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Marx, the Mahatma, and Multiracialism: South African Indian Political Resistance, 1939-1955

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Marx, the Mahatma, and Multiracialism: South African Indian Political Resistance, 1939-1955 I . Wesleyan University The Honors College Marx, the Mahatma, and Multiracialism: South African Indian Political Resistance, 1939-1955 by Christopher Sarma Class of 2009 A thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors from the College of Social Studies Middletown, Connecticut April, 2009 i Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... iii Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1: From Imperial Brothers to South Africans: Early South African Indian Identity ........................................................................................................... 14 “A Call for Labor”: The First Indians Come to South Africa ................................ 14 Breaking Cords: Anti-Indian Legislation ............................................................... 15 “The Conquest of Adversary through Suffering”: 1907 Satyagraha Campaign ..... 17 “Feelings of Sympathy”: The 1913 Campaign ....................................................... 22 An Alien Element in the Population: Malan’s Attack on the Indians .................... 26 Chapter 2: A Call to Fight: The Rise of Yusuf Dadoo and the Start of the Second World War ................................................................................................................. 32 “Leading to Bitterness”: The Transvaal Asiatics Act ............................................. 32 “Let God Alone Be Your Guide”: Indian Protests against the Transvaal Land Act ................................................................................................................................ 38 “The Future of Our Civilization”: South Africa’s Decision to join the War .......... 45 Chapter 3: The End of Liberal Dreams and the Rise of the Radicals ................. 54 “Segregation has fallen on evil days”: New Views on Segregation ....................... 54 “Community of Interests”: The Rise of the Moderates .......................................... 58 “A Few Isolated Acquisitions”: The Broome Commission’s Report ..................... 61 “The Inherent Rights of All Civilized Men”: Reactions to the Pegging Act .......... 65 “To Serve the Community”: Reasons for Indian Radicalization ........................... 71 Chapter 4: Engaging the Human Rights Discourse: South African Indian Interpretations of the UN Charter .......................................................................... 77 “The Realization of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms”: The UN Charter ................................................................................................................................ 77 “Hellish and Rejected with Scorn”: The Asiatic Land Tenure and Representation Bill .......................................................................................................................... 82 “The Weapon of Satyagraha”: The 1946 Passive Resistance Campaign ............... 88 “A Million Non-Satyagrahis”: Initial Cross-Racial Alliances ................................ 91 “An Insult to the National Pride and Honour of India:” Preparations for the UN .. 94 ii “A Sacred Cause”?: Satyagraha versus Passive Resistance ................................... 95 Chapter 5: From Victory to Violence: The UN and the Durban Riots ................ 99 “An Issue Affecting all Oppressed Peoples of the World:” Preparing for the UN Conference .............................................................................................................. 99 “Suffering, Frustration and Violation of Human Dignity”: Pandit Challenges Smuts .............................................................................................................................. 101 “Away from the UNO and Towards Isolation”: Problems in Implementation ..... 109 “Apartheid over our Dead Bodies”: The National Party’s Victory ...................... 113 “They Told Us To Kill the Indians”: The 1949 Durban Riots .............................. 116 “Gandhi Re-assessed”: Failures in the Radicals’ Message ................................... 120 Chapter 6: A Return to Older Principles: The 1952 Defiance Campaign ......... 123 “The Tyranny of the Gestapo”: Early Resistance to Apartheid Laws .................. 123 “We Shall March Forward with this Weapon”: The 1952 Defiance Campaign ... 128 “The Road to Freedom is Via the Cross”: Christianity and the Defiance Campaign .............................................................................................................................. 135 “Non-European Unity is a Fantastic Dream”: The Failure of Cross-Racial Alliances .............................................................................................................................. 140 “The Freedom Charter is a Political Bluff”: Toward Ethnic Nationalism ............ 143 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 149 Works Cited ............................................................................................................. 159 iii Acknowledgements Having never done original primary research nor written a paper over fifteen pages in my academic career, I entered this year completely unprepared to write a thesis. Thus, I must begin by thanking the many people whose guidance, aid, and insights over the last nine months have helped me to complete this project. First and foremost, I must express my deepest gratitude to my advisor Professor Richard Elphick. From insisting I research in South Africa over the summer to convincing me to write a final chapter with three weeks to go, he helped me to write the best thesis I possibly could. I will miss his constructive criticism as well as his lectures on the finer points of grammar. In South Africa, I must thank Professor Bill Freund for first suggesting that I investigate the human rights component of the “South African Indian Question” and Professor Goolam Vahed for meeting with me and sharing a draft of his current manuscript. Mr. K. Chetty, Miss Vino Reddy, and Mr. Mwelela Cele all helped me navigate the archives of the Gandhi-Lutuli Documentation Centre and the Killie- Campbell Library. Back at Wesleyan, Professor Stephen Angle kindly met with me on several occasions to discuss the emergence of the human rights discourse in the 1940s. Katie Hanna, Jake Zuehl, and Eric Taffet took time out of their busy schedules to read drafts of this thesis. Eric, along with Jake Abrahamson and Amr Al-Zain, have been incredible housemates whose humor and support helped to make this project possible. Finally, I must thank Benedict Bernstein, Howie Lempel, Mark Sun, Ari Edmundson and the many others with whom I have enjoyed late nights and early mornings in PAC. My conversations with them have helped me become the person I am today. 1 Introduction On 12 March 1993, approximately one year before South Africa’s first nonracial election, Nelson Mandela asked the South African Indian community to support the African National Congress. South African Indians account for only three percent of the country’s population and for the most part reside in the coastal province of Natal and the northeast Transvaal province. Yet as Mandela noted in his speech, the community has long been politically active in South Africa. Mandela claimed that Indians had established “the struggle for democratic changes in this country” and, in consequence, the African political leadership saw the Indians’ support as “very crucial.”1 Though Indians are an important part of South Africa’s complex racial society, South African historical accounts have generally marginalized the Indian story. Compared to Afrikaner, European, and African histories, relatively few works exist on Indians. Even comprehensive scholarly accounts on the country, such as Leonard Thompson’s A History of South Africa and T.R.H. Davenport’s South Africa: A Modern History, spend a few pages on the Indian story. Historians have only extensively examined Mohandas K. Gandhi’s work in South Africa between 1893 and 1914. South African Indian political history in the 1940s is crucial to understanding non-European resistance politics in South Africa, but remains an underdeveloped area of historical research. The decade witnessed Indians re-asserting demands for political and social equality, launching their first nonviolent resistance campaign 1 Nelson Mandela, “Speech to Members of the Indian Community,” in Nelson Mandela: Forging a Democratic, Nonracial South Africa ed. Steve Clark (United States of America, 1993), 224. 2 since 1913, and holding the South African government accountable before the newly- founded United Nations. The Indians’ demonstrations helped internationalize the South African government’s discriminatory practices towards Africans and Indians in a new way and laid the foundations for the better-documented African opposition to the post-1948 apartheid government. For example, Indians political accomplishments inspired the 1952 joint African-Indian Defiance Campaign, the largest nonviolent movement in South Africa’s history. This thesis examines South African Indian political history between 1939 and 1955 and explains how the Indian struggle transformed into an international and human rights issue. Beginning with the South African Indians’ pre-war politics,
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