The following is an excerpt from Pradeep Magazine’s recently published book Not Just Cricket: A Reporter’s Journey through Modern India.
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My visit to South Africa had memorable moments outside of the cricket field as well, the most significant being my visit to the Phoenix settlement that Gandhi had founded near Durban. South Africa was the country where Gandhi began his transformation from a Gujarati Baniya lawyer into a great visionary leader of the masses. The transformative journey is believed to have begun on a railway platform in a small town called Pietermaritzburg, where he was thrown out of a train because he was travelling in a first-class compartment not meant for Blacks and ‘coolies’.
India had a game against Namibia scheduled at Pietermaritzburg, and the local administration arranged a visit to that infamous station. There was even a short train journey played out for the players and the media—we rode in an exact replica of the train that Gandhi was travelling in when the incident took place. The area where Gandhi is supposed to have been dumped from the train has been marked, and for his followers it is now a pilgrimage spot. The whole recreation of the incident was like a dream for me as I sat in the replica train and tried to imagine what it might have been like for Gandhi back in 1893.
‘A Reporter’s Journey through Modern India,’ Pradeep Magazine, HarperCollins Publishers India, 2021.
When I was a college student in Amritsar, I had devoured every bit of information I could find on Gandhi. But I could never have imagined that one day I would be standing in faraway South Africa on the same platform, at the same spot where his journey of change had begun. At that spot, there is a plaque that reads: ‘In the vicinity of this plaque M.K. Gandhi was evicted from the first class compartment on the night of 7 June 1893. This incident changed the course of his life. He took up the fight against racial oppression. His active non-violence started from that date.’
However, though Gandhi fought for racial equality and dignity for the thousands of Indians in the Kwazulu-Natal area, I was to discover he was not revered by Black South Africans. In fact there was palpable tension between Blacks and Indians, who saw each other as rivals on the economic and social ladder.
When in Durban for the India–England match—in which Ashish Nehra produced a hostile spell of swing bowling to demolish England—I was keen to visit the Gandhi farm. To my disbelief, no one seemed to have heard of the place, be it the Indians or the Blacks. Finally, one Black taxi driver said he had an idea of where the place could be, but warned us not to go there as it was right in the midst of a ‘notorious’ Black area and we could be mugged on our way there. He said we needed a police escort for our visit. I was determined to make the trip no matter what, and visited the police station to arrange an escort. The cops agreed to send a jeep to escort our taxi.
The drive to the Phoenix Ashram took about an hour, winding through a desolate area. The final stretch was a narrow road that ended at the premises. There was one tourist bus parked outside. Apparently, the place was not as unknown as it had appeared to be. Inside, instead of the old structure I was expecting, there was a new building in place.
I learnt that the original was burnt down by a Black mob in 1985, in anger against a large section of Indians in South Africa who they felt had sided with the Whites and shunned Blacks. Mandela’s government had it rebuilt after the 1994 elections. The new structure had been built as similar as possible to the original.
The caretaker was a Black man. He greeted us and showed us around, pointing out the rooms where Kasturba and Mohandas Gandhi had lived and worked. I asked the caretaker why there was tension between the Blacks and the Indians. His terse response was, ‘Indians think they are too clever.’
In my interaction with the two communities, I could sense their mutual mistrust. The Indians felt they were ‘culturally’ superior to the Blacks, and in the elections that followed the abolition of apartheid in 1994, the majority of the Indians were believed to have voted against Mandela. The Indians felt that the Blacks were too aggressive and unfairly favoured, even though the affirmative action laws that were introduced post Apartheid included both Blacks and Indians as its beneficiaries.
Also read: Michael Holding’s ‘Why We Kneel’ Is a Strike at the Heart of Racism in Sports – And Society
South Africa, like India, was struggling with the problem of ‘reservations’, and in their case it extended to sports. The row has often threatened to derail South African cricket. Predominantly a sport played by White people, the cricket board introduced a law that mandates that every team at the domestic level should have six ‘players of colour’ (non-White players), and three of them must be Black. At the national level too the same rule applies, with a requirement of two instead of three Black players.
Players like Makhaya Ntini and Kagiso Rabada, both fast bowlers of outstanding merit, are a result of this policy. However, it is a reflection of class divisions within the game of cricket that there has been hardly any Black batsman of repute to have emerged from the country. During the time of the British empire, the working-class people were condemned to the menial tasks of bowling and fielding, while the nobility enjoyed batting. South African Blacks alleged that they are advised to become bowlers when they start playing as children, as if ‘our race is born to only bowl and not bat’.
Pradeep Magazine is a cricket writer, columnist and former sports editor.
