An "eventful" history of Hind Swaraj : Gandhi between the Battle of Tsushima and the Union of South Africa

Abstract

On July 1, 1909, Gandhi was on board the liner Kenilworth Castle en route from Cape Town to Southampton. The prosperous Johannesburg lawyer had recently emerged as a noted figure in the politics of the British Empire, through his leadership of the satyagraha of Indian immigrants in the Transvaal. The union of the four self- governing British colonies in South Africa into a single state under white control was now under way and awaited ratification by the Westminster parliament. Gandhi’s aim was to lobby the British authorities for the protection of the interests of the immigrant Indian population within this new order. On the voyage, he spent some time talking to fellow passenger John X. Merriman, the English- born, liberal political leader of the Cape Colony, who gave him a sympathetic hearing. But Merriman was losing his battle with Afrikaner General Louis Botha to become prime minister of the new state (Lewsen 1982: 300 – 301). And Merriman’s Gladstonian worldview was in any case a thing of the past. The white men of South Africa had cut a deal among themselves to create a racially defined nation, and Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government in Westminster, feeling guilty about the suffering of the Afrikaners in the Boer War and for the most part committed to defending the empire, wanted to allow them to implement it.