Ghar wapsi: 100 years ago, Gandhi returned from S Africa to turn citizens into heroes

When South Africans meet Indians, they often say with justifiable pride: “You gave us a Gandhi, we returned you a Mahatma.” When Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned to India from South Africa on 9 January 1915, he was no ordinary NRI.

His ‘ghar wapsi’ after a ‘banwas’ of 22 years during which he founded and led the struggle of Indians, the vast majority of whom were poor indentured labourers, against racial discrimination and oppression in South Africa was hailed not just by urban and educated Indians who held receptions for him in Bombay.

Ordinary people, the aam admi and aurat, also knew of his work, as he realised when he visited the Kumbh mela at Hardwar and his ‘darshan’ was sought by the multitudes present there.


Gokhale hailed him as being “without doubt made of the stuff of which heroes and martyrs are made” and noted, “He has in him the marvellous spiritual power to turn ordinary men around him into heroes and martyrs.” How did Mohandas, the nervous lawyer who fainted on his first appearance in court in Bombay after his return from England acquire this marvellous spiritual power?

From 1893, when he first went to South Africa and began to organise Indians, to 1906, when he launched his first passive resistance campaign which he named Satyagraha, Gandhiji first tried all the ‘moderate’ methods, appeals, petitions, memorials, set up the Natal Indian Congress, a paper called the Indian Opinion, and tried his best to publicise the conditions and demands of the Indians in the hope that once the authorities, particularly in London, were apprised of them, they would intervene on behalf of Indians, who were after all British subjects.



By 1906, he was convinced that these ‘moderate’ methods were not working. At a huge public meeting called at the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg, it was resolved that Indians would refuse to obey a new law which required them to carry on their person at all times certificates of registration with their fingerprints.

Civil disobedience or Satyagraha had begun; the movement had moved into its ‘Gandhian phase’. The last date for registration passed, and those who refused to register were ordered to leave the country, and on refusing to do so were sent to jail, which was now named King Edward’s Hotel, thus removing the stigma attached to jail-going.



Gandhiji himself had to serve a prison term involving hard labour and harsh living conditions. The foremost issue now was the poll tax of three pounds imposed on all ex-indentured Indians, a heavy burden for labourers whose monthly wage was 10 shillings, and a judgment of the Supreme Court declaring all marriages not conducted according to Christian rites illegal, thus invalidating all Muslim, Hindu and Parsi marriages. Indentured and ex-indentured labourers joined the struggle, as did women who felt their honour was put at stake by invalidating their marriages.



Satyagraha was launched with Gandhiji’s wife, Kasturba, marching with a group from Phoenix Settlement in Natal and illegally crossing the border to Transvaal, and being arrested. Another march of 11 women from Tolstoy farm crossed the border illegally in the opposite direction and reached Newcastle, a coal-mining town, where they persuaded mineworkers, mostly Tamil, to go on strike.



With Gandhiji at their head, these workers, numbering around 2,000, now marched to Transvaal. They were taken back to the mines and starved, whipped, kicked and beaten with sticks in an unsuccessful attempt to force them down to the coal face.



Gandhiji himself was made to live in a dingy and dark cell, manacled and handcuffed, and made to sweep the compound and dig stones. This brutal repression of unarmed, non-violent satyagrahis aroused the anger and sympathy of the Indian community with workers in mines and plantations going on a lightning strike. At its peak, around 50,000 indentured labourers were on strike, and several thousand ‘free’ Indians in prison.



These included Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Parsis. Finally, negotiations led to a settlement which conceded the substance of the Indian demands and Gandhiji returned to India to apply the method of Satyagraha to the Indian freedom struggle.



As Gandhiji recorded later in his Autobiography: “The fight in South Africa was … fought by illiterate soldiers; it was for the poor, and the poor took their full share in it.” It was this experience of sharing the lives, the joys and suffering of the poor that convinced him that his politics had to be based on their participation, and gave him what Gokhale called the spiritual power to turn these ordinary men and women into heroes and martyrs. From the Indigo tenants of Champaran in 1917 to the peasants of Noakhali in 1946-47, the ‘daridranarayan’ remained his talisman, ‘antodaya’, or the uplift of the last man, his dream, and the ending of untouchability and achievement of communal harmony his cherished goals.



Does the Pravasi Divas, held annually in January to mark Gandhiji’s return home, reflect the spirit of that ghar wapsi? Are even the descendants of indentured labour, from Mauritius, the Caribbean, Fiji and South Africa, Malaysia, as welcome as the wealthy NRIs who promise to invest dollars or euros? Do NRIs today seek inspiration from the most famous NRI of all times, whom General Marshall, US secretary of state, hailed as “the spokesman for the conscience of all mankind”?