Sons, 1997; Margaret Chatterjee, Gandhi and His
Jewish Friends, London: Macmillan, 1992; Dennis
Dalton,
Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993; T.G. Ramamurthi,
Nonviolence and Nationalism: A Study of Gandhian Mass Resistance
in South Africa, New Delhi, 1993; Ronald Tercheck,
Gandhi: Struggling for Autonomy, Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1998; and J.N. Uppal, Gandhi: Ordained in South
Africa, New Delhi: Publication Division of Ministry of
Information, Government of India, 1995.
-
Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The
Early Phase, Vol. 1, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House,
1965, xxiv+854 pages. Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Discovery
of Satyagraha—On the Threshold, Vol. 2, Mumbai: Sevak
Prakashan, 1980, xxii+525 pages. Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi:
The Birth of Satyagraha: From Petitioning to Passive Resistance,
Vol. 3, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1986.
-
Mahatma: Life of Mohandas
Kramachand Gandhi, New Delhi: Government of India, 1960.
-
Parekh, Bhiku, Colonialism,
Tradition, and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political
Discourse, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1989. See also his
other works: Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical
Examination, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1989; and
Gandhi, Oxford University Press, 1997.
-
Maureen Swan, Gandhi: The South
African Experience, Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985.
-
New Delhi: Sanchar, 1995.
Gandhi and South Africa, 1914-1948, edited by E.S. Reddy and
Goplakrishna Gandhi, Ahmedabad, Navajivan Publishing House,
1993.
-
Rajmohan Gandhi, The Good
Boatman: A Portrait of Gandhi, New Delhi: Viking, 1995. See
chapter 7, "The Colour Line," pp. 207-224.
-
Durban: Madiba Publishers, 1996.
Professor Meer has been an anti-apartheid activist from the
1940s. She produced a popular account of Gandhi in
Apprenticeship of a Mahatma, first published by the Phoenix
Settlement Trust in 1970. The revised second edition was
published by the Institute for Black Research/Madiba Publishers
in 1994; and the first Indian edition was published by Dr.
Ramesh Bharadwaj for the Gandhi Hindustani Sahitya Sabha, New
Delhi, 1997. A film with the title, The Making of the Mahatma,
was based on this book and made by Shaym Benegal in 1996.
-
Pietermaritzburg: University of
Natal Press, 1996, edited by Judith Brown and Martin Prozesky.
-
M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and
Other Writings, edited by A.J. Parel, Cambridge University
Press, 1997.
-
Scholars differ widely in their
definition and understanding of culture. UNESCO’s 1997
definition is: “Culture is a dynamic value system of learned
elements, with assumptions, conventions, beliefs and rules
permitting members of a group to relate to each other and to the
world, to communicate and to develop their creative potential,”
International Encyclopedia Of Social & Behavioral Sciences,
5(2001):3116. See also the pp. 3-30 in The Interpretation of
Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz, New York:
Basic Books, 1973. Two studies on transnationalism are Peter van
der Veer, editor, Nations and Migration: The Politics of
Space in the South Asian Diaspora, Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylavia Press, 1995, and Linda-Basch, Nina G. Schiller,
and Cristina S. Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational
Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized
Nation-States, Langhorne, Penn.: Gordon and Breach, 1993.
-
Surendra Bhana, Gandhi's
Legacy: The Natal Indian Congress, 1894-1994,
Pietermaritzburg:
University
of Natal Press, 1997.
-
Surendra Bhana and J.B. Brain,
Setting Down Roots: Indian Migrants in South Africa, 1860-1911,
Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1990.
-
Indian Opinion (IO),
June 13, 1908 (6/13/1908), 11/21/1908, 10/2/1909, 8/27/1910,
9/10/1910.
-
Ibid., 8/24/1907,
5/30/1908.
-
Protector’s
Reports from 1863 to 1910.
-
Ibid.
-
I 183/1890,
3282/1890, NAR, Pietermaritzburg.
-
IO 7/29/1911, 8/5/1911,
8/12/1911, 8/19/1911, 8/28/1911, 9/2/1911, 9/9/1911, 9/16/1911,
9/23/1911, 9/30/1911, 10/7/1911, 10/14/1911, 10/21/1911,
10/28/1911, 11/4/1911, 11/11/1911, 11/25/1911, 12/2/1911,
12/9/1911, 12/16/1911, 12/23/1911.
-
Protector's Reports, 1890 to 1910.
-
IO 4/9/1904.
-
The first annual banquet was held
in 1905. IO 11/11/1905.
-
At the second AGM, the officials
of the Ladysmith Indian Footbaal Club were B. Raghoonath Singh,
T.G. Thomas, Soloman, and Syed Hassen. The captain was F.M.
Samuel and the vice captain was M. Peters. IO 1/19/1906,
9/7/1907, 10/19/1907, 11/2/1907, 4/29/1907, 12/5/1908, 7/9/1910.
See also a recently published book on cricket: Ashwin Desai,
Vishnu Padayachee, Krish Reddy, and Goolam Vahed, Blacks in
Whites: A Century of Cricket Struggles in KwaZulu-Natal,
Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002.
-
The cycle race was from Bridge
Hotel in Queen Street to Mt Edgecombe. IO 9/19/1908,
7/4/1908, 8/27/1910, 5/21/1910, 12/3/1910.
-
Protector’s Reports for 1883,
1884, 1885; IRD 357/1911; I 778/1907; I 1005/1908, I
2426/1909, NAR, Pietermaritzburg; SN 2976, 2977, Newspaper
Cuttings, 9 and 13 February 1896; SN 885, 22 April, 1896,
Newspaper Cuttings; SN 2256, Newspaper Cuttings, April 9, 1897,
SN 553, Newspaper Cuttings, October 7, 1895,
Sabarmati, Ahmedabad.
-
The NIC had as one of its goals
the promotion of education for Indians, but its role in direct
assistance was minimal, and critics were not slow to point this
out. John L. Roberts who wrote to Gandhi in March 1901 charged
that education had become a "dead principle" for the Congress,
and challenged it to offer scholarship funds instead of making
"empty promises" and "unfulfilled pledges." The
Indian Opinion criticized the NIC for its do-nothing
attitude on education. SN 3488, 3485, Newspaper Cuttings,
September 10, and September 10, 1900; SN 2494, 10 August 1897,
and SN 3786, 12 March, 1901, SN 3077, 7 March, 1899, Sabarmati,
Ahmedabad; IO
6/10/1905, 10/28/1905.
-
IO 8/7/1909.
-
Ibid., 6/18/1910, 7/2/1910,
7/9/1910; I 962/1900; I 868/1895; CSO
674/1910; I 1784/1908, NAR, Pietermaritzburg.
-
IO 2/23/1907.
-
Ibid., 8/24/1907,
1/25/1913; Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG), Vol.
12, p. 481.
-
Some relevant sources are: James
D. Hunt's two books, Gandhi and the Nonconformists:
Encounters in South Africa, New Delhi: Promilla & Co., 1986,
and Gandhi in London, revised edition, Springfield, VA:
Nataraj Books, 1993; Sushila Nayar, Mahatma Gandhi:
Satyagraha At Work, Vol. 4, Ahmedabad: Navajivan
Publishing House, 1989.
-
M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and
Other Writings, edited by Anthony J. Parel,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. L, LXI. See
also the main points given in Hunt’s Gandhi in London,
pp. 151-52, and in Sushila Nayar's Mahatma Gandhi: Satyagraha
At Work, Vol. 4, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing
House, 1989. Other useful sources are: Parel, Anthony J.,
“Gandhi’s Idea of Nation in Hind Swaraj,” Gandhi Marg
13 (1991):261-82; and Hind Swaraj: A Fresh Look,
edited by Nageshwar Prasad, New Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation,
1985.
-
The first of the 33 articles
appeared in January 1913, and continued until 16 August 1913.
IO
1/4/1913, 1/18/1913, 1/25/1913, 1/26/1913, 2/8/1913,
3/22/1912, 2/15/1913, 2/22/1913, 3/1/1913, 3/15/1913, 4/5/1913,
4/12/1913, 4/19/1913, 5/3/1913, 5/10/1913, 5/17/1913, 5/24/1913,
5/31/1913, 6/7/1913, 6/14/1913, 6/24/1913, 6/28/1913,
7/5/1913, 7/12/1913, 7/19/1913, 7/26/1913, 8/2/1913,
8/9/1913. Gandhi created a bio-moral imperative of public life.
His Key to Health (1948) was a shortened version of his
essays in the
Indian Opinion on "General Knowledge About Health" in
1913 which was reproduced in a book form in 1913, and reprinted
in 1965 as The Health Guide.
-
The full title is Sex, Diet,
and the Politics of Nationalism, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2000, pp. 19, 22, 38, 84.
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