Daughter Of Midnight - The Child Bride of Gandhi. Arun Gandhi
becoming a new kind of person. But the degree to which he was being transformed was in no way revealed in the second-hand reports she was receiving.
Perhaps my grandfather himself did not understand, could not convey, the significance of what was happening to him during those early years in South Africa. It is only in retrospect, I believe, that we can see that this was when and where the transformation began.
Day by day and step by step, the future Mahatma was discovering truths, inventing strategies, setting patterns, which would guide his own future actions, and inspire future generations of human rights crusaders. The wordless orator, the failed advocate, the self-doubting young barrister who had fled in shame from a Bombay courtroom had vanished. In Durban during these years, another Mohandas was emerging. A Mohandas who was a tireless foe of oppression, and a resourceful servant of the people. He was becoming a sometimes cajoling, sometimes commanding leader of men.
Improvising as he went, he took others with him. His refusal to accept fees for public service (his established rule for all public work thereafter) was announced quite casually on the day he agreed to stay in South Africa and lead the franchise campaign. To ease his way, a number of Durban’s Indian businessmen immediately offered Mohandas generous retainers for legal advice and counsel.
His law practice was soon so remunerative he could pay for his own household expenses in Durban, support his family in Rajkot, and have a surplus left over to spend on his public service endeavours.
This assumption of decency on the part of his adversaries, this belief that they could be reached by appeals to mortality, would become another abiding precept of Gandhian philosophy. Meanwhile, the Gandhi name became synonymous with calls for reform. In the summer of 1894, he organised an association he called the Natal Indian Congress and became its first executive secretary.
Although Mohandas’ attention seemed centred on political activities and social causes, his preoccupation throughout this period was religion. “I had gone to South Africa for travel, for escape from intrigues, for my own livelihood,” he wrote in his autobiography. “But I found myself in search of God …” He asked friends in India to send him books about Hinduism and Buddhism. He studied the Theosophical Society’s English translation of the classic Hindu Upanishads. He learned more about Zoroastrianism in a book called The Sayings of Zarathustra. He read Washington Irving’s biography of the Prophet Mohammed. And he began to glimpse what he later called “the infinite possibilities of universal love.”
Mohandas announced to friends and co-workers that he was taking a six-month leave, beginning in June of 1896. He wanted to travel to India to publicise their cause, he explained; he wanted to make the Indian people aware of the problems their brethren faced in South Africa, and ask Indian leaders to back the campaign for reforms. And — oh, yes — while he was in India, he would also collect his wife and sons and bring them back to live with him in Beach Grove Villa.
Living apart from her husband had been difficult, but living with him was more confusing. Kasturbai reached this conclusion within days after Mohandas arrived in Rajkot in the summer of 1896, ending an absence of more than three years. Not that his homecoming was not sweet, nor that their time together (when they had any time together) was less than blissful.
But her happiness had to be contained, smothered. A wife did not show such emotions in public, not even in her own family, not even before her own children. To express her joy, she cooked all of Mohandas’ favourite foods, but she couldn’t come out of the kitchen to serve him the dishes she so lovingly prepared, let alone sit and eat with him. The honour of serving food to the men of the house was for her eldest sister-in-law Nandkunwarben, who, since the death of Putliba, had been the acknowledged head of the Gandhi women’s household.
They had so much stored up to talk about — what had happened during the past three years to their sons, to the family, to their friends, and to them. Mohandas told her about South Africa and spoke of his plans to take her there. She wasn’t sure at first whether she was excited or frightened by this idea. Then he described the house he had waiting for her and she knew it was a dream in the making. Kasturbai always longed to hear more, but Mohandas was working so long and hard — writing, talking to people, answering the many letters that arrived from South Africa — that he often fell asleep in the midst of their nocturnal conversations. She never had the heart to wake him up just to ask more questions. She would lie there by his side, thinking about this man who was her husband.
She had known him in many guises — as a timid schoolboy, as a passionate and unbearably possessive young bridegroom, as an earnest but uninspired college student, as a bereaved son mourning the loss of beloved parents, as a muddled and lost young husband trying vainly to use his English education to support his family in an ancient Indian culture. But she had never seen him as he was now — a self-assured young lawyer whose advice was respected even by elders: a leader.
This South African experience had made him more thoughtful, more mature, more forceful, and — what was it? — more like himself. As if he were coming into his own. Everyone had noticed the changes in Mohandas, she was sure of that. Her brothers and sisters-in-law treated him with unaccustomed deference now. And Kasturbai could see that Mohandas accepted all this as his due. Or was it simply that he was thinking of his work, and he expected everyone to know and accept the fact that his work came first, before anything else?
Sometimes she felt unsettled, overwhelmed almost, by all these changes. This new kind of husband who had some consuming mission he could not ignore and she did not yet understand. The new respect everyone showed now that he was prosperous and successful, the new urgency of his demands upon himself — all this was puzzling.
And here, amidst it all, her unchanging self — trying to picture the new life waiting for her and her sons in South Africa, wondering what would happen to them in that strange land.
Mohandas had made the house in Rajkot his headquarters for conducting business at home and abroad, and his first order of business was writing, publishing, and distributing a pamphlet entitled The Grievances of the British Indians in South Africa. In this brief discourse, Mohandas detailed soberly and without exaggeration how colour prejudice affected the lives of Indians in South Africa, and discussed what could be done to combat it; he stated, in summary, his basic political tenet: “Our method in South Africa is to conquer this hatred by love.”
“You could ask the boys to help you with all this work,” she said. Kasturbai had been trying for days to devise some way for her sons to spend more time with their busy father. Here it was.
“Harilal’s handwriting is very neat now, and Manilal can help paste the stamps. I’m sure the other children would like to help, too.”
Mohandas thought it was a fine idea. Next day he not only enlisted his own sons and the other Gandhi children in the pamphlet-mailing project, but also asked all the schoolchildren in the neighbourhood to join in. Working together for several hours daily, these young volunteers finished the job in a few days. Ever the pragmatist, Mohandas rewarded them with used foreign postage stamps from his voluminous South African correspondence and, always the instructor, urged them to start stamp collections.
No sooner was the mailing dispatched than Mohandas’ energies were diverted to another community service. News came that bubonic plague had gripped Bombay. Precautions had to be taken in Rajkot.
Mohandas volunteered to work with a local sanitation committee which toured the city, inspecting the homes (and latrines) of rich and poor alike, pointing out disease-breeding conditions. Other committee members disdained to visit the dwellings of the Untouchables, writing them off as hopeless. Mohandas had no such qualms. My grandfather made careful note of this experience. In later years, whenever he embarked on a reformist mission, the first task he assigned to colleagues was to carry and clean buckets of nightsoil.
Bapu believed this was one way to break caste taboos — to emphasise that all honest work was worthy, no essential work was lowly. By this time, Mohandas’ pamphlet (known simply as the “Green Pamphlet” because of the colour of its cover), was drawing comment in newspapers and journals all over India.
Mohandas Gandhi’s words were making his countrymen