Transcription
It also means, as if said, morality, loss and conduct. And I want to give an illustration from an Indian epic. There are a couple of you here who are familiar with this from a previous class that you’ve had with me, but I think it will be useful for the rest of you as well. So there’s an Indian epic called the Mahabharat, which again has been mentioned in some of the readings. And there is, you know, I won’t go over the whole history of what this epic is about, but it’s—you’ve—you have the epic is a story, a narrative about a dispute between the Kauravas and the Pandavas. And this epic, which is really monstrous in size—there are five Pandava brothers—and this particular episode takes place in the midst of this war between the two of them. And the—the Pandavas are led by a man called Yudishtir, right? So he’s he’s he’s the—the—the anointed—the person who’s going to be anointed the king, as it were.
Now, in the midst of this battle, the Pandavas, who represent the forces of good, shall we say—I’m simplifying it—the Kauravas represent the forces of evil. It’s much more complex than that, of course, but to get to the gist of the matter, at some point in the battle, the Pandavas are in a state of despair. They’re in a state of despair because there is a Kaurava leader, a man who’s who’s guiding them, his name is Drona. And Drona is a preceptor; he’s the teacher. In fact, he’s the teacher who had taught both the Kauravas and the Pandavas, because it related, right, when they were young. And the Pandavas are now in a state of despair because Drona is this ferocious, disciplined warrior. He’s like a yogi, right? I mean, once he sets himself on a task, he’s extraordinarily disciplined and a ferocious fighter, as I said. And the Pandavas come to the realization that if they’re going to win this war, they have to slay Drona; they have to get rid of him. But there’s a complication. The complication is they’re not able to do that.
So eventually, the Pandavas sit in council, and they’re going to be advised by Krishna, and they’re going to come up with a scheme. And the scheme is that it’s going to be suggested to them that if the Kauravas are told that Drona is dead, right, they’re going to lose heart; they’re going to immediately become despondent, and they’re going to lose heart, and that will turn the tide of war. That will turn the tide of war. So the—but the Pandavas say, “But he’s not dead. How do we tell them that he’s dead?” And so Krishna suggests that what ought to be done is they ought to, in fact, actually slay his son. Okay, his son is Ashwatthama, but Ashwatthama is himself a rather ferocious fighter. So that might be—because in order to actually get Drona despondent, that’s would be the trick—you slay his son. And so then again the question is, “Yeah, but how do we kill his son? His son is really a ferocious fighter.” And then Krishna says, “Look, so Drona’s son’s name is Ashwatthama. He says there is an elephant which also is called Ashwatthama. What we’re going to do is we’re going to kill the elephant Ashwatthama, and then we’re going to have Yudishtir say—because Yudishtir also has a reputation as someone who never lies—so if the Kauravas hear Yudishtir say that Ashwatthama has been killed, they’ve got to believe it, right? And once they—once they believe that Ashwatthama has been killed, Drona is going to become despondent; the tide of war will shift, right?” And so what—what is a stratagem here? The stratagem is you kill an elephant by the name of Ashwatthama, and then you have Yudishtir say—but then you say that Ashwatthama has been killed. But then Yudishtir says in council, “Look, I can’t do that because that’s telling a lie,” right? And Krishna says, “Well, how is it really a lie, because you are killing Ashwatthama?” I saw this is this—this is a debate that’s going to go on that eventually what’s going to happen is that the compromise that’s going to be reached is that Yudishtir is going to shout out loud, “Ashwatthama has been killed,” okay, right? So he says the elephant in a lower register. Now the question is, is he telling a lie or is he telling a falsehood? I mean, truth—is he telling the truth or is it the other way around? I now this is the problem with Dharma. Dharma is slippery. Dharma means right—right conduct, morality, and of course you could say the cosmic scene—is that the Pandavas in fact do have to win because they represent the forces of good, right? But if you were to, of course, look at that—look at this episode in detail, you know, you’re—if you’re a philosopher, you would say, “Well, the intent was to deceive; the intent was to deceive the Kauravas.” But of course it’s a matter of how you do the interpretation of what we call speech acts. When someone says something, why should we assume, for example, that intention is always what really matters? Perhaps what matters are the effects or the consequences. If, for example, you could lie to Hitler and somehow make a difference, would that not be good? Somebody would argue, and we’re not here to resolve this matter; we’re simply—I’m trying to explain to you that Dharma is in fact much more slippery than one thinks.
Because when Gandhi or another person of his ilk, let’s say, speaks about Dharma in the Indian context, said, “One must act according to one’s own Dharma,” right? So what does that mean? Does that—that means in the first instance that you should act according to what you think is right, but of course that’s highly subjective. Highly subjective. So one of the things that Indian tradition teaches us—and we’re going to have to consider in subsequent weeks to what extent Gandhi subscribed to that—is that when one speaks of Dharma, there are many kinds of Dharma. So for example, even a snake has a Dharma, and what is its Dharma? Its Dharma is to hiss. What is the Dharma of a dog? The Dharma of a dog is to bark. So however much you might be annoyed by the barking of your neighbor’s dog, you remember that that’s the dog’s Dharma. An individual has a Dharma, but that Dharma—Dharma of an individual may conflict with the Dharma of the individual as a member of a community, as a caste group, for example, right? So there may be conflicting notions of Dharma at work. And Gandhi is one of—Gandhi’s sort of solutions through this is to say that whatever helps uphold the universe of truth is, in a manner, Dharma. That’s what Gandhi is going to really suggest. But then, of course, this goes back to the whole idea of what we really mean when we speak about truth, and that’s one of the reasons I designed the—how they’ve been reading to you, because one of the things that Mother talks about, I think quite productively, is that we’re going to see that number one, Gandhi moves from truth to truth, by which I mean that his positions evolved, right? They might be—and you know there’s a whole series of pamphlets that came out of Gandhi’s writings. If you read the—even pieces, you—you—you would have noticed that one of the things he argues is that one of the fundamental problems with Gandhi’s scholarship is that everybody relies upon anthologies. There are hundreds of anthologies of Gandhi’s writings. Now, some of these anthologies were put together in his own lifetime. So what would a typical anthology look like? Gandhi on nutrition, Gandhi on hygiene, Gandhi on women’s issues, Gandhi on law, whatever. And what do they do? They arrange all of these writings chronologically. And in one of these series there is a preface, a standard preface, where Gandhi says that I’ve been asked, you know, I said something in 1910, then I said something in 1920 about the same subject, which appears to be completely contradictory. And so there—so the president asks Gandhi, “Well, which—which really represents your view?” And Gandhi’s argument there was very simple: He said, “Whatever I said at the most recent instance really represents my view, because it—because I evolved my positions.” And when I say if—I’ll give you an illustration of that. In his lifetime, Gandhi was an advocate of prohibition, complete prohibition. I mean, he was utterly opposed to the use of alcohol. And one of the reasons he was utterly opposed to the use of alcohol was because he understood—certainly in the Indian context, all right, I’m not gonna make a global argument for the moment, but certainly in the Indian context—he understood that that the consumption of alcohol in most Indian families was highly injurious to Indian families. You know that in India, even today, the day that you get your salary—which in India is either the first of the month or the seventh of the month—those days are dry days in most states in the country, by which I mean that if, for example, you—most people get their salary in, let’s say, a certain state on the first of the month, the first of the month all the liquor shops are closed. They’re closed because what they have found is that when men get their salary on the first of the month, they go to a liquor shop and they squander half of their salary, especially poor people. And then when they go back home in the evening and the wife says, “Well, where’s the salary?” Well, half of it has already been spent on, you know, six bottles of beer. Okay, I’m talking about today, right? And this is an argument that Gandhi was making in the 1920s and 30s, where he was saying that in fact this is highly injurious. However, when I say that Gandhi evolves from one view to another, I would argue that today Gandhi would be more opposed to soda drinks than he would be to alcohol, because the biggest killer in history is sugar, by far, by far. I’m not just speaking about cases of obesity, diabetes today; I’m speaking about the whole complicated history of sugar and its relationship to slavery, for example. And you’ll see the connection with South Africa when we get to that in just a few moments. All right. So Gandhi’s conception of truth is not static. Yet we also have to understand, as a final comment, because so far we’ve really been arguing in a way at a level of a distraction—although I keep on giving you illustrations—but then we’re going to have to see how does he deploy these ideas when he’s waging a war, so to speak, of nonviolent resistance.
The last thing I really want to mention, and this particular connection, is that this should not lead us to the view that Gandhi’s conception of truth is simply relative, right? In other words, said, “Well, you have your truth; I have my truth; she has her truth, and all of these truths are equivalent.” No, right? Because of course one of the things that Gandhi is going to argue is that that when we have a conflict in a particular situation, what we have to attempt to understand is each person’s position, find something that may actually be common to all the positions, and that may take some effort because at the beginning it may seem that there’s absolutely nothing common. It may seem that way, but yes, of course, this is what the dialectic—dialectical method and the Socratic method is—true—is that you keep on questioning until you find some common basis, so to speak, right, on which you can then build up a dialogue. On which you can build up a dialogue. So truth is not relative for Gandhi in that sense, except that it is relative only in that if he had a position in 1910 and then he has got a position in 1925, and he says that my position in 1925 approximates more what I think than the position in 1910, that’s because his thinking has evolved; it has changed; he has moved from one truth to another. All right, so this is the larger sort of scheme of things you need to keep in mind—what I have called some elements of a Gandhian grammar, the terms that you need to be familiar with before we can really begin to assess his politics and the political movement that he led in some detail.
Now I want to move to—and this was of course what I had done in my concluding remarks. I had given you, as you might recall our last Thursday afternoon, I had given you the four major arguments that we can actually think about against violence. So I don’t really want to recapitulate that now. Let me move to the next phase, because the next phase here is, as I said, a consideration eventually of how Gandhi initiated satire in South Africa. But before we can do that, of course, we have to understand why is it that Gandhi went to South Africa, and what is it—what on earth were Indians doing in South Africa to begin with? The context for that is very simply the following: Remember, India is under colonial rule, and India is not the only colony that the British have. The British have colonies that are spread throughout the world. You’ve got India, you’ve got portions of Africa, and of course you have portions of the Caribbean, the British Caribbean. The Caribbean is not exclusively a British terrain; there is a Spanish Caribbean, as we know. As an illustration, we know that the French had had an involvement there—think about Haiti, for example. The British, of course, a major player, and in 1835 there’s going to be a fundamental development which has repercussions for Indians as well, and that is the abolition of slavery in British possessions around the world. So Britain, for whatever reasons—most people argue that it’s a purely humanitarian thing—we—we don’t need to—we don’t have the luxury of being able to consider the whole history of slavery and why is it that it was abolished in 1835, but it was. And when I said was abolished in 1835, it doesn’t mean that it was abolished all over the world. I’m talking about the abolition of slavery in British possessions around the world in 1835.
Now this leads to a complication. The complication is that you have large British-owned plantations in places such as Trinidad, Jamaica—I’m just giving you two simple illustrations. We’re gonna later on—we’re gonna find that there are, for example, British plantations in places such as Malaysia. In Malaysia, the plantations were rubber plantations. However, in most parts of the world where you have plantation labor, you know what the cash crop was—it was sugarcane, right? So these are sugar plantations. Now, if you have abolished slavery, what is a problem for the plantation owner? The fundamental problem for the plantation owner is you need a source of labor. And of course, logically, the first thing you would do is you would go to the—go to the Africans who had been freed from slavery and ask them if they would work. However, what free Africans were doing was they were putting a price on their labor, which plantation owners are unwilling to meet. I mean, you know, it’s—it—for—for the plant—from the perspective of the plantation owner, this is a dramatic shift, because thus far the plantation owner has been able to exploit that labor, not worry about, of course, having to pay the slave—you have to, of course, be responsible for the upkeep of the slave, as was the case, of course, and plantations in—in the America, right, in the South, in the deep South area of cotton plantations—similar story in a way. But now the free laborer is saying that, “Well, I’m setting my price at such-and-such,” and the plantation—are saying—says, “Well, I’m not willing to meet your price. I think the price is too high; it’s going to cut into my profit margin.” So what did these plantation owners do? Many of them, right? And this is where you would have to consider the links between the different British colonies—the fact that the land-owning elites, for example, were very often related to each other, right? So that the plantation—plantation owner who has plantations in Jamaica or Trinidad, for example, right, that Barbados, right, that this same plantation owner might have relatives who are occupying high positions in office in India. And so what they did—to cut a very long story short, because this is not a course, of course, on the history of Indian labor or of the history of Indian—Indian diaspora—is that they were able to—they were able to approach the Government of India and Indians under colonial rule and say, “Would it be possible to get laborers from India?” Okay, and indeed that is what happened. So what you’re going to have happen is the 1830s—in the mid-1830s, in fact, almost immediately after the abolition of slavery—the first Indians are going to begin to go to places such as Mauritius. Okay, Fiji is going to be later. Then you’re gonna get the Caribbean, the British Caribbean—Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados. Okay, you’re gonna get Indians going to Ghana, Suriname, Natal. I’m going to show you some slides. Natal is in what is called South Africa today, right? There was no Union of South Africa at that point in the 1850s, 1860s. Right? Those are the circumstances under which these people are leaving. We’re going to return to this slide later on. Let me just show you what South Africa looked like in 1860. This is not the Union of South Africa; it’s not at this point a union. So here you have the Transvaal, okay, and the Orange Free State. And these two territories, these two large territories, are under the rule of the Boers—B-O-E-R-S. The Boers are Dutch, whereas—then you have Natal here—with a few—Natal here—this is a British possession, okay, and it is to Natal that the Indians are going to first arrive in 1860. This is, by the way, what South Africa looked like after the Union. So the Union of South Africa is created about 1911, 1912—I forget the exact date—and I just want you to take a look at some of the major cities that we’re talking about—Durban here, which is on the coast, okay, and then Johannesburg over here. Now these are the two places where Gandhi is going to be quite active. He’s going to have law offices—he’s a lawyer, remember that he had trained as a lawyer in England—and he’s going to arrive in South Africa in 1893 at the age of 24, all right? And then the—and Pretoria here is—is the capital of South Africa. And then, of course, you’ve got, you know, much further to the west here, you’ve got Cape Town. And so—so this is what South Africa looked like after the Union had—the Union of South Africa takes place while Gandhi is still there. He’s going to leave South Africa on the eve of World War One in 1914, and he’s going to arrive in India in January 1915. Now I just want you to very briefly—again, as I said, this is not a class on the Indian diaspora or the Indian indentured labor—but one thing I want you to bear in mind is the fact that there are all of these transnational links that are going to be an important part of the struggle for the emancipation of Indians, okay? And one of the things that nobody has really—really worked on is what is the relationship of Indians in, let’s say, South Africa to Indians in Mauritius, Fiji, Guyana, Suriname, and so forth, right? The people look at the relationship between Indians in South Africa and India, Indians in Mauritius and India, but they don’t really look at all of these far-flung places, and what were the links between the people over here. And this is a map which, by the way, which shows you global migrations from South Asia, because South Asia—in India—which today includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, a couple of other countries like Nepal, but—but global migrations from South Asia have been a part of world history now for a considerable period of time. These dotted—these dotted lines that you see here—these represent, okay, the migrations of indentured laborers, and I’ll explain to you in a minute what indentured labor is, but this is—this is all 19th-century migrations. This map shows 20th-century migrations as well, but the ones in dotted—lines here—these are 19th-century migrations from India. So you can see to South Africa, to Guyana, Suriname, Jamaica, Trinidad over here, and then you can see to Fiji—from India to Fiji over here in the Pacific. Did somebody have a question? Yes. What’s that? Sorry. Okay. So essentially—essentially the—what we’re speaking about is this: When you have the abolition of slavery in 1835, the Indians who go over—okay, let me explain a few things, and you—I’m gonna show you a few slides which will show you what they—what—what things were like in the 19th century. The Indians who went there—to Fiji, South Africa, wherever—very often had no idea where they were going. The vast majority of them were illiterate; literacy rates would have been less than 1% among the Indians who went. They were predominantly male, and that, by the way, is a story of global migrations—quite often even down to the present day—usually the men migrate first, and then the families might migrate later on, but certainly at this point it’s disproportionately male. Okay, they’re called indentured laborers because you signed a contract. So when you indenture yourself, you essentially sell yourself into slavery. Indentured labor is another word or phrase for slavery. And very often, by the way, the Indians were—right—where do you think they lived? They lived in the places where the slaves had been living. Very often, some of the slaves had moved out; they had become free, but it’s complicated. It’s complicated because, of course, simply by the fact that the British say that, “Hey, slavery is abolished,” well, these people still need to make a living. How are they making a living? But that’s a complicated set of questions that we don’t need to be detained by at the moment, right? What I’m explaining here is the circumstances under which these left. And so what—how did they leave? They were actually very often taken from the interior of the country; they were—they were—they would then go to the port. At the port, they were put on a boat, okay? And as I said, some of them thought they were just going for a month or two to a nearby island, right? Some of them were actually kidnapped. Now we have quite a few records which indicate what were the circumstances under which they left, right? And there are all kinds of complexities, such as how long was the passage. Many of these Indians, by the way, were, for example, vegetarian, okay, and—and really Orthodox vegetarian. And so you’ve got—you’ve got meat being cooked in a pot, and you cannot actually accept food from the same pot if you were a really Orthodox person, even if—even if it was a vegetarian dish. All kinds of complexities here. It’s a five-year contract; they signed a five-year contract. So they get free passage, of course—they’re being taken there—they—they have to work for five years; they get a certain amount of money—usually a very small sum of money—and then, if you read et cetera in South Africa, Gandhi talks about that, you know, there was—there were the question about what happens when the contract is over after five years. Most of them were expected to go back, okay, but there was very often a stipulation that you could stay back and get yourself re-contracted for another five years, and then at the end of that second five-year period you would be a free man or woman with the right to live wherever you have been taken to, whether it was Fiji or Mauritius or whatever the case might be. All right, so this is very simply what we mean when we speak about an indentured laborer. I’m now—one last little image here—again, this is a complex flowchart, which is actually a modern-day, you know, a depiction of a modern-day sort of trends of migration. You can see that India is over here. If you look at the cursor over here, you can see the lines—there are very thick; it shows you the flows from India to other parts of the world—to the former Soviet Union, to North America—you know, fairly broad line over here, right? So India is still a major player and if you’re looking at global migration trends. All right. And now this is something I want you to consider very briefly. This is just a—this is just a contemporary map. All I want you to think about is this: That when Gandhi is going to be in South Africa, as we’re going to see presently, if he is going to eventually become involved in the struggle for the rights of Indians, however, the Indians who were indentured laborers came largely from this area over here. So if you look at the cursor here—over here—the Gangetic Plains—it’s called the Gangetic Plains because you see this is the river Ganges over here. So this is modern-day…
Yupi and Bihar area; this is where they're coming from. And when they go to Mauritius or debtor or wherever, they would usually be taken to the port. The port would be either Kolkata here, or it could be, depending on where they were coming from, it could be Mumbai, Bombay in the 19th century as it was known.
And there were some Indian indentured migrants, laborers who came from South India, from PAML country over here, or they are Telugu speakers from here, most of them who went to Malaysia, which is much later in the 19th century, come from South India. But the ones who went to Mauritius and Trinidad—and if you go to Trinidad by the way, I spent some days there many years ago—in Trinidad and Fiji and Jamaica, they speak a nineteenth-century kind of Hindi which you don't hear in India that often now. Alright, because things get frozen in a certain way, so it's an interesting phenomenon.
But in any case, here is the problem: Gandhi comes from Gujarat. And one problem that you should be thinking about immediately is how is Gandhi communicating with these people, right? And I'm not just speaking about the fact that there are linguistic differences, right? So you've got speakers of South Indian languages, because in certainly in South Africa—once again, Satyagraha in South Africa offers ample testimony to this—if you've if you read it carefully, he talks about the presence of people who spoke South Indian languages such as Tamil and Telugu. Then, of course, you've got the migrants from from Gujarat, okay. And there is a distinction that is made between those coming from what we might call indentured backgrounds and those Indians such as Gandhi. Gandhi is not going as an indentured laborer; he's going as a lawyer. And so very often they make a difference between what are called passenger Indians, those who paid their own passage, those who purchased their own ticket and went, as did Gandhi in 1893. Why does he go in 1893, right? And and and when you see, by the way, let me just mention as a little note before I forget, all of these slides will be made available to you. All right, I'm gonna put I'm gonna post them up in batches, so I'll probably post the first batch of the first three weeks' slides at the end of this week. So when you see SSA, that's Satyagraha in South Africa, right. And Gandhi describes the conditions under which he arrived on page 37 in 1893. So he's a passenger Indian; he's a Gujarati. But then you have these coolies. So the other group of Indians is called the coolies, okay. And that's that's what I mean. If you look at the top entry over here, the Indians, the coolies, was a pejorative word, and the word—and some of you I'm sure are familiar with it—it has also been used to describe Chinese laborers in the United States, the people who were building the railroads, for example, in the late 19th century, right. So these were Chinese coolies, and the word is a pejorative word, and it really means somebody who is a laborer but has racial connotations as well, because the coolies were very often associated with with with black Africans. Okay, maybe that was very often the Association. And then you have these passenger Indians such as Gandhi.
And of course, one of the things that we would also have to consider if we were doing a course on indentured labor is the conditions in India. Because logically, the question you have to ask yourself is why would hundreds of thousands of Indians leave India and become indentured laborers? It's not as though they have been given a first-class ticket to live in luxury, right? Why would they leave India to become essentially slaves in a place that is ten thousand miles away and where they get completely cut off from India? And that's true even down to the present day. It's very different than the Indians in the United States who generally belong to a much more professional elite class, highly educated. The Indians in Fiji—and I was in Fiji about 10, 15 years ago—and when I was going back to the airport, the taxi driver, you know, was an Indian in the Fijian, because 50% of the population of Fiji is Indian, so he asked me, you know, where I was from, and I said I'm from India. Yeah, right. And he said to up Katie buddy Kurt, a young gay, meaning, oh, so you must do you must be a farmer; you must be doing farming, because for him the Indians are still predominately farmers, right? Because that's that's a background from which he came from, and somebody like him, his family's been in Fiji for five generations, completely cut off from India, never went back. All right. So the question now is what is it that impelled these Indians to live, and what impelled the Indians to leave is, of course, the fact that the economic conditions in India were rotten, absolutely rotten. Colonialism had certainly wreaked considerable havoc in India. So you what you have is you have agrarian distress, you have rest in the countryside, you have an economy that cannot sustain this population, and that's the reason why some of these people are leaving. And when I'm talking about Indian indentured migrants leaving, I'm talking about over 2 million Indians who are going to leave India and completely transform, of course, such places as Trinidad and Guyana and Suriname, where eventually they became the majority, as was the case in Fiji and in Mauritius, right. So this is so you've got Indians, and then you've got the passenger Indians who pay their own passage; that included people like Gandhi. But Gandhi is not a not a Muslim; he's a Hindu. They were also Gujarati Muslims, known as Menon scourges smileys, broadly speaking Shias, all right. And these were trading communities; these were trading communities which incidentally also had very close links with the Hindus, right. So even though they were Muslims, they had very close links with the Hindus. And when Gandhi arrives in South Africa, okay, he is among, if I may put it this way, he goes in 1893. When did the first Indians arrive in South Africa? So here, by the way, this is from the Natal Mercury, Thursday, November 22nd, 1860. The is here; this is the first news article about the arrival of the Indians in Natal in 1860, right. So we are talking about a hundred and fifty-five years since the Indians arrived in in Natal, Natal province, which I showed you in this map here. Look at the map here again; this is what we're talking about here; this is the province here. So this is sugar plantations, and that's what the Indians have been brought over for; they are going to work on the sugar plantations. And if you look over here, this is a this is a photograph actually from that time, because of course photography was around; these are the first group of Indians who arrived there, and this is a bunch of them walking to the estates. And they all come from extremely poverty-stricken backgrounds; the vast majority of them would have been lower caste, quite poor. Again, the passenger Indians are going to be different; they're going to come later on. Because one of the reasons why you're going to have passenger Indians coming later on is that remember that some of these Indians after ten years are going to become quote free, right? We're going to see that they're still going to be restraints imposed upon them; they're going to be convicted that that the white elites are going to are going to obviously try to make life difficult for them, right. But fundamentally, think of it this way that you've got some number of free Indians; what do they do? Well, some of them are going to set up a vegetable garden; some of them are going to start trading, right. And eventually, some of them are going to become fairly well-off, a very small number; they're going to become fairly affluent; they're going to open up stores. Now, when you have passenger Indians who've been settled there for twenty, thirty years, it's possible that disputes might arrive might arise among them, litigation over business matters. And when litigation happens, then you know that there's a there's, if I may use a provocation, there's a there's a group of vultures waiting to enter the scene; lawyers, they're called, right. And that is the context in which Gandhi is fundamentally going to arrive in South Africa, right. But before we get to that, just a couple more things here. Look at this image, okay. This is from slightly later, but it is Indians who have arrived in Natal, the indentured coolies; they are all given a number; it's like being a convict; think of it. In fact, your name is wiped out essentially. And one of the interesting things I've seen over the years because I teach a course on the Indian diaspora, which I'll be doing next year, I constantly get emails from Indians living in Fiji or Waiver asking me, you know, how do I find out my ancestors? How do I find out which my first ancestor was who came to Fiji? Where are the records, right? Because if you have an image like this, you've got you've got these numbers, right? These people are numbered consecutively. And incidentally, by the way, this image was published in a book produced by the South African Tourism government government Department of Tourism in 1950, and it says, Meet the Indians of South Africa. All right, I imagine, right? I mean, that's the kind of virulent racism that you are really speaking about here. Here, meet these Indians, you know, this is part of our diversity, right? That's what the South African government is saying when they bring out this book for tourists in 1950. And of course, you know what happened 1950; that's the year after apartheid officially became, right, the policy of South Africa. And I want to make a little note here so that you understand, because I don't want you to come away with the impression that in the 19th century they did not have apartheid; they did not have apartheid in South Africa officially, an official doctrine. Apartheid means racial separation, right? And this became the official doctrine of South Africa in 1949, and you had a four-tiered racial structure. So you had the whites at the top, and then you had the coloreds, right? So these are mixed people, and then you had the Indians, and then, of course, you had the big base at the bottom, which was black South Africans. When Gandhi arrived in South Africa in 1893, that was effectively the racial picture at that point, except that you have to make a distinction between, of course, the Boers and the English. The Boers were, as I said, Dutch speaking, and then you've got the English. And in fact, there's going to be a war between them, and it's eventually at the end of that war and negotiations and all of that which eventually are going to lead to what becomes known as a union of South Africa, right. But this was the this was the racial structure of South Africa, and then it's going to be codified in the 20th century, as I said, in 1949, when South Africa officially becomes an apartheid state. And when officially becomes an apartheid state, it means, among other things, that racist discrimination is explicitly written into the law, okay, explicitly written into the law; it's not something that you try to hide or that you're ashamed of, not certainly there under apartheid. And this is what an identity card looked like, okay. So when they come, they are they're photographed, as you saw in the previous slide over here, and they're given a number, but then, of course, they had an identity card, because one of the things that's going to happen—and this identity card is again going to be a part of apartheid South Africa—when they had the pass laws, that if an African, a black South African, wanted to go from one place to another, he needed a pass, right? He needed a pass. Now, this is this identity, okay, card is essentially again something that an Indian had to carry if you wanted to leave your plantation and you wanted to go to the next-door plantation, for example, right. But of course, one of the reasons why they have these identity cards is that they need a method of surveillance; they need a way to be able to keep control over all of these people, all right.
I think you get a picture now of what we are speaking about. Gandhi arrives here; there are two groups of Indians; there's the there's the passenger Indians who are merchants, lawyers, people who have paid their own passage, and then you have the Indians, and these these coolies are the ones who are working on indentured as indentured laborers on these plantations. Now, Gandhi is invited to South Africa by a man known as Dada Abdullah, okay, who is a trader; he came, by the way, from he came from Porbandar, the same place that Gandhi was born in, right, from from a coastal place in Gujarat, as I've mentioned to you before. In fact, they if you go to Porbandar—and I'll try to show you slides from my recent visit to Porbandar on another occasion—that if you go to poor poor banda, you can still see remnants of the memory of Dada Abdullah there, a considerable number of them in places like Porbandar. So he's a he is involved in some litigation; he needs a lawyer; he puts out the word; Gandhi is available. One of the reasons he's available is that after he had finished his degree in England, he went back to India, and Gandhi tells you himself in his autobiography that that one year he spent in India was not very successful for him, right, that he was kind of floundering; he couldn't really negotiate the system properly, and he felt that he couldn't make much of himself in India. Because think of it this way: the Mahatma is nowhere on the horizon at this point in time; he is still Mohandas, right? There is no inkling there; there is no sign that this man is going to be eventually transformed into somebody called the Mahatma, the great soul. In fact, at this point he is a struggling lawyer in a small little place; frankly, that's what he is, right. So he go he accepts the invitation which he's and he's heard—this is word of mouth—because as I said, the Abdullah comes from the same same place; they're people that they know in common; he gets word of mouth that they need an Indian lawyer; Gandhi agrees to go, right. And he says in his autobiography that he went with the expectation that he would stay for about a year. Well, it turned out that he stayed for over 20 years in South Africa. Yes, he did; he did make a few trips to India in between; he made a few to England in particular, actually; he made a few trips to England in between, but for the most part his life henceforth is going to be associated with South Africa. And that is cetera in South Africa on pages 39 and 40; he tells you the circumstances under which he decided that he would say. He says in his autobiography—this has been contested, by the way, by some people who argue that well, he puts a very different gloss on it—it has been argued that that Gandhi's recollection or what actually happened may not have been entirely correct, but he says there was a farewell party for him, right. So here, let me read a read just the bottom of from page 39, 40 from cetera in South Africa: "1894 was thus already upon us"—remember he came in 1893—"I returned to Durban and prepared to return to India. At the farewell entertainment"—so there's a farewell party for him— "held by Dada Abdullah, someone put a copy of the Natal Mercury"—that's the same newspaper from which you saw that little clipping of the coolies arriving, right—"in my hands. I read it and found that the detailed reports of the Proceedings of the Natal Legislative Assembly contained a few lines under the caption, Indian franchise. The local government was about to introduce a bill to disenfranchise Indians, right, that the Indians would be stripped. The local government was—read of Natal—was about to introduce a bill which would strip Indians of their rights, right. The local government is about to introduce a bill which could only be the beginning of the end of what little rights they were then enjoying." And then he says that he'd that some of the people at the party implored him to stay back because he was a lawyer; he had the legal resources; perhaps he knew how to fight the government. And Gandhi says he decided to stay back, all right. And henceforth begins his South African adventure.
Now, one of the earliest incidents in South Africa that we must take note of, okay, is when he is going to be thrown out of a train. Because remember, I have already dwelled on the fact—and I think that this is now, you know, if you read the text again, but if you keep in mind what's happening in the 19th century, right, and the whole conditions of the abolition of slavery, beginnings of Indian indentured labor, the use of indentured labor on plantations, the horrible working conditions, okay, in the plantation, then you're talking about long working days, and these people are essentially staying exactly and the same premises where the slaves had stayed, basically, bare furnishings, if I may put it this way, you know, a meager diet that you are given very often, right. And again, this is supposed to be a new face; this is the after the abolition of slavery, remember that. And what we're saying, of course, in the 19th century, if you had to broaden out the global context, what we're saying is that the European powers essentially dominate the world; virtually every place is Dommy is under European domination; either it's British or it's French or it's Dutch, Belgian; the Germans are going to enter into the scene later on; there's not much left for them by the time they get active. And then, of course, we've got, of course, Japan later on becoming in the early part of the 20th century displaying its own imperialistic tendencies when it moves into places such as court, such as China, right. Okay, so this is a scenario that we're really talking talking about. What I'm saying, in other words, is that notions of racism were so deeply entrenched that there were very few people who were in fact actually even reflecting, it seems to me, on what it means to be really racist; it was part of the world order at that point in time.
Now, when Gandhi arrives in South Africa and begins to spend time there, he's gonna get a rude shock. One of the reasons he's gonna get a rude shock is because he is, after all, a lawyer; he's a passenger Indian, right? He's relatively well-off, and he expects that there is going to be a different treatment handed out to him as a passenger Indian than the treatment that is handed out, in fact, actually to Indians, right. And in this case, I want to turn to the autobiography. So if you look at again part 2, chapter 8, if you—because you have a slightly different Edition—I'm going to just read out the passage to you. So what is Gandhi going to do? He's gonna take a train ride, and he is going to be leaving from from Durban. I want to show you the map here, okay. And so you'll see exactly the place where he was where he was thrown out of a train. So here is Gandhi; this is where the train originates in Durban; if you look at the cursor over there, he's taking a train to Pietermaritzburg; he has a first-class ticket, a first-class ticket, as was common then and as is common in many parts of the world even today, you know, it's it's like flying, you know, there's a business class and economy class; so there was, of course, a first-class cabin, and then there was third class, and Indians typically rode in the third-class cabin. The train reached Maritzburg, that's Pietermaritzburg, he says, the capital, about 9:00 p.m. A railway servant came and asked if he wanted bedding and all of that, and then a ticket collector comes, okay, and sees a colored man there, a colored man being Gandhi here, and he comes back with a couple of officials; they all kept quiet when another official came to me and said, "Come along; you must go to the van compartment." By the way, the van compartment is where you put, you know, bedding and luggage and all of that. "But I have a first-class ticket," said I. "That doesn't matter," rejoined the other; "I tell you you must go to the van compartment." "I tell you," says Gandhi, "I was permitted to travel in this compartment at Durban, and I insist on going on in it." "No, you won't," said the official; "you must leave this compartment, or else I should have to call a police constable to push you out." "Yes, you may; I refuse to get out voluntarily." The constable came; he took me by the hand and pushed me out; my luggage was also taken out; I refused to go to the other compartment, and the train steamed away. So Gandhi refuses to go to the van compartment, to the third class; he's thrown out; the luggage is thrown out after him; this is the middle of the night, right? And he's standing there on the platform. By the way, if you go to Pietermaritzburg today, there is a plaque there which commemorates the event, and the plaque was was inaugurated by Nelson Mandela, right? Tells you how how things change; sometimes they do, and they don't in many ways.
I'm so the importance of this, of course, most transparently, is the fact that Gandhi: a) came to the awareness that fundamentally speaking there is no difference between the coolie Indian and the passenger Indian; that he might think that he is higher than the other Indians because, after all, he is a lawyer, right, and he is earned, you know, his money, and he is entitled to travel the way that he wants to; but in South Africa it didn't matter whether you were whether you were a lawyer or whether you were one of these indentured laborers working in Natal on a on a plantation; you were an Indian, and if you were an Indian, you were certainly not entitled to travel first-class. b) More broadly speaking, he becomes aware of a phenomenon called racism, right? So this is the awakening, you might put it this way. Now, of course, by the way, we have to constantly question the narrative, you know, this is Gandhi's recall of what happened; he writes about this; there's no reason to to question his recall of it, but, you know, is there an element of drama there? Well, there probably was; there probably was. And one of the interesting things again that you have to consider is that—I mean, I've hinted at this constantly—that when Gandhi is growing up in India as a young boy in his teens, I don't believe that Gandhi would have directly experienced racism in that fashion. And the reason he wouldn't have is because frankly there was very little occasion for an Indian to come into interaction with a white man. In South Africa the situation is very different; it's very different partly because, of course, now Gandhi is a young man, okay; he is a professional; he's interacting with white people; the reason he's interacting with white people, of course, is because he's a lawyer, and the the courts are dominated obviously by the white indecent; there was I'm not even sure that at the time that Gandhi was practicing whether there was any black man in South Africa who was practicing law, and I'd have to really search the history books to see if there was, because Gandhi himself is one of the very first Indian lawyers, right, in South Africa, indeed anywhere outside India. All right. So that's the context that you have to keep in mind. And henceforth he is going to become aware of that, and then we're going to have of racism, and then now, of course, we're going to think of him as somebody who's going to be waging a struggle against something that is called racism, right, the fact that people are distinguished by virtue of the fact that they happen to be either white or black or colored, whatever the the case might be.
Now let me just look at one more thing in his description, because it hurts us to something that is very fundamentally a part of Gandhi's language, and I'll point to that in a moment: "It was winter, and winter in the higher regions of South Africa severely cold; Maritzburg being at high altitude, the cold was extremely bitter; my overcoat was in my luggage, but I did not dare to ask for it lest I should be insulted again; so I sat and shivered; there was no light in the room," etc., etc. And this is what he says: "I began to think of my duty," interesting word, because I want to point to an enormous conundrum here. The conundrum is this that I want you to think about: Gandhi is known fundamentally as a person, okay, other than, of course, his advocacy of nonviolent resistance, and as a person who has inspired the greatest movements in
The 20th century, whether in India or outside India, as in the case of the American civil rights movement. However, once you take that out, he's known as somebody who is the major figure, or one of the major figures, in the 20th century in the anti-colonial struggles—struggles against colonialism, struggles against race. In other words, he is known as a person who advocated for the rights of people. And one of the things that has happened under conditions of modernity is that we all speak in the language of rights. I mean, you look at this campus—very good illustration—you know, when identity politics became important, when people who were Chicanos or Asian-Americans, Korean Americans, Japanese Americans, whatever the case might be, and then, of course, subsequently, you know, that gay and lesbian movements—right—each of these movements speaks about the rights that they have, the rights that they have.
However, what is interesting about Gandhi is that he seldom speaks of rights; he speaks of duties. And by the 20th century, okay, by the 20th century, the language of duty had become archaic—actually almost arcane; nobody really speaks about duties. You know, if you're if you're in the feminist movement, I mean the the feminists in the in the women's movement will tell you, "We don't want to hear about duties; we've been told about that for five hundred years—what our duties are—we want to hear about our rights." And Gandhi is going to argue—as somebody, by the way, and saying to you ironically, somebody who is at the forefront of these movements against racism, colonialism, oppression—he's going to argue that before we in fact stake our rights, let us be certain that we perform our duties.
And I think that's one of the reasons why it has become difficult for some people to embrace Gandhi's ideas, because he's speaking in a language which fundamentally most people who are involved in political movements today are not sympathetic to; they simply think of their rights, okay, and I'm not thinking of duties here in the sense in which John F. Kennedy speaks of, you know, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country"—right? I'm not speaking of it in that sense; not speaking of it in the sense of patriotism necessarily. Saying that Gandhi is saying that that before we become rights-bearing creatures, we are duty-bearing creatures, okay? And then he says, "Why is it that I decided to now intervene? Because duty beckoned. Duty beckoned. Then I have a higher obligation; I have an obligation to my conscience; I have an obligation to the community," right? And let me finish the quotation: "Now I began to think of my duty: Should I fight for my rights or go back to India?" Right? So he's saying there's a dialectical relationship between rights and duties. "Should I fight for my rights or go back to India, where at least he wouldn't have to face these insults," right? "Or should I go to Pretoria without minding the insults and return to India after finishing the case?" He's still thinking, by the way, okay, "Maybe I'll stay back; I'll finish this legal case, now this legal matter, and then I'll head back," right? This is, by the way, a very common story with people who migrate—you or you know, you think you're coming to the country for a few years; I make a living in the US, and then, you know, once I've pocketed enough money, I'll head back. And then, of course, life takes its own course, and this is a story of immigration very often—that people stay on.
"It would be cowardice to run back to India without fulfilling my obligation. The hardship to which I was subjected was superficial, only a symptom of the deep disease of color prejudice. I should try, if possible, to root out the disease, not just address the symptoms and suffer hardships in the process." You see, each line is pregnant with meaning, because but he's also building up an epic, right? I mean, at this point, what's happened? He's been thrown out of the train, and now he's saying, "Let me contend with this deep disease of color prejudice; I'm going to try to root out the disease and suffer hardships." Well, what hardships? We don't know that yet, right? But he's building up an epic—that there's going to be a struggle ahead. "Redress for wrongs I should seek only to the extent that that would be necessary for the removal of the color prejudice," right? So, "I being wronged to the extent that this wrong that has been inflicted on me, I should try to redress this wrong that is corrected, but I shouldn't confuse my own need at this time with the greater problem of color prejudice that exists in the world." He's already differentiating between what is the larger parameters of the struggle and his own little difficulties, okay? So this is how Gandhi is now going to get into the struggle.
Now, very briefly, because we are not here, as I said, to really consider the whole history of what Gandhi is doing in South Africa, very briefly, what are some of the grievances that Indians have? Okay, so you know, at the end of indenture, there were these options, as I've said to you, okay? See, the option is so there—it's a five-year contract, and the option is you return back to India and pay your own passage. Now, how would you do that, by the way? Because a one-way passage from Natal to Kolkata, Calcutta, or Bombay, or wherever you're going to go to India, whichever port, is quite expensive, okay? Most of these indentured laborers would certainly have not had the money. In other words, it's what I call an empty option—that's American commercialism, right? It's like a hundred types of cereals—not really an option; they're all the same; they just give different colors, different shapes, right? We have to think about what is called choice here, right? The politics of choice—it's not really an option, but it's presented as one, because the plantation owners are saying, "You can head back; your five years are over; you've served your term; we'll be giving you a monthly salary—after all, you survived the five years; you know, your candy is not as that bad of a slave; you're free to head back." And remember, by the way, five years is a fairly long period of time; some of these people, as I've said, are people who didn't even know where they were going, and they were certainly not writing letters back to their wives or their children, right? So this is essentially lost contact, and many of them are reluctant to return for that reason. The other option is you get yourself re-indentured; you get yourself indentured; you go through another five-year period of that, and then you become a free man with the option to stay behind. So it's ten years of servitude effectively, right? And so, of course, Gandhi, Gandhi and the other Indians who are now going to become involved—and we have to be quite certain, by the way, that Gandhi is not the only one—there are going to be other Indians—all he's going to eventually establish an organization; it's called the Natal Indian Congress—Natal Indian Congress. Remember, by the way, that there was an organization in India, a nationalist organization; I had mentioned to you the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, right? So Gandhi has in mind a nationalist organization in South Africa, in Natal; he is going to come up with the Natal Indian Congress there. You put together some people; you have a common cause, right? Because how do you make yourself politically effective? Right? That's the question for Gandhi. And recall again, there is a problem, and that problem is that the Indians who are going to be gathered under the umbrella of this organization speak diverse languages, and they have quite diverse histories; they have quite diverse histories, right? Because they come—some of the Indian—in some of the indentured laborers are eventually going to join—initially, as in India—is going to be largely an organization comprised of the Indian elites—elites is a relative term—because their elites relative to the coolies, to the indentured labor; they're certainly not elites to the white elites, okay, right? So this is the context here. Then there is a heavy annual capitation or poll tax, right? We're looking very briefly at what are some of the grievances, some of the some of the hardships that Indians have to think about. So if you go to *Satyagraha in South Africa*, um, he talks about this, okay? So he talks about the imposition of an annual capitation tax—page 25—on the laborers who did not re-indenture themselves at the end of the first five years. So that's option three: You don't re-indenture yourself; you pay a tax of twenty-five pounds. Twenty-five pounds for an Indian indentured laborer was an enormous, enormous sum of money, okay, right? And so, and this tax is being imposed, of course, on the Indians; it's not a poll tax that is paid by every person living in their time; it's not being paid by white people, right? Then he's talking about the disenfranchisement of Indians, right? And this is in *Satyagraha in South Africa* on page 27. In other words, the removal of Indians from any voters' list; most of them, of course, could not be on a voters' list in any case, because in order to vote, you had to meet property qualifications, which was the case, by the way, in the United States as well for a very long period of time, all right, before universal universal franchise became the norm. And in many countries, this was the this was usually what happened—that that universal franchise was achieved after a long struggle. Initially, for example, if you look at the United States in the late 18th century, you're talking about white men who are property owners; they are the ones who have the vote. And gradually, of course, the franchise becomes larger and larger—you know, a larger number of people; you relax a property right; then you allow the vote to black people, women, etc., etc., right? That this is how the franchise really grows, right? But we're saying in the 1890s, early 1900s, now there already are Indians who are traders, lawyers, who are—as I said—we of this disenfranchisement of Indians here is referring to the fact that every Indian would be stripped of the right to vote, however small the number to begin with. And then to give you another illustration, the difficulties that Indian traders had in getting trading licenses. So if you look at page 28, let me just read out a very small passage, right? One of these imposed—page 28—and one of these imposed severe restrictions on Indian trade and the other on Indian immigration in Natal. So these are two bills that have been proposed by the government. "The substance of the first act was that no one could trade—no one—no Indian could trade without a license issued by an official appointed in accordance with its provisions. In practice, any European could get a license, while the Indians had to face no end of difficulty in the matter; he had to engage a lawyer and incur other expenditure," right? If this is, of course, in other ways in which in which the white establishment sought to prevent Indians from entering into trading because it cuts into their trade, into their profit, right? And you could, of course, if you go through the chapters that he has right in *Satyagraha in South Africa*, you will get an enumeration of all of the grievances that were being experienced by the Indians.
Now let me move to the last stage here. So we are not, as I said, systematically going through the history of what Gandhi is doing in South Africa, but before I move to the last stage where I want to discuss and briefly one particular episode—well, we don't really have that much time—let me just very briefly mention this. Okay, number one: There is a substantial, and I would say increasingly vigorous, critique of Gandhi's years in South Africa. What is the basis of that critique, and is it justified? The first basis of that critique is the argument that Gandhi was much more attentive to the rights of people of his class background—the passenger Indians—that he was to the rights of the indentured laborers or the Indians as they were—not okay. That's the first element of that critique. Secondly, that he did not, in fact, actually argue for the emancipation of black people in South Africa, right? There is that that he—yes, he made some attempt to bring together some Indians—even that is being contested now; some people say, as I've already indicated to you, that he was basically concerned largely with the rights of Indians who were of his class background, but but if but another criticism which is allied to that is that he was not at all attentive to the rights of black people in South Africa. And thirdly, the reason he was not attentive to that was that he had his own histories of racism, right? That yes, he might have been discriminated against, as I've indicated to you, and that episode where he is thrown off the train, but that Gandhi himself actually held a relatively poor opinion of the black man in South Africa, all right?
Now, very briefly, I can tell you what my position on this is: I think there's no question that that Gandhi, when he was in South Africa, did not involve black people in the struggle. I think that's unequivocally true, and I think the reasons why he did—and I think we'd have to understand why he didn't do that—because I have suggested to you that the Indian population there was already a very complicated mix; it was a complicated mix because of different varying class backgrounds, linguistic backgrounds, and so forth and so on. And I think that Gandhi was also at this—hi—in particular a pragmatist, a realist who understood the situation on the ground. The situation on the ground was that he had absolutely no expectation that he would be able to wage a struggle where he would bring together all colored people, whoever they might be. And because, of course, one of the things you have to—you have to consider is—yeah—and this is a question that I will pose to some of the critics: Why should we assume that black people would have accepted Gandhi as a spokesperson for their cause? Right? I mean, if you look—if you look at, let's say, the American civil rights movement—you know, even the American civil rights movement is very interesting because because if you look at the black leadership—and I'm speaking not just of Martin Luther King; I'm talking about James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, okay, any number of people—it is very clear that they all understood that this struggle had to be fundamentally waged by black people themselves—that you could have white liberals, and you could take their support, but they will be supporting you from the outside, from the outside, okay? And there are lots of reasons for that—for example, the fact that very often that white educated elites may hijack the movement; they might get the credit—all number of reasons which I can't enter into right now. But I'm suggesting that when we begin to think of what Gandhi is doing in South Africa, we'd have to ask ourselves: Was he thinking about what he could realistically actually accomplish on the ground itself, okay? But I think there's no question that he was a person who in this respect had a fundamental failing, okay? That's the last comment I really want to make, because we do know that in many other spheres of life Gandhi is going to be well ahead of his time, but I think in this respect—and I'm going to continue on this note in my next lecture—in this respect, the fundamental failing was that Gandhi was not able to outgrow the conventional attitudes about black people that were part of the common opinion of that time, okay? So on that note, we're going to end for today, and I'm going to take off from here, and as I said in my next lecture, unquestionably moving to his years in India.