of the seizure came before the court, things did not go well for the government. Mr. Justice Jorissen was offended that the detectives had not only seized books belonging to Abdulla, but also records belonging to the court. Jorissen accused the state of a failure of good judgment, saying that the arbitration was a serious proceeding that had been unnecessarily and violently interrupted. He opined that rather than causing a raucous and costly interruption of the arbitration, the state could simply have petitioned the court for an order compelling Abdulla to turn the materials over to the state. Jorissen ordered all the materials returned; he charged Baker and Livingstone to keep custody of them.
As for the charges against Baker, the Transvaal High Court, in a unanimous decision, threw them out, citing Baker’s status as an attorney and “a well-known and respectable citizen” and finding the detectives’ “vulgar, cruel and mean” behavior to be without justification.15
None of these collateral events could distract from the attention received by the case that gave rise to them. After approximately three weeks of arbitration hearings, Livingstone announced his decision. He found the purchase price to be £37,000, prompting The Press of Pretoria to proclaim it “one of the most expensive arbitration cases that has been heard in South Africa for some years.”16 This was the amount owed by Mohamed and Company before subtraction of the sum, not made public, that it had already paid Abdulla and Company. On the 20th day of May 1894 the arbitrator’s award was made a rule of the High Court of Justice.
REFLECTIONS
Gandhi was a prolific writer. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi stretches out over one hundred volumes. He wrote numerous sketches of his life, later bound together as a lengthy autobiography, My Experiments with Truth. And yet from what must have been a rich storehouse of memories of his nearly twenty-year career at the bar, Gandhi chooses to relate his experiences in only a small handful of cases. One of those was the Abdulla case.
In reflecting on the case, Gandhi first draws a lesson about the relationship between truth and the practice of law. He claims that while he did earnestly pursue his interest in religion during his year in Pretoria, his primary concern was with the case—and its facts. He eventually came to know the facts, he claims, better than the parties themselves. He recalls the advice later given him by one older head that “facts are three-fourths of the law” and the observation of another “that if we take care of the facts of a case, the law will take care of itself”—propositions with which most practitioners might agree. Gandhi offers his own formulation when he states, “Facts mean truth, and once we adhere to truth, the law comes to our aid naturally.”17
From his study of the Abdulla facts, Gandhi concluded that Abdulla’s was a very strong case and that “the law was bound to be on his side.” But Gandhi saw more than this:
I also saw that the litigation, if it were persisted in, would ruin the plaintiff and the defendant. . . . No one knew how long the case might go on. Should it be allowed to continue to be fought out in court, it might go on indefinitely and to no advantage of either party. Both, therefore, desired an immediate termination of the case, if possible.
I approached Tyeb Sheth and requested and advised him to go to arbitration. I recommended him to see his counsel. I suggested to him that if an arbitrator commanding the confidence of both parties could be appointed, the case would be quickly finished. The lawyers’ fees were so rapidly mounting up that they were enough to devour all the resources of the clients, big merchants as they were. The case occupied so much of their attention that they had no time left for work. In the meantime mutual ill-will was steadily increasing. I became disgusted with the profession. As lawyers the counsel on both sides were bound to rake up points of law in support of their own clients. . . . This was more than I could bear. I felt that it was my duty to befriend both parties and bring them together. I strained every nerve to bring about a compromise. At last Tyeb Sheth agreed. An arbitrator was appointed, the case was argued before him, and Dada Abdulla won.
But that did not satisfy me. If my client were to seek immediate execution on the award, it would be impossible for Tyeb Sheth to meet the whole of the awarded amount, and there was an unwritten law among the Porbandar Memans living in South Africa that death should be preferred to bankruptcy. It was impossible for Tyeb Sheth to pay down the whole sum of about £37,000 and costs.18 He meant to pay not a pie less than the amount, and he did not want to be declared bankrupt. There was only one way. Dada Abdulla should allow him to pay in moderate instalments. He was equal to the occasion, and granted Tyeb Sheth instalments spread over a very long period. . . . [B]oth were happy with the result, and both rose in the public estimation.
Gandhi then expresses his own feelings at this result:
My joy was boundless. I had learnt the true practice of law. I had learnt to find out the better side of human nature and to enter men’s hearts. I realized that the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder. The lesson was so indelibly burnt into me that a large part of my time during the twenty years of my practice as a lawyer was occupied in bringing about private compromises of hundreds of cases. I lost nothing thereby—not even money, certainly not my soul.19
One must entertain a certain amount of skepticism about the accuracy of Gandhi’s recollection of how arbitration came about. On the one hand, it stretches credulity to think that an unlicensed twenty-four-year-old bag carrier for the sophisticated and experienced lawyers in the case could single-handedly convince two major Indian businessmen to go to arbitration. On the other hand, Gandhi might have been able to gain the confidence of the parties because he was their countryman, and an educated one at that. Moreover, it makes sense that if Mohamed compromised on arbitration, Gandhi would be able to make a persuasive case to Abdulla that, with respect to the installments question, it was his turn to compromise.
MORE LESSONS
What did Gandhi draw from the Baker incident? We do not know whether he was physically present during the arrest. Surely he knew of it, however, inasmuch as it was the talk of the town. Baker displayed extraordinary courage in defiance of overreaching power when he resisted the efforts of the officers to seize his files. Baker apparently felt no shame on the occasion of this or any of his other arrests. Gandhi himself would later defy many an authority and freely court arrest. Gandhi learned something other than law from Baker.
What more did Gandhi learn from his involvement in the case of Abdulla v. Mohamed? He had been given a rare view into the privileged life and the benefits it brought. Even from his lower-level perch as a nonpracticing lawyer who served in a capacity more befitting a paralegal than a barrister, Gandhi could see the enormous amounts of money at play in the South African business and legal community. Abdulla’s commercial empire stretched from Bombay to Durban to Pretoria and beyond. Other Indians were profiting from the trade that became available with the growth of the Indian community in South Africa. And if there were wealthy business owners, would prospering lawyers not be far behind? Wouldn’t there be a special place for an Indian lawyer? And couldn’t such a lawyer charge handsomely for his services? There were large amounts of money to be made, far, far more than Gandhi ever made in his failed attempts at establishing a practice in his home country.
It was no wonder, then, that the European bar in Durban eyed this prospective competitor with suspicion.
ONE MONTH MORE
Toward the end of May 1894 Gandhi packed his bags and headed for Durban, whence, it is said, he intended to sail back to India. On his arrival there, he learned that the same Dada Abdulla who had thought of him as a white elephant a year earlier now planned a farewell party for him. If we were to trust Gandhi’s recollection of this event in the autobiography he wrote years later, we would be led to believe that at this occasion Gandhi, while scanning a newspaper, learned for the first time that the right of Indians to
