Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (9 page)

Gandhi, twenty-four years old and trained as a lawyer in London’s Inner Temple, arrived in South Africa in May 1893. He had a job as legal adviser to a wealthy Gujarati Muslim merchant. Imperial Britain was tightening its grip on the African continent. Gandhi was unkindly jolted into political awakening a few months after he arrived. Half the story is legendary: Gandhi was thrown out of a ‘Whites only’ first-class coach of a train in Pietermaritzburg. The other half of the story is less known: Gandhi was not offended by racial segregation. He was offended that ‘passenger Indians’—Indian merchants who were predominantly Muslim but also privileged-caste Hindus—who had come to South Africa to do business, were being treated on a par with native Black Africans. Gandhi’s argument was that passenger Indians came to
Natal as British subjects and were entitled to equal treatment on the basis of Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation, which asserted the equality of all imperial subjects.

In 1894, he became secretary of the Natal Indian Congress founded and funded by rich Indian merchants and traders. The membership fee, of three pounds, was a princely sum that meant the NIC would remain an elite club. (For a sense of proportion—twelve years later, the
Zulus would rise in rebellion against the British for imposing an unaffordable one-pound poll tax on them.)

One of the earliest political victories for the NIC came in 1895 with a ‘solution’ to what was known as the
Durban Post Office problem. The Post Office had only two entrances: one for Blacks and one for Whites. Gandhi petitioned the authorities and had a third entrance opened so that Indians did not need to use the same entrance as the ‘Kaffirs’.
¹¹³
In an open letter to the Natal Legislative Assembly dated 19 December 1894, he says that both the English and the Indians “spring from common stock, called the Indo-
Aryan”, and cites
Max Müller,
Arthur Schopenhauer and
William Jones to buttress his argument. He complains that the “Indian is being dragged down to the position of a raw Kaffir”.
¹¹⁴
As spokesman for the Indian community, Gandhi was always careful to distinguish—and distance—passenger Indians from indentured (bonded) workers:

The Indian indentured labour whose “moral faculties” were in such a state of collapse were largely from the subordinated castes and lived and worked in conditions of virtual
slavery, incarcerated on sugar cane farms. They were flogged, starved, imprisoned, often sexually abused, and died in great numbers.
¹¹⁶

Gandhi soon became the most prominent spokesperson for the cause of the passenger Indians. In 1896, he travelled to India where he addressed packed—and increasingly indignant—meetings about the racism that Indians were being subjected to in South Africa. At the time, the White regime was getting
increasingly anxious about the rapidly expanding Indian population. For them Gandhi was the leader of the ‘coolies’—their name for all Indians.
¹¹⁷
In a perverse sense, their racism was inclusive. It didn’t notice the distinctions that Gandhi went to such great lengths to make.

When Gandhi returned to Durban in January 1897, the news of his campaign had preceded him. His ship was met by thousands of hostile White demonstrators, who refused to let it dock. It took several days of negotiation before Gandhi was allowed to disembark. On his way home, on 12 January 1897, he was attacked and beaten. He bore the attack with fortitude and dignity.
¹¹⁸
Two days later, in an interview to
The
Natal Advertiser
, Gandhi once again distanced himself from the ‘coolies’:

In 1899, the British went to war with Dutch settlers over the spoils of South Africa. Diamonds had been discovered in Kimberley in 1870, and gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886. The
Anglo-
Boer War, as it was called then, is known more properly today as the South African War or the White Man’s War. Thousands of Black Africans and indentured Indian labourers were dragooned into the armies on either side. The Indians were not given arms, so they worked as menials and stretcher-bearers. Gandhi and a band of passenger Indians, who felt it was their responsibility as imperial subjects, volunteered their services to the British. Gandhi was enlisted in the
Ambulance Corps.

It was a brutal war in which British troops fought Boer
guerrillas. The British burnt down thousands of Boer farms, slaughtering people and cattle as they swept through the land.
Tens of thousands of Boer civilians, mostly women and children, were moved into concentration camps, in which almost thirty thousand people died. Many simply starved to death.
¹²⁰
These concentration camps were the first of their kind, the progenitors of Hitler’s extermination camps for
Jews. Several years later, after he returned to India, when Gandhi wrote about the South African war in his memoirs, he suggested that the prisoners in the camps were practising a cheerful form of satyagraha (which was the course of action he prescribed to the Jews of Germany too):
¹²¹

After the war, the British announced that their troops would be given a slab each of “Queen’s Chocolate” as a reward for their bravery. Gandhi wrote a letter to the Colonial Secretary to ask for the largesse to be extended to the Ambulance Corps leaders, who had volunteered without pay: “It will be greatly appreciated by them and prized as a treasure if the terms under which the gift has been graciously made by Her Majesty would allow of its distribution among the Indian leaders.”
¹²³
The Colonial Secretary replied curtly to say that the chocolate was only for non-commissioned officers.

In 1901, with the Boer War now behind him, Gandhi spoke of how the objective of the
Natal Indian Congress was to achieve a better understanding between the English and the Indians. He said he was looking forward to an “Imperial Brotherhood”, towards which “everyone who was the friend of the Empire should aim”.
¹²⁴

This was not to be. The Boers managed to outmanoeuvre and out-brotherhood Gandhi. In 1902, they signed the
Treaty of Vereeniging with the British. According to the treaty, the Boer republics of the
Transvaal and the
Orange Free State became colonies of the British Empire under the sovereignty of the British Crown. In return, the British government agreed to give the colonies
self-rule. The Boers became the British government’s brutal lieutenants.
Jan Smuts, once a dreaded Boer ‘terrorist’, switched sides and eventually led the British Army of South Africa in the
First World War. The White folks made peace. They divided the diamonds, the gold and the land between themselves. Blacks, Indians and ‘coloureds’ were left out of the equation.

Gandhi was not deterred. A few years after the South African War, he once again volunteered for active service.

In 1906, the
Zulu chief
Bambatha kaMancinza led his people in an uprising against the British government’s newly imposed one-pound poll tax. The Zulus and the British were old enemies and had fought each other before. In 1879, the Zulus had routed the British Army when it attacked the Zulu kingdom, a victory that put the Zulu on the world map. Eventually, over the years, because they could not match the firepower of British troops, they were conquered and driven off their land. Still, they refused to work on the White man’s farms; which is why bonded, indentured labour was shipped in from India. Time and again, the Zulus had risen up. During the
Bambatha Rebellion, the rebels, armed only with spears and cowhide shields, fought British troops equipped with modern artillery.

As the news of the rebellion came in, Gandhi published a series of letters in
Indian Opinion
, a Gujarati–English newspaper he had started in 1903. (One of its chief benefactors was Sir Ratanji Jamsetji Tata of the Tata industrial empire.) In a letter dated 18 November 1905, Gandhi said:

On 14 April 1906, Gandhi wrote again in
Indian Opinion
(translated from Gujarati):

The rebellion was eventually contained. Chief Bambatha was captured and beheaded. Four thousand Zulus were killed, thousands more flogged and imprisoned. Even
Winston Churchill, Master of War, at the time Under Secretary of State, was disturbed by the violence. He said: “It is my duty to warn the Secretary of State that this further disgusting butchery will excite in all probability great disapproval in the House of Commons … The score between black and white stands at present at about 3500 to 8.”
¹²⁷

Gandhi, on his part, never regretted the role he played in the White Man’s War and in the Bambatha uprising. He just reimagined it. Years later, in 1928, in
Satyagraha in South Africa
,
¹²⁸
the memoirs he wrote in
Yerawada Central Jail, both stories had, shall we say, evolved. By then the chessmen on the board had
moved around. Gandhi had turned against the British. In his new account, the ‘Truth’ about the stretcher-bearer corps in the Bambatha Rebellion had ‘grown’ into another ‘Truth’:

The retrospectively constructed image of the flogged, defeated Zulu—a dumb animal conveying his gratitude to God’s missionaries of peace—is completely at odds, as we shall see, with his views about Zulus that were published in the pages of his newspapers during those years. In Gandhi’s reimagining of the story of the Bambatha Rebellion, the broken Zulu becomes the inspiration for another of his causes:
celibacy.

Gandhi’s experiments with poverty and celibacy began in the Phoenix Settlement, a commune he had set up in 1904. It was built on a hundred-acre plot of land in the heart of Natal amidst the sugar fields that were worked by Indian indentured labour. The members of the commune included a few Europeans and (non-indentured) Indians, but no Black Africans.

In September 1906, only months after the Bambatha Rebellion, despite his offers of friendship and his demonstrations of loyalty, Gandhi was let down once again. The British government passed the
Transvaal Asiatic Law Amendment Act. Its purpose was to control Indian merchants (who were regarded as competition to White traders) from entering the Transvaal.
¹³¹
Every male Asian had to register himself and produce on demand a thumbprinted certificate of identity. Unregistered people were liable to be deported. There was no right of appeal. Suddenly, a community whose leader had been dreaming of an “Imperial Brotherhood” had been once again reduced “to a status lower than that of the aboriginal
races of
South Africa and the Coloured People”.
¹³²

Gandhi led the struggle of the passenger Indians bravely, and from the front. Two thousand people burned their passes in a public bonfire; Gandhi was assaulted mercilessly, arrested and imprisoned. And then his worst nightmares became a reality. The man who could not bear to even share the entrance to a post office with ‘Kaffirs’ now had to share a prison cell with them: