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| Answer» <p>The Tolstoy Farm was the second of its kind of experiments established by Gandhi. The first, the Phoenix settlement in Natal, was inspired in 1904 by a single reading of John Ruskin's Unto This Last, a work that extolled the virtues of the simple life of love, labour, and the dignity of human beings. Gandhi was not as personally involved in the daily running of the Phoenix settlement as he was to become in his stay of interrupted duration at the Tolstoy Farm which lasted for about four years. In part this was because the political struggle had shifted to the Transvaal after 1906, and he controlled it from its Johannesburg headquarters.To a large extent Gandhi's more intimate involvement at the Tolstoy Farm coincided with the heightened tempo of the passive resistance campaign, and the development of the Gandhian philosophy of the perfect individual in a perfect new order. This essay will briefly discuss the historical context within which the Tolstoy Farm was founded, and explore the activities at the farm which led Gandhi to call the experiment a "cooperative commonwealth".The satyagraha movement in the Transvaal galvanised around the Asiatic Registration Act of 1907 and the Transvaal Immigration Act of the same year. Both were discriminatory. The first act required all Indian males residing in the Transvaal to register by thumb-prints, and the second restricted the entry of Indians into the province. The campaign was broadened later to include other issues as well, most notably the£3 poll tax required of every member of the indentured family in Natal.It is incredible that Gandhi should have been able to arouse such a large number of people to political activism even to the extent of serving jail sentences. At one stage some 2,500 Indians were in prison at the same time for deliberately violating the offending pieces of legislation. A few of the satyagrahis had known nothing but comfort and security outside the jails. Most had not even seen the inside of a jail before, and they must have found the hard labour sentences and the squalid conditions difficult to bear. Yet there was evidence to suggest that the satyagrahis were infused by a defiant spirit represented in the answer of a hawker who said, "Mr. Gandhi, he know. If he say go to prison, we go."Much of this kind of implicit faith in this principled leader had been inspired by the fact that he had championed the cause of the Indians for over a decade when he could have opted for the less rigorous chores of being simply a lawyer. Gandhi's quiet and resourceful simplicity, his boundless energy, and his incredible staying power further enhanced his leadership. But it was probably the force of his satyagraha philosophy that impelled his followers forward. They may not have fully understood all its revolutionary dimensions, but they realised that it was a new and potent force as just in its implementation as the causes for which it fought. They captured its ethos, and were propelled by it in turn.They understood the clear and simple terms in which Gandhi explained satyagraha. It was based upon truth, aimed against a clearly defined wrong, and not against those who directly or indirectly were responsible for its existence. But those responsible must be persuaded by peaceful means to eliminate the wrong over which satyagraha had been undertaken. A just cause, the satyagraha philosophy insisted, required a weapon untainted by force and falsehood. The removal of the wrong was not an end in itself. Only if these golden rules were observed would it be possible for the satyagrahis to suffer the hardships that would accompany their campaign. They must hold fast even in the face of death.Gandhi's followers learnt further that satyagraha was based upon trust and compromise. When Jan C. Smuts (1870-1950) offered a compromise in 1908, he was ready to accept the Transvaal leader's word. What did it matter, Gandhi reasoned, if the Indians had to register by thumb-prints, something they had previously sworn not to do, if by doing so the law making registration compulsory were itself eliminated. There was a crisis of confidence in the Indian's leadership in this matter, and he nearly paid for it with his life when a disgruntled Pathan, to whom Gandhi's action appeared contradictory, savagely beat him. But the compromise with Smuts became a casualty of misunderstanding, and Gandhi's decision to re-open the campaign restored faith in his leadership. His followers had learned from this that satyagraha implied give and take, of allowing the adversary sufficient leeway to realise his error, but of never forcing upon him unwarranted humiliation. For Gandhi too, it was an object lesson to be less credulous about political promises.During the final phase of the campaign when the Tolstoy Farm was established Gandhi's own growth became noticeable. During his three months of jail in 1909, first at Volksrust and then at Pretoria, he read about thirty books. He made further acquaintance of the works of Leo Tolstoy 1828-1910) and Henry D. Thoreau (1817-1862), among others, and of the Hindu religion. Gandhi had read of Thoreau when he was a student in London, and had summarized the American's essay on Civil Disobedience in an issue of Indian Opinion in 1907. Now in jail, he eagerly explored Thoreau further.</p> | |