Great Soul_ Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India Part 3

What's easy to miss in accounts of Gandhi's life at Tolstoy Farm is how powerful a factor his feeling for Kallenbach has become in the inward turning he has taken. Not only is he bent on reforming this partner, he strives to make their a.s.sociation permanent. The architect wavers. He is living life on two planes. While at Tolstoy Farm with Gandhi, he has also become a Zionist and a more observant Jew; he takes Gandhi to synagogue on Pa.s.sover and introduces him to matzoh. Some weeks, in preparation for a move to India, he studies Hindi; other weeks, when he wonders how much of Gandhi's time he'll be able to own in a still unimaginable Indian future, he studies Hebrew in preparation for a new life in Palestine. On a day-by-day basis, the surest index to the architect's changeable mood is which language he's studying, Hindi or Hebrew. He's disconsolate, if not jealous, when Gandhi lavishes admiration and time on someone else. Persisting, Gandhi puts up with all this for more than two years, all the time seeking to preserve their bond.

Kallenbach's ups and downs can be traced in an appointments and account book he kept for 1912 and 1913, which can be viewed in the archive of Gandhi's Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, India. For the sake of frugality and fitness, Kallenbach and Gandhi made a regular practice of walking the twenty-one miles from the farm, near a rail stop called Lawley, to the center of Johannesburg, following a route across a great expanse of veldt that much later, in the apartheid era, was turned into the sprawling black towns.h.i.+p of Soweto. On each occasion, Kallenbach records the times. When he walks with Gandhi, often starting as early as 4:00 a.m., it takes a little more than five and a half hours to reach their respective offices in the center of Johannesburg; on his own, he usually manages to lop an hour off. On every single mention, Gandhi in these pages isn't Upper House but "Mr. Gandhi." The formality seems to acknowledge that their relations.h.i.+p, however it's understood, isn't one of equals.

Today Lawley still functions as a rail stop. Next to it sprawls a large postapartheid shantytown of corrugated metal and mud huts squeezed together on virtually every square foot of some long-defunct white farm. When an attempt was made to restore Tolstoy Farm and erect a memorial there, the squatters from the shantytown soon stripped the place bare. When I visited it in 2008 there was not even a sign. All that was left were some banked brick benches, the foundation of an old farmhouse, the well-fenced dwellings of a few white stakeholders who work at an adjacent brick kiln, some burned-over eucalyptus trees, and a few fruit trees, progeny perhaps of the scores Kallenbach planted a century ago, and, finally, a view across the towns.h.i.+ps and mining slime dams to a Johannesburg Gandhi would scarcely recognize.

In their day, Gandhi and Kallenbach continued to experiment with diet, limiting their daily intake at one stage to a single carefully rationed evening meal. And every month or so Kallenbach recorded another "long discussion" with Mr. Gandhi. Details are completely absent, but sometimes these conversations provoke resolutions on Kallenbach's side to step up his Hindi studies and come to a decision on leaving his profession. Then someone else comes into the picture, competing for his soul mate's attention, and a fresh shower of doubts rains down on him. The most personal and intriguing note in the diary is recorded on August 27, 1913, eight months after Gandhi has finally moved back to Phoenix. Tolstoy Farm has been wound up, Kallenbach is back at Mountain View, and Gandhi, on a visit, is staying with him. Then another of the Jews in Gandhi's Johannesburg circle, Sonja Schlesin, his feisty secretary, shows up. By some accounts, it was Kallenbach who introduced Schlesin, seventeen years his junior, to Gandhi in 1905; their families had been close in the old country. But he has come to consider her high-handed in her claims on Gandhi's time and, in some sense, to view her as a rival. "On account of Miss Schlesin's coming to Mountain View walked alone to office," Kallenbach writes. "Discussions about her brought about Mr. Gandhi's vow. It has been an exceedingly trying day for me."

If this entry were an ancient cuneiform inscription, it would hardly be more difficult to decipher. Is he alluding to Gandhi's vow of brahmacharya, or the recent vow that led to a fast the previous month over some carnal doings that surfaced at Phoenix? (In Gandhi's mind, there could be no such thing as innocent s.e.xual play; earlier he'd complained about a case of "excessive tickling" at Phoenix.) Neither of those vows seems to be what Kallenbach has in mind. Probably he's referring to a vow known only to K. and G. The context is obscure, but Kallenbach's feelings, for once, leap off the page. Rivalries and jealousies of this sort would become chronic in Gandhi's entourage in later years. But Kallenbach is special. In leaving Joburg, Gandhi appears to have left him behind, to have broken free. In fact, he made the move at the start of 1913 on the a.s.sumption that his dearest friend would eventually follow. Recognizing that Kallenbach is "on the fence," he asks him in a tone that's at once wheedling and pa.s.sive-aggressive "to consider the joint life as we have lived it." But the clearest clue to his feelings is this: in packing up his own things for s.h.i.+pment to Phoenix, it turns out, he has also packed and s.h.i.+pped Kallenbach's books and tools. Upper House is wounded when Lower House requests their return; even then he doesn't give up. As we will see, this isn't the end. Kallenbach eventually plunges into Gandhi's last and greatest satyagraha campaign in South Africa, then seems to pull back again, thrown off balance by Gandhi's newfound fondness for a British clergyman, Charles F. Andrews. "Though I love and almost adore Andrews so," Gandhi writes, "I would not exchange you for him. You still remain the dearest and nearest to me...I know that in my lonely journey through the world, you will be the last (if even that) to say good-bye to me. What right had I to expect so much from you!"

So much of what, we're left to wonder. The answers can only be love, devotion, unquestioning support. In Gandhi's words, Kallenbach was "a man of strong feelings, wide sympathies and childlike simplicity." On another occasion, he complained of his friend's "morbid sensitiveness," meaning, it seems, his jealousy and susceptibility to other influences. Three months before he leaves South Africa, Gandhi again rea.s.sures his Jewish soul mate: "You will always be you and you alone to me. I have told you you will have to desert me and not I you." Finally Kallenbach succ.u.mbs. He sails with Gandhi when he leaves the country with the intention, soon thwarted, of accompanying him all the way to India.

The several ties that bound Gandhi to the Transvaal-the satyagraha campaign, Tolstoy Farm, and Kallenbach-cannot easily be disentangled. But by January 9, 1913-the day Kallenbach jotted in his diary, "Mr. Gandhi and balance of Tolstoy Farm occupants left for Phoenix"-the strongest of these was the personal one to the architect. Only when it's factored into consideration can Gandhi's prolonged abstention from Indian politics in Natal be plausibly explained.

The timing of Gandhi's departure from the Transvaal and his return to Phoenix had little or nothing to do with Indian politics in Natal, from which he'd been conspicuously removed for a decade. It was dictated by a pledge that his staunch admirer and presumptive guru, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, had wrung from him at the end of his triumphal five-week tour of South Africa in 1912. The Indian leader's visit, organized with all the pomp and circ.u.mstance usually reserved in South Africa for visits by British cabinet ministers-a blur of public tributes, crowded procession routes, and civic receptions attended by dignitaries who in that era were, by definition, nearly all white-had brought Gandhi out of his retreat at Tolstoy Farm. At its end, when Gokhale sailed for home, Gandhi and Kallenbach accompanied him as far as Zanzibar. When Indian communities at East African ports along the way turned out to welcome the leaders, they found the lawyer from Johannesburg in Indian garb for the first time in southern Africa since the London-returned dandy wore a turban into a Durban courtroom, the day after he arrived from India, now nearly twenty years earlier. The older man ("whose eyes were always on me," so Gandhi later wrote) used the time on board to talk earnest politics. "In these conversations Gokhale prepared me for India," Gandhi said. When they parted in Zanzibar, Gokhale exhorted, all but commanded, Gandhi to prepare to put South Africa behind him within a year and come home to fulfill his destiny. Gandhi, it appears, promised to try. Back at Tolstoy Farm by mid-December 1912, it took him just four weeks to wind up that particular experiment with truth and move his base back to Phoenix. In his own mind, this was just the start of a longer eastward journey that had always been inevitable. "I shall be there when the time comes," he'd written when the subject of his repatriation came up. His "inner voice," it seemed, would help him know when his "withdrawal," as he termed it in a letter to Kallenbach, should occur.

There was unfinished business he still needed to clear. Gandhi believed he'd reached a compromise with s.m.u.ts in early 1911 that would enable him to write finis to the satyagraha campaign that had been his ostensible reason for camping in the Transvaal. That was a year after South Africa's first national government-all white, of course-had come into being. In truth, the compromise Gandhi had been ready to embrace would have made only a slight difference in the real circ.u.mstances of beleaguered Indian communities. The "Black Act" requiring Indian registration in the Transvaal would have been repealed by the new white Parliament (for whatever that was worth, now that practically all Indians had registered), and an immigration law that was explicitly anti-Asian would have been replaced by one that was seemingly nonracial in terminology, only implicitly and functionally anti-Asian. (By means, for instance, of literacy tests in European languages, with Yiddish being included on the list of languages in which an immigrant could be tested but not, of course, Hindi, Tamil, or any other Indian language.) Absurdly, as a gesture to the principle of equality, it would retain the provision from earlier drafts that six "educated" Indians (meaning Indians who'd followed an English curriculum) could be admitted to the Transvaal annually, a way around the likelihood that even Indians who were proficient by Western standards would still be effectively barred.

Seen in a broader context, as a second generation of Indians born in South Africa was beginning to do, the "compromise" didn't promise much. If it went through, Indians would still lack a vote; their rights to own land or open businesses could still be subject to severe restrictions; the indentured labor system would be left standing; and educational opportunities for Indian children would remain entirely at the discretion of antagonistic white authorities. Still, for a few months in 1911, there seemed to be a deal. Then the government introduced bills supposed to embody the extremely limited aims of the Gandhi-s.m.u.ts bargain, and once the arcane language and obscure cross-references to provisions in other laws had been pa.r.s.ed, traced, and decoded, the only thing that was obvious was that Gandhi's good faith had yet again been exploited. What one provision appeared to grant, another provision took away. If anything, the draft legislation worsened conditions for Indian residents and raised the barrier to immigration even higher. Threatening renewed resistance, Gandhi himself had now to acknowledge that the immigration reform over which he'd bargained had yielded a new "Asiatic Expulsion Bill." New drafts were then promised, withdrawn, and promised again as the authorities waited him out, testing Indian resolve. Nearly five years after the start of satyagraha, he had nothing to show for the resistance his leaders.h.i.+p had inspired. Indians had courted arrest and gone to jail more than two thousand times, serving sentences of up to six months at hard labor; some, like Thambi Naidoo and Gandhi's son Harilal, doing so repeatedly. Hundreds of other resisters had been deported back to India. The world had fleetingly taken notice-India, especially-but the new white government had outmaneuvered Gandhi. Disillusion was building, especially in the Natal to which he returned at the start of 1913.

Then he did something remarkable, upping the ante. He added a new demand and put it at the top of his list, one that had more heft, that spoke directly and clearly to the central question of whether the Indian community in South Africa was to be regarded as temporary or permanent, a demand that carried radical implications, bearing as it did on the prospects of the poorest Indians, the indentured laborers of Natal who toiled in a system Gandhi had long since identified as "a subst.i.tute for slavery." Seemingly all of a sudden, Gandhi made the abolition of Natal's annual three-pound head tax on former indentured laborers the main object of the new satyagraha campaign he'd been threatening for two years.

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 s.m.u.ts. 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 African Chronicle, whose own att.i.tude 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 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 pet.i.tions 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 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 pet.i.tions 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 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 s.m.u.ts 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 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 pa.s.sive 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 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, n.o.ble 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 leaders.h.i.+p. 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 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 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 African Chronicle editor now used his pages to a.s.sert, 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? editor now used his pages to a.s.sert, 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 a.s.suming 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 s.m.u.ts 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 sc.r.a.pped. 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 s.m.u.ts 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 pet.i.tioner had given way to the spiritual pilgrim with a strategy of ma.s.s 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 s.m.u.ts: "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 s.m.u.ts 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 a.s.sume 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.

5.

LEADING THE INDENTURED.

THE GREAT SATYAGRAHA CAMPAIGN of 1913 is a conspicuous milestone on Gandhi's road, a biographical episode that can't be lightly pa.s.sed 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 fort.i.tude-or spirit-to reach for ma.s.s leaders.h.i.+p 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, s.m.u.ts 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. of 1913 is a conspicuous milestone on Gandhi's road, a biographical episode that can't be lightly pa.s.sed 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 fort.i.tude-or spirit-to reach for ma.s.s leaders.h.i.+p 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, s.m.u.ts 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. s.m.u.ts 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 cras.h.i.+ng in.

In 1913, white restlessness and infighting weren't confined to the former generals at the top. The foundations of the new industrial society, based on the hugely profitable gold mines, had been severely shaken by a brief general strike by white mine workers in July; six months later, white railway men called another. In the first strike, involving nascent trade unions and, so it was alleged, allied anarchist conspirators, thousands of white miners took over the center of Johannesburg. They set fire to the railway station and to the offices of The Star The Star, a newspaper known for following the line of the mine owners. They next turned their attention to the Rand Club, the stuffy preserve of those same interests. This was cla.s.s warfare, but on behalf of whites only. (The same color-coded radicalism, a decade later, during another supposed general strike, would express itself in a priceless slogan adapted from Marx and Engels: "Workers of the world, fight and unite for a white South Africa.") In 1913, s.m.u.ts had yet to build his army. The former Boer commander had to rely on two regiments of mounted imperial-that's to say, British-troops to suppress the strikers, some of whom would have fought in the Boer War, under his or Botha's command, against those same regiments. The troops saved the Rand Club, killing twenty-one strikers, but couldn't contain the rioting, which stopped only when Botha and s.m.u.ts arrived personally on the scene without a security escort and succ.u.mbed to the miners' demands. It was "a deep humiliation," s.m.u.ts said.

It's in this period of turmoil-between two whites-only general strikes, as the governing party started to break apart-that Gandhi launched his campaign, which he later chronicled as if it had happened in a vacuum, as if the land had been inhabited by only Indians and white autocrats. His numerous biographers have generally followed his lead, paying little or no attention to the South African context. It wasn't that Gandhi failed to register what was going on. He wrote a long piece for Indian Opinion Indian Opinion summing up the whites versus whites cla.s.s struggle. Using what the editors of his collected writings helpfully footnote as "a Gujarati saying," he said it was a mountain being made out of a mustard seed. (Student of the New Testament that he was, Gandhi himself probably knew it was Matthew 17:20.) If the spectacle of white unrest had any implications for South African Indians, he failed to spell them out. But by then, in a steady stream of telegrams from Phoenix to ministers and members of the white Parliament, he'd already started to threaten a new round of pa.s.sive resistance if the government held firm on the three-pound head tax and on its restrictive new immigration bill, which seemed to turn virtually all Indians into "prohibited aliens." summing up the whites versus whites cla.s.s struggle. Using what the editors of his collected writings helpfully footnote as "a Gujarati saying," he said it was a mountain being made out of a mustard seed. (Student of the New Testament that he was, Gandhi himself probably knew it was Matthew 17:20.) If the spectacle of white unrest had any implications for South African Indians, he failed to spell them out. But by then, in a steady stream of telegrams from Phoenix to ministers and members of the white Parliament, he'd already started to threaten a new round of pa.s.sive resistance if the government held firm on the three-pound head tax and on its restrictive new immigration bill, which seemed to turn virtually all Indians into "prohibited aliens."

As if these grievances weren't enough, yet another controversy burst out following a judicial ruling in Cape Province that traditional Indian marriages-Hindu, Muslim, and Parsi-had no standing in South African law, which recognized only weddings performed by judges, other officials sanctioned by the state, or Christian clerics. This meant all Indian wives, except a small number of Indian Christians, were living out of wedlock and all their children were illegitimate in the eyes of the law of their adopted country, further undermining their already tenuous residence rights.

The marriage question helped jolt Indians in South Africa out of the despondency and resignation that seemed to have settled on the community during the years of Gandhi's withdrawal to Tolstoy Farm. Ma.s.s meetings were held in Johannesburg in April and May, though Gandhi himself, now back in Natal, was absent. The marriage issue even made an activist out of Gandhi's. .h.i.therto-retiring wife, according to an account he gave at the time. "Then I am not your wife according to the laws of this country," he quoted Kasturba as saying in April after the matter had been explained to her. "Let us go to India." Her husband replied that they couldn't back off the struggle. She then volunteered to join it by courting arrest. Or so the story went in his telling. The idea of women doing that hadn't previously occurred to Gandhi. Soon he had a female flying squad ready to follow Kasturba to jail, on his signal. "We congratulate our plucky sisters who have dared to fight the Government rather than submit to the insult," he wrote after forty Johannesburg wives signed a pet.i.tion to the interior minister that was probably drafted by Gandhi himself (certainly not by Kasturba, who was illiterate).

Part of Gandhi's inspiration for his earliest pa.s.sive resistance campaigns had come from the example of suffragette demonstrations he'd witnessed in London. That example may have had something to do with his openness now to the idea of Indian women courting arrest, which was novel to the point of being countercultural. It was also a sign that Gandhi was beginning to think tactically and politically again. His attention had been diverted first to Tolstoy Farm and then, after his return to the Phoenix Settlement at the start of the year, to proselytizing for his latest discoveries in matters of health and diet. In thirty-three weekly installments, ending in August, Gandhi held forth in Indian Opinion Indian Opinion on the efficacy of cold baths and mud packs, on the danger of vaccination against smallpox, and on the perils of s.e.xual indulgence. But even before winding up the series, he dropped hints that the next campaign wouldn't be a simple reprise of the last. "I have sketched out an elaborate program which I have not the time to set forth here," he remarked in a letter to Hermann Kallenbach at the end of April. Two months later, in another letter to his confidant, he says he's "resolving in my own mind the idea of doing something for the indentured men." The scholar Maureen Swan seizes on this sentence as a harbinger, a turning point. "Never before," she writes, "had Gandhi addressed himself to the Natal undercla.s.ses." But what was that "something" he was thinking of doing? And did doing it on the efficacy of cold baths and mud packs, on the danger of vaccination against smallpox, and on the perils of s.e.xual indulgence. But even before winding up the series, he dropped hints that the next campaign wouldn't be a simple reprise of the last. "I have sketched out an elaborate program which I have not the time to set forth here," he remarked in a letter to Hermann Kallenbach at the end of April. Two months later, in another letter to his confidant, he says he's "resolving in my own mind the idea of doing something for the indentured men." The scholar Maureen Swan seizes on this sentence as a harbinger, a turning point. "Never before," she writes, "had Gandhi addressed himself to the Natal undercla.s.ses." But what was that "something" he was thinking of doing? And did doing it for for the indentured entail or even imply, in his early strategizing, that it might also be done the indentured entail or even imply, in his early strategizing, that it might also be done with with them? In letters and articles written in the months leading up to the 1913 campaign, there's nothing besides these suggestive but vague sentences to hint that it might have. But fifteen years later, when, back in India, Gandhi got around to writing his own narrative of the period, everything fell tidily, retrospectively, into place. Here, without acknowledging that he'd dodged pleas to join an earlier campaign against the head tax, he says the "insult" to Gokhale and, by extension, all Indians over the tax issue had thrown open the door to mobilizing the indentured. them? In letters and articles written in the months leading up to the 1913 campaign, there's nothing besides these suggestive but vague sentences to hint that it might have. But fifteen years later, when, back in India, Gandhi got around to writing his own narrative of the period, everything fell tidily, retrospectively, into place. Here, without acknowledging that he'd dodged pleas to join an earlier campaign against the head tax, he says the "insult" to Gokhale and, by extension, all Indians over the tax issue had thrown open the door to mobilizing the indentured.

"When this tax thus fell within the scope of the struggle," Gandhi wrote in a second autobiographical volume, Satyagraha in South Africa Satyagraha in South Africa, "the indentured Indians had an opportunity of partic.i.p.ating in it...thusfar this cla.s.s had been kept out of the fray." It's reasonable to read this as acknowledging they had been "kept out of the fray" as a considered choice made by none other than himself. Though the indentured were illiterate, he then recalled, they turned out to understand issues better than he'd have imagined. How many of them would actually join in, he goes on, remained a mystery to which he had no clues. From this we can surmise that the idea of calling out the indentured may indeed have lodged in Gandhi's mind months before the campaign kicked off in September, but he had little confidence they'd respond.

There's circ.u.mstantial evidence that a turning point in his thinking may have come in the days leading up to the violent white miners' strike in Johannesburg, which broke out on July 3, soon after Gandhi dropped his tantalizing aside to Kallenbach about "doing something for the indentured." Gandhi had then traveled up to Johannesburg on June 30 for negotiations on his long-pending, or rather slow-fading, compromise with s.m.u.ts. The government was too preoccupied with its own dissension and the rising white militancy on the mines for those talks to go anywhere. But Gandhi stayed on, settling down in Kallenbach's Mountain View house for a week or so. On consecutive days, Kallenbach dutifully noted in his diary, they then went to lunch at the home of Thambi Naidoo, the Tamil leader who'd proved himself to be Gandhi's single most dedicated satyagrahi; on the third day, they took dinner there. Kallenbach tells us nothing else; and there's no other record. But these meals are unusual enough to command attention. The fussy ascetic that Gandhi had become by 1913 had long since ceased to dine out, even in vegetarian households. And even when he'd had a social life of sorts, it had been largely with his European friends and soul mates, not the Naidoos. Three days in a row suggests these could have been meals with a purpose, an impromptu satyagraha summit or skull session-what today might be called a retreat.

An impression has lingered in the oral tradition of South African Tamils that Thambi Naidoo sometimes had to press his leader to lead. Could this have been such an occasion? On July 5, the day of the shootings by the troops guarding the Rand Club, Gandhi and Kallenbach walked into town from Mountain View and back. Kallenbach takes terse note of the shootings, saying only that there were "many more deaths." That evening he and Gandhi have "another long discussion." Did it involve the day's events? We'll never know. At roughly the same time, Botha and s.m.u.ts arrived on the scene downtown and, unable to do anything else, bowed to the workers' demands. Word of their retreat would have gotten around, even without the burned-out and crippled Star Star to spread it. The idea that the Boer War generals had bent under pressure couldn't be contained. to spread it. The idea that the Boer War generals had bent under pressure couldn't be contained.

Could the example of the white mine workers have served as Thambi Naidoo's "mustard seed"? He wouldn't have had to be told that indentured Indian mine workers in the coal districts of Natal were mostly Tamils. Given the fact that his meetings with Gandhi in Johannesburg coincided with the rising of the white working cla.s.s there, it's not far-fetched to think that he drew some inspiration from the white proletariat. What we do know is that on October 11, when eleven Indian women-ten of them Tamils, including Thambi Naidoo's wife-courted arrest by illegally crossing into Natal from the Transvaal border town of Volksrust, they were accompanied by Naidoo; and when they reached the coal-mining center of Newcastle two days later and implored the Indian miners to strike, Naidoo was still their guide. The Natal Witness The Natal Witness, published in the provincial capital of Pietermaritzburg, identified Thambi Naidoo as the "ringleader."

Gandhi had used the threat of a strike by the indentured to badger the government. Just two weeks earlier he'd written to the minister of the interior warning that "the step we are about to take...is fraught with danger." That step, as the letter defined it, involved "asking those who are now serving indenture and who will, therefore, be liable to pay the 3 tax on completion of their indenture, to strike until the tax is withdrawn." In the immediate aftermath of the strike he also acknowledged there had been a "plan" to send the Tamil women to Newcastle to agitate among the indentured Tamil coal miners "and persuade them to go on strike on the issue of the 3 tax." The signal for the start of the walkout was to have been Gandhi's own arrival in town, some days afterward, once the women had prepared the way. "But the mere presence of these women," Gandhi wrote, "was like a match to dry fuel...By the time I reached there Indians in two coal mines had already stopped work."

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Arriving in Newcastle October 1913, at the start of strikes on the coal mines (photo credit i5.1) (photo credit i5.1)

Gandhi had solemnly warned the interior minister: "It may be difficult to control the spread of the movement beyond the limits one may set." Here we see in action the pa.s.sive-aggressive in pa.s.sive resistance. Years later, writing as memoirist rather than activist, he said he'd been "as much perplexed as I was pleased" by the early outbreak of the strikes. "I was not prepared for this marvelous awakening," he recalled. In his mind, though he'd hatched the movement and foretold its spreading, he was not responsible for the course it now took. Responsibility, he'd say, lay with the government for rebuffing his reasonable demands for the removal of the head tax as promised. This can be interpreted as self-delusion, opportunism, or cunning, all of which were part of the leader's makeup in s.h.i.+fting proportions. It can also be interpreted as political genius. Gandhi may actually have been surprised that things worked out as he'd warned the authorities they might. But he had no hesitation exploiting the outcome he'd foreseen, even if he hadn't fully believed his forecast.

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After the strikes, possibly in Durban (photo credit i5.2) (photo credit i5.2)

He was not therefore a prisoner of events when he arrived in Newcastle on October 17, 1913. For the first time in his life, he found himself the leader of a ma.s.s movement. In Durban recently, Ha.s.sim Seedat, a lawyer whose avocations include the study of Gandhi's life and the collection of Gandhi materials, showed me a photograph of Gandhi as he disembarked that day. In it, the advocate turned leader is once again in Indian dress as he'd last been in Zanzibar, ten months earlier, bidding farewell to the homeward-bound Gokhale. The point of the costume change was to stress his identification with the indentured by adopting their garb. Hermann Kallenbach, his architecture practice now on hold, was there to greet him. He'd arrived the day before and had already gone on mine visits with Thambi Naidoo. Natal's attorney general reported that "a Jew Kallenbach...appears to be agitating."

Gandhi immediately called for the walkout to be extended to collieries still in operation. The strikes quickly spread beyond the mines. GANDHI CAUSES TROUBLE GANDHI CAUSES TROUBLE, a headline over a Reuters dispatch from Newcastle announced the next morning on the front page of The Natal Witness The Natal Witness of Pietermaritzburg. "A peculiar position has arisen here," the dispatch began. "Hotels are without waiters and the mines are without labor." of Pietermaritzburg. "A peculiar position has arisen here," the dispatch began. "Hotels are without waiters and the mines are without labor."

As the message spread beyond the two collieries that had already shut down, the roster of closed mines lengthened: Ballengeich, Fairleigh, Durban Navigation, Hattingspruit, Ramsey, St. George's, Newcastle, Cambrian, and Glencoe. Within a week, all nine had been at least partly crippled by the walkout of indentured Indian mine workers. Two thousand strikers were believed to be waiting for their leader's next command.

Most of the strikers were still in mine compounds, still being fed by their increasingly anxious employers, still refusing to work. The strike next spread to Durban, where most services halted as indentured Indian bellmen, waiters, and sweepers, munic.i.p.al menials of all sorts, stopped working. Thambi Naidoo was eventually arrested in a railway barracks in the process of enlisting even more indentured workers, threatening the s.h.i.+pment of coal to the gold mines and ports.

For a week, Gandhi himself was a self-propelled whirlwind, in constant motion from meeting to meeting, rally to rally, riding up and down the rail line he'd had his first fateful venture on in 1893. From Newcastle he traveled to Durban, where he faced a meeting on October 19 of restive Indian businessmen who made up the leaders.h.i.+p of the Natal Indian Congress, the organization he once spearheaded, whose charter he'd single-handedly drafted, in whose name he'd sent all his early pleadings to colonial and imperial authorities. Frightened by the radical turn in Gandhi's movement that his call to the indentured seemed to represent, the Congress pa.s.sed what amounted to a motion of no-confidence, effectively expelling him. (A Gandhian rump soon regrouped as the Natal Indian a.s.sociation.) The leader had lost the support of most, though not all, of the Muslim traders who'd been his original backers, but he had little time now to mend fences.

Not surprisingly, it was P. S. Aiyar, the maverick editor of African Chronicle African Chronicle, who gave doubts about Gandhi's new course their most cantankerous expression. "Any precipitate step we might take in regard to the 3 tax," he wrote with some foresight, "will not be conducive to improving the lot of these thousands of poor, half-starving people." Aiyar urged Gandhi to call a national conference of South African Indians and heed any consensus on tactics it reached. Gandhi brushed the suggestion aside, saying he could accept the idea only so long as the result didn't conflict with his conscience. This was too much for Aiyar. "We are not aware," he erupted, "of any responsible politician in any part of the globe making such a stupid reply." In effect, he said, Gandhi was presenting himself as "such a soul of perfection...[that his] superior conscience was pervading everywhere."

No such sideline mutterings could slow Gandhi now. From Durban he shot back to Newcastle to tour some mine compounds, then scooted off to Johannesburg to rally white supporters, then went back again to Durban to face the owners of the mines. In six days, he spent at least seventy-two hours on trains. Everywhere, in speeches and written statements, he held out hope for an early end to the disruptions, even as his lieutenants worked to draw more indentured laborers into the still spreading protest. The aims of the strikers, soothing pa.s.sages in his written statements and speeches seemed to say, couldn't be more modest; all the government needed to do was honor its pledge to banish the head tax, and fix the marriage law while they were at it. The workers were not striking for improved working conditions, he told the mine owners. The quarrel was not with them. Nor was it political. "Indians do not fight for equal political rights," he declared in a communique to Reuters really meant for the authorities. "They recognize that, in view of existing prejudice, fresh immigration from India should be strictly limited."

Despite all these signals and a.s.surances, some of the mine executives voiced their deepest fear: that in addition to calling out his indentured countrymen, he'd seek, finally, to widen the stoppage by involving African workers. Gandhi denied having any such intention. "We do not believe in such methods," he told a reporter from The Natal Mercury The Natal Mercury.

John Dube's Ilanga Ilanga, reacting to the Indian strikes, slyly took note of white fears that Africans might follow this example. The first of several commentaries ended with a Zulu expression that can be translated, "We wish you the best, Gandhi!" or even, "Go for it, Gandhi!" Later, when it seemed likely that the agitation might gain some privileges denied Africans from a white Parliament simultaneously engaged in pa.s.sing the egregious Natives Land Act, an undertone of resentment crept in.

By October 26, the leader had landed back in the coalfields. All the women he'd dispatched to the area to win over the indentured had by then been arrested and sentenced to prison terms of up to three months, including his wife-along with scores of strikers identified by mine supervisors as "ringleaders," many of whom would eventually be deported back to India-but an unfazed and completely focused leader was now ready to stay put with the strikers, to take over as field commander of what The Star The Star, in a small headline, sneeringly mislabeled MR. GHANDI'S ARMY MR. GHANDI'S ARMY. In the next eleven days, until he himself was finally locked up on November 11, Gandhi would have his most prolonged and intense engagement with indentured laborers in his two decades in South Africa.

Within a day of his return to Newcastle, Gandhi hit on a tactic for bringing the conflict to a head. It involved forcing the authorities to contemplate ma.s.s arrests, far beyond the capacity of the prisons to hold those it detained. With this end in view, Gandhi urged the miners to leave the compounds and court arrest by marching across the Transvaal border at Volksrust. It was "improper," he said, for them to be consuming the rations of the mining companies when they had no intention of working until the head tax had been abolished. Another point probably counted for more but was left unstated: as long as the strikers were at the mines, there was a danger they could be sealed off in the compounds, limiting the possibility of communication and further ma.s.s action. On October 28, the first batch of marchers set out from Newcastle in the direction of the provincial border. The next day Gandhi himself led another two hundred from the Ballengeich mine. The procession, according to a tabulation he made later, reached five hundred, including sixty women, voicing religious chants as they marched: "Victory to Ramchandra!" "Victory to Dwarkanath!" "Vande Mataram!" Ramchandra and Dwarkanath were other names for the G.o.ds Rama and Krishna, heroes of the great Hindu epics. The last cry meant "Hail, Mother!" or, more specifically, Mother India, fusing high-flown religious and political connotations. "They struck not as indentured laborers but as servants of India," Gandhi wrote. "They were taking part in a religious war."

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With Kallenbach, during 1913 strikes. Gandhi's secretary, Sonja Schlesin, center. (photo credit i5.3) (photo credit i5.3)

By November 2, about two thousand miners and other indentured laborers had a.s.sembled at Charlestown, the Natal railway terminus, where the young Gandhi had boarded a stagecoach on his first journey to the Transvaal in 1893. Charlestown is thirty-four miles from Newcastle, mostly uphill, sometimes steeply. Here a reporter for the Sunday Times Sunday Times found Gandhi in s.h.i.+rtsleeves in "the evil-smelling backyard of a tin shanty...sitting on an upturned milk case." Next to him was a galvanized tub "full of an unsavory concoction which I took to be soup," also sacks containing hundreds of bread loaves. The future Mahatma, working with "incredible rapidity," was serving as quartermaster, cutting the loaves into three-inch hunks, then, according to this description, digging with his thumb a small hole into each hunk, which he then filled with coa.r.s.e sugar as the men filed by in successive batches of a dozen strikers each. found Gandhi in s.h.i.+rtsleeves in "the evil-smelling backyard of a tin shanty...sitting on an upturned milk case." Next to him was a galvanized tub "full of an unsavory concoction which I took to be soup," also sacks containing hundreds of bread loaves. The future Mahatma, working with "incredible rapidity," was serving as quartermaster, cutting the loaves into three-inch hunks, then, according to this description, digging with his thumb a small hole into each hunk, which he then filled with coa.r.s.e sugar as the men filed by in successive batches of a dozen strikers each.

It's a picture to fix in the mind: Gandhi, in the thick of his struggle, feeding his followers-described by another reporter on the scene as "consisting mostly of the very lowest castes of Hindus," plus "the merest smattering of Mohammedans"-with his own hands. That a certain proportion of the strikers (maybe 20 percent, maybe more) were once considered untouchable in the Tamil villages from which they originally hailed is no longer, for Gandhi, something to be remarked upon. In his own mind, feeding them one by one in this way is basic logistics, not a display of sanct.i.ty. But for however many hundreds or thousands who received their food directly from his hands, he set a new standard for Indian leaders.h.i.+p, for political leaders.h.i.+p anywhere. Later he wrote that he'd made serving food in Charlestown his "sole responsibility" because only he could persuade the strikers that portions had to be tiny if all were to eat. "Bread and sugar const.i.tuted our sole ration," he said.

On November 5, he tried to get through to s.m.u.ts in Pretoria by phone in order to give him one last chance to renew his pledge on the tax. By then, s.m.u.ts was flatly denying that there had ever been such a pledge. Gandhi was curtly rebuffed by the minister's private secretary. "General s.m.u.ts will have nothing to do with you," he was told. Then and now, the provincial border consisted of a little stream on the edge of Volksrust. (Under majority rule, names have changed. What was Natal is now KwaZulu-Natal; that portion of the Transvaal is now Mpumalanga.) The geography of this hinterland was familiar to Gandhi, who'd been arrested in 1908, at this same point, for crossing the same provincial border without a permit.

On the morning of November 6, shortly after dawn, he set out from Charlestown with 2,037 men, 127 women, and 57 children. Gandhi told them that their destination was Tolstoy Farm, a distance of about 150 miles. A small police detachment was waiting for them at the border, but the "pilgrims," as Gandhi had taken to calling them, swarmed across. Volksrust's Afrikaners, who'd threatened to fire on the marchers, looked on pa.s.sively as the procession pa.s.sed through the town in regular ranks. Their first encampment was eight miles down the road. There, that night, Gandhi was arrested and taken back to Volksrust to appear before a magistrate who granted the retired barrister's professionally argued request for bail. The sequence of arrest, arraignment, and bail was repeated the next day, so twice in two days he was able to rejoin the marchers. On November 9, with the procession already past the Transvaal town of Standerton, more than halfway to Tolstoy Farm, their leader was arrested for a third time in four days. Denied bail this time, he was hauled back to Natal where, two days later in Dundee, yet another coal-mining town with a British antecedent, he was found guilty in a small whitewashed courtroom-still in use in the postapartheid era-on three counts relating to his having led indentured laborers out of their mine compounds and out of the province. As always, Gandhi eagerly pleaded guilty to each charge. The sentence-welcomed by Gandhi, who was never truer to his principles than when he found himself in the dock-was nine months of hard labor.

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Strikers march into the Transvaal at Volksrust (photo credit i5.4) (photo credit i5.4)

If the authorities calculated that the detention of Gandhi and his Jewish lieutenants, Polak and Kallenbach, would be enough to break the back of the strike, they soon discovered that it had a momentum all its own. The indentured mine workers from Natal got within fifty miles of Johannesburg before a ma.s.s arrest could be organized. They had to be reminded by Polak that satyagraha ruled out active resistance to arrest. It took two days to pack them into three special trains that were waiting for them in the town of Balfour. Unlike Gandhi, the authorities made no provision for feeding the strikers, who were immediately prosecuted when they got back to Natal for the statutory crimes of abandoning their workplaces and illegally crossing the provincial border. They were then sentenced to hard labor underground at the mines, which had been conveniently certified as annexes to the overflowing Newcastle and Dundee jails-"outstations," they were called-with their white foremen deputized as warders. Hard labor meant there would be no pay for the six months the sentences would last. Beatings with sticks and sjamboks sjamboks, whips made out of rhino or hippo hide, were among the methods used to herd the strikers back to work.

At the Ballengeich mine, the source of the first coal miners to march with Gandhi, the indentured laborers had been absent from the compound for nearly two weeks by the time they were returned. Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai, two South African scholars who have written a comprehensive account of the repression that followed the strike, offer the testimony a laborer named Madhar Saib later gave to the so-called protector about his encounter with a white mine captain named Johnston: "He gave me strokes with a sjambok on the posterior, the Kaffir policeman holding me by one of my hands. He then told me to go to work...[then] tripped me with his foot and I fell down, whereupon he placed his foot on my throat and gave me another stroke which caught me on the p.e.n.i.s. When I urine it hurts."

Having discovered that hunger and exhaustion wouldn't be enough to break the strikes, the authorities had now determined on a crackdown. "Any government worth its salt would put its foot down," said s.m.u.ts, noting with scathing accuracy that the demand for the repeal of the head tax on former indentured workers had been "an afterthought" for Gandhi. His elevation of the head tax as an add-on to his earlier list of demands, s.m.u.ts said in a telegram to the mine owners, was a political maneuver "intended to influence Natal Indians, to whom the real grounds which he started the pa.s.sive resistance movement, and which never included this tax, do not appeal."

The mine owners, disillusioned by the losses they'd suffered after listening to Gandhi's sweet talk, were now pressing for action. The Natal Coal Owners a.s.sociation said the time had come for the strikers to be arrested. Taking their cues, editorial writers demanded to know why the government's response had been so feeble. The Star The Star, which never bothered to dispatch a reporter to the scene, called on it to end its "s.h.i.+lly-shallying" in an editorial that ran under a headline that shouted COOLIE INVASION COOLIE INVASION. How was it possible, the newspaper asked, that "a handful of fanatics, however conscientious," could get away with preaching "defiance of the laws of the Union"?

Adding to the gathering pressure for a crackdown was the spread of the strike's seeming flood tide even after Gandhi and his lieutenants had been locked up, even after the Natal strikers had been s.h.i.+pped back to the coal mines as not merely indentured laborers but prisoners of the state. From the coalfields in the hinterland it now reached the sugar lands on the Indian Ocean coast, leading at the height of the harvest season to a seemingly spontaneous succession of walkouts from the plantations and sugar refineries where indentured Indians still amounted to three-quarters of the workforce, taking in places where Gandhi had never campaigned.

The first walkout from a sugar estate appears to have come on November 5, at Avoca on the north sh.o.r.e, not far from Phoenix. By November 8, sugar refineries on the south sh.o.r.e had been hit, and by the middle of the month, when a stoppage by Indian street cleaners, water carriers, household servants, railway men, and boatmen briefly paralyzed Durban, there were probably more than ten thousand indentured Indians on strike in the province. In Durban, the strike was "practically universal," the chief magistrate re