GANDHI AND THE INDIAN INDENTURED SERVANTS IN SOUTH AFRICA
By David W. Bulla, Ph.D.
Associate professor and Dean of Research
College of Communication and Media Sciences
P.O. Box 144534
Zayed University
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
[email protected]
Slavery Past, Present and Future
Wednesday 8 July 2015
Mansfield College, Oxford, England (UK)
1 Abstract
This research paper looks at Mohandas K. Gandhi’s coverage of Indian indentured
servants in South Africa during his 21-year stay in that country. During that time,
Gandhi became a journalist, an underappreciated aspect of his career as a political
activist. His first mention of indentured servants came in his 1896 document titled
“The Grievances of the British Indians in South Africa,” also known as the “Green
Pamphlet.” It was published in India during a visit home and widely distributed in the
subcontinent. Its first edition came to 10,000 copies. Those sold out, and Gandhi
printed several thousand more before he returned to Durban in January 1897—when
he was nearly lynched by a mob of angry Europeans. The pamphlet is an extended
grievance letter that prefigures his South African newspaper, Indian Opinion. The
pamphlet’s main aim was to set down in a systematic fashion an argument against
oppression of the Indian work force in South Africa. The “Green Pamphlet” mentions
indentured servants eighteen times in its text, which runs to 15,000 words. Gandhi
noted that the biggest grievance by indentured Indians was that when their contracts
ran out after five years, they had to return to India—or pay a tax of £3, a sum that
would bankrupt most of these near slaves. Gandhi commented, “How, in a British
Colony, such a measure could even be thought of passes our comprehension. Almost
all the public men in Natal are agreed that the prosperity of the Colony depends upon
the Indian labour.” While Gandhi was taking up the general grievances of Indians
living and working in South Africa at the turn of the century, he would make equality
a key theme in his political activism, first in South Africa and then in India (where
eventually he would advocate better treatment for the untouchables). Seven years
after publication of the pamphlet, Gandhi would start a newspaper in Durban called
Indian Opinion. A major theme would be the living and working conditions of the
Indian indentured servants of South Africa. For example, on 29 October 1903, Gandhi
ran a page-two story (the front page was mostly advertising) titled “Indentured
Labour from India.” In 1902, there had been a large influx of Indian indentured
servants precisely because native African and free Indians expected higher wages. In
other words, the indentured Indians represented cheaper labour. Gandhi called such a
labour system “slavery” in his editorial. He would write nearly 200 articles about
indentured workers in South Africa from 1903 to 1914.
2 When the denizens of the twenty-first century think of Mohandas K. Gandhi,
we usually first associate him with the Indian independence movement—and perhaps
that’s about all we remember about him. That is, the then man, wearing almost
nothing, succeeded in getting Great Britain, the great empire in all her pomp and
glory, to quit India. There is no doubt that he will almost always be remembered for
India’s separation from Great Britain first and foremost, but such a perception does
not do Gandhi justice—and it fails to contextualize his political life. Gandhi was
indeed a political activist, but he was not a one-cause advocate. Rather, over the
course of nearly a half-century of activism, he supported several causes, including
vegetarianism, Hindu-Muslim rapprochement, equality, and even what today would
be termed fundamental human rights.
The topic of this study is the latter, particularly the rights of the indentured
Indian servants he came across during his twenty-one years in South Africa—the two
decades of his political apprenticeship, which largely coincided with his development
as a journalist. These laborers worked in mines and on plantations while earning “a
nominal pittance” for survival.1 In 1896, he mentioned the Indian indentured servants
for the first time in a document known as the “Green Pamphlet,” though its formal
title was “The Grievances of the British Indians in South Africa: An Appeal to the
Indian Public.” This political broadside was published in India during a trip Gandhi
took there in 1896 to try to explain the Indian experience in South Africa and to warn
the writer’s fellow citizens back home about the lack of what today would be called
human rights for the South African Indians. Gandhi was particularly incensed at
recruiting agents in India who “deluded” Indian workers into making the voyage
across the Indian Ocean to their new world.2
3 Gandhi’s pamphlet tried to whip up support for the attempt by the Natal Indian
Congress to counter repressive laws and to argue that Indians, as British subjects,
should have the same rights and privileges as British all over the empire. Very early
in the pamphlet, he lays out the fact that about 60 percent of the Indians living in
Natal near the turn of the century were indentured servants, most of them brought to
South Africa to work on the sugar plantations. In all, Gandhi mentions indentured
servants eighteen times in the “Green Pamphlet.”
Later, in his book Satyagraha in South Africa, the author said the Indian
laborers received room and board, but little beyond that. He wrote in that book:
“Adequate consideration was not given to the question as to how these illiterate
labourers who had gone to a distant land were to seek redress if they had any
grievances. No thought was given to their religious needs or to the preservation of
their morality.”3 Gandhi went on to call the indentured Indians in South Africa
“temporary slaves.” Yet he also said that the “seed of the great Satyagraha
movement” came with the Indians who rode the steamships from Bombay to southern
Africa.4
In the “Green Pamphlet,” Gandhi noted how the indentured servants were vital
to the economy of South Africa, especially that of the Indian businessmen living
there. These thousands of indentured servants bought the goods that the merchants
sold, and the latter were mainly Muslims coming from northwestern India—many of
whom had become wealthy, including the man who brought Gandhi to South Africa
to serve as his legal counsel.
Gandhi described how these Indian workers were treated, including the namecalling they faced in the streets and in the columns of white European newspapers:
“Coolies,” “Samys,” and “semi-barbarous Asiatics,” among other names, rolled off
4 the tongues and pens of white South Africans. Gandhi also noted that a pass law was
enacted to keep the indentured servants from quitting. While Gandhi thought the law
was actually just, he believed its enforcement was unjust. Gandhi quoted the Natal
Advertiser newspaper, which reported abuse of the indentured servants by policemen
for using alleged violations of the pass law to force Indians into jail for a night or two
to clean out the facilities.5
At the same time, Gandhi observed that the authorities would treat nonindentured Indians better than their indentured countrymen if only the police could
tell the difference between the two. The fact that the authorities could not distinguish
between professionals and labourers rankled Gandhi, as did the overwhelming sense
that Indians did not belong in South Africa. He wrote in the “Green Pamphlet”:
“There is no more reason to presume a man to be a thief than to presume an Indian to
be a deserter. Even if an Indian did desert and made preparations to look decent, it
will be difficult for him to remain undetected for a long time. But, then, the Indian in
South Africa is not credited with any feelings. He is a beast, ‘a thing black and lean’,
the ‘Asian dirt to be heartily cursed’”.6 Still, Gandhi, who grew up in a caste system,
stated that professionals—at least—should be above the undignified treatment of the
anti-immigrant laws of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Africa.
Later in the pamphlet, Gandhi wrote that the free Indian was treated just as an
indentured servant was and that the whites wanted the “total extermination” of the
Indians in South Africa—that the leadership of the country was destroying the
aspirations of Indians, including that of the professional and merchant classes.7
A major passage in the “Green Pamphlet” is when Gandhi details the case of
an indentured Indian servant named Balasundaram, who was physically abused by his
master. Balasundaram lost two teeth with a great loss of blood from one beating. His
5 case ended up in front of a magistrate, who was shown the worker’s blood-soaked
turban. The judge ordered Balasundaram to the hospital for treatment. When he was
released, Balasundaram sought out Gandhi, then a practicing attorney in Durban. He
asked Gandhi to get him set free from his indenture contract, but Gandhi thought it
would be easier simply to get him transferred to another master.
However, a legal intermediary called a protector worked to have
Balasundaram returned to his master. Indeed, Balasundaram signed a statement
saying he did not want a new master. Gandhi got word of this and hustled to the
protector’s office. Eventually, Gandhi had the matter returned to the lap of the
magistrate, who sternly told the master to accept the attorney’s request for allowing
the worker to change masters. Balasundaram, then, was turned over to a Methodist
minister. Gandhi concluded his anecdote thusly: “This is only a typical instance
showing how hard it is for the indentured men to get justice.”8
During the Second Boer War (1899-1902), Gandhi raised an ambulance corps
of Indians that included indentured servants. Despite serving the British Empire
during the campaign, these workers received no real reward for their war effort.
Instead, they faced oppression. The Indentured Act Law No. 25 of 1891 made it
illegal for indentured workers to go a mile beyond their employer’s residence without
written permission. Anyone arrested under this law would be sent back to his master
and had his wages deducted to pay the fine.9
In 1901, the government made filing grievances against employers or handlers
very difficult. An indentured laborer would only be allowed to complain if he first
received permission from a magistrate. If one went to get such permission from a
magistrate and was denied, then the worker was written down for being absent
without leave—resulting in a new set of penalties or punishment. Facing such
6 stonewalls when it came to filing a complaint for ill-treatment on the job, Indians
sometimes chose to commit suicide. Indeed, the Indian suicide rate “shocked the
authorities and roused the indignation even of a section of the Europeans,” according
to Gandhi biographer Pyarelal Nayyar.10
In 1903, Gandhi began publishing a weekly newspaper titled Indian Opinion
in Durban. By the autumn of 1903, he began tackling the topic of the indentured
Indian workers in South Africa. In its first eleven years, Indian Opinion would have
196 separate articles with the word “Indentured” in the headline.11 In September
1903, Gandhi described these laborers in this way: “The indentured Indian is
practically helpless. He comes from India in order to avoid starvation.”12 The first full
article devoted to the indentured workers came in October of that year in an article
entitled “Indentured Labour from India,” which appeared on the page two of the
English section of the weekly newspaper (a second part was in Gujarati). The article
details how many Indians had come to South Africa in the previous year (more than
three thousand) and that they were attractive to the European employers because they
were cheaper and more reliable than black African labour.
While the Indian workers were much in demand, Gandhi reminded his readers
that journalists of European descent often expressed popular resentment of the
increasing Indian population of Natal. He went on to point out that more than two
thousand free Indians had stayed in Natal after their indentured stints had ended and
paid the regressive £3 poll tax (which when first proposed in 1894 would have been
£25, but the Indian viceroy reduced it to £3).13 Because these indentured servants—
who signed contracts for five years—were so poorly paid, Gandhi called their status
“a form of slavery.”14 Their deciding to stay on after their indentures ended gave
alarm to the whites, who hoped they would return to India instead of staying in South
7 Africa. To discourage staying, the government required the children of the freed
Indians to also pay a £3 tax. A family of six would be paying £18 tax per year for the
right to remain in South Africa.
However, there was a catch because the Indian Immigration Act required the
government to pay for an Indian child’s journey home after the parents ended their
indenture. Thus, the child had to either stay and pay the £3 tax (which also required
the procurement of a license to remain), sign off as indentured servants themselves, or
return home to India at the expense of the colonial government.15
At the conclusion of the article, Gandhi rails against Natal’s Indian Marriage
Law, which required Indians to register their marriages with the state. Gandhi argued
that marriage was a religious issue for Indians, not a government matter. “With many
sects,” he wrote, “the tie once bound is inviolable, and divorce is not recognized at all.
Registration, to such people, is practically a farce.”16
In 1908, Gandhi would also remarked on the plight of other indentured
workers in South Africa. This time he publicized the ordeal of Chinese indentures. He
said dozens of Chinese workers were flogged every day in the Johannesburg mines.
These floggings had the attorney-journalist describing slave-like conditions there. He
then observed: “Slavery was at first a substitute for cattle, and indentured labour was
a substitute for slavery. Indenture must be prohibited by law and the main duty of
Natal Indians in this matter is to start an agitation on a big scale.”17 Gandhi went on to
praise the Natal Advertiser for calling the indenture scheme an “abominable
system.”18
Toward the end of Gandhi’s stay in South Africa, he took up the indentured
servants’ cause again. In June 1913, the attorney-editor informed his friend Herman
Kallenbach that he planned on “doing something for the indentured man.”19 In his two
8 decades in South Africa, Gandhi had relatively little personal experience with
indentured workers. Most were from the south of India, mainly Tamils (one of the
reasons Gandhi began to study Tamil on board his ship from South Africa to India in
1896 when he was going to publish the “Green Pamphlet” was because he wanted to
be able to communicate with those Indian indentured servants who spoke that south
Indian language); Gandhi was from the small city of Porbandar, Gujarat, and the
Muslim merchants he represented generally from Bombay or Ahmedabad. When he
had led the pro-British ambulance corps during the Boer War, he had worked next to
indentured workers. Still, even if he was not conversant with indentured workers on
an everyday basis, he knew well their plight and knew the £3 tax they had to pay after
their indentures were up proved to be prohibitive, forcing many to sign up for three
more years of near slave status.
Working to repeal that tax, as well as striving to overcome a court ruling that
made it illegal to be members of any religion that recognized polygamy, would
become the last major challenge for Gandhi in South Africa. Indeed, when the
Supreme Court of the Cape Colony declared all Hindu and Muslim marriages null and
void, making all Indian children bastards, the Indians of South Africa felt
embarrassed—and they feared their children would lose their inheritances.20 A key
part of the Indian social system had been made invalid. The political activist used
these two causes to make Satyagraha into a mass movement.21 In October 1913,
Gandhi urged a strike against the £3 tax, and the Indian coalmine workers took it to
heart. The government decided to leave the strikers alone to prevent Gandhi from
filling the jails and gaining the upper hand in public opinion. Eventually, it arrested
Gandhi (his wife Kasturbai was already in jail serving a three-month sentence at hard
9 labor that left her very ill), set him free, and arrested him again. All the government
did to the strikers was send them back to the mines.
However, the Indian workers refused to work, and the strike spread to the
sugar cane fields and even affected the railroads. Approximately 50,000 workers
walked off the job, and the Indian and British press praised their courage. In the end,
Gandhi called off the strike, and, at the urging of the Indian government the South
African government empowered a commission to look into the workers’ grievances.22
The commission decided that the £3 tax should be abolished. It also said Hindus and
Muslims should not be discriminated against because of the marriage practices of
those two religions. By the summer of 1914, Gandhi was off to England and
eventually was on his way to India for the final phase of his political career. He would
never return to South Africa.
After he left South Africa, Gandhi was gratified to see that the British
government would pass the Indian Relief Act, making the indentured servant system
illegal; Natal had already outlawed it in 1911.23 No longer could Indians be contracted
to other nations, including South Africa, to serve as unpaid laborers abroad. In
Satyagraha in South Africa, Gandhi wrote that “the stopping of indentured labour”
was “important” and that his political campaigns in South Africa had had some effect
on the repeal of indentured labor.24
In the end, it may not be entirely clear why a middle-class, professional
Indian—brought up in the world of caste—took up the cause of the rights of
indentured servants. Perhaps his reading in South Africa of the works of literary men
like Leo Tolstoy and John Ruskin, which shaped his thinking about modernity, also
affected his attitude toward those Indians less fortunate than himself, which when he
returned to India would include backing the cause of the untouchables. Perhaps it was
10 because he recognized that all Indians in South Africa were mistreated by the
Europeans who ran the country, and none more so than the indentured workers.
In his first mention of the indentured servants in Indian Opinion, Gandhi noted
that a Natal government official praised Indians for being law-abiding. The editor
countered: “The pity of it is that the law-abiding instinct is very much wasted in a
place like South Africa.”25 Here was sarcastically referring to the lack of respect for a
human being as a human being—as a dignified soul who deserved a universal set of
rights and fair treatment, no matter one’s nationality, religion, race, or caste. For
Gandhi passive resistance, based on a thorough evaluation of a society’s economic
and social systems, was the means for bringing an end to slavery. In his book Hind
Swaraj, a dialogue crafted while he was in South Africa, he wrote: “So long as the
superstition that men should obey unjust laws exists, so long will their slavery
exist.”26
Because Gandhi took up their cause, the indentured Indians came to adore
Gandhi.27 Supporting their cause was shrewd politics. The indentured workers gave
the Satyagraha movement the mass numbers it needed to be a formidable political
force. When Gandhi took the Satyagraha movement home to India, the indentured
cause would shift to that of the untouchables. In the end, just as much as Gandhi
should be remembered for the Quit India campaign, or even his failed attempt to unite
Hindus and Muslims, he should be remembered for his championing the underdogs of
society, in both South Africa and India.
Notes
1
Yesmin Khan, “Gandhi’s World,” in Judith M. Brown and Anthony Parel, The
Cambridge Companion to Gandhi (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2011), 18.
2
Mohandas K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa (Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan
Publishing House, 1928), 20.
11 3
M.K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, 20.
4
M.K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, 20.
5
Mohandas K. Gandhi, “The Grievances of the British Indians in South Africa: An
Appeal to the Indian Public,” 1896, 7.
6
Mohandas K. Gandhi, “The Grievances of the British Indians in South Africa: An
Appeal to the Indian Public,” 1896, 7.
7
Mohandas K. Gandhi, “The Grievances of the British Indians in South Africa: An
Appeal to the Indian Public,” 1896, 9.
8
Mohandas K. Gandhi, “The Grievances of the British Indians in South Africa: An
Appeal to the Indian Public,” 1896, 11.
9
Pyarelal Nayyar, Mahatma Gandhi, Volume II: The Discovery of Satyagraha—On
the Threshold (Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan Publishing House, 1980), 342.
10
Pyarelal Nayyar, Gandhi, Volume II, 351.
11
Indian Opinion: 1903-1914, DVD-R, 3 volumes, National Gandhi Museum, New
Delhi, India.
12
“Compulsory Repatriation,” Indian Opinion, 17 September 1903.
13
Rajmohan Gandhi, Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, His People and an Empire
(Haryana, India: Penguin Books, 2006), 81.
14
“Indentured Labour from India,” Indian Opinion, 29 October 1903, 2.
15
Pyarelal Nayyar, Gandhi, Volume II, 412-413.
16
“Indentured Labour from India,” Indian Opinion, 29 October 1903, 2.
17
Gopalkrishna Gandhi, The Oxford India Gandhi: Essential Writings (New Delhi,
India: Oxford University Press, 2008), 95.
18
“The Natal Indenture System,” Indian Opinion, 3 October 1908, 2.
19
Arthur Herman, Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire
and Forged Our Age (London, UK: Arrow Books, 2008), 190.
20
Nagindas Sanghavi, The Agony of Arrival: Gandhi, the South African Years (New
Delhi, India: Rupa, 2006), 371.
21
Herman, 191.
12 22
Kathryn Tidrick, Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life (London, UK: Verso,
2006), 100.
23
Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India (New
York: Vintage Books, 2011), 129.
24
M.K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, xi.
25
“Indentured Labour from India,” Indian Opinion, 29 October 1903, 2.
26
Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule (Ahmedabad, India:
Navajivan Publishing House, 1938), 70.
27
Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi: The Man, His People and the Empire (London: Haus
Books, 2007), 170.
13