A number of changes in Gandhi's personal life soon impacted
his growing celebrity. The first was his achievement of Brahmacharya, or
the voluntary abstention from sexual relations. This was not an uncommon
Hindu practice among men in their forties and fifties, who gradually
cease sexual activity once they have had enough children to satisfy
the demands of custom, family and caste, but Gandhi adopted the
practice between 1901 and 1906, when he was in his thirties. He
seems to have regarded it as part of his quest for selflessness
and restraint in all aspects of life; in his writings, he suggests
that as a young man he succumbed too easily to lust, and recounts how
he failed to be with his father when he died because he was making
love to his wife, a lapse of duty for which he never forgave himself.
Whether or not Gandhi's decision was based on pure principle–amateur
psychologists have speculated exhaustively about alternative motives–suffice
it so say that from 1906 onward, with Kasturbai's consent (she
was physically frail at this point, and may have welcomed his decision)
Gandhi was almost entirely celibate.
At the same time, Gandhi read for the first time John
Ruskin's book Unto This Last, which maintained
that the life of labor–that is, of work done with the hands, rather
than machines–was superior to all other ways of living. Gandhi
was convinced by the argument, and he considered this new idea the
final piece to his personal philosophy. He quickly applied Ruskin's
belief to his personal life, abandoning Western dress and habits,
and moving his family and staff to a farm in the Transvaal that
he called the Phoenix Settlement. There he strove to live the
life that Ruskin's book urged–after some time, he even gave renounced
the use of an oil-powered engine and printed Indian Opinion by
hand-wheel. From that point on, he conceived of his political
work not in terms of a modernization of India,
but as a restoration of the old Indian virtue and civilization that
had been lost to Western materialist and industrialist influences.
He imagined a utopia in which handlooms and spinning wheels would
provide all the power, rendering engines and electricity superfluous;
correspondingly, he and his extended family soon began using these
traditional implements on his own farmstead.
Thus arose an unlikely religio-political celebrity–a crusader against
injustice who renounced both sexual pleasure and the entire modern
world. To this mix of traits was added his philosophy of political
protest, which soon gained a name: Satyagraha.
Taken literally, it meant "truth-force" in Sanskrit, but in practical
terms, it meant a refusal to obey unjust authority. In 1906 it
was put to the test within a few years of being coined, 1906 being
the same year that Gandhi made his final renunciation of sex and
entered fully into Brahmacharya. The Transvaal
government had made plans to register every Indian over the age
of eight, making them an official section of the population. The
Indian community called a mass meeting on September 8 of that year,
and there Gandhi asked the whole community to take a vow of disobedience
to the law. He warned them that it might mean torture and death–but
everyone present took the vow.
The law went into effect in July of 1907, after the Transvaal attained
self- government, and the resolve of the Indian population was quickly
proven. Gandhi was among the first to appear before a magistrate
for his refusal to register, and he was sentenced to two months
in prison. He asked for a heavier sentence– a characteristic act
of Satyagraha–and devoted his time in jail to
reading. After his release, the campaign went on. A compromise
proposed by Jan Smuts, an Afrikaner hero in the Boer War and now
Prime Minister of the Transvaal, fell apart when Smuts broke his
word to Gandhi.
Indians burned their registration cards, crossed the Transvaal-Natal
border without passes, and went to jail in large numbers. In 1908,
Gandhi went to jail again: this time his reading included the writings
of the American Henry David Thoreau, most notably his impassioned
essay "Civil Disobedience," which spoke directly to Gandhi's plight.
He emerged from prison resolved to continue resistance for as
long as necessary.
In the end, the struggle would last until 1913. Gandhi
went to London in 1909, and managed to drum up enough support among the
British to convince Smuts to eliminate the odious registration law.
But the Transvaal's Prime Minister, despite his growing respect for
Gandhi, still wanted to relegate the Indian population to second-class
status. (Possibly he did not personally desire their subjugation;
however, given the views of his supporters, he had no other choice.)
The final struggle was joined in 1913, with the refusal of the
white government in Natal to lift the crippling poll tax, and a Supreme
Court decision in the Cape Colony that made all non-Christian marriages
illegal–which, in effect, made all Indian wives into mistresses
and all their children into bastards. Gandhi now organized satyagraha on
a massive scale: women volunteered to cross the Natal-Transvaal
border illegally; when they were arrested, five thousand Indian
coal miners went on strike. Gandhi took command of this "army"
and led them across the Natalese border, courting arrest.
In the end, their large numbers were their triumph. "You
can't put twenty thousand Indians into jail," Smuts said in 1913,
and negotiated a settlement whereby the legality of Indian marriages was
restored, the poll tax was abolished, and the import of indentured
laborers from India (really more akin to slaves) was to be phased
out by 1920. In July of 1914, Gandhi sailed for Britain: "The
saint has left our shores," wrote Smuts, "I sincerely hope forever";
the statement represented Smuts's deep admiration and regard for
Gandhi (for the rest of his life he kept a pair of sandals given
him by "the saint"), yet also the political distress that the Indian
leader caused him and his administration. And Smuts got his wish:
Gandhi never to set foot in South Africa again. He was forty-five
and a celebrity, known throughout India for the amazing success
of satyagraha, and stepped out into a world about
to change: World War
I was only a month away.
