In November 1904, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi bought a large farm fourteen miles from the port of Durban in South Africa. Prior to this purchase, Gandhi had lived all his life in urban spaces—in small towns like Porbandar and Rajkot, in larger towns like Durban and Johannesburg, in great cities like London and Bombay. His activities thus far had been restricted to mental work; thinking and writing, and speaking on behalf of his clients in court. Now, inspired by a reading of John Ruskin’s book, Unto This Last — which had been gifted to him by his friend, Henry Polak — Gandhi chose to live, at least part of the time, on the land, working with his hands. He also founded a multilingual newspaper named Indian Opinion, articulating the hopes and fears of the Indian diaspora in South Africa.
The property that Gandhi bought was named Phoenix Farm, after a nearby railway station of that name. On the 120th anniversary of Phoenix’s founding, the South African scholar, Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, has published a history of the settlement from its birth to the present. The book begins with a detailed account of Phoenix’s first decade, when Gandhi was still in South Africa. The nine sections that follow present a carefully curated and annotated selection of letters narrating the subsequent history of Phoenix in the century since Gandhi’s departure for India. The book ends with an epilogue on Phoenix in the present.
The early parts of the book pay proper attention to Albert West, an English dissenter, who met Gandhi in a vegetarian restaurant in Johannesburg and played a key role in running Indian Opinion and in making the settlement a real, living community. Of the daily inter-faith prayers introduced by Gandhi in Phoenix, West remarked: “Hindus, Muslims, Parsees, and Christians sang hymns and read the various scriptures in different languages. This, to my mind, was a unique example of a universal church service, where no particular religion was placed in a superior position and where Truth and Love were acknowledged to be the universal attributes of God.”
After Gandhi departed in 1914, West struggled to keep Phoenix afloat. In 1917, Gandhi sent his second son, Manilal, to South Africa to help revive the settlement. Dhupelia-Mesthrie observes that Phoenix provided Manilal “an opportunity… to find a purpose in life in comparison to uncertain prospects in an ashram run by Gandhi in India.” In December 1919, Manilal wrote to his father: “I do not feel comfortable coming to India at this moment… I can work and live here with greater peace of mind. Therefore I would like to stay here and do I[ndian] O[opinion] work as well as study as much as I can. But if you wish for me to come to India I am willing to do so.”
After taking over the farm, Manilal Gandhi helped meet its expenses through the cultivation and sale of sugarcane and mealies. In 1927, Manilal married Sushila Mashruwala, who was from Akola in Maharashtra. It was to be an exemplary partnership, with Sushila playing a vital role in managing and running the farm and the newspaper. As Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie writes, Sushila adroitly balanced “her roles as wife, mother, and press worker.” Dhupelia-Mesthrie is herself the granddaughter of Manilal and Sushila Gandhi; but here, as elsewhere in the book, her interpretations and judgements are the product not of family piety, but of the discernment of the professional historian.
As in Gandhi’s day, during his son’s stewardship too, Indian Opinion juxtaposed reports on South African affairs with news on major developments in India itself. With rising costs and a stagnant subscriber base, maintaining the periodical was always a struggle. In July 1938, Manilal wrote to his friend, Babar Chavda, that he had canvassed two hundred South African Indians to contribute 25 pounds apiece to meet the deficit and keep alive Indian Opinion and Phoenix, which he described as “Gandhiji’s one and only monument in South Africa.” If this help was not forthcoming, he remarked, “then we must understand that there is no need for Indian Opinion and then I will have to close and go back.”
In September 1942, Manilal began planning a special issue on the Quit India movement and the British raj’s suppression of it. He asked Chavda to find him an artist who would do an appropriate cover illustration. He provided this brief: “There should be India’s map in the background and on it should be the picture of Mother India bound by chains… On the right-hand corner there should be a map of Britain from which flames are rising and burying India. On that should be written imperialism. From the sky [the five deceased patriots] [Bal Gangadhar] Tilak, Dadabhai Naoroji, Rabindranath Tagore, Abbas Tyabji and Mahadev Desai should be showering flowers” (on the jailed patriots of the present).
In 1948, the National Party won power in South Africa and aggressively promoted the policy of racial discrimination known as ‘apartheid’. In August 1951, Manilal Gandhi wrote to the prime minister, D.F. Malan, saying that “today every measure of the Government affecting non-Europeans appears as a symbol of its hatred for the non-Europeans.” Manilal told Malan that “the policy of apartheid not only deprives human beings of the right to full economic and political expression,… it also denies them the right to the fullest development of their personality and their spiritual being as children of God.” He asked the prime minister, himself a minister of the Christian Church, to therefore “re-examine the politics of your Government in the light of the teachings of God.” Two years later, Manilal was arrested in the Defiance Campaign, spending more than a month in jail.
Manilal died in 1956. Sushila continued to edit Indian Opinion for another five years, until it finally shut down in August 1961. Her daughter, Ela, and son-in-law, Mewa, stayed with her in Phoenix — in later years, both were to be active in the anti-apartheid struggle and to be continually harassed by the police as a result.
The letters written by Manilal and Sushila have interesting reflections on other major players in Indian affairs in South Africa, such as the veteran liberal politician, V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, and the rising young communist, Dr Yusuf Dadoo. Another important correspondent was the novelist, Alan Paton, who provided critical assistance to Sushila in keeping Phoenix going after the death of his friend, Manilal.
In 1985, the area around Phoenix was hit by a bout of violence, sparked by the death of a black activist at the hands of the police. Residents of the settlement began fleeing in fear. One news report noted that “the windows of the Gandhi home were smashed, and commemorative photographs of his life lay outside, trampled and broken.” What was once a thriving settlement was abandoned, with the land being taken over by squatters.
Sushila Gandhi was broken by the destruction of Phoenix. She died in 1988. Twenty-one years later, her daughter, Ela Gandhi— who had been an MP in South Africa’s first multi-racial Parliament — drove me to the small, three-acre property that was all that remained of the original one hundred acres of Phoenix Farm. It housed a modest but well-kept museum to Gandhi. Though much shrunk in size, it still had the power to move visitors.
Phoenix was the first of five such settlements founded by Gandhi, followed by Tolstoy Farm in inland South Africa, and by the Kochrab, Sabarmati, and Sevagram ashrams in India. It was Phoenix that set the template; as an experiment in inter-faith, inter-racial, inter-caste living, where physical labour was as important and as valued as mental labour. It was also in Phoenix that Gandhi printed and published his first newspaper, Indian Opinion, likewise a forerunner of later journalistic ventures in India. Without Phoenix, there would have been no Gandhi. In her book, Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie brings that settlement and its rich and resonant history back to life.
ramachandraguha@yahoo.in
