M.K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law. Charles R. DiSalvo

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M.K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law - Charles R. DiSalvo

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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 to his employer.

      At the same time that Abdulla was evaluating Gandhi, Gandhi was evaluating his client. He recognized that Abdulla, while practically illiterate, was blessed with a native intellect, an education provided by the school of experience, and a worldly acumen that permitted him to make a success of his entrepreneurial work. It is not surprising, then, that the first test of Gandhi’s legal mettle was set up by Abdulla.

      Before addressing this incident, we must acknowledge that Gandhi’s biographers have focused, not without justification, on two other incidents that occurred on a journey Gandhi was to take at the end of May 1893 from Durban to Johannesburg, incidents that woke Gandhi to the reality of race prejudice in South Africa. Prior to these better-known events, however, Gandhi experienced the sting of color prejudice at the hands of Natal’s judicial system. It is to that incident we turn first, inasmuch as it was sure to have been a strong influence in shaping Gandhi’s self-image as well as his understanding of the legal system in South Africa.

      TROUBLE IN THE COURTROOM

      On the morning of May 25, 1893, just days after Gandhi’s arrival, Abdulla took his new lawyer to a Durban courtroom, introduced him around, and had him sit with his European lawyer in the “horseshoe,” an area reserved for counsel.1 While Indians were not strangers to Natal’s courts, the European populace did not relish their appearance there. The colonists were annoyed by the need to interpret their language and by the perceived loquaciousness of Indian witnesses. Moreover, many believed that the greater portion of the testimony of Indians consisted of fiction, not fact. Indians, according to the Natal Advertiser, told the “most astounding and preposterous stories.”2 For an Indian to appear not as a witness, but as a barrister, upset every notion the Europeans had of Indians in court. An Indian barrister had never before appeared in a Durban court.

      The intensity with which some Europeans disliked Indians should not be underestimated. Only a few days before Gandhi’s arrival in Durban, the Natal Advertiser had editorialized that “coolie immigration has to be stopped. We want cultivators of our lands. But let us see to it that we only assist men of our own race to take up that calling in this country. We want more immigrants, but we want them white. . . . [D]o not let us become suffocated with the native scum of the streets of Bombay and Madras.”3

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