South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.
several of Gandhi’s relatives, as well as his immediate family. The core functions of the press were family run. Chagganlal, a nephew, ran the accounts and the Gujerati section; Maganlal, another nephew, oversaw composing and did other skilled jobs. However, this was not a family business in the normal sense. As Prabhudas Gandhi (1957:18) noted in his memoir: ‘In Gandhi’s ashram the place of blood ties was taken by common ideology and a common devotion to duty.’ Or as Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph (2006) have indicated, Gandhi’s ashrams were modern institutions in which entry and exit were by choice rather than lineage.
The press also became central to Gandhi’s educational philosophy. Part of Phoenix’s work involved running an informal boarding school for children from both the settlement and beyond. Prabhudas Gandhi attended this school and has left a description of his routine. After an early start, students attended school from 9 to 11 a.m., after which they spent half an hour digging in the fields. When students complained and asked whether this digging couldn’t happen early in the morning, Gandhi replied: ‘You must get into the habit of working in the fields in the heat of the sun. Today you are studying here, but if the struggle starts and you have to go to jail, who will then let you rest in the shade?’ At 11.30 a.m. the students bathed, had lunch and worked on their own while the adults were busy in the press. At 3 p.m. the children went to the press and received vocational training or assisted with press work. At 5 p.m. the children returned to work in the fields till sunset (Gandhi, P., 1957:114–15).
Gandhi saw Phoenix as a training ground for satyagrahis and for prison. There was hence a rigorous labour regime, of which the press formed a part. Working a hand-operated iron press is noisy and involves long hours. It is physically demanding and those who did it on a full-time basis often developed back and kidney problems from the constant strain of pulling the bar of the press (Rummonds, 2004:598). Typesetters too developed aching fingers and felons (painful, pus-producing infections at the ends of their fingers) (Rummonds, 2004:265). Since most settlers at Phoenix never worked full-time at the press, they probably avoided these ailments. They were nonetheless subject to the labour disciplines of the printshop, which increasingly became part of the project of training for satyagraha.
The press, then, was a fulcrum of social relationships in Phoenix, which was at times known as the IPP settlement. When the manager of the press, Alfred West, married in July 1908, the wedding was reported in Indian Opinion as though the bride were marrying into the company (4 July 1908).
The idea that everyone worked equally on the press was probably something of an illusion. A core of people were devoted to the running of the press, two of whom earned commercial salaries. Also, it is clear from some accounts that the press, like all concerns in Natal, relied on cheap African labour. Millie Polak (1931:53–54) reports:
The printing-press, at this time, had no mechanical means at its disposal, for the oil-engine had broken down, and at first animal power was utilized, two donkeys being used to turn the handle of the machine. But Mr. Gandhi, ever a believer in man doing his own work, soon altered this, and four hefty Zulu girls were procured for a few hours on printing day. These took the work in turns, two at a time, while the other two rested; but every male able-bodied settler, Mr. Gandhi included, took his turn at the handle, and thus the copies of the paper were ‘ground out’.
In his autobiography, Gandhi notes his preference for a hand-operated press, which he regarded as more uplifting. He writes: ‘There came a time when we deliberately gave up the use of the engine and worked with hand-power only. Those were, to my mind, the days of the highest moral uplift for Phoenix’ (Gandhi, M., 1957:303–4).
There is, of course, an irony when this claim is set against Millie Polak’s description indicating that the hardest physical labour was done by four Zulu women. On the face of it, Phoenix stood beyond the wage economy, since in theory settlers did not receive salaries, only a £3 grant. However, as we have seen, two members of the press did receive commercially linked salaries and so the press at least was not entirely extricated from the relations of the market. One does not know what the Zulu women were paid, if anything. Their absence from Gandhi’s account points to the extent to which his press was a South African one that relied, if only in small part, on cheap African labour.
Gandhi was to leave South Africa in 1914. The press continued at Phoenix under the guidance of his son, Manilal, who edited Indian Opinion until his death in 1956. The presses were preserved in a museum at Phoenix, but have not survived intact. During internecine fighting in the early 1980s in Natal, Phoenix was looted and burned. The story of Manilal and the press has been masterfully told by Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie (2004) and need not detain us here. Instead, let us ask what we might learn from the biography of the press between 1898 and 1914.
The IPP and Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism
The IPP had two clear chapters in its early life, one in Grey Street in Durban and the other out at Phoenix; one apparently as a commercial operation, the other as anti-commercial – two commonsense categories that we take for granted. Yet to use such stark oppositions is to miss the uniqueness of the early IPP, as well as the ways in which Gandhi built on that legacy.
One way to grasp this uniqueness is to compare and contrast the IPP with similar printing establishments of the time in Durban. By the turn of the century the city was home to 14 presses, all of them white-owned, except for the IPP. The IPP was located in Grey Street; the Indian Opinion office was in Mercury Lane. Grey Street fell into what had emerged informally as the Indian area, while Mercury Lane was located in the ‘white’ foreshore of the city, although there was some porousness between these areas. This flexibility was, however, rapidly disappearing as the Natal colonial state started to implement ever-more rigorous forms of municipal segregation (Swanson, 1983).
With regard to the print shops in the ‘white’ area, these would generally have been staffed by white men, except for very menial positions, which would have been occupied by Indians and/or Africans. The white printers were united by strong bonds of solidarity. Most printers had done apprenticeships in Britain, parts of the empire or Natal, and belonged to the well-organised and vocal South African Typographical Union (Downes, 1952). These workplace networks promoted a marked sense of racial protectionism and white labourism. These networks spread into other areas. One key institution of colonial Natal society was the volunteer military regiment, which supplemented the small imperial standing army and promoted a widespread ethic of militarised masculinity, as Rob Morrell (2001) has demonstrated. At times, men who worked together signed up for these regiments, as did a group of typographers, who joined the Frontier Light Horse in 1879 in the lead-up to the Anglo-Zulu war (Downes, 1952:16). In the ‘Asiatic Invasion’ crisis of 1896, this cross between the volunteer regiment and the workplace became apparent: lynch mobs were organised into divisions according to their professions, such as railwaymen, carpenters and joiners, store assistants, plasterers and bricklayers, saddlers, and tailors – and, of course, printers (Natal Witness, 15 January 1897).
The establishment at 113 Grey Street was somewhat different. Firstly, the staff members were diverse, being drawn, as we have seen, from Mauritius, St Helena, Gujarat, South India, Durban and parts of southern Africa. One employee was a member of the South African Typographical Union and had had to seek permission to work for an Indian (Downes, 1952:99). The other workers were not unionised.
Another distinctive feature of the press was its use of different languages. For commercial printing, this would have involved typesetting in a range of different languages and scripts. As Indian Opinion got going, the work of translation became central to the print-shop activities. The newspaper first appeared in four languages – English, Gujarati, Hindi and Tamil – although the latter two were subsequently dropped. Even working with two languages, the process of translation formed part of the labour processes of the press. Some pieces were written in Gujarati, but others were translations from English. In theory, what should have happened was that the Gujarati compositor would translate articles from English and then set them in Gujarati. However, the reality was that compositors were not always fluent in English. The long-suffering Nazar had to summarise the gist of the article for them in Gujarati so that they could then typeset it. Type in Indian languages was always in short supply and the compositor at one point enjoined Nazar to avoid words with the Gujarati letter