LITMIR.BIZ

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Gandhi, Gandhi was evaluating his client. He recognized that Abdulla, while practically illiterate, was blessed with a native intellect, an education provided by the school of experience, and a worldly acumen that permitted him to make a success of his entrepreneurial work. It is not surprising, then, that the first test of Gandhi’s legal mettle was set up by Abdulla.

      Before addressing this incident, we must acknowledge that Gandhi’s biographers have focused, not without justification, on two other incidents that occurred on a journey Gandhi was to take at the end of May 1893 from Durban to Johannesburg, incidents that woke Gandhi to the reality of race prejudice in South Africa. Prior to these better-known events, however, Gandhi experienced the sting of color prejudice at the hands of Natal’s judicial system. It is to that incident we turn first, inasmuch as it was sure to have been a strong influence in shaping Gandhi’s self-image as well as his understanding of the legal system in South Africa.

      TROUBLE IN THE COURTROOM

      On the morning of May 25, 1893, just days after Gandhi’s arrival, Abdulla took his new lawyer to a Durban courtroom, introduced him around, and had him sit with his European lawyer in the “horseshoe,” an area reserved for counsel.¹ While Indians were not strangers to Natal’s courts, the European populace did not relish their appearance there. The colonists were annoyed by the need to interpret their language and by the perceived loquaciousness of Indian witnesses. Moreover, many believed that the greater portion of the testimony of Indians consisted of fiction, not fact. Indians, according to the Natal Advertiser, told the “most astounding and preposterous stories.”² For an Indian to appear not as a witness, but as a barrister, upset every notion the Europeans had of Indians in court. An Indian barrister had never before appeared in a Durban court.

      The intensity with which some Europeans disliked Indians should not be underestimated. Only a few days before Gandhi’s arrival in Durban, the Natal Advertiser had editorialized that “coolie immigration has to be stopped. We want cultivators of our lands. But let us see to it that we only assist men of our own race to take up that calling in this country. We want more immigrants, but we want them white. . . . [D]o not let us become suffocated with the native scum of the streets of Bombay and Madras.”³

      When Gandhi entered the courtroom, he did so dressed “a la English,”⁴ but he also wore the turban common among Hindus at the time. After Gandhi had settled himself into the lawyers’ sitting area, largely vacant that morning, he quietly studied the proceedings taking place before him. Before too long, the court’s chief clerk took Gandhi into the interpreter’s room and advised him, on his next visit to the courtroom, not to take a seat in the horseshoe unless he first produced his credentials. Gandhi, thinking that he was safe for the day, returned to his seat. The presiding magistrate, however, began to glare at him, and eventually sent word to Gandhi that he had no business sitting in the lawyers’ section. Gandhi replied that he was an English barrister. The magistrate, however, stated in open court that Gandhi had not formally presented himself to the court, he had not submitted his credentials to act as a lawyer in Natal, and by wearing his “chapeau” in court, he had failed to accord the court the proper respect. The magistrate requested that this interloper both vacate the horseshoe and, if he wished to stay, remove his turban. Gandhi declined the invitation to remove the turban, “apologized if he had done anything wrong,” and left the courtroom. It is unlikely that a visiting European lawyer would have been treated with a similar lack of hospitality. Indeed, the Natal Mercury, in reporting the incident, accused the court of “misdirected zeal.”⁵

      Afraid that the newspaper notices of this incident would harm his reputation, the next day Gandhi wrote a careful letter to the editor of the Natal Advertiser describing his conversation with the clerk and explaining that he was assured by the clerk that he could retain his seat for the day. Gandhi apologized for what was perceived to be his rudeness.

      LESSONS

      After this unceremonious end to his first appearance in court and with court-watching now out of the question, there wasn’t much for Gandhi to do. Abdulla’s brother had done a favor for Lakshmidas, Gandhi’s brother, by putting Gandhi on the firm’s payroll, but there were no legal skills that the novice Gandhi had that the firm’s experienced European lawyers didn’t already possess in abundance. Accordingly, Dada Abdulla looked upon him as a white elephant.⁶ With time on his hands and, after almost ten days in South Africa, with very little to occupy his attention, it was natural enough that the thought of establishing a practice of his own in Durban would enter Gandhi’s mind. The thought must have entered the minds of the European lawyers, too; in fact, it was reported that the prospect of competing with an Indian for the business of the Indian merchant community was of sufficient concern among the established European bar to “cause quite a flutter of excitement among the legal fraternity.”⁷ By this time, however, Abdulla was ready to act. After observing Gandhi for more than a week, he finally consented to allow him to help in the case. The firm’s Johannesburg counsel had sent word to Abdulla that the case was beginning to move and that he needed Abdulla or someone else familiar with the matter to come to the Transvaal to help work on it. Gandhi would be useful in this capacity because both the litigants hailed from Gandhi’s hometown of Porbandar and thus shared Gujarati as their native tongue; Gandhi could serve as an interpreter for the firm’s European lawyers, translating legal concepts with an accuracy of which only someone trained in the law was capable.

      First, however, Gandhi had to acquaint himself with the case. It concerned the sale of the Transvaal branch of Dada Abdulla and Company’s trading business to another Muslim merchant, a relative of Abdulla, Tayob Hajee Khan Muhammad. Muhammad and Company had defaulted on the promissory note it had given Abdulla and Company to support the sale, and Abdulla had sued to recover on the note. The case, according to Gandhi, was thus “mainly about accounts”—a subject that baffled him.⁸ Gandhi did not even know what “P. Note,” the shorthand term for promissory note, meant. Like a good lawyer called to work in another profession’s field, however, Gandhi immersed himself in the study of bookkeeping, mastered it, and announced to Abdulla that he was ready to work. With that, Dada Abdulla dispatched Gandhi by a combination of train and coach to join the firm’s counsel in Pretoria, the capital of the Transvaal.

      Abdulla purchased for Gandhi a first-class train ticket for the Durban-to-Charlestown leg of the trip. Just before the train reached the Pietermaritzburg station, a European passenger brought the presence of a “colored” man in the first-class section to the attention of train officials. When they demanded that Gandhi remove himself to the van compartment, he refused and dared them to call a constable. The officials did call the constable, who promptly pushed Gandhi not only out of his first-class compartment but out of the train altogether—and threw his bags after him. Humiliated, Gandhi spent the night in the piercing cold of the Pietermaritzburg train station. His mind raced through the possibilities. Was South Africa a mistake? Should he give it up and return to India? Should he remain in South Africa, keep his head down, and do his work? Should he stay and fight? After a night of thought, Gandhi, having already survived his embarrassing eviction from the Durban courtroom, resolved to fight.

      In the morning Gandhi wired Abdulla, who arranged for fellow merchants in Pietermaritzburg to tend to Gandhi during the day. That evening Gandhi reboarded the train for Charlestown on which he availed himself of a reserved berth and a bedding ticket.

      After the train reached Charlestown in the morning, Gandhi presented himself at the stage coach station for passage to Johannesburg. The authorities there balked at putting Gandhi in the coach with white passengers. When they seated him outside of the coach box to separate him from the whites, Gandhi, not wanting to lose yet another day, decided to pocket the insult and take his seat alongside the coachman. This arrangement held until the coach reached Pardekoph, when the white man in charge of the coach demanded that “Sami” (a derogatory term for Indians) take a seat on the footboard so that the white man could take Gandhi’s seat and enjoy a smoke. At this Gandhi refused. “It was you who seated me here, though I should have been accommodated inside. I put up with the insult. Now that you want to sit outside and smoke, you would have me sit at your feet. I will not do so, but I am prepared to sit inside.” This was too much for the white man. He punched Gandhi in the head and then seized his arms in an attempt

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