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“… the least Indian of Indian leaders.”
V. S. NAIPAUL’S WORDS were intentionally surprising, even startling. What a way to describe the iconic figure in a loincloth whom the Cambridge-educated Nehru called “the quintessence of the conscious and subconscious will” of village India. How could Gandhi be at once “the least Indian” and “the quintessence” of the country’s deepest impulses? I was newly arrived in India toward the end of 1966 when I came upon Naipaul’s line. For me it was the most memorable in his scorching, sometimes hilarious first book on India, An Area of Darkness, published in 1964. It spoke to Gandhi’s time in South Africa, to the question of how it had shaped him.
I’d landed as a correspondent in New Delhi, coming from South Africa via London myself, just as Gandhi had in 1915, which may suggest why I was susceptible to the flattering argument that outsiders saw the country more clearly than its most sophisticated inhabitants. In the first generation after independence, it was insolent if not heretical for any Indian, especially one born in Trinidad and resident in London, to argue that India’s father figure, its beloved Bapu, as he was called in his ashrams and beyond, had come into his own overseas—in Africa, of all places—and had been forever changed by the traumatic but unavoidable experience of having to look on his motherland through what had become foreign eyes. In other words, the way Naipaul himself saw India. The writer was blunt. He didn’t waste words; that was an essential part of his genius. Basically, he was saying that Gandhi was appalled by the country he’d later get credit for liberating. It was the social oppression of India and its filth—the sight of people blithely squatting in public places to move their bowels and then, just as blithely, leaving their turds behind for human scavengers to remove—that accounted for the Mahatma-to-be’s reforming zeal. “He looked at India as no Indian was able to,” the young Naipaul wrote; “his vision was direct, and this directness was, and is, revolutionary.”
Naipaul found supporting evidence in the Autobiography, a book he would continue to mine every decade or so for new insights into “the many-sided Gandhi.” In this earliest excavation, he concentrated on a visit by Gandhi to Calcutta on a return home in 1901 that he’d originally intended to make permanent. Gandhi doesn’t know it yet, but he still has a dozen years ahead of him in South Africa. Within a year, he’ll allow himself to be summoned back from India. This is the pre-satyagraha Gandhi, still only thirty-two, the writer of lawyerly petitions to remote officials, not yet a leader of mass protests. Gandhi is in Calcutta—now called Kolkata—to attend his very first annual meeting of the Indian National Congress, a movement he’d one day transform and dominate but that, at this stage, hardly knows his name.
Naipaul doesn’t waste words on context, but a little helps. Calcutta, at the start of the last century, is “the packed and pestilential town” Kipling described, but it’s also in those days still the seat of the viceroy, capital of the Raj, “second city” of the empire, and capital as well of an undivided Bengal (a Muslim-majority area by a thin margin, taking in the entire Ganges delta including all the present Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal). Not just that, it has been an important seedbed of Hindu reform movements and is now on the verge of a period of ferment that might be called prerevolutionary. In these respects, it’s India’s St. Petersburg. A political newcomer, Gandhi has been granted a scant five minutes to speak about the situation Indians confront in far-off South Africa. In nobody’s eyes but his own is the arrival of this lawyer, lately from Durban, a big deal. He’s as central to the proceedings as a delegate from Guam or Samoa at an American political convention.
But look what happens. Naipaul brilliantly swoops in on three paragraphs in the Autobiography. They need no magnification. Twenty-five years later, when Gandhi wrote about this first encounter with the Congress, he still sounded astonished, really aghast. “I was face to face with untouchability,” he said, describing the precautions high-caste Hindus from South India felt they had to take in Calcutta in order to dine without being polluted by the sight of others. “A special kitchen had to be made for them … walled in by wicker-work … a kitchen, dining room, washroom, all in one—a close safe with no outlet … If, I said to myself, there was such untouchability between the delegates of the Congress, one could well imagine the extent to which it existed amongst their constituents.”
And then there was the problem of shit, which was not unconnected, since sweepers, scavengers, Bhangis, call them what you will, were deemed to be the lowest, most untouchable of all outcastes. Here’s Gandhi again:
There were only a few latrines, and the recollection of their stink still oppresses me. I pointed it out to the volunteers. They said pointblank, “That is not our work, it is the scavenger’s work.” I asked for a broom. The man stared at me in wonder. I procured one and cleaned the latrine … Some of the delegates did not scruple to use the verandahs outside their rooms for calls of nature at night … No one was ready to undertake the cleaning, and I found no one to share the honour with me of doing it.
If the Congress had stayed in session, Gandhi concludes tartly, conditions would have been “quite favourable for the outbreak of an epidemic.” A quarter of a century lies between the Calcutta meeting and his rendering of this memory. Conditions have improved but not enough. “Even today,” he says, in his insistent, hectoring way, “thoughtless delegates are not wanting who disfigure the Congress camp … wherever they want.” (Forty years later, when I attended my first session of the All India Congress Committee, the party—in power then for a generation—had discovered the Indian equivalent of the Porta-Potty.)
Naipaul considers Gandhi’s fierce feelings about sanitation and caste an obvious by-product of his time in South Africa. He doesn’t go further into their genesis. Gandhi tells another story, but it’s incomplete; it doesn’t begin to explain his readiness to do the scavenger’s job in the Calcutta latrine, his eventual readiness to make this one of his signature causes. He says he has been opposed to untouchability since the age of twelve, when his mother chided him for brushing shoulders with a young Bhangi named Uka and insisted he undergo “purification.” Even as a boy, he says in his various renditions of this incident, he could find no logic in his mother’s demand, though, he adds, he “naturally obeyed.”
The memory isn’t unique to Gandhi or his era. Indians living today, when the practice of untouchability has been forbidden by law for more than sixty years and now is more or less disowned by most educated Indians, can recall similar lessons in distancing from their childhoods. This is true among Indians even in South Africa, where the existence of untouchability was seldom acknowledged and never became an issue of open debate. On a recent visit to Durban, I heard a story like Gandhi’s from an elderly lawyer friend who recalled his mother refusing to serve tea to one of his schoolboy pals whom she identified as a Pariah. (Yes, that outcaste South Indian group gave us the English word.) But Gandhi’s experience as a boy doesn’t explain his behavior in Calcutta. At the age of twelve, he didn’t think of helping Uka empty the Gandhi family’s latrine, and his readiness to shrug off untouchability didn’t instantly mature into a passion to see it abolished. The path he followed to the Calcutta meeting has twists and turns and leads ultimately through South Africa. But it starts in India, where untouchability was coming into disrepute among enlightened Hindus well before Gandhi made himself heard on the subject. Coming into disrepute, that is, among a smallish sector of an Anglicized elite that had been educated to one degree or another in English. At the same time, according to persuasive recent scholarship, the actual practice of untouchability was becoming more rigid and oppressive in the villages where the elite seldom ventured. This happened as upwardly mobile subcastes sought to secure their own status and privileges by drawing a firm line between themselves and dependent groups they conveniently branded as “unclean” but systematically exploited. Just as racial segregation became more rigid and formally codified in the Jim Crow era in the American South and the apartheid years in South Africa, the barriers of untouchability were, in general, not lowered but raised even higher in colonial India, according to this line of interpretation.
What outsiders and many Indians think they know and understand about the caste system and the phenomenon of untouchability owes much to colonial taxonomy: the unstinting efforts of British classifiers—district officials called commissioners, census takers, and scholars—to catalog its multiplicity of subgroupings and pin them down the way Linnaeus defined the order of plants. Outlining the system, they tended to freeze it, imagining they had finally uncovered some ancient structure undergirding and explaining the constant flux, jostling, and blur of contending Indian social groups and sects. But the fixed system they thought they had delineated could not be pinned down; shot through with all the inconsistencies, ambiguities, and clashing aspirations of the actual India, not to mention its undeniable oppressiveness, it kept shifting and moving. Not all very poor Indians were regarded as untouchable, but nearly all those who came to be classed as untouchable were wretchedly poor. Shudras, peasants in the lowest caste order, could be looked down upon, exploited, and shunned on social occasions without being considered polluting by their betters. Some untouchable groups practiced untouchability toward other untouchable groups. If one group could be considered more polluting than another, untouchability could be a matter of degree. Still, to be born an untouchable was almost surely to receive a life sentence to an existence beyond the pale, though the location of what the scholar Susan Bayly calls the “pollution barrier”—the boundary between “clean” Hindu groups and those deemed to be “unclean” or polluting—might shift from place to place or time to time. In some regions, South India in particular, contact with even the shadow of an untouchable could be regarded as polluting. In few regions, however, were supposedly untouchable women secure from sexual exploitation by supposedly “clean” higher-caste men.
Some outcaste groups managed, over a stretch of generations, to promote themselves out of untouchability by ceasing to practice trades that were regarded as polluting such as picking up night soil or handling dead carcasses or working in leather. Others found they could distance themselves from their lowly origins by converting to Christianity and Islam. (Among Christians, in a shadowy carryover belying missionary promises, not to mention the Sermon on the Mount, some Indian Christians continued to treat others as untouchable.) Practices varied from region to region, as did the authority of high-caste Brahmans, the priestly types who rationalized the system and were, usually, its chief beneficiaries. The British and the missionaries who followed in their train taught members of the broad spectrum of various overlapping sects, devoted to various gods, that they belonged to a great encompassing collective called Hinduism. Simultaneously and more important, Indians were making the discovery for themselves. (Ancient Persians described “Hindus” more than two millennia before the British arrived; and recent scholarship suggests that the coinage “Hinduism” was first accomplished by an Indian, early in the nineteenth century.) Similarly, members of specific groups that were targets of untouchability—Chamars, Mahars, Malas, Raegars, Dusadhs, Bhangis, Doms, Dheds, and many more—learned they were all members of a larger group called untouchables. In short order, some began to draw the conclusion that they could make common cause for their own advancement.
Before Gandhi made his final return from South Africa to India, Brahmans were running schools in Maharashtra for the education of untouchables. They didn’t necessarily, however, make a practice of eating with those they were uplifting. A movement called the Arya Samaj, concerned about the number of untouchables converting to Christianity and—given the then-theoretical possibility that votes might one day be counted in India—even more concerned about the number converting to Islam, instituted a ritual of shuddi, or purification, for untouchables who could be lured into “the Hindu fold” (as Gandhi would later describe it). Here again the equality they offered was strictly limited; followers of the movement were not even consistent on the question of whether the “purified,” or reconverted untouchables, should be allowed to draw their water from wells used by higher castes. Perhaps it would be just as well if they were given their own separate but equal wells. It was enough not to consider the practitioners of polluting trades polluted. Higher-caste reformers saw no need for them to undertake such dirty, distasteful tasks themselves.
In later years, Gandhi displays at least a passing familiarity with this reformist history without ever acknowledging it influenced his own thinking. The theme of a memoir subtitled “The Story of My Experiments with Truth”—in the literary sense, its conceit—is that he had always been an independent operator, fearlessly making his own discoveries based almost entirely on his own experience. In the political realm, he never really portrays himself as a follower, even when he writes about his close ties to Gokhale, the Indian leader who cleared a path for his return to India, seeing Gandhi as a potential heir, and whom he acknowledged as a political guru. In the religious realm, he also acknowledged one guru, a philosophizing Jain poet (and diamond merchant) in Bombay named Shrimad Rajchandra, from whom he sought guidance when feeling pressed by Christian missionaries in his Pretoria days. But Rajchandra, who died early, in 1901, was no social reformer. Gandhi posed a series of questions to this sage. Included in his response was advice on what’s called varnashrama dharma, the rules of proper caste conduct. Gandhi was then warned not to eat with members of different castes and, in particular, to shun Muslims as dining companions.
Much as he admired, even revered, Rajchandra, these strictures against out-of-caste dining gave him no pause. It took years for members of Gandhi’s own household who remained orthodox to become accustomed to nonsectarian dining. “My mother and aunt would purify brass utensils used by Muslim friends of Gandhiji by putting them in the fire,” recalled a young cousin who grew up on the Phoenix Settlement. “It was also a problem for my father to eat with Muslims.” Later, back in India, Gandhi sometimes argued that the reluctance of Hindus to eat with Muslims was just another offshoot of the untouchability he deplored. “Why should Hindus have any difficulty in mixing with Mussalmans and Christians?” he asked in 1934. “Untouchability creates a bar not only between Hindu and Hindu but between man and man.”
The question of how he came upon his independent views still needs some untangling. In Gandhi’s own telling, after being warned against physical contact with the untouchable Uka at age twelve, he was not confronted with caste as a significant question until he resolved to go to London to study law. Then the mahajans, or elders, of the Modh Banias—the merchant subcaste to which all Hindu Gandhis belong—summoned him to a formal hearing in Bombay, now Mumbai, where he was spoken to severely and warned that he’d face what amounted to excommunication if he insisted on crossing the “black water,” thereby subjecting himself to all the temptations of flesh (principally, meat, wine, and women) that can be assumed to beckon in foreign parts. If he went, he was told, he’d be the first member of the subcaste to defy this ban. Then only nineteen, he stood up to the elders, telling them they could do their worst.
We can surmise that the mahajans were already fairly toothless, for Gandhi’s orthodox mother and elder brother Laxmidas supported him: in part, because he solemnly took three vows in front of a Jain priest to live abroad as a Bania would at home, in part because his legal training was seen as a key to the extended family’s financial security. What we cannot do is conclude that this younger Gandhi was already in open rebellion against the caste system. In asserting his independence, he stopped well short of renouncing the caste that had just effectively declared him untouchable, warning its members that dining or close contact with him would be polluting. Three years later, when he returned from London, a docile Gandhi traveled with Laxmidas to Nasik, a sacred place in Maharashtra, to submit to a “purification” ritual that involved immersion in the Godavari River under the supervision of a priest who then issued certificates, which Gandhi preserved, saying he had performed his ablutions. The Bania in Gandhi, who always kept a frugal eye on accounts and expenditures, made a point of complaining to his first biographer, Doke, nearly two decades later, that the priest had charged fifty rupees.
And that wasn’t the end of his purification. The Gandhi family then had to give a banquet for caste members in the Gujarati town of Rajkot, where he spent much of his childhood and where his wife and son had been stashed all the time he was abroad. The dinner itself included a ritual of submission. The prodigal son was expected to strip to the waist and serve all the guests personally. Gandhi—whose torso would be naked above the waist throughout the latter part of his life—submitted. Most members of his jati were mollified, but some, including his wife’s family, never again ran the risk of allowing themselves to be seen eating in the presence of one so wayward, even after he became the recognized leader of the country. Gandhi went out of his way not to embarrass the holdouts, some of whom signaled that they were ready to ignore the ban in the privacy of their homes. He preferred to shame them. “I would not so much as drink water at their houses,” he tells us, lauding himself for his own “non-resistance,” which won him the affection and political support of those Banias who still regarded him as excommunicated.
Or so he claims. The line between humility and sanctimoniousness can be a fine one, and Gandhi occasionally crossed it. On display here is his tendency to turn his life into a series of parables, as he dashed off his memoir in the 1920s and, as he grew older, in his everyday discourse. The fact is he’d defied the caste elders and then, even after he’d gone through the purification ceremony, ostentatiously refused to evade the ancient prohibition in collusion with anyone who worried it might still be valid. His handling of the matter might be seen as passive-aggressive: in the arena of family, a precursor of satyagraha. It’s Gandhi’s way of seizing higher ground. All that came later. On his return from London, he had strong practical reasons for getting back on good terms with his caste. His standing with the Modh Banias was bound to have a bearing on his prospects as a lawyer, for it was among them that he would expect to find most of his clients.
The purification ceremony in Nasik and the banquet in Rajkot show that he was far from being a rebel against the strictures of caste in the interim between his return from London and his departure for South Africa. Whatever his private views, the newly minted barrister’s stand on caste and its place in Indian society was still basically conformist. The experience of becoming untouchable in his own relatively privileged subcaste had given Gandhi no particular insight into the life of the downtrodden. At most, it insinuated the notion that caste might not be an impermeable barrier. It was just a step, then, on the way to Calcutta in 1901. Naipaul is almost certainly right: that encounter might never have occurred the way it did had he not gone to South Africa. If we look closely at Gandhi’s early experience there, several critical moments of consciousness-raising appear to converge in a period of roughly half a year, starting in the latter part of 1894 as he was setting up a law practice in Durban.
Could his engagement with Christian missionaries in that period have had something to do with the sprouting of a social conscience? It’s clear enough that British and American missionaries helped insinuate a notion of social equality into Indian thought. The thin edge of their wedge, it was always implicit and sometimes explicit in their general critique of a social order they considered wicked and in their more specific attack on the authority of Brahmans. The priestly caste was portrayed in Christian tracts as self-serving and corrupt. (“Wherever you see men, they have two hands, two feet, two eyes, two ears, one nose and one mouth, whatever their kind or country,” a letter in a missionary newspaper noted nearly three decades before Gandhi was born. “Then God could not have had it in mind to create many castes among men. And the system of caste, that is only practised in India, is caused by the Brahmans to maintain their superiority.”) However, it’s less clear that discussions of caste and social equality came up in discussions between Gandhi and the missionaries who competed for his soul in Pretoria and Durban. Everything about the newcomer’s first experiences in the emerging racial order suggests that such matters should have and may have arisen. But these evangelicals had salvation, not social reform, on their minds. From all that we actually know of their conversations with Gandhi, they were consistently otherworldly.
Enter Tolstoy, from the steppes. At some point in 1894, apparently in his last weeks in Pretoria, Gandhi received a packet in the mail from one of his well-wishers in Britain. This was Edward Maitland, leader of the tiny Esoteric Christianity spin-off from the Theosophist movement. Inside was the newly published Constance Garnett translation of The Kingdom of God Is Within You, the great novelist’s late-life confession of a passionate Christian creed, founded on the individual conscience and a doctrine of radical nonviolence. Ten years later, Gandhi would come upon Ruskin and a few years after that on Thoreau. Subsequently, he would correspond with Tolstoy himself. But if there is a single seminal experience in his intellectual development, it starts with his unwrapping that package in Pretoria. The author of War and Peace, a book the young lawyer would have found less compelling, excoriates the high culture of the educated classes, which profess to believe in the brotherhood of man, condemning in the course of his argument all the institutions of church and state in czarist Russia. What they have in common, he rages, is bedrock hypocrisy, never more so than when they’re declaiming on the subject of brotherhood:
We are all brothers, but I live on a salary paid me for prosecuting, judging, and condemning the thief or the prostitute whose existence the whole tenor of my life brings about … We are all brothers, but I live on the salary I gain by collecting taxes from needy laborers to be spent on the luxuries of the rich and idle. We are all brothers, but I take a stipend for preaching a false Christian religion, which I do not myself believe in, and which only serves to hinder men from understanding true Christianity.
And this: “We are all brothers—and yet every morning a brother or a sister must empty the bedroom slops for me.”
Here we begin to get a clear view of how the social conscience that Gandhi would bring to Calcutta in 1901 was formed. It was not just living in South Africa that inspired it. It was musing about India while living in South Africa and reading Tolstoy there as he would continue to do in the coming years. By the time he got to the Calcutta meeting, Gandhi had read Tolstoy’s subsequent jeremiad, What Is to Be Done? Here Tolstoy, continuing in his full-throated prophetic vein, tells the educated classes how they can save themselves—through an uncompromising rejection of materialism, a life of simple living, and physical labor to provide for their own necessities. (“Body labor” and “bread labor,” he calls it, language Gandhi eventually appropriates for his own use.) In this context, Tolstoy, now determined to shed the privileges of a Russian aristocrat, returns to the question of human feces. The laws of God will be fulfilled, he writes, “when men of our circle, and after them all the great majority of working-people, will no longer consider it shameful to clean latrines, but will consider it shameful to fill them up in order that other men, our brethren, may carry their contents away.”
The deep impression Tolstoy etched on Gandhi’s soul was sufficiently conspicuous for one of his Indian critics to seize on it, years later, as proof of his essential foreignness. This was Sri Aurobindo, a brilliant Bengali revolutionary who advocated terrorism under the name Aurobindo Ghose, then lived out his long life as an ashram mystic and guru in the tiny French enclave of Pondicherry in South India. “Gandhi,” Aurobindo said in 1926, “is a European—truly a Russian Christian in an Indian body.” Gandhi, by then all but undisputed leader of the nationalist movement in India, might plausibly have retorted that Aurobindo was a Russian anarchist in an Indian body, but the Bengali’s remark either passed him by or was beneath his notice.
The younger Gandhi, the South African lawyer and petitioner, immediately saw the contradiction between Tolstoy’s prophetic teachings and the values prevailing among Indians of his station. Evidence that he has been more than shaken soon begins to accumulate. In May 1894, he travels to Durban, presumably to close out his year in South Africa and board a ship for home. Gandhi’s account of what happened then has been accepted by most biographers: how at a farewell party his eye happened to fall on a brief newspaper item on the progress of a bill to disenfranchise Natal’s Indians, how he called it to the attention of the community and was then prevailed upon to stay and lead a fight against the legislation. But an Indian scholar and Gandhi enthusiast, T. K. Mahadevan, noting that the bill had by then been progressing in stages through the colonial legislature for more than half a year, devoted a whole book to exposing Gandhi’s “fictionalizing” and “mendacity” in his recounting of this episode in the Autobiography. With all the vehemence of a trial lawyer addressing a jury, the scholar concluded that the young barrister was mainly looking out for himself. Rather than return to an uncertain future in India, according to Mahadevan, he wanted to establish a legal practice in Durban.
It’s more generous and probably more accurate to allow for the possibility of mixed motives, of altruism and ambition each playing its part in the cancellation of his voyage home. In any case, by August 1894 he has thrown himself into a life of what would now be called public service, drafting petitions and, early on, a constitution for the Natal Indian Congress, a newly formed association of better-off Indians, mostly traders and merchants and, in the Durban of that time, mostly Muslim. And here for the first time, at the very outset of his career in politics, he notices and mentions poor Indians. With Tolstoy hovering at his shoulder, or so we can reasonably surmise, Gandhi lists among the seven “objects” of the new Congress two for which it’s hard to find any other inspiration in his reading or experience: “To inquire into the conditions of Indentured Indians and to take proper steps to alleviate their sufferings … [and] to help the poor and helpless in every reasonable way.” He may have done little for or with the indentured until late in his stay in South Africa, but clearly they were on his mind and conscience from his earliest days in politics.
In 1895, with founders of the Natal Indian Congress, mostly Muslim merchants (photo credit i2.1)
Such “objects” remained words, floating for years into a realm of high-flown aspiration, stopping far short of a program. Gandhi doesn’t immediately travel to the sugar plantations and mines to make an on-the-spot inquiry. Years later, back in India, he would attribute his hesitation to his own social anxieties. “I lived in South Africa for 20 years,” he said then, “but never once thought of going to see the diamond mines there, partly because I was afraid lest as an ‘untouchable’ I should be refused admission and insulted.” By then, his equation of British racism and Indian casteism—the notion that all Indians were untouchable in British eyes—had become the rhetorical cutting edge of his argument as a social reformer. It worked for him as a nationalist, too.
But that was not where he started. Initially, his goal was social equality within the empire for his benefactors and clients, the higher-class Indian merchants. Indentured Indians thus weren’t invited to join the Natal Indian Congress. Its annual membership fee of three pounds was far beyond their means. Their sufferings remained unalleviated, but several months later Gandhi had his first notable encounter with an indentured laborer; it’s a case of reality crashing in. A Tamil gardener named Balasundaram, indentured to a well-known Durban white, turns up in Gandhi’s recently opened law office, where one of the clerks, also a Tamil, interprets his story. The man is weeping, bleeding from the mouth; two of his teeth have been broken. His master has beaten him, he says. Gandhi sends him to a doctor, then takes him to a magistrate.
That’s the version of the encounter he gives in the Autobiography, what deserves to be belittled as its movie treatment. None of his biographers seem to notice how far this account, written after the passage of three decades, strays from one he wrote just two years after the event. In the earlier one, the laborer has already gone on his own to the official known as the protector of immigrants, who conveys him to a magistrate, who, in turn, arranges for him to be hospitalized for “a few days.” Only then does he land on Gandhi’s doorstep. His wounds have been treated, he is no longer bleeding, but his mouth is so sore he can’t speak. Surprisingly, he’s able to write down his request in Tamil. He wants the lawyer to have his indenture canceled. Gandhi asks whether he’d be willing to have it transferred to someone other than his employer if cancellation can’t be arranged. It takes half a year, but finally Gandhi arranges for Balasundaram to be indentured to a Wesleyan minister of his acquaintance, whose services Gandhi has been attending most Sundays.
Balasundaram is hardly a typical indentured laborer. Instead of toiling on a sugar plantation or mine, where laborers in large numbers are confined to compounds, the gardener lives in the city, where he knows his way around well enough to be able to get to the protector and Durban’s one Indian lawyer on his own. That he’s at least semiliterate suggests that he may not be an untouchable. Gandhi, later claiming more credit than he seems to have deserved, describes the case as a turning point. “It reached the ears of every indentured laborer, and I came to be regarded as their friend,” he says in the Autobiography. “A regular stream of indentured labourers began to pour into my office.” He says he got to know their “joys and sorrows.” These broad claims have been widely accepted. (“He emerged virtually as a one-man legal aid society for these poor Indians,” a respected Indian scholar, Nagindas Sanghavi, wrote.) Evidence from this period to support them, however, is less than slight. Gandhi himself doesn’t go on to mention any subsequent cases involving indentured laborers; if there were records of such cases, they’ve long since disappeared. Apart from sketchy reports of two weekend forays late in 1895 to pass the hat for the Natal Indian Congress, there’s nothing to indicate he went out of his way to meet the indentured in his Durban years.
On October 26, 1895, he’s said to have visited shanties near the Point Road where Indian dockworkers and fishermen lived, collecting only five pounds. (Point Road, the thoroughfare he first traveled on landing in Durban, has lately, in the new South Africa, been renamed Mahatma Gandhi Road, a well-meant tribute that has discomfited local Indians, given its reputation for prostitution.) The next weekend he ventured north with some Congress members to the sugar country, but, barred from speaking to laborers at the Tongaat estate, he concentrated on local Indian traders. A British estate owner was asked by a magistrate in Durban to report on Gandhi’s activities. The planter was no clairvoyant. This is what he wrote: “He will cause some trouble I have no doubt, but he is not the man to lead a big movement. He has a weak face.”
Gandhi’s real attitude to the indentured in this period is made plain by the arguments he advanced on the first of his losing causes in South Africa: that of protecting the voting rights of literate, propertied Indians. Such Indians, he wrote in December that year, “have no wish to see ignorant Indians who cannot possibly be expected to understand the value of a vote being placed on the Voters’ List.”
If the thought of following Tolstoy’s teaching on his brief foray to the sugar country on Natal’s north coast so much as crossed his mind, it hadn’t yet carried him to the conclusion that he needed to do physical labor with his own hands. Nor, it seems, did he try again to penetrate the plantations, having failed the first time. So for anyone looking for the origins of his passion on untouchability—so evident by the time he reaches Calcutta in 1901—the Balasundaram case sheds little light. The most that can be said is that it might have helped set the stage for his next revelation, which came not from actual encounters with poor Indians but from finding himself on the short end of an argument with whites. At virtually the same time, probably no more than a few weeks after the gardener’s arrival in his office, Gandhi the lawyer and petitioner was pulled up short by an editorial in a Johannesburg paper called The Critic.
The editorial chews over Gandhi’s first venture in political pamphleteering, an open letter to the members of the colonial legislature in Natal, published at the end of 1894. In it, Gandhi took on “the Indian question as a whole,” asking why Indians were so despised and hated in the country. “If that hatred is simply based upon his color,” the twenty-five-year-old neophyte wrote, “then, of course, he has no hope. The sooner he leaves the Colony the better. No matter what he does, he will never have the white skin.” But if the hatred was a result of misunderstanding, then maybe his letter would spread some appreciation of the richness of Indian culture and the thrifty hard work that made Indian citizens so useful. The case was different, Gandhi conceded, with indentured laborers, imported by the thousands on starvation wages, held under bondage, and lacking anything that can be described as “moral education.” In finely honed understatement, so understated it probably passed over the heads of most white readers, Gandhi writes: “I confess my inability to prove that they are more than human.” He’s saying: Sure, they’re unsanitary and degraded, but what can you expect, given the conditions in which you confine them? Maybe the image of Balasundaram, the only indentured laborer he’d met up to that point, flitted through his mind.
The Critic seizes on that argument and turns it around. It was the caste system and not the laws of Natal that condemned Indian laborers to be “a servile race,” it said. “The class of Hindoos which swarms in Natal and elsewhere is necessarily of the lowest caste and, under the circumstances, do what they will, they can never raise themselves into positions which command respect, even of their fellows.” Gandhi, the newspaper said, should “begin his work at home.”
It’s Gandhi’s authorized biographer and longtime secretary, Pyarelal, who brings this passage to our attention. That may mean he has come upon a clipping Gandhi—a great hoarder and indexer of clippings all through his career—had saved from his South Africa days. Or, since Pyarelal was at Gandhi’s side for nearly thirty years, from boyhood on, it may also mean that he has discussed the editorial with the man he called his “Master.” Pyarelal is given to flowery hyperbole. But writing of the editorial in The Critic, he seems sure of his ground as he describes an epiphany:
The barbed shaft penetrated to the core of Gandhiji’s heart. The truth burst upon his heart with the force of revelation that so long as India allowed a section of her people to be treated as pariahs, so long must her sons be prepared to be treated as pariahs abroad.
The shaft flung by an English editorial writer in Johannesburg would become a fixture in Gandhi’s own arsenal of arguments. (“Has not a just Nemesis overtaken us for the crime of untouchability?” he would ask in 1931. “Have we not reaped as we have sown? … We have segregated the ‘pariah’ and we are in turn segregated in the British colonies … There is no charge that the ‘pariah’ cannot fling in our faces and which we do not fling in the faces of Englishmen.”)
Gandhi would testify that the point made by the editorial writer in Johannesburg was one he regularly had to confront. “During my campaigns in South Africa, the whites used to ask me what right we had to demand better treatment from them when we were guilty of ill-treating the untouchables among us.” Whether the point was made routinely or just once, it left a permanent impression.
Ultimately, he did “begin his work at home,” if under “his work” we include his Tolstoyan preoccupation with sanitation and the cleaning of latrines. He returned to India in 1896 with the aim of gathering his family and bringing it back to Durban. Soon after he arrived in Rajkot, there was an outbreak of plague in Bombay. Put on a sanitation committee in Rajkot, he made the inspection of latrines his special task. In the homes of the wealthy—and even in a Hindu temple—they were “dark and stinking and reeking with filth and worms.” He then went into the untouchables’ quarter: “the first visit in my life to such a locality,” he acknowledged. Only one member of the committee was ready to go along. It turned out the untouchables had no latrines. “Latrines are for you big people,” they told him, or so Gandhi recalled. They relieved themselves in the open, but, to his surprise, they kept the hovels where they lived cleaner than the more substantial homes of their social betters. Henceforth for Gandhi, sanitation and hygiene were at or near the top of his reform agenda.
The first overt sign that he has started to connect his passion for latrine cleaning with his convictions about untouchability crops up back in Durban, a year or so later. By his own account, Gandhi turns vicious in an argument with his long-suffering wife, Kasturba, over the emptying of a chamber pot. Here for the first time we find the categorical imperative of “body labor,” derived from Tolstoy, brought into action against the very Indian practice of untouchability, which Gandhi has now learned to abhor on grounds that it undercuts the case he has been making for Indian equality in South Africa. The chamber pot in question had been used by Vincent Lawrence, one of Gandhi’s law clerks, whom he describes as “a Christian, born of Panchama parents.” A Panchama is an untouchable. Lawrence had been recently staying as a houseguest in the lawyer’s two-story villa on Beach Grove, steps from Durban Bay. A submissive Hindu wife, in her husband’s portrayal, the illiterate Kasturba, normally called just Ba, had reluctantly learned to share with him the unspeakable duty of cleaning chamber pots. “But to clean those used by one who had been a Panchama seemed to her to be the limit,” says Gandhi. She carries the clerk’s pot but does so under vehement protest, weeping and upbraiding her husband, who responds by demanding sternly that she do her duty without complaining.
“I will not stand this nonsense in my house,” he shouts, according to his own account.
“Keep your house to yourself and let me go,” she replies.
The future Mahatma is now in a fury. “I caught her by the hand, dragged the helpless woman to the gate … and proceeded to open it with the intention of pushing her out.” She then sues for peace, and he admits to remorse. Thirty years later he either doesn’t remember or chooses not to say who finally emptied the chamber pot.
Here we have a clear prelude to the Calcutta scene on which Naipaul fastened. It shows that Gandhi didn’t have to travel back to India to be confronted by the persistence of untouchability. He could bully his own wife on that score but must have known he had yet to convert her. As late as 1938, he erupts in a similar fury upon learning that Ba has entered a temple in Puri that still bars untouchables. His pique becomes an occasion for a fast, and he loses five pounds. What’s somewhat unreadable, still, after the first incident in Durban, is the question of his own attitude to the very poor, the Panchamas and other low-caste Indians oppressed by the practice he abhors. His Christian law clerk is too easy an example. He is educated, an upstanding citizen in a starched collar. What about the indentured laborers on the sugar plantations with whom he doesn’t mix, for whom he sometimes apologizes, those who fit a white man’s stereotype of a “servile race”? Does he care about them in only an abstract, self-regarding sort of way, because he objects to the impression they leave of Indians? Or does he actually care about them?
A few lines in the Autobiography suggest that a positive answer came during the Durban years. Gandhi, who developed what he describes as a “passion” for nursing while caring for a dying brother-in-law in Rajkot, started putting in an hour or two most mornings as a volunteer in a small charitable hospital. This brought him, he says, into “close touch with suffering Indians, most of them indentured Tamil, Telugu or North India men.” But that’s all he says. It’s a remark made in passing. We don’t know how long this volunteer nursing went on, only that he counted it as good preparation for the Boer War, when the stretcher bearers he led sometimes nursed wounded British troops. These “body snatchers,” as they were called by the troops, were themselves mostly indentured laborers. It was the war, rather than the volunteer nursing, that actually gave him his most conspicuous engagement with the poorest Indians before the final satyagraha campaign in his last year in South Africa.
Of the eleven hundred stretcher bearers nominally under his command, more than eight hundred were indentured, recruits from the sugar plantations on a stipend of one pound a week (double what most of them normally earned). The indentured, Gandhi makes clear, remained “under the charge of English overseers.” Technically, they were volunteers, but they’d actually been drafted as a result of an official government request to their employers passed along by the so-called protector of immigrants. Rounded up on the plantations where they were indentured, these “semi-slaves,” as Gandhi called them, were then marched off under the command of their usual overseers. It would be an overstatement, but not altogether inaccurate, to describe Gandhi as a convenient front man in this transaction. In a revealing passage, he later acknowledged he had nothing to do with recruiting most of the stretcher bearers: “The Indians were not entitled to the credit for the inclusion of the indentured laborers in the Corps, which should rightly have gone to the planters. But there is no doubt that the free Indians, that is to say the Indian community, deserved credit for the excellent management of the Corps.”
Here again he’s plainly saying that “free Indians” are members of the community; Indian indentured laborers are not. So while he has told us in the pages of the Autobiography that he was now recognized as “a friend,” a man who knew their “joys and sorrows,” his claim to have “got into closer touch” with the indentured with whom he served on the fringes of Boer War battlefields rings a little hollow. He speaks of no individuals, no incidents, just “a greater awakening amongst them,” a realization that “Hindus, Musalmans, Christians, Tamilians, Gujaratis and Sindhis were all Indians and children of the same motherland.” The awakening is “amongst them.” We can almost picture his captive audience nodding while he speaks, even though many of them—the Tamils in particular—have no common language with him. But, as a matter of fact, we’re not sure he delivered such speeches at the time. More likely, these words are directed to a different audience, in a different place, at a later time: convinced Gandhians in India who follow from week to week the installments of his memoirs in his newspaper. Long after the events he relates, Gandhi the Indian politician shapes and reshapes the experience of Gandhi the South African lawyer in order to advance his nationalist agenda and values at home.
Part of that reshaping involves his memory of valor in the face of danger. The original understanding was that the Indians would not be exposed to battlefield fire and risks. But when the British found themselves falling back from a severe reversal, according to Gandhi, their commander paused to reopen the question with the Indians in the most tactful and sensitive way. “General Buller had no intention of forcing us to work under fire if we were not prepared to take such risk,” he wrote, “but if we undertook it voluntarily, it would be greatly appreciated. We were only too willing to enter the danger zone.” In later years, Gandhi habitually used martial metaphors to summon the valor of his volunteers for nonviolent resistance. Perhaps that’s what he’s doing in this passage. But the impression he leaves is exaggerated. He never met General Redvers Buller; it’s less than clear that the general knew his name. What he’s talking about are orders and dispatches issued in the commanding officer’s name. And his stretcher bearers never really operated on battlefields. They were at their greatest peril when, briefly, they were asked to carry their burdens over a pontoon bridge and pathways known to be in range of Boer artillery. But the guns remained silent, and no Indians were wounded or killed, even though the early Natal battles to which they were dispatched—Colenso in mid-December 1899 and Spion Kop a month later—quickly became charnel houses for the British, with the total of killed, wounded, and captured amounting to 1,127 in the first case and 1,733 in the second. The fact that not a single member of the ambulance corps fell to a Boer marksman or shell makes clear that their arduous, certainly stressful labors in the “danger zone” couldn’t have been all that dangerous.
In describing these events, Gandhi cultivates the manly, modest voice of a leader who doesn’t want to boast. On a rereading, there comes to seem a touch of the mock-heroic in that voice as well; his small ambiguities seem more calculated than careless. Yet biographers make the most of them. Here’s Louis Fischer, one of the earliest and still one of the most readable, on the stretcher bearers: “For days they worked under the fire of enemy guns.” Pyarelal, the apostle turned biographer, describes Gandhi’s role in carrying General Edward Woodgate, the mortally wounded commander at Spion Kop, to the base hospital. “The agony of the General was excruciating during the march and the bearers had to hurry through the heat and dust.” Two months were to pass before Woodgate finally died from his wounds. It’s possible he was conscious as the stretcher or, more likely, curtained palanquin in which he was evacuated bumped along across the Tugela River valley for a little more than four miles to the base hospital at Spearman’s Camp, where General Buller had established his headquarters. Physical details of the evacuation are sparse in Gandhi’s account. Whether he accompanied the wounded commander for the whole distance is never entirely clear.
Spion Kop was a strategic hilltop that Woodgate had led his troops to capture in the middle of the night, only to discover in the morning that he’d neglected to secure the highest ground. Their trenches were half-dug when the Boers opened fire. Recklessly standing outside the trenches, Woodgate was shot through the head as soon as the morning mist lifted. He had to be pulled into a trench filled with dead and dying Lancashire fusiliers, then evacuated to “the first dressing station” by a squad of his troops, next hauled down the hillside to a “field hospital” by British stretcher bearers before his body could be handed over to the Indians. The contemporaneous “Times” History of the War in South Africa has a detailed narrative of these events, even naming one Lieutenant Stansfield as head of the squad that got Woodgate’s body down the hill. The narrative doesn’t mention the Indians, nor did a young British correspondent who climbed the hill late in the day after “the long, dragging hours of hell fire” had wound down.
“Streams of wounded met us and obstructed the path,” Winston Churchill wrote in his dispatch to the The Morning Post. “Corpses lay here and there. Many of the wounds were of a horrible nature.” At the base of the hill, “a village of ambulance wagons grew up.” Gandhi and Churchill were seldom again on the same side. They wouldn’t actually meet until a brief official encounter in London in 1906, which proved to be their only one. It’s intriguing to think they may have crossed paths at Spion Kop. What’s especially striking is the complete absence from Gandhi’s accounts of the picture Churchill described. Either he saw very little of it, or, somehow, the impression it left soon faded.
Thirty educated Indians from Durban had been designated as “leaders” and given uniforms (paid for by the Muslim traders, none of whom volunteered). Leaders also got tents. The recruits from the ranks of the indentured had to sleep on open ground, often without blankets, at least in the early weeks. Gandhi was leader of the “leaders.” It’s never entirely clear that the leaders actually carried stretchers. In his several accounts Gandhi leaves the point vague. It’s at least as likely that they supervised the work, marching along and setting the pace (though Gandhi’s first biographer, Doke, came away from his interviews with the impression that his subject actually hauled stretchers). When it was all over, Gandhi wrote a beseeching letter to the colonial secretary noting that a gift of “the Queen’s Chocolate”—held out as more than a gift, a royal beneficence—had just been distributed to British troops in Natal. He asked that the chocolate go as well to the uniformed leaders of the ambulance corps who had served their brief tours without compensation. He made no request on behalf of the much larger number of indentured laborers whom he had not personally recruited. In the event, no Indians got “the Queen’s Chocolate.” The exchange makes a pathetic coda. The official replied stiffly. The chocolate was intended only for enlisted men and noncommissioned officers, he said; only for whites, he might just as well have said, for that’s how Gandhi, scrounging for some small recognition of common citizenship, no matter how symbolic, would have read it. Eight Indians, including Gandhi, got medals. None of the other stretcher bearers got any recognition except a letter from Gandhi himself accompanied by a modest unspecified gift.
Vincent Lawrence, the outcaste clerk whose chamber pot had disgusted Kasturba Gandhi, was among the “leaders” sleeping in tents, which shows that for Gandhi the great social divide had become a matter of class, not caste. The idea of crossing that divide is presented only retrospectively. At the time he finds it remarkable that the stretcher bearers got along well with British soldiers they encountered, considering that the indentured laborers were “rather uncouth.”
The fastidiousness is Gandhi’s. He’d not always be this fussy. Much later, in India, after he’d crossed the social divide, Gandhi adopted an untouchable girl as his daughter. She was named Lakshmi. Years after his death, when the writer Ved Mehta sought her out, Lakshmi described Gandhi’s obsession with the system of sanitation he established in his ashram: how his followers were trained to pass stool and urine into separate whitewashed buckets in a whitewashed latrine, then cover the stool with earth, eventually emptying the stool buckets in a distant trench, covering what was disposed there with cut grass, and then using the urine to rinse the bucket out. “Bapu had found a use even for urine,” Lakshmi said. Ved Mehta doesn’t indicate whether this was said with pride, irony, or some measure of each. Maybe she was simply matter-of-fact, in which case she sets an example for anyone trying to understand his thinking on such matters now.
The ashram and the refinements of its sanitation system were still to come when Gandhi reached Calcutta in 1901. But the impulse to experience India as the mass of rural Indians did, more or less the way Tolstoy sought to experience the Russia his former serfs inhabited, was now breaking through. Perhaps the spectacle of South Indian Brahmans shielding themselves from pollution behind wicker walls was what triggered it. The boundaries of caste were obviously more firmly drawn in India, even in the precincts of the Indian National Congress, than they had been in South Africa. There, among the indentured at least, intercaste relationships, sometimes sanctified as marriages, were not uncommon, an adaptation to a shortage of females resulting from the decision of colonial officials to import only two women for every three men. A laborer on a particular estate could hardly be sure of finding a mate from his specific subcaste and region there. He might not even care about these categories anymore. In a contemporary send-up of the recruiting agents for the distant plantations who operated in the most depressed parts of India, the promise that caste restrictions could be loosened or abandoned in the new land is part of the pitch of a “sweet-tongued talker.” In this lightly satiric version, the agent promises high wages, light workloads, and no priests “to call on you to conform to the customs of caste traditions.” The laborer will be able to eat, drink, or lie down “with any lass you may love and no one demurs or disputes your rights.”
In fact, an 1885 judicial commission looking into conditions on the sugar plantations in Natal found “high-caste men married to low-caste women, Mahommedans to Hindus, men from Northern India to Tamil women from the South.” Later, when the contracts of indenture ran out, upwardly mobile ex-indentured Indians who’d elected to stay in South Africa and make a life there soon started to reerect the barriers that had been taken down. In 1909, fifteen years after Gandhi had first come forward as a spokesman for the Indians of Natal, twenty-nine Hindus sent a petition to the protector of immigrants, demanding the immediate dismissal of two Pariahs who’d been appointed as constables in their community. “These two Indians are sent out to execute writs,” the petitioners complained, “and at other times to search our houses … What we wish to point out is that if a pariah touches our things or makes an arrest we [are] polluted. They also put on airs.”
Today, five or six generations later, marriages between persons of South and North Indian extraction, not to mention Hindus and Muslims, are still likely to provoke family tensions in South Africa. Marital Web sites tend to be less pointed about caste requirements, however, than they still are in India, but there are sometimes veiled allusions. In marital ads in India today, there are occasional explicit references to Dalits, the preferred name for the former untouchables in recent decades. In South Africa today, such up-front, unashamed allusions to untouchability seem to be beyond the scope of marital ads aimed at the Indian minority. Untouchability is never mentioned. Except for a rare academic study, it may not have been acknowledged in print since a single mention a long lifetime ago in The Star of Johannesburg. The headline on a small article on June 18, 1933, nearly two decades after Gandhi left South Africa, said: UNTOUCHABILITY IN JOHANNESBURG REMOVED. The elders of the Hindu temple in a neighborhood called Melrose, the article said, had decided to admit untouchables to worship there, in response to a fast against the practice that the Mahatma had ended in India three weeks earlier. Without acknowledging it in so many words, the article thus confirmed that there had long been Indians deemed to be untouchable by other Indians in South Africa and that they’d been barred from the temple throughout Gandhi’s time there.
Gandhi must have known this. But since it was not in the open, untouchability never had to be named as a particular target of his reforming zeal, much as he’d come to abhor it. Even if he had the impulse to launch a campaign among South African Indians against it, how could he have done so without reinforcing anti-Indian sentiments among whites or splitting his small community? Calcutta at the end of 1901 was a different story. At the Congress session untouchability was blatantly in the open as an unquestioned social practice. Not only did Gandhi see it with a foreign eye; he reacted.
When the Congress ended, he stayed on in Calcutta for a month, lodging for most of that time with his political guru, Gokhale, and calling on prominent figures, including Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu reformer known to his followers as “the Seraphic Master.” An overnight sensation at the World’s Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in conjunction with the World’s Fair in 1893 when he was just thirty, Vivekananda had been hailed as a prodigy, even prophet, in some religious circles in the West. But when the colonial lawyer came to call, he was on his deathbed at the age of thirty-nine and not receiving visitors. There’s no way of knowing whether Gandhi wanted to talk about religion or India. For both men, these were never unrelated subjects. Vivekananda’s central theme was the liberation of the soul through a hierarchy of yogic disciplines and states of consciousness, starting with some Gandhi would later profess: nonviolence, chastity, and voluntary poverty. He also spoke scathingly about the involuntary poverty to which Indians by the millions were subjected, saying it was futile to preach religion to the Indian masses “without first trying to remove their poverty and their sufferings.” When Gandhi mentioned Vivekananda in speeches later, it was almost always to haul out a favorite quotation about the evil of untouchability. The swami could be down-to-earth as well as mystical. He condemned India’s “morbid no-touchism.” And, in the phrase Gandhi regularly used, he played on the official designation of India’s lowest and poorest as “depressed classes.” What they really should be called, Vivekananda said before Gandhi came on the scene, was “the suppressed classes.” Their suppression depresses all Indians, Gandhi would always add.
On leaving Calcutta at the end of January 1902, Gandhi resolved to travel alone across India by train on a third-class ticket in order to experience firsthand the crowding, squalor, and filth that were the lot of the poorest travelers. With a rhetorical flourish but no direct reference to anything his Master said then or later, Pyarelal wrote that Gandhi wanted to bring himself “into intimate touch with a wide cross-section of the Indian humanity with whom it was his ambition to merge himself.” He bought a blanket, a rough wool coat, a small canvas bag, and a water jug for his expedition.
His resolve to travel third-class from Calcutta may not have become as celebrated as his resistance to being expelled from a first-class compartment on the other side of the Indian Ocean nearly nine years earlier. But it’s not far-fetched to see it as a turning point that’s equally laden with portents. If he hadn’t crossed the social divide in his own mind and heart before, he did so now. It wasn’t a political gesture, something done to attract attention, for no one was paying him any except Gokhale, who, after reacting incredulously to the unheard-of notion of an upper-caste lawyer in third class, finally was touched by Gandhi’s earnestness, so touched he accompanied his protégé to the station, bringing him some food for the journey and saying, “I should not have come if you had gone first-class but now I had to.” That, at least, was the way Gandhi remembered his send-off. Gokhale’s admiration for his would-be apprentice, who was only three years younger, grew into a kind of reverence. “A purer, a nobler, a braver and more exalted spirit,” he would tell a crowd of Punjabis in 1909, while Gandhi was still in South Africa, “has never moved on the earth.”
After that trip across India in early 1902, Gandhi made it a rule—it might even be called a fetish—always to travel third-class in India (even when, as sometimes happened in later years, the railway laid on entire cars and even trains for the exclusive use of his entourage, inspiring the poetSarojini Naidu’s loving jibe: “You will never know how much it costs us to keep that saint, that wonderful old man, in poverty”). On this first outing, he found the noise unbearable, the habits of the passengers disgusting, their language foul. Chewing betel and tobacco, they “converted the whole carriage into a spittoon,” he said. Getting into “intimate touch” with Indian humanity proved to be a nasty experience, but, Pyarelal wrote, “in retrospect, Gandhi even enjoyed it.” Presumably he means that Gandhi got a kick out of the thought that he was doing something completely original for an aspiring Indian politician. In South Africa, he noted, third-class accommodations, used mainly by blacks, were more comfortable with cushioned rather than hard wooden seats and railway officials not as completely indifferent to overcrowding as they were in India. But in South Africa he had mostly traveled first-class until then. Merging with indentured Indians there wasn’t yet part of his program, and they weren’t often on trains; merging with blacks never occurred to him.