Gandhi also had several long meetings with Sir Benjamin Robertson, which focused on the marriage question. He said the Commission, and the law, should recognize as valid all de facto monogamous marriages celebrated anywhere in the past. Monogamous marriages contracted in the future could be solemnized before a priest and, if required, registered. This anterior recognition, said Gandhi, was crucial; otherwise the children of such unions were in danger of being stigmatized as ‘illegitimate’.
Gandhi further asked that wives who were de facto monogamous be admitted into South Africa; and that existing plural wives of Indians who had rights of residence in South Africa be registered. The Government was especially worried about the legitimacy accorded by Indian faiths to polygamy. Gandhi argued that an acceptance of his proposals ‘as to legal recognition of de facto monogamous unions enables the State to popularise monogamy to an extent hitherto unknown’ in South Africa.18
The course of the negotiations with Smuts and others were reported to Gokhale in a long and intensely felt letter written to him by C. F. Andrews. This stressed Gandhi’s goodness of character, but also the fragility of his nerves, on edge as a consequence of the crises he had faced these past few months. As he was negotiating with Smuts, Kasturba again fell ill, while his old rivals P. S. Aiyar and M. C. Anglia had decided to renege on the boycott and testify to the Commission. When the General’s letter outlining the settlement came, Gandhi was ‘terribly excited and said that from first to last the letter was a studied insult’. Andrews was now ‘in despair’. Gandhi had expected a personal letter, corresponding with the friendliness of the interviews. What he got was a missive in neutral, even officious language. Going over the communication sentence by sentence, Andrews ‘saw at last where the one omission lay. It lay in General Smuts not recognizing the honourableness of Mr Gandhi’s motives.’ The priest went up to meet Smuts once more, and had a clause inserted that satisfied Gandhi’s honour.
It had been a close-run thing, wrote Andrews to Gokhale, which he had recounted in detail as it bore on Gandhi’s own future and the future of the Indians in South Africa. In a magisterial analysis of Gandhi’s personality, Andrews observed,
His work in S. Africa is done – and nobly done: and this time it was very near to a collapse. Everyone here says he is ‘played out’. Polak, Kallenbach, Ritch, etc. – All say the same. He must go, both for his own sake and for the community’s. Yes! For the community’s: for if he stays on he will dwarf everyone else and there will be no leaders here for at least another generation. It is painfully, palpably evident already: and it will be more evident still in a year’s time, if he does not go. Let this honourable settlement be reached and then immediately without a moment’s delay let him go to India and be with you or at one of the Servant of India Houses. It is pitiful to see him here at work. He does everything – he will do everything: and people simply get to lean on him more and more and the selfish ones take advantage of his goodness. He gets into the way of giving hasty orders without careful thinking (having to settle so many affairs) and when it comes to the big things on which the whole issue is staked again and again lately he has acted or thought hastily … He is one of the best men in the world! … He has made the noblest fight that has been made for years, and I cannot bear to think that it should all end in some great and huge mistake made in haste … but persisted in because of a mind distracted or outworn.19
This is a perceptive letter, showing (pace Lord Gladstone) that at least one European understood the mind and methods of (the mystical) Mr Gandhi. These past months had been incredibly intense for Gandhi. Planning for the satyagraha without knowing where the volunteers or funds would come from; courting arrest and the spell in jail; the illness of his wife and the still problematic relationship with his eldest son; the difficult and still unresolved negotiations with his old adversary; indeed the whole question of whether or not he should even remain in South Africa – all these issues agonized and troubled him. And he would yet ride all the horses – ‘he does everything – he will do everything’, as Andrews put it, the accumlated stress making his friends fearful that he might be headed for a breakdown.
Throughout January, batches of passive resisters were released from prison. They were met at the jail gates by their comrades, and then conveyed to receptions in Durban. When Mrs Sheikh Mehtab and her mother were released on 12 January, Maganlal Gandhi and his wife were at hand to receive them. Eight days later it was the turn of Mrs Thambi Naidoo and her fellow Tamils to be freed. The ladies were taken from the Durban prison to Parsee Rustomjee’s store on Field Street, where they were garlanded and fed with home-cooked food. Their stoicism and sacrifice was saluted in speeches made by, among others, Henry and Millie Polak, and Sonja Schlesin. Songs of praise were sung by Sheikh Mehtab and his pupils in Hindustani, and by the Moodley sisters, in Tamil.20
In the second week of February Gandhi came down to Cape Town with Kasturba and C. F. Andrews. The Hindu couple and their Christian friend stayed with a Muslim family, the Gools. On the 14th, Andrews gave a lecture on the life and work of Rabindranath Tagore at the Town Hall. The Governor-General, Lord Gladstone, presided. Among the ‘large [and] distinguished audience’ were some Members of Parliament. The point of Andrews’ talk was to demonstrate that India was not merely a land of ‘coolies’ but also of ‘noble ideals’. He expressed the ‘warmest appreciation of higher Indian life and thought’, as represented particularly by Tagore.21
The conflict in South Africa was not mentioned, but Andrews clearly had it in mind when stressing Tagore’s universalism, his capacity to rise above parochial identities of language and race. The poet’s work, he argued, offered the hope that
in the higher phases of life and thought East and West may become wholly and intimately one … [Where] the disruptive forces and jealous rivalries of race and colour and intolerant creeds, of commerce and trade and party politics, are so seemingly strong and outwardly powerful, it is indeed no small blessing to mankind, if even a single voice can be heard above their discordant tumult, speaking a message which East and West alike acknowledge to be true and great … [The] sovereignty of the poet is no shadowy thing. It is already heralding the downfall of ancient tyrannies and the coming in of new world forces which make for peace.22
On 19 February, the Indians of Cape Town threw a farewell party for C. F. Andrews. The guest of honour was the liberal MP W. P. Schreiner, who saluted the priest as a representative of ‘the entire brotherhood of humanity’. So, of course, was the speaker himself. Andrews’s blindness to matters of race was rare enough among white men in British India, but truly exceptional in Schreiner’s South Africa.
Andrews himself spoke both in Hindustani and English. He had penned a last message for the newspapers, which thanked South Africans for their hospitality, and observed that the atmosphere regarding the Indian question had ‘wonderfully changed’ in recent weeks. The credit for this change he gave to ‘Mr Gandhi’s chivalrous attitude’ and ‘General Smuts’ great considerateness’. He modestly omitted to mention his own reconciling role.23
Andrews left by the SS Briton on 21 February. Five days later, he sent Gandhi a letter suffused with love and regard. When ‘I saw you on the wharf standing with hands raised in prayer and benediction,’ he wrote, ‘I knew, as I had not known, even in Pretoria, how very, very dear you had become to me and I gazed and gazed and the sadness grew upon me and even the thought that I was on my way to India could not overcome it.’ Later, when he felt seasick, he was consoled by the memory of his friend, of
this new gift in my life which God had given me; and it made me so happy, Mohan, even while I was in utter physical misery, – just to think of it and remember it! … Somehow I didn’t quite know how much you had learnt to love me till that morning when you put your hand on my shoulder and spoke of the loneliness that there would be to you when I was gone.
In the six weeks that Gandhi and Andrews had spent in each other’s company, they had come to be soulmates. The w
ord, or cliché, is inescapable, and apposite. These were both seekers after truth and God, men of sentiment and conscience who sought heroically to reconcile East and West, white and brown, colonizer and colonized, and, not least, Hinduism and Christianity. More than the £3 tax and the marriage question and the personality of General Smuts, the duo had discussed – at Phoenix, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Cape Town – the multiple paths to God. Thus, after its intimate and emotionally charged prologue, Andrews’ letter moved on to matters of faith. His month with Gandhi had inspired him to write a book on the comparative history of religion, on how the ‘persistent voice of conscience’ had ‘become marvellously developed and expressed in the two great races which possessed religious genius, – the Semitic and the Indo-Aryan’. The writing of this book would mean ‘a lonely pilgrimage’, because – no doubt under the influence of his new Hindu friend – it would mean ‘giving up claims for the Christian position which everyone in the West whom I know and love … could not conceive of doing’.24
Shortly after his new friend had left, a letter arrived for Gandhi from his oldest friend, Pranjivan Mehta. This asked for a receipt for Mehta’s contributions in 1913 – amounting to the considerable sum of Rs 32,000 – and added: ‘I hope the [proposed] new Bill [embodying the agreement between Gandhi and Smuts] has mitigated your hardships.’25 Left unspoken was the other (and greater) hope, so long and so passionately held by Mehta, that his friend would now move back to India and prepare to take charge of the political movement there.
There had been several occasions in the past when Gandhi had been on the verge of returning home. In October 1901 he left Durban with his family, in his eyes for good. A little over a year later, he was brought back to negotiate the rights of South African Indians in the post-War settlement. He came, hoping however to return as soon as he possibly could. In September 1904 he offered a compromise solution to Lord Milner, a halfway house between the extreme demands of the White Leaguers and those of the more radical Indians. Had this been accepted, Gandhi would have rejoined Kasturba and the children, and had a third try at establishing himself in the Bombay High Court.
When Milner rebuffed him, Gandhi asked the family to join him in Johannesburg instead. In 1906 and 1909 he visited London to lobby for the rights of the Indian community; on either occasion, had their demands been met he would have returned to India. In the summer of 1911 he once more had strong hopes that Smuts would acquiesce to their main demands. That, too, was not to be – so a fresh round of satyagraha was launched. Now, finally, a honourable settlement was about to be inked into law – and the Gandhis could fulfil Pranjivan Mehta’s deepest desire and go back to their homeland.
Back in 1911, preparing for his eventual departure from South Africa, Gandhi had handed over his practice in Johannesburg to L. W. Ritch. Then in May 1913, Henry Polak moved to Durban, opening an office on Smith Street, where he met clients as well as subscribers to Indian Opinion.26 Gandhi’s hope now was that since he had arranged for experienced hands to represent the community, he – who had come to South Africa to settle a single dispute, staying on, with interruptions, for two decades – could finally return to India himself.
In the last week of February 1914, Gandhi wrote to Gokhale that he planned to depart in April with his family, and with some boys from the Phoenix School. His mentor had bound him to a vow of silence on political matters, operative for a full year after his return to India. That vow he would ‘scrupulously observe’. His ‘present ambition’, he told Gokhale, was to ‘be by your side as your nurse and attendant. I want to have the real discipline of obeying someone whom I love and look up to. I know I made a bad secretary in South Africa. I hope to do better in the Motherland if I am accepted.’27
Gandhi was still in Cape Town, in part because he wished to be at hand while the report of the Enquiry Commission was finalized, and in part because Kasturba was very ill. She could not sit without support, and could not eat solid food either. Grapes and orange juice were her main sustenance. Gandhi was anxious about the settlement, and anxious about his wife’s health. She had developed ‘ominous swellings’ whose cause the doctor, their friend and host Dr. Gool, could not yet locate.28 Kasturba lay ‘hanging between life and death’. She was claiming Gandhi’s ‘undivided attention’; she wanted him ‘by her side the whole day’. In one twenty-four hour period, all she consumed was the juice of two tomatoes and a teaspoonful of oil. ‘It seems to me,’ wrote Gandhi to Kallenbach, that ‘she is gradually sinking.’29
These factors explain, but do not excuse, the extraordinary harshness of a letter Gandhi wrote his son Harilal on 2 March. ‘I have your letter,’ he began. ‘You apologize in every letter of yours and put up a defence as well. It all seems to me sheer hypocrisy now. For years, you have been slack in writing letters, and then come forward with apologies. Will this go on until death, I forgiving every time.’
Gandhi went on to compare Harilal with his brothers. ‘You violate all the conditions I had made and you promised to fulfil,’ he complained:
You were never asked to go in for studies at the cost of your health. You have failed to take care of it. No wonder that Ramdas and Manilal have outdone you. And Ramdas has put in a fine effort, indeed, and grown in size as well. Manilal, too, has plenty of strength and would have been stronger yet if he had not taken to the evil ways of pleasure [with Jeki Mehta]. Even their studies I take to be sounder than yours.
Harilal had expressed a desire to go to Bombay to continue his studies. In that case, said Gandhi, he must leave his wife Chanchi and children in Gujarat. ‘Weighing my advice against that of others,’ concluded Gandhi, ‘do what you think best. I am a father who is prejudiced against you. I do not approve of your ways at all. I doubt whether you have any love for us. This statement sounds very harsh, but I see extreme insincerity in your letters.’30
Gandhi sent Harilal’s letter to Manilal. ‘Think over the wretched state he has been reduced to,’ he remarked. ‘The fault is not his, but mine. During his childhood, I followed a way of life none too strict in its rule and he is still under its influence. Tear off the letter after reading it.’ The prejudiced father hoped that the second son would make up for the deficencies of his brother. Once they returned, said Gandhi to Manilal, ‘It is my desire to see you esteemed in India as a brahmachari of a high order, your conduct so naturally well-disciplined that it cannot but produce an impression on others. This will require hard work, study and purity in you.’31
By the second week of March, Kasturba’s health had improved. Gandhi attributed the recovery to his own methods of healing. There was speculation that the swelling in her stomach might be cancerous. Gandhi believed that cancer ‘never yields to medical treatment but it must yield to fasting treatment if the patient has stamina’.32 He put his wife on an extended fast, feeding her only with neem leaves in water. The pain in her stomach eased. She could now sit up, and eat. ‘If she survives,’ he told his nephew Maganlal, ‘take it for certain that our [nature-cure] remedies and faith in God have saved her. She has come to realize that the doctor’s medicine was the cause of her breakdown.’33
Kasturba’s life was no longer in danger, but now her husband’s life was. Word that the Enquiry Commission would only recognize monogamous marriages had reached the Muslim merchants in the Transvaal. These merchants had brought Gandhi to South Africa; they had funded his early campaigns; many of them had gone to jail under his leadership. But recognition of the right of a man to have multiple wives was a central article of their faith. Now they accused Gandhi of betraying their interests, and, more crucially, their religion.
In early March, Gandhi heard that his brother Laxmidas had passed away in Porbandar. He had been sick for some time. Although they had not met for more than a decade, in recent years they had become somewhat reconciled. Gandhi had forgiven or forgotten the intrigue that got the family into trouble in Porbandar in 1891. Laxmidas had gloried in the popular acclaim his younger brother was receiving in India for the work he w
as doing in South Africa.34 Gandhi’s other brother, Karsandas, had died the previous June. Preoccupied with the satyagraha, he did not comment in public on either death; but he knew now that he would go back to a India bereft of his parents and his brothers too. Only his sister Raliat, herself a widow, still survived.
On 11 March, Gandhi wrote to his nephew Chhaganlal that he had heard that ‘they are plotting again in Johannesburg to take my life. That would indeed be welcome and a fit end to my work.’ In case he was killed, Gandhi left instructions on what the family must do. They should live like farmers on the land, simply. Gandhi had to provide for five widows, these being his sister, the wives of his two dead brothers, and two other family members. If Gandhi was now murdered by his enemies, the money for this could be taken from Pranjivan Mehta. Over the course of time, however, sons should assume responsibility for their widowed mothers, including Harilal for Kasturba.35
It was a young man named Medh who had written to Gandhi about the plot to murder him. We do not know who the plotters were. The Pathans who had assaulted and nearly killed him in 1908? And were they to act on their own or as mercenaries of the merchants? How active was the plot in any case? Had Medh drawn hasty conclusions from words spoken in anger? What we do know is there were increasing concerns in Johannesburg about what the Commission would say on the marriage question. In the last week of March, a ‘largely attended meeting representing all sections of Mohammedans in the Transvaal’ took place in the Hamidia Hall. Gandhi had often spoken here to appreciative and even admiring crowds. But this time he was, so to speak, an absent presence. The meeting resolved that ‘the recommendation of recognising one wife only and her children … if carried out, will molest and violate the principle of our sacred religion.’ The meeting further made ‘it known to whom it may concern that Messrs Gandhi, Polak and their associates have no right or authority whatsoever to represent the Moslem community or any matters concerning them.’36