The Lawyer Gandhi
Gandhi arrived in Durban by ship on 23 May 1893. Slightly built, in his early twenties with curious bright eyes, he provided no hint of his approaching greatness; yet there was enough in his appearance to suggest that the Indian lawyer Dada Abdullah had engaged was no commonplace individual.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in Dada Abdullah’s hometown, Porbandar. Like most people in the coastal town with its white limestone walls, Gandhi was ever-mindful of its fluid edge. The sea was ‘almost within a stone’s throw’ from the city’s walls, he told a future biographer. ‘It swept around the city so closely that at times it made almost an island of Porbandar.’ The breeze lifted off it and wafted inland, through temple streets and bazars, to find the boy on the terrace of his three-storeyed house. The Gandhis were not Muslim Memons like Dada Adbullah but Hindus of the merchant vania caste and with a long record of state service. One of his ancestors, Uttamchand Gandhi aka Ota Bapa, had been a legendary customs collector and his father was the chief administrator for the local ruler.
With the rise of the East India Company, Kathiawar, one of India’s numerous princely states, became a British Protectorate; that is, it continued to be in the hands of its erstwhile feudal lords but supervised by a British political agent stationed in the capital, Rajkot, 150 km inland. Gandhi’s family moved to Rajkot and he attended Kathiawar’s first English school, the Rajkot High School.
Just as in Bombay and Surat, a wave of reform was sweeping over Rajkot at the time, urging Indians to change their traditional mores to align with the superior understanding of the West. Young men, for instance, were convinced that Englishmen derived their enviable strength and ability to rule over India through the consumption of meat. A doggerel then in vogue among the boys at Gandhi’s school went: ‘Behold the mighty Englishman/ He rules the Indian small/ Because being a meat-eater / He is five cubits tall.’
The promise of physical and moral strength tempted Gandhi to try the forbidden food, but the strong Vaishnava ethos of his upbringing did not allow him to swallow it and he vomited it out. The failed experiment did not diminish his fascination for the British, however, and when some years later, after his father’s death, a family friend mentioned the possibility of travelling to England for higher studies, Gandhi jumped at the suggestion.
Cover of ‘The Other Mohan’ by Amrita Shah, HarperCollins
Nobody in the backwater of Kathiawar, where no more than a couple of boys matriculated every year, had ever travelled abroad to study. In pursuing this course Gandhi had to incur debt and also risk a potential caste boycott for breaking the taboo against crossing the dreaded kaala paani. Explaining his uncommon resolve, Gandhi later attributed it to ‘ambition’. ‘I had a secret design in my mind to come here to satisfy my curiosity of knowing what London was like … I thought to myself that if I go to England, not only shall I become a barrister but I shall be able to see England the land of philosophers and poets, the very centre of civilization.’3
In London, the gawky Kathiawari boy took lessons in ballroom dancing and the violin, went to the theatre and was known to frequent Piccadilly Circus in a high silk top hat, fine striped silk shirt, double-breasted vest and patent leather boots, with gloved hands wrapped around a silver mounted stick.4 He was overwhelmed by the elevator and bright lights of the Victoria Hotel and felt he ‘could pass a lifetime’ in its rooms.
The return to India was a rude shock. Lacking connections, he could not find work in Bombay where he expected to start a practice. And when he did land a case, he botched it. ‘I stood up but my heart sank into my boots. My head was reeling and I felt the whole court was doing likewise.’6 He fled in shame to Rajkot where he focused on drafting petitions. But there, too, an incident occurred which put paid even to his greatly diminished aspirations. Persuaded by his elder brother, to whom he owed a great deal, and against his better judgement, he approached the British political agent for a personal favour. The furious agent had him removed, leaving Gandhi feeling humiliated and conscious of having further destroyed his prospects of professional success. The feudal politics of the town, familial obligations and the arrogance of the white agent crowded upon the sensitive young man, suffocating him. At this point, more than anything, Gandhi desperately ‘wanted somehow to leave India’.
And here he was, on tossing waves and a nippy wind that may have reminded him of his first big adventure, the one that took him to ‘dear old London’. Memories may have flooded back, of the foppish youth aspiring to play the violin and twirl in a ballroom. After the initial enthusiasm had worn out, Gandhi found his affectations dropping away naturally one by one. Frivolous fancies did not hold his attention. In the city with its ‘teaching institutions, public galleries, museums, theatres, vast commerce, public parks’, a space of a myriad options, he had discovered his true self in more sober passions such as vegetarianism and religious philosophy.
The brief period he had spent back in India had been deeply disappointing. But despite his recent setbacks, there was again a sense of possibility. Despite the fact that this new job was temporary and not quite commensurate with his qualifications, it was an escape from the privations of home and a second chance at proving his professional competence. The incident with the agent had disturbed him (a ‘shock’ that led him to change his life, as he puts it) and his appearance suggested the nature of his response. It was a combination that conveyed pride in his Indianness as well as in his English legal training. He wore a European frock coat, pressed trousers, shiny shoes and a turban (‘Being a barrister-at-law, I was well dressed according to my lights and landed at Durban with a due sense of my importance’). It also conveyed how little he knew about the society he was entering.
When he arrived in Natal, Gandhi ‘had no idea of the previous history of the Indian emigrants’. The large Indian presence in South Africa stemmed from the need for agricultural labour in Natal. Imported in 1860 after considerable debate, Indian indentured workers had proved greatly reliable and been engaged by the Natal Government Railway as well as the municipality. But the first contingent of indentured workers had gone back to India in 1871 after completing their contracts with complaints of such a serious nature against plantation owners that their export was suspended for a few years. It was only resumed in 1874 after new guarantees regarding medical care and abstinence from corporal punishment were put in place and the office of a Protector of Indian Immigrants was established.
The protector’s authority was limited in practice by the influence of plantation owners who also enjoyed the favour of the courts. The proprietors of Reynolds Bros, owners of the Umzinto Plantation and Trading Company, one of the largest employers of Indians, were repeatedly given a free pass by the authorities despite a stream of horror stories involving intolerable living conditions, bestial assault of workers and suicide by overworked labourers emerging from their farms. Even small white employers were high-handed in their behaviour, leaving the indentured Indian in a state of extreme vulnerability as the following case demonstrates.
A merchant named Hay found his servant, an indentured Indian called Isaac, with some playing cards in his hand. Annoyed by his apparent idling, he ordered him to get to work and open some wine cases, which Isaac proceeded to do with more noise than the task warranted, according to Hay who reported him to the authorities. A second criminal magistrate of London convicted Isaac for breaching Section 36 of the Immigration Law and being ‘insolent to his master’. The Natal Witness in February 1906 reported that their lordships (Supreme Court) considered Isaac’s appeal against the ruling and upheld the magistrate’s findings.
These instances of white misbehaviour and arrogance fitted into a fundamentally racist outlook, which perceived the indentured Indian in purely instrumental terms. The absence of recreation, of cultural nourishment and a severely distorted gender ratio led to a high prevalence of drunkenness and brawls among workers. So strong was the stigma attached to indentured workers that it even repelled their own countrymen. Muslim passenger Indians — mistaken for ‘Arabs’ in their loose garb and Turkish caps — embraced the nomenclature, hoping it would distinguish them from the wretched indentured worker. Parsis called themselves ‘Persians’. The former took pains to stress their religious taboos against alcohol and campaigned for facilities such as a graveyard and a maulvi to solemnize marriages, to demonstrate how much more culturally evolved they were than the indentured labourers who followed no proper marriage or burial rituals.
Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins.
Amrita Shah is a former editor of Elle and Debonair, an ex-contributing editor with the Indian Express, and has worked for the US-based Time-Life News Service. She is the author of award-winning Ahmedabad: A City in the World (2015), Vikram Sarabhai: A Life (2007) and Telly-Guillotined: How Television Changed India (2019).
