THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS had been set up to give political representation to the middle class that was emerging in Indian society in the late nineteenth century. It was started by Allan Hume, a British theosophist who had worked for the Indian Civil Service until he resigned, irritated at being denied promotion because he was too pro-native. At his suggestion a meeting of Indians had been held in Bombay in 1885 at which the proceedings began with a declaration of loyalty to Britain and a statement that their objective was not political independence but a better deal for Indian professionals. The Congress quickly took on the aspirations of educated Indians and absorbed such organisations as Dadabhai Naoroji’s Indian National Association. Thereafter the lawyers and administrators of Congress met once a year to discuss how to acquire a role in government.
Though Congress aimed to represent all educated Indians, fault lines were evident from its inception. Muslims tended to view the organisation sceptically because of its Hindu majority, despite the presence in its ranks of such Muslim activists as Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Orthodox Hindus, on the other hand, were suspicious of the westernised outlook of Congress—they would have preferred a Hinduised discourse that put the preservation of their tradition at the centre of political life. Nor was Congress in its early years of any interest to the common people; it made no attempt to address issues such as poverty and the lack of essential services in health and education. Over the years Gandhi was to struggle with all these issues, attempting to unite in Congress’s activities the three interest groups: the masses of India whose principal concern was day to day existence, Muslim activists and orthodox Hindus.
Having settled his wife and children at the family home in Rajkot, Gandhi went on to his first Congress meeting in Calcutta. He used the train journey to lobby travelling delegates on behalf of a resolution advancing the interests of South African Indians. The lordly Pherozeshah Mehta told him they could do nothing for Indians in the colonies when they did not have rights in their own country.
At the conference venue Gandhi made his customary inspection of the sanitary arrangements and as usual found them disgusting. He complained to the volunteers who had come to help with the meeting but they were not interested, considering such work to be fit only for untouchables. Gandhi asked for a broom and cleaned a latrine. Later he invited volunteers to help him clean faeces from the veranda outside the dormitory where they were staying, where delegates had defecated during the night. They declined, so he found a broom and did it himself.
Gandhi made a point of seeking out leading Congress members and renewing his acquaintance with some such as Tilak and Gokhale whom he had previously met. For Bal Gangadhar Tilak, also known as ‘Lokamanya’ (beloved of the people), Western institutions were a means to an end—to independence and a reassertion of Hindu national character. Tilak had entered active politics when the British raised the age of consent to twelve in 1891, after a child bride had died of sexual injuries; such interference with religious practice could not be tolerated. He later served a prison term for incitement to murder after publishing inflammatory articles quoting the Bhagavad Gita saying that no blame could be attached to anyone who selflessly killed an oppressor, after which a British administrator was assassinated. Gandhi admired but kept his distance from Tilak.
Far more amenable to Gandhi’s approach was Gopal Krishna Gokhale, head of the moderates, who admired the means and methods of the West and worked within, though not for, British structures. He campaigned for social justice (via such organisations as his Servants of India Society—it was not a Congress priority) and acted more as a Gladstonian Liberal than as an Indian nationalist. Indeed, he modelled much of his approach on that of Gladstone. Gandhi hero-worshipped him, calling him ‘my political guru’ and treating him as a political father-figure, though Gokhale was only three years older than him.1
Gandhi’s first experience of constitutional democracy was not a positive one. There were lengthy speeches on major resolutions, all of which had some well-known leader to back them. The final resolutions, which the subjects committee came to late at night when everyone wanted to get away, were rushed through without real consideration. Gandhi’s resolution on support for the South African Indians had the backing of Gokhale, who spoke up for Gandhi when the meeting was almost over. With that mark of approval—rather than any objective sense of the importance of the motion—he was permitted to speak for five minutes. He started, but in these unfamiliar surroundings the facility he had acquired for public speaking in South Africa departed him; he read the resolution and began his introductory remarks, but despite all his lobbying he had not taken the time to study procedure. When the bell was rung to signal that he had used three minutes of his time he assumed it was telling him that his time was up, and sat down. He felt hurt because he had seen important delegates speaking for half an hour and no bell had been rung for them. His resolution was accepted but, as none were rejected, this was a qualified success. Both Gandhi and the Congress had a good deal to learn about running a successful political meeting. Nor had he endeared himself to the leadership by blaming the Indian National Congress for not acting to defend Indians in the Transvaal and Orange Free State, concluding that ‘had no steps been taken in Natal, the position would be infinitely worse there today than it is.’2 In other words, had Gandhi not organised the Indians in Natal their situation would be as bad as that in the Boer republics, which was a questionable proposition at best.
Gandhi had hoped to make an impression at Congress but this first foray into national politics had not been encouraging. In Calcutta after the Congress session he stayed with Gokhale, who introduced him to important people and praised his habits of self-reliance. Gandhi made so bold as to advise his mentor on his way of life, explaining the virtues of the simple life such as that of walking rather than taking a carriage or a train. Gokhale listened indulgently but did not change his lifestyle.
Seeing animal sacrifice at a temple of Kali in Calcutta made Gandhi reflect that ‘the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being,’ a belief he shared with the Jains of his native Gujarat.3 He had read about the Hindu reforming organisation the Brahmo Samaj, and now met some of its members. Later, he travelled to Benares (Varanasi) where, as usual when he visited holy sites, he was disgusted by the filth. While there, he called in to see Annie Besant, leader of the theosophists, thus maintaining his contact with the religious movement that had informed his own views.
He left Gokhale in order to make a tour through India from Calcutta to his home in Rajkot during which—in a way that would be recognised as pure Gandhi—he chose to travel third-class on the trains. He carried a food box given him by Gokhale, a long coat to keep him warm, a canvas bag and a water jug; he was at this time still wearing the coat and trousers of a Parsi. He had travelled both third- and first-class in Europe and found little difference between the basic amenities. In India Gandhi was appalled at the indifference of the railway authorities to the comfort of third-class passengers, and at the dirty and inconsiderate habits of the passengers themselves which included smoking, spitting and throwing rubbish on the floors. Gandhi’s idea of improving matters was to propose that ‘educated men should make a point of travelling third class and reforming the habits of the people.’4
Gokhale had told Gandhi to settle down in his own home area, to work as a barrister and make a contribution to the work of Congress. He arrived back in Rajkot in February 1902, then settled in Bombay, which was a better location for political action. He was diffident about resuming practice, remembering his past failures and having no love for the conventions of the Bar, but he found that his experience in South Africa and his diligent attention to the Indian Evidence Act had produced a good lawyer out of unpromising material.
Without the obligations of earning a living he would never have taken to the law; but he practised medicine—his own form of it—simply because he enjoyed it and could immediately see its value. During this trip to India ten-year-old Manilal was stricken with both pneumonia and typhoid. There was no effective treatment except to keep the patient comfortable and strong enough for the immune system to fight off the infections. A Parsi doctor told Gandhi his son needed eggs and chicken broth. Gandhi told him that as the family was strictly vegetarian, it was out of the question to give him either. The doctor advised him not to be so hard on his son, but he felt that it was only in such cases that a man’s faith was truly tested. Gandhi decided personally to administer to Manilal hydropathic treatment as set out in the work of a German writer, Louis Kuhne, who saw disease as the result of ‘morbid matter’ entering the body. Treatment was the elimination of this matter by water baths, wrapping the patient in wet sheets and other bathing-related practices. To this Gandhi added fasting, which ‘could also be tried with profit,’ so Manilal was put on a diet of orange juice and water together with frequent three-minute hip baths.5 Gandhi was genuinely haunted by fears that he was foisting his fads on his children, but the child’s fever broke and Manilal recovered, confirming Gandhi in his confidence in the ‘nature cure.’ He was further to confirm the curative abilities of his remedies when he treated the broken arm of eight-year-old Ramdas with an earth poultice. He henceforth used earth, water and fasting for a variety of ailments.
Gandhi’s legal practice in India was soon providing him with a living; his South African clients in particular stayed in contact, supplying him with work that needed to be done on the subcontinent. On leaving South Africa, Gandhi had promised to return if he were needed. Just as he was settling in he heard that the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, was visiting South Africa as part of wound-healing exercises after the Boer War. the Indian community wanted to present their case to Chamberlain and felt they needed Gandhi to help them with it.
So Gandhi left his family in November 1902 and sailed off, expecting to be away for less than a year. The war had ended with the expectation of all four colonies uniting under one government; in the event, there was no quick progression to union but each colony continued with its own legislature and the Boers refused to have anything to do with the British central government. This was the situation that confronted Chamberlain.6
As the Boer War had supposedly been fought in order to promote just rule in South Africa, the Indians thought they had a reasonable chance of a fair hearing. There was a good deal of confusion over this, but many Europeans as well as Indians believed that anti-Indian ordinances had gone with the Boer defeat—certainly, anti-British laws had been repealed. Chamberlain received Gandhi’s Natal delegation coldly, however. The government had made no policy statement on the position of Indians: that of the ‘natives’ was considered paramount. Chamberlain acknowledged that the Indians’ grievances appeared genuine but stressed that the imperial government had little control over self-governing colonies, and if the Indians wanted to live in an area dominated by Europeans, they had best try to placate their immediate masters.
Having made such representation in Natal, Gandhi aimed to head next for the Transvaal, where the Boers were still predominant, in order to represent Indian concerns about their treatment. But permits were needed to travel to the Transvaal, and Indians found it hard to obtain them. Gandhi asked his old friend Alexander, the police superintendent, who obtained a pass for him.
When Gandhi arrived, the ‘Asiatic Department’ was set to arrest him—until they found he had a permit, which enraged them. The Assistant Colonial Secretary then received Gandhi and other delegates, and rudely explained that Gandhi would not be allowed to see Chamberlain. In the event, Gandhi’s place was taken by another Indian barrister but Chamberlain was no more encouraging in Pretoria than he had been in Natal. It was an experience that would make many want to leave the region and not go back. Characteristically, given his courage in the face of danger and his willingness to enlist for a long struggle, the setback led Gandhi to feel he must stay in South Africa, particularly in the Transvaal where the oppression was worst. He set up a practice in the legal district of Johannesburg with four Indian clerks and a Scottish secretary. Soon he was to found a party, the British Indian Association. In rejoining the battle in Africa he was to present himself as a servant of the people moving from ‘larger’ service in India to a smaller region where he was needed more.7 In fact, he had met with no great success in public work in India and he was finding in South Africa the political and professional opportunities that had been denied him in his home country.
His first political job in South Africa was to clean up the Asiatic Department, which was run by people whose experience of government had been gained on the Indian subcontinent and who were contemptuous of those whose interests they were supposed to protect; at least some of them were actively corrupt. After permit restrictions had been relaxed for Europeans it became apparent that Indians and other Asians, such as the Chinese, were obliged to pay bribes to officials, putting an unfair burden on them. It also meant that permits to travel and work in the Transvaal were awarded on the basis of ability to pay rather than the needs of the territory.
Gandhi collected evidence of the bribes and took it to the police commissioner, who listened patiently—it was the second time Gandhi had found a senior police officer in South Africa to be just and fair. He examined Gandhi’s witnesses and was satisfied with the evidence but lamented that it was difficult to get a white jury to convict a white offender against non-whites. Gandhi refined his evidence and narrowed the case down to two officers against whom he had irrefutable proof, and warrants were issued against them. One of them absconded but the police commissioner brought him back. They were tried, but despite the evidence the jury acquitted them. Gandhi was becoming disgusted with the whole legal system, but the case had drawn attention to genuine abuses and both officers were eventually dismissed from their posts. The importance of honesty was reaffirmed and the Indian community reassured. Furthermore, Gandhi’s position was considerably enhanced, bringing him more business.
Gandhi now again brought his family to South Africa. He felt he must take personal responsibility for them for two reasons: he wanted to tell his brother he would remit no more money to him, and he was about to cancel the insurance policy he had taken out earlier in order to protect his family in the event of his death. Gandhi had struggled spiritually with his obligations towards family. He had formed a study group with some theosophists, looking at Hindu scriptures in both translation and the original (as he had done when he was in London). The Bhagavad Gita now became the subject of the primary in-depth study of his life. He took to learning sections by heart while he did his morning ablutions, and in this way committed thirteen chapters to memory. He came to regard the Gita as ‘an infallible guide of conduct. It became my dictionary of daily reference.’ This is far from remarkable, since people of a spiritual bent do the same in respect of the Torah, the New Testament or the Koran. What is different about Gandhi is the way he wanted to interrogate the scriptures until they gave answers he felt applicable to him. ‘How was one to divest oneself of all possession?’ he asked. ‘Were not wife and children possessions?... Was I to give up all I had and follow Him?’8
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that his family was treated like so much baggage of which he had to be divested if he wanted to reach spiritual perfection. People who are, or who have pretensions to be, great spiritual leaders have been known to renounce their families: Jesus did so, as did Buddha, though Mohammed did not—his mission was aided and encouraged by his wife Khadijah.
Gandhi’s practical difficulty was that his brother Laxmidas, as head of the family, was looking after Gandhi’s wife and children for which he was sending him money. Gandhi now decided that God would take care of them, so he wrote to his brother, who had supported him through all his studies and early struggles, to tell him he had given him all his savings and he should expect nothing more, as future earnings would be utilised for the good of the community. Laxmidas was deeply offended and felt Gandhi was reneging on a sacred duty to care for his family. Gandhi wrote, in a cold letter addressing Laxmidas as ‘Respected Sir,’ that the whole community was his family. This is very similar to the answer Jesus gave when told he was forsaking his mother and brothers (Matthew 12: 46–50), but Gandhi does not refer to it.9 Similarly, it was in what he represents as a moment of weakness that he had taken out the life insurance policy. Now he cancelled it, feeling that such a thing would rob his wife and children of their self-reliance, and that God would provide.
This dealing over his family’s future was probably the most dishonest thing Gandhi ever did in his life—he knew very well that it was not God directly, but his brother Laxmidas, who would look after his wife and children in the event of his death, but his spiritual pride led him to renounce his bonds with his brother. His obligation to contribute to the family economy was clear: he had reaped the benefits of familial obligation when he was studying and struggling as a young lawyer, then instead of contributing towards the support of the next generation as custom and generosity decreed, he had discarded such obligation. Now that he had the freedom to spend as he wished, some of the public uses to which he put his money were questionable. For instance, he borrowed £1,000 from a client’s account, with his permission, to support a venture for a large vegetarian restaurant in Johannesburg, but the business failed and Gandhi had to pay his client back from his own pocket.
Gandhi was always scrupulous with his accounts and expected others to be so. When a legal clerk, James W. Godfrey, had apparently lost ten shillings on the day’s accounts, Gandhi held him responsible. ‘He went carefully over all the accounts,’ said Godfrey, ‘and found that the book keeper had made a mistake, apologised profusely to me and punished himself by starving himself for three days. He said he had done me a grave wrong and had to punish himself.’10
Laxmidas continued to act as head of the family, and in January 1903 had arranged the betrothal of Harilal, who was fourteen, to the eleven-year-old daughter of a lawyer friend of the family. Gandhi’s dismay can only be imagined—presumably Laxmidas had anticipated it and was asserting his authority over his capricious brother. Gandhi finally gave his consent when it was agreed that the marriage would not take place for many years. They married in 1906 when Harilal was almost eighteen and his bride, Gulab Vohra, almost fifteen. Laxmidas arranged an expensive wedding but when he asked Gandhi to reimburse him he declined. With less than paternal benevolence Gandhi wrote: ‘It is well if Harilal is married; it is also well if he is not. For the present at any rate I have ceased to think of him as a son.’11
Kasturba and the other boys, Manilal, Ramdas and Devdas, arrived in South Africa early in 1904, thereby fulfilling a promise Gandhi had made to her when he had left India that either he would be back there within a year or she would come out to him. In spring that year, plague broke out in an Indian settlement and Gandhi worked in a makeshift infirmary. For the first time Kasturba directly contributed to his work, visiting Indian women in their homes to explain basic hygiene measures and how to detect plague symptoms. She had finally found a way to get through to him and he began to show the first glimmerings of respect for her.
Gandhi was described at this time as ‘bright and cheerful and full of the joy of life.’12 A British journalist, Arthur Hawks, who visited him, described entering ‘a very plainly furnished office, about twelve feet square’ where he met ‘a little man, apparently forty years old, with a small black moustache on a face not specially dark in colour, but very bright in understanding. His voice was of the singular softness which seems to distinguish all Indians. From the opening of the conversation I was struck by his exquisite English—as natural in flow as if he had never spoken another tongue and as mellifluous in diction as it was in inflection.’13
Gandhi’s new project in South Africa, which absorbed any spare money, was a press. Early in 1903 he had been approached by a printer and community activist, one Madanjit Vyavaharik, to help with the launch of Indian Opinion, a weekly newspaper that was to be published in English, Gujarati, Tamil and Hindi. It was first published on 4 June 1903, but soon found the range of languages too much to handle and reverted to English and Gujarati only. Its declared objective was for ‘an Imperial and pure ideal... to bring the European and the Indian subjects of King Edward closer together.’14 In spring the following year Vyavaharik, who wanted to return to India, offered the journal to Gandhi in return for loans Gandhi had made him. So Gandhi was now in control of the enterprise.
He was thirty-three years old and ambitious for influence; he had been a successful lawyer and respected in his community, but he had not been able to prevail upon Chamberlain and the authorities to accede to his point of view (or even to receive him, in the Transvaal). He had made little stir in nationalist politics in India. He simply had to move his personal project to another level: Indian Opinion would be the vehicle for this. The newspaper presented not so much Indian opinion as Gandhi’s. He wrote for it every week, and it therefore contained the essence of his thoughts while he was working on the ideas that would make him world-famous.
The newspaper covered current events concerning the Indian community in South Africa and abroad. Foreign subjects chosen for coverage were those that were felt to reflect on the Indian scene in South Africa: the strikes in Russia in 1905; unrest over the partition of Bengal in 1906; and celebratory pieces on the Japanese victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Gandhi’s future colleague Jawaharlal Nehru, thousands of miles away at Harrow School, was similarly moved by news of the first Asian defeat of a European power. Its meaning for the end of the European empires in the East was to unfold gradually over the next forty years: Japanese expansion was to form the backdrop to all regional independence movements.
Indian Opinion contained uplifting features on the lives of great Western reformers such as Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale, Abraham Lincoln and Leo Tolstoy. Gandhi also gave helpful social tips such as ‘Avoid, as far as possible, blowing your nose or spitting on the street or paved walks or in the presence of others... One should not belch, hiccup, break wind or scratch oneself in the presence of others... if one’s spittle gets blown on to others, it annoys them...’15 He penned moral injunctions against such practices as the use of tobacco: “The evil effects of this habit become really dangerous when it spreads among juveniles. They learn to steal and commit other crimes. They deceive their parents and ruin their health. They become irritable, and by the time they become adults they lose their strength of mind.’16 In this Gandhi was following Tolstoy, whose views on tobacco he quoted: ‘the worst of all intoxicants inasmuch as a man addicted to it [is] tempted to commit crimes, which a drunkard never dare[s] to do.’17 It is characteristic of Gandhi that, once he had accepted Tolstoy as a spiritual guide, he accepted as accurate his pronouncements on merely factual matters too.
In a quest for spiritual perfection Tolstoy had divested himself of his estates and wealth and endeavoured to live the simple life of a peasant, much to the consternation of his wife and family. It was this Western (and Christian) influence rather than anything specifically Indian that informed Gandhi’s progress over the next ten years.
Politically, Gandhi repeatedly stressed the failure of the merchant elite to unite and organise, recognising their obligations to the wider community. As Maureen Swan has noted, Gandhi was ‘looking always for a deficiency in the individual’ rather than in institutions and the wider political climate.18 On the positive side, there was no doubting his genuine wish to elevate his community. His failure to engage with the articulate activists in the black and coloured communities, however, meant his work was committed to subdividing the racial state to separate Indians from other non-whites. Gandhi was as much a racial purist as the Boers. He wrote in September 1903: ‘We believe as much in the purity of race as we think they do, only we believe that they would best serve the interest, which is as dear to us as it is to them, by advocating the purity of all races and not one alone.’ Indicating that if given citizenship rights Indians would know their place, he continued, ‘We believe also that the white race in South Africa should be the predominating race’.19 An association with the elite and racially exclusive did not fit badly with Gandhi’s view of the spiritually superior man, his body purified by the right food and the chastity, his mind rarefied by contemplating the moral value of every action.
Journalism was a unifying force for the Indian community, but just as importantly, a bridge between them and those Europeans who could respect cogent arguments in print. It was through his writing that Gandhi met Henry Polak, a Jewish-English journalist who frequented the vegetarian restaurant where Gandhi ate lunch and dinner. Polak had been converted to vegetarianism by reading Tolstoy, so he and Gandhi had much in common. Polak introduced himself by complimenting Gandhi on his written criticisms of the government over the recent plague.
On the day he met Polak for the first time, in October 1904, Gandhi had to go to Durban to sort out the finances of the Indian Opinion press. Polak accompanied him to Johannesburg station and gave him a book of essays, John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, to read on the journey. Gandhi found the book impossible to put down: it seemed to answer all his questions about how to put into practical effect his spiritual yearnings. The message he received from it was the Christian socialism that had become increasingly attractive in Europe in the last half of the nineteenth century: its basic premises were that the good of the individual is contained in the good of all, that there is dignity in labour and all labour is of equal value, that a life of labour is a life worth living, that each person should be able to keep himself from his own labours, that the pursuit of luxury for its own sake is to be disparaged. Ruskin’s ‘there is no wealth but life’ is perhaps his most celebrated statement. His reputation was tarnished in the twentieth century by scholars pondering on his private life—in particular, his unconsummated marriage and his emotional attachment to little girls—but in the nineteenth century, when such things were less discussed, he was an influential visionary of culture and social organisation, promoting education, self-reliance and self-respect among the working class.
There was an endearing adolescent quality about Gandhi—reading a book that inspired him, he would often find it offered the answer to his problems and just had to put its ideas into practice immediately. He writes: ‘I determined to change my life in accordance with the ideals of Unto This Last.’20 Thus started Gandhi’s experiments with ideal communities.
Ideas of socialist self-help had been developed in Britain by such pioneers as Robert Owen and Edward Carpenter; the latter thinker’s book Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure was also avidly devoured by Gandhi. Socialist beliefs were discredited in the second third of the twentieth century by brutal experiments in state socialism, but they were very much the progressive alternative in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a further development in Britain, William Morris dwelt on notions of the spiritually elevating power of art, which should be available to all. This was something that did not particularly interest Gandhi; in his model religion took the place of art. The spiritual message of work and self-reliance had evolved as a corrective to the predominantly class-based view of British society that saw manual work as low and undignified, the ‘intellectual’ work of the middle class as more elevated and the workless state of the landed aristocrat as best of all.
When he arrived in Johannesburg he found the press’s finances in an even worse state than he had imagined. He had just installed an Englishman, Albert West, as head printer, another skilled worker whom he had met through the vegetarian restaurant and who had left a safe job in a Johannesburg print shop to follow Gandhi. The profits anticipated from Indian Opinion had not materialised, but West was a solid enough character to want to overcome the difficulties rather than merely complain about them. The situation he explained to Gandhi was this: subscriptions were not being collected, bills were not being paid; the newspaper was making a loss and was projected to do so for the foreseeable future. Gandhi’s solution, inspired by Ruskin’s book, was to move the press to a small farm on which everyone would labour to produce food for the community; everyone would draw a basic salary of £3 per month regardless of nationality, colour or the labour they performed, and Indian Opinion would be produced as an offshoot to this experiment in alternative living.
Albert West was enthusiastic (despite the £3 salary being £7 less than his agreed rate). ‘To say I approved of the proposal suggests a certain amount of wishful thinking,’ he commented later. I was certainly in love with the idea, and my love for Gandhi was sufficient to make me want to succeed in this venture.’21 Chaganlal Gandhi, a cousin who had come over with Gandhi and was working at the press, agreed to follow the master in whom he too had put his faith. Maganlal, another cousin who was soon to become a favourite of Gandhi, also joined, though their wives were more orthodox and found communal living a trial: amongst other duties, they had to purify the brass utensils used by Gandhi’s Muslim friends by putting them in the fire. Most of the ten or so workers already employed at the press rejected the new scheme, but rather than terminating their contracts Gandhi determined to keep them on their original salaries so long as they would move with the press. The editor of the paper, another Gandhi supporter and activist called Mansukhlal Nazar, was not prepared to move to the farm but was willing to continue as editor from Durban.
Gandhi now advertised for a piece of land near the railway line in Durban and soon he and West were examining a hundred acres near the station at the town of Phoenix that Gandhi bought for £1,000. The land was overgrown and snake-infested but there were fruit trees on it and a collection of dilapidated farm buildings. His old friend Jivanji Rustomji placed large corrugated-iron sheets and other building materials at his disposal, and some Indian building workers who knew Gandhi from their service in the Boer War helped to erect a shed for the press. The heavy printing equipment had to be moved from Durban to Phoenix using four wagons and sixty-four bullocks, and they had to ford three rivers to reach the settlement.
People worked all the daylight hours, sleeping in hastily pitched tents, erecting the shed, installing the press and making roads and irrigation ditches. During this time only one issue of Indian Opinion had to be printed by an outside press. For the first Phoenix edition, working to a strict deadline, the type was set and the paper prepared for a run that had to be printed and hand-folded ready for the morning train, for national distribution. When the press was ready to run, however, the engine failed. West was in tears; everyone feared the first Phoenix edition would not appear on time.
The only alternative was to use a wheel that had to be hand-turned and required four men to perform the task—it was so laborious that they had to work in relays. The printers were exhausted, but so were the carpenters who had been working all day on the buildings: they were now sleeping, and West was loath to disturb them. Nonetheless, Gandhi woke them and, using his special skills of persuasion, asked them to start turning the heavy wheel. They agreed and worked all night, Gandhi working beside them while West sang hymns to keep their spirits up; the edition went off in time. It was a lesson to Gandhi in how to push people beyond the supposed limits of their endurance—asked to make a further sacrifice, they willingly acquiesced.
In order to follow the plan of self-sufficiency the land was parcelled out so that each worker, Gandhi included, had three acres on which to build a corrugated-iron houses for himself. Gandhi would have preferred mud huts or peasants’ brick houses but they would have cost more than corrugated-iron ones. The settlement’s atmosphere was enthusiastic and happy, partly because of its experimental nature and the feelings of optimism surrounding it, and because Gandhi had not yet evolved the regulations that were to curse his future settlements. He did not try to impose chastity, for example, or the rigorous food disciplines that could make life miserable.
Back in Johannesburg Gandhi told Polak about the Phoenix settlement—in effect, the fruits of his reading Unto This Last—a revelation that doubtless increased Polak’s admiration for his new friend. Polak forthwith handed in his notice at the magazine he worked for and went to work at Phoenix. Gandhi soon had need of an assistant in Johannesburg, however, so he invited Polak to join him, living at his home, and set about training him to be an attorney. He encouraged him to bring his fiancée Millie from England and a few months later was best man at their wedding; he was at this time encouraging his supporters to marry and have a normal family life. Millie had met Polak at the South Place Ethical Society in London; they had been delaying their wedding on financial grounds, but Gandhi assured them he would look after them.
When the Polaks were installed in Gandhi’s house Kasturba had to put up with the novel experience of sharing her working areas with another woman who did not know her language or share her approach to family organisation. Recognising Gandhi’s attachment to Polak, she used to call him Gandhi’s ‘first-born’—a not particularly subtle comment on the difference between the affection he showed for his children and that for his disciples.22
With the introduction of the Polaks into Gandhi’s home in Johannesburg came a further drive for simplicity: he purchased a hand mill so that his family could grind their own flour to make bread. His sons also helped in the laundry and, inevitably, with the sanitary arrangements. Manilal and Ramdas, twelve and seven in 1904, were still not sent to school, but Gandhi improved on his previous efforts at educating them by asking them to work with him every day, talking to them on the five-mile walk to the office and giving them school work to do when they got there. He addressed the children exclusively in Gujarati, although Polak argued that fluent English-speaking would give the boys an advantage. Gandhi contended that knowledge of their home language would be to their country’s good: having grown up in South Africa, it was important that, back in India, they did not seem like foreigners.
Gandhi encouraged some of his extended family and his friends to move to the Phoenix settlement and was soon working out a way to get Kasturba and the boys there. The opportunity was afforded him by the Zulu rebellion that came about in Natal early in 1906 when a Zulu chief, enraged by the imposition of yet another tax, advised his people to refuse to pay it and speared the tax collector. An expeditionary force went out to ‘subdue’ the Zulus. Though Gandhi’s sympathies were with the Africans, his loyalty was with the British Empire, and applying the same logic he had used over the Boer War he asked himself what would be best for the Indian community. Indians were still considered cowardly scoundrels and Gandhi was anxious to impress again on the British that this was not so. He wrote to the Governor of Natal offering his services in organising an Indian ambulance corps (though Gandhi’s home was in Johannesburg, he considered himself a citizen of Natal, and that was where Phoenix was). The Governor accepted, and within a short time Gandhi had given up the house in Johannesburg, settled Polak there in a smaller one, sent his wife and children to Phoenix and had left for Durban to recruit men for his new enterprise. He was not to live with his wife and children again for the next four years.
When Gandhi and his twenty-three men arrived in the field it was obvious there was no rebellion to deal with—he was attached to a punitive force. His main work would be to nurse Zulus wounded in the government’s operations—some were suspected enemies who had been flogged and whose unattended sores had festered, while others were ‘friendly’ Zulus who had been shot by mistake. When Gandhi’s group followed a column into the field, they encountered more of these latter casualties, as the British soldiers moved into Zulu areas. “This was no war but a man-hunt,’ he wrote.23 He had witnessed the efficient brutality of an imperial power. After six weeks the mission was deemed completed and Gandhi returned to Phoenix. He does not say so explicitly, but his experiences in the Boer War and the Zulu rebellion must have taught him the futility of venturing a frontal military attack on the dominant nation.
During his long marches in the sparsely populated land he had fallen again to thinking about what he should do to bring himself closer to spiritual self-realisation. He came to the decision, he later recorded, that ‘he must accept poverty as a constant companion through life’ and that without celibacy he could not serve humanity with his whole soul: ‘I should have more and more occasions for service of the kind I was rendering, and... I should find myself unequal to the task if I were engaged in the pleasures of family life and in the propagation and rearing of children.’24 This is presented as a renunciation of sex and the embracing of chastity—hardly a novel concept, since it was part of Hindu and Buddhist thought, had been a Christian concept at least since the time of St Jerome and had significant influence in the Catholic and Greek Orthodox traditions. ‘It is celibacy that has kept Catholicism green up to the present day,’ Gandhi said.25 In the Hindu and Jain traditions chastity was normally reserved for older men who had already had families; it has no place in Judaism or Islam. In Gandhi’s formulation, it seems less a renunciation of sexual desire than a rejection of wife and family. When Tolstoy similarly renounced his sexual nature when he was writing his novella of sexual disgust The Kreutzer Sonata in 1889–1890, his wife interpreted it as a rejection of her.
Gandhi discussed with his cousins Chaganlal, Maganlal and others whether he should stop having sex with his wife. He had been attempting to rein in his powerful sexual urges at least since 1900, when the long marches during the Boer War had given him similar time for reflection; but he considered that he had failed in the past because his motive was not pure—he had simply wanted to have no more children. Now in mid-1906 he made a decision and announced it, ‘consulting’ with Kasturba only when he was about to take the vow. As usual, Gandhi was seized with enthusiasm for his new idea and encouraged others to follow suit. In December 1907 he was telling readers of Indian Opinion: ‘Adultery does not consist merely in sexual intercourse with another man’s wife. We are taught by every religion that there can be adultery even in intercourse with one’s own wife. Sexual intercourse is justified only when it is the result of a desire for offspring... it is the duty of every thoughtful Indian not to marry. In case he is helpless in regard to marriage, he should abstain from sexual intercourse with his wife.’26
Gandhi’s ambition had been thwarted previously, he felt, because he had not made the brahmacharya vow: ‘Up to this time I had not met with success because the will had been lacking, because I had no faith in myself, no faith in the grace of God, and therefore my mind had been tossed in the boisterous sea of doubt.’27 Once he made the vow, his sex life would no longer be a matter of self-control, but of spiritual purity, a contact with the eternal.
Now he had declared his intention, how could he control his passions? He aimed at a fully integrated physical and spiritual state so again took to experimenting with his diet, introducing fasting along with exclusive diets—of fruit only or grains only. He had found, though, that changing his diet increased the ‘relish’ with which his body greeted the new food. Still worse, fasting increased the appetite. Over time he continued experimenting, deciding on such restraints as not taking tea or finishing the last meal of the day before sunset in an attempt to reduce reliance on physical sensation and to eat only precisely what the body needed. ‘All restraint, whatever prompts it, is wholesome for men,’ he said.28 The ideal meal should be limited, simple, spiceless and, if possible, uncooked.
Now he was extending his dietary experiments not merely from the point of view of vegetarianism, but in order to maintain his chastity. Years of dietary experiments ‘showed me that the brahmachari’s ideal food is fresh fruit and nuts. The immunity from passion that I enjoyed when I lived on this food was unknown to me after I changed the diet.’29 But such diets took their toll, he wrote to a doctor friend: ‘I think it was when I was carrying on a fruit-and-nut diet experiment that I damaged my teeth. I believed that I had permanently damaged two molars.’30
Gandhi’s ideas about diet and sex seem idiosyncratic to the point of mania, but there may have been a physiological reason why different diets worked to lower his sexual urge. He had serious constipation. His later secretary Pyarelal remarked: ‘before he took to naturopathy, the Mahatma was virtually a slave to Eno’s Fruit Salts. Every morning he put a spoonful of it at the bottom of a tumbler, poured in water and gulped down the fizzing liquid that gave him relief.’31 If the reference to naturopathy—the method of Gandhi’s London friend Dr Thomas Allinson—is accurate, it applies to Gandhi’s condition as a young man, but Pyarelal may be referring to a later adoption of naturopathic methods. While in prison in South Africa Gandhi remarked that he ‘had the bad habit of taking a long time for evacuation’ and was unhappy when the warden or other prisoners tried to rush him at this business.32 He was, as usual, by no means coy about sharing his physical state with this friends: he wrote in 1909 that one should aim at a diet and eating habits (length of mastication, for example) that would produce faeces that were ‘consistent, free from odour and which should leave the seat [anus] without soiling it.’33 When Gandhi was tormented by sexual thoughts, perhaps his impacted colon was pressing on his prostate gland and stimulating him sexually. This would explain why some diets, by reducing his constipation, would help him feel less sexual.
However the physiology worked, it was thus that in 1907, armed with a newspaper, a spiritual community, a strict vegetarian diet and chastity, Gandhi felt equipped to take on what was soon to be the united South African state.