While thinking far ahead of how best to break "our shackles" in British

India, Gandhi led a merchant deputation to address the new British

governor of Transvaal, Lord Selborne. Gandhi appealed to the governor to
allow more Indians to enter Transvaal, explaining that his merchant friends
"have constantly to draw upon India for confidential clerks . . . reliable
men," currently excluded under the harsh Immigration Restriction Act.23
He further requested that local boards or town councils be empowered to
issue new trade licenses to expedite that intolerably slow process. Finally,
he urged repeal of the £3 tax on ex-indentured Indians and all new immigrant
Indians. "What we want is not political power; but we do wish to live
side by side with other British subjects in peace and amity and with dignity
and self-respect. . . which we have learned to cherish as a priceless heritage
of living under the British Crown."24
To the end of 1905 Gandhi remained His Majesty's loyal subject. But
Lord Selborne listened in stony silence to all that Gandhi and his British Indian
Association deputation had to say, promising nothing. Yet 1906 began,
it seemed to Gandhi, with reason to hope for beneficent changes, first,
because the "Indian cause is just," and also because a new Liberal government
was voted into power in Great Britain, bringing "Honest" John Morley
to the helm of London's India Office as its secretary of state. "His sympathies
for the weaker party are well known," Gandhi assured his readers.
"A moderate appeal to him, therefore, . . . cannot fail to obtain a good
hearing."25 Two months later, however, Morley spoke of Bengal's partition
as "a settled fact," leaving Gandhi to conclude that "the people of Bengal
will not get justice." Nor would the Indians of Transvaal without the "requisite
effort."26
What began as "Natal Native trouble" in March of 1906 escalated a
month later into a full-scale "Zulu Revolt." Gandhi responded much the
way he had to the Boer War. "We are in Natal by virtue of British power.
Our very existence depends upon it. It is therefore our duty to render whatever
help we can."27 Gandhi proposed another Indian Ambulance Corps at
a meeting of the Natal Indian Congress in Durban. His proposal was sent
to the colonial secretary and accepted.
In April of 1906, brother Lakshmidas wrote angrily to chastise Gandhi
for having stopped sending his monthly savings to Rajkot and for appearing
no longer to be attached in any respect to his extended family and for
neglecting the traditional duties of a younger Hindu brother. "You are prejudiced
against me," Gandhi replied. "All that I have is being utilized for
public purposes. It is available to relations who devote themselves to public
work. . . . You may repudiate me, but still I will be to you what I have al-
[ 57]
Gandhi's Passion
ways been. ... I have no desire for worldly enjoyments of any type whatever.
I am engaged in my present activities as ... essential to life. If I have
to face death while thus engaged, I shall face it with equanimity. I am now
a stranger to fear."28
Gandhi led his corps of some twenty Indian stretcher-bearers in pledging
"true allegiance to His Majesty King Edward the Seventh, His Heirs
and Successors," promising "faithfully" to "serve in ... the Active Militia
Force of the Colony of Natal."29 He wrote a few weeks later in Gujarati
that "this has produced a very favourable impression on ... prominent
whites," encouraging more Indians to volunteer, adding "It can be looked
upon as a kind of ... picnic. The person joining . . . gets enough exercise
and thus keeps his body in good trim and improves his health. . . . People
love him and praise him."
At this very time, when actively engaged in removing wounded bodies

1
from fields of battle, Gandhi's thoughts turned "furiously in the direction
of self-control. ... It became my conviction that procreation and the consequent
care of children were inconsistent with public service. I had to
break up my household at Johannesburg. ... I took my wife and children
to Phoenix and . . . the idea flashed upon me t h a t . . . I must relinquish the
desire for children and wealth and live the life of ... one retired from
household cares."30 The vow of celibacy which he took now he viewed as
one that "opened" the "door to real freedom.... I vow to flee from the serpent
which I know will bite me."31 He had feared serpents as a child,
hardly surprising in rural India, yet in this context the use of serpent seems
more an echo of Christianity's symbol of temptation. He would attempt a
much deeper analysis near the end of his life, some forty years later, involving
more dangerous experiments with the Brahmacharya celibacy vow.
Now he had no difficulty in abstaining from further physical contact with
Kasturba, noting "where . . . desire is gone, a vow of renunciation is the
natural . . . fruit." Kasturba silently accepted his avowed wish, apparently
relieved at his decision to abstain from sex with her.
Sergeant-Maj or Gandhi worked bravely with his corps for six weeks in
the summer of 1906, but by the end of July each of the Indian stretcherbearers
was presented a silver medal by the Natal Indian Congress when
the corps disbanded. Gandhi advised the Congress to try to organize a permanent
corps, and "in the process white prejudice against Indians might altogether
disappear."32 But instead of disappearing, the prejudice intensified
so the community voted to send a deputation, consisting of Gandhi and
one of its leading merchants, to London to lobby on behalf of South African
Indians. Winston Churchill, colonial under secretary of state at this
time, arrogantly tried to "justify" the "deprivation of the franchise from
British Indians," Gandhi reported, arguing that all "non-European Natives"
were "coloured people," and therefore unsuited to representative or
[58 ]
Satyagraha in South Africa
responsible rule.33 Thus began the bitter feud between Gandhi and Churchill,
which was to intensify over the next four decades, much to the misfortune
of Great Britain as well as India.
The Legislative Council of the Transvaal now introduced an Asiatic
Ordinance Bill that would require registration of all Indians, including
women and children, who would then be fingerprinted and forced always
to carry identification cards. Gandhi's first editorial reaction was to call it
"abominable!" A week later he termed it "criminal."34 All Indians would
be subject to "indignities" at the hands of "arbitrary" officials, who would
be empowered even to banish those whom they disliked.
On September 9, 1906, Gandhi addressed Johannesburg's Hamidiya
Islamic Society, speaking against the ordinance he labeled a "Black Act"
and urging his audience to prepare "cheerfully" to "suffer imprisonment.
There is nothing wrong in that. The distinctive virtue of the British is bravery.
If therefore we also unite and offer resistance with courage and firmness,
I am sure there is nothing that the Government can do."35 Two days
later he organized a mass meeting, at which he proposed that all of them
take a solemn oath against "The Government," which "has taken leave of
all sense of decency." Not to oppose such an evil government would be
"cowardice," Gandhi argued, but everyone must "search his own heart,
and if the inner voice assures him that he has the requisite strength to carry
him through, then only should he pledge himself."36 This was the birth of
Gandhi's revolutionary method of Satyagraha, or "Hold Fast to the
Truth," which would be replicated in India many times, beginning with a
sacred vow, taken only by those who had considered the full implications

2
of their solemn oath. This was his first public reference to his "inner voice,"
the voice he later defined as God that was Truth. If a majority of the Transvaal's
Indian community took the oath, he told them, the ordinance might
not be enacted, but he warned against excessive optimism.
"We might have to go to Gaol, where we might be insulted. We might
have to go hungry. . . . We might be flogged by rude wardens. We might be
fined heavily and our property might be attached. . . . We might be deported.
.. . some of us might fall ill and even die." The risk of death did not
deter him, however, and he argued that "even if every one else flinched
leaving me alone to face the music, I am confident that I would never violate
my pledge. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not saying this out of
vanity."
Was there not just a touch of vanity, however, in that public declamation
that he was ready to die rather than surrender? This was, after all, but
two months since he had risked death daily without flinching in order to
bear wounded soldiers from fields of carnage. Sergeant-Major Gandhi,
who fearlessly led his ambulance corps into the center of battle unarmed,
would hardly tremble were he now faced with prison or flogging in so
[ 59 ]
Gandhi's Passion
righteous a cause. Like the bravest of British officers he admired, he would
do his duty. Bravery, as he told them, was the "distinctive virtue of the British,"
and much of Gandhi's psyche had indeed by now become British to
the core. The rest of him, which remained Hindu and Indian, had also
changed. His April 1906 letter to Lakshmidas made that clear: "I have no
desire for worldly enjoyments of any type. ... If I have to face death ... I
shall face it with equanimity." He had steeled himself, like a true yogi, impervious
to personal family feelings or to any pleasures of the flesh, devoid
of desire, material or sexual, living simply to serve the community, whose
spokesman and foremost advocate he had become, working only for public
purposes. Thus uniting within his battle-hardened body the rock of British
martial courage and the steel of a naked Sadhu's yogic indifference to heat
and cold, beds of nails or burning coals, Gandhi sublimated all his powers
and potent sexual energy, pitting himself against discriminatory anti-Indian
laws enacted by racial bigots. Fearing nothing, loving no one, neither wife,
nor eldest son, nor older brother, he had made himself invulnerable to
physical coercion of any kind and to human temptations that so easily
lured men of weaker resolve from their sacred vows.
Three thousand Indians attended the mass meeting in Johannesburg's
packed Empire Theatre, where Gandhi so forcefully spoke, unanimously
passing resolutions, calling upon the Legislative Council to withdraw its ordinance,
and warning that if so "tyrannical" a law was passed the entire Indian
community would "prefer gaol" to abiding by it. The Council was not
moved to change its ordinance, however. Nor was Victor Alexander Bruce,
the Earl of Elgin, former viceroy of India, now colonial secretary of state,
moved to withhold Great Britain's approval. Indeed, the Transvaal's governor,
William Waldegrave Palmer, the Second Earl of Selborne, conveyed
the news of Lord Elgin's approval to Gandhi's association in mid-
September. That news came as a bombshell on the very eve of Gandhi's
planned departure for England. Many members of the community feared
that if he left them they might "waver" and take out registration certificates
under the Black Act.37 Others insisted, however, that Gandhi must go and
voted to provide him with funds to do so, even as Lord Elgin, through Lord
Selborne, informed Gandhi that no useful purpose would be served by
sending a deputation to him. Gandhi immediately replied that his community
must adhere to its "resolve to resist the Ordinance."38 So on October

3
1, 1906, Gandhi and Haji Ally, president of Johannesburg's Hamidiya
Islamic Society, boarded the Cape Mail and two days later sailed from
Cape Town aboard the S.S. Armadale Castle for London.
To help prepare his community for resistance to the ordinance, when it
came into effect on January 1, 1907, Gandhi wrote from shipboard an article
about the principled courage of Wat Tyler, John Hampden, and John
Bunyan. Tyler had lost his life leading the fourteenth-century Peasants' Re-
[ 60 ]
Satyagraha in South Africa
volt against heavy royal taxation, inspiring many farmers to join him before
his beheading by the lord mayor of London. He also lauded Oliver
Cromwell's cousin, Hampden, who led the opposition to Charles I's extortionist
demands for "ship money" in the Commons. Imprisoned by that
despotic king for nearly a year, Hampden's principled opposition "sowed
. . . [the] seed of the struggle for freedom" leading to the English Civil War,
which brought in Cromwell and real parliamentary power for the people.39
John Bunyan was "a saintly man," whose devout faith made him oppose
the "religious oppression" of the bishops in his time. Locked up in Bedford
Prison for twelve years, he wrote The Pilgrim's Progress, hailed by Gandhi
as "the most beautiful book in the English language." If enough Transvaal
Indians also went to jail, the fruit of their suffering, he assured them, would
be to break their chains, to overcome tyranny and persecution, and one day
allow them to emerge as free as the English.
Gandhi's deputation reached Southampton on October 20, 1906, and
entrained for Waterloo Station, from which they were driven to the Hotel
Cecil. Dadabhai Naoroji and his Parsi colleague in Parliament, Sir Muncherji
Bhownaggri, agreed, together with Sir Henry Cotton and Sir George
Birdwood, to accompany their deputation to Lord Elgin. Haji Ally, who
suffered badly from rheumatism and too many cigars, developed a high
fever as soon as they reached London and was immediately taken to Lady
Margaret Hospital in Bromley, where Gandhi's old friend Dr. Josiah Oldfield
promised to attend to him every day.