M.K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law. Charles R. DiSalvo
supplied with housing and food.8 When the laborer’s indenture was mature, the laborer could return to India, re-enlist for another period of indenture, or receive property equal to what it would have cost the government to ship him or her back to India.9 After 6,445 immigrants had been imported between 1860 and 1866, the dissatisfaction of the government of India with the operation of this arrangement, together with effects of an economic depression on Natal, resulted in the suspension of immigration in 1866.10
After the depression of 1866 began to ease and the demand for sugar began to rise, interest in the importation of Indian laborers resurfaced. More than two hundred “Planters, Merchants and others interested in the supply of Labour” petitioned the Natal government for help: “Your memorialists are more profoundly impressed as ever with the necessity of an increased supply of labour; it is absolutely essential for carrying on the Industries of the Coast Lands, and for giving to capitalists arriving among us that security which is required in entering on enterprises involving so large an outlay which can only be successfully prosecuted by a more abundant and regular supply of labour.”11
GROWERS VERSUS MERCHANTS
This renewal of interest in immigration troubled the government of India, concerned, as it was, over the complaints it had received about the treatment of its citizens during the previous period of immigration. The Natal government, however, gave sufficient assurances such that India permitted immigration to resume in 1874. These assurances included provisions that an indentured servant could return to India at the end of ten years (five years of service, followed by five years of freedom), that there should be no unequal treatment of Indians who remained, and that certain substantial percentages of the immigrants be women.12 These provisions, reluctantly accepted by the government of Natal, practically guaranteed that immigration would result in a permanent Indian population in Natal, a prospect feared by important elements of the Natal economy. For years there had been tension between the coastal growers on the one hand and the merchants and traders on the other over the question of immigration. The white growers needed Indian laborers to run their farms, while the white merchants and traders were apprehensive over the increased competition from freed Indians who became hawkers, market-gardeners, and traders, and from Indian merchants who voluntarily came to Natal to profit by serving the needs of the expanding Indian community. With the agreement to renew immigration, however, the growers’ needs trumped the merchants’ fears, as well as the concerns of the larger white society about the social disruption the Indians’ presence might cause. The conflict between the growers’ interests in cheap labor for their agricultural and other enterprises and the merchant class’ fear of competition would not remain submerged for long, however. As the Indian population steadily mounted, the wider white community’s fear of the Indian community’s political, as well as economic, power mounted with it. Indeed, as Indian indentured servants, followed by free Indian merchants, started pouring into Natal, the movement for responsible government gained more urgency. The Europeans who demanded responsible government from the Crown knew that, freed from the Colonial Office’s concerns about the Indian government’s reactions over the treatment of Indians in Natal, Natal could deal with its “Indian problem” with a much freer hand.
The numbers tell the story. In 1859, just a year before the importation of indentured servants began, there were no Indians in Natal. In 1880, a mere six years after the resumption of immigration, Europeans in Natal numbered 22,654 to the Indians’ 12,823, less than a two-to-one ratio. By 1891, two years before Gandhi’s arrival, the ratio had become nearly one-to-one. In 1904 the Europeans’ slight edge vanished: there were 103,673 Indians living in Natal to 92,597 Europeans.13 With numbers like these, the reality was that, were they fully enfranchised, the Indians could outvote the Europeans.
GANDHI’S CLIENTS
The economic reality was not simply in the numbers but also in the spirit of the Indians who migrated to Natal. Indian entrepreneurs of all types—from lowly market-gardeners,14 traders, and hawkers to powerful merchants—had a well-deserved reputation for business acumen.15 It was common for Indians freed from their term of servitude to set up small shops in direct competition with Europeans, often besting them. Of far greater importance, however, were the “Arabs,” mainly Gujarati-speaking Muslims from the region surrounding Gandhi’s birthplace of Porbandar who called themselves Arabs to distinguish themselves from those whom they considered run-of-the-mill Indians. These entrepreneurs came to South Africa for one purpose only—to make their fortunes in business. But a small portion of the total Indian population in Natal, they constituted what historian Maureen Swan calls the “commercial elite.” As such, they controlled Indian political and economic life before and after the time Gandhi arrived in South Africa. The wealth accumulated by these important figures in the Indian community was astonishing. To take one example, economic historian Zbigniew Konczacki estimates that in the period of 1903–1904 the commercial elite reaped profits and other income from trade in Natal to the tune of £502,000.16
By contrast, the living and working conditions of indentured Indians were deplorable. Swan describes them:
Plantation labourers were overworked (as much as a seventeen or eighteen hour day during the overlapping crushing and planting seasons), malnourished and poorly housed. These aspects of their existence gave rise to abnormally high disease and death rates. . . . In addition, the . . . indentured labour system offered little room for even such basic human comforts as family life. . . . There was . . . a serious imbalance in the male:female ratio, and the possibility of establishing or maintaining a family unit was made . . . remote by the prevalent employer practice of refusing to ration or pay any non-working Indian. In short, there is a solid weight of evidence . . . to suggest that overwork, malnourishment, and squalid living conditions formed the pattern of daily life for most agricultural workers.17
When the twenty-three-year-old lawyer who would later embrace voluntary poverty boarded the SS Safari in Bombay on April 19, 1893, he was going to South Africa not to champion the interests of oppressed Indian workers, but to represent the interests of the privileged elite.
FOUR
Dada Abdulla’s White Elephant
There was not any immediate work for me.
GANDHI
WAITING FOR GANDHI AS HE disembarked was Dada Abdulla, one of the richest men of any color in Durban. Owner of an international shipping line and trading houses in both Natal and Transvaal, the Porbandar expatriate had acquired a vast fortune in South Africa. In the past year Abdulla had become entangled with another Indian businessman in a bitter struggle over a commercial transaction involving a huge sum of money. Gandhi understood that he had been invited to South Africa to give routine assistance in this piece of litigation. What he did not understand as his host greeted him in late May 1893 was that the world of relative complacency and comfort to which the wealthy Abdulla, with his flowing robes and his subservient attitude toward the European colonists, would introduce him would slowly but inexorably give way to a world of hard choices.
Gandhi’s first weeks in South Africa foreshadowed the questions that would, in increasingly loud tones, demand answers throughout his entire life in the law. As a lawyer, how was Gandhi called to work for justice? Was he called to be the insider, the London-trained barrister who would use the traditional accord given his position, the weight of precedent, and the ordinary forms of legal disputation to argue his causes? Was he called to be the insider with a conscience, one who would show no fear in openly advancing his views that the law and society had taken a wrong turn and were in need of reform? Or was he called to be the outsider, one who would advocate the abandonment and rejection of a bankrupt legal system?
Abdulla took Gandhi by the arm, and the two embarked upon a week or so of reconnoitering each other in Durban. Abdulla started with an assessment of Gandhi’s fine English clothes; he quickly sized him up as one whose expensive tastes were more appropriate for Europeans than Indians who needed to work hard for their bread. Abdulla wasn’t certain what was inside the man either. He feared that once he sent this twenty-three-year-old to the Transvaal, where the case was being litigated, he would fall under the influence of the Indian defendants there and become disloyal