As the world
is celebrating the 150th Birth Anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi from October 2018-2020,
on the International Day of Women, 8th March 2019 my thoughts are
with Kastur Kapadia who was also born on 11th April 1869 in the
western
part of India in Saurashtra. At that time in India, girls were not allowed to attend school, so Kastur who was an in depended teenager never got a chance to go the school, but remained a curious and fast learner all her life. That was the era of child marriages and she became an object of an early marriage at the age of 13 years to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi who was six months younger than her. But the day they got married something changed in the adolescent boy Mohan! Overnight he became a husband!!!
Mohandas had
read somewhere about Monogamy and he decided that his wife should also observe the
strict authority of the husband, that he had become. He told her that she will
have to take his permission before going anywhere. Kastur said, alright I will
tell you where I am going, I will take your permission, but to go to a higher
authority than you, I do not need your permission. Kastur was a spirited girl
and she was going to the temple. Mohandas was silenced and wrote in his
autobiography called ‘My Experiments with Truth’ that from that day my wife
became my ‘Guru’. She was never disrespectful, never discourteous but perhaps
she never ever obeyed his commands. Breaking the law courteously was the lesson
he learnt from her. This was one of the lessons of nonviolence of using the
Truth Force which he used in his subsequent Nonviolent Civil Disobedience
movements in South Africa and India.
When Mohandas
left for London to study law in 1891, the family mortgaged Kastur’s jewelry to
support her husband of 18 years to become a Barrister. The couple already had a
child by then. For three years she
stayed back at her Brother -in -laws home waiting for her husband to return. She
got a chance to live with him when the couple moved to South Africa along with
their two children where Barrister Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had taken on the
mantle of a social organizer and a political activist at the age of 26 years in
Natal in South Africa. Kasturba travelled on the ship for her maiden voyage for
the first time with her husband and two children, who called her Ba ( mother)
in their mother tongue Guajarati , but not before her persistent husband forced
them to wear western clothes and eat with the fork and knife before settling in
Durban.
Kasturba’s
arrival in South Africa was marked by a disturbing event. There was an outbreak
of plague in Bombay because of which the ships Nadir and Courland were placed
in quarantine. There was another reason why they could not disembark as the majority
of "white" residents in Durban wanted the ships to go back to India
with its passengers, fearing a high Indian population which according to them
Barrister Mohandas Gandhi had brought back with him. Furthermore, they accused Gandhi of condemning
Natal whites while in India, and of inducing Indians to come to South Africa
for the purpose of swamping Natal of Indians. When passengers were finally
allowed to disembark, Gandhi was assaulted by a mob, but he refused to press
charges.
Finally, the Gandhi’s’
settled in their new home, Beach Grove Villa. For Kasturba, this was a new
challenge as she was now the only woman of the household, and she felt lonely.
However, she took interest in her husband’s work and she desired to help him as
much as she could and putting up with the idiosyncrasies of her husbands.
Gandhi had
always been a proponent of communal living, influenced by monastic ideals. When
he was travelling by train back to Durban he was given a book by his friend
henry Polak called ‘Unto this Last’ by John Ruskin. Overnight he decided to
leave the comfort of his posh home and shifter to Phoenix settlement to lead
the life of an agrarian community. Leo
Tolstoy was also an inspiration for Gandhi, who drew on his dislike of urban
life. Tolstoy considered agricultural labour to be a worthy exercise. Gandhi
was also inspired by a Trappist community near Pinetown in Natal that he had
visited in 1895. Kasturba quietly modified her life and adjusted to this new
way of life easily. She was very adaptable and in Gandhi’s long absence for the
nonviolent struggle or in the prison in South Africa she took the reigns of the
large community in her able hands. She was witnessing the transformation in her
husband’s life and was determined to lead a similar life supporting him quietly
and efficiently. Meanwhile after the
birth of their fourth son, she became very ill and suffered a grave danger to
her wellbeing.
Kasturba, by 1900, had given birth to four sons, and the childbirths
were difficult, especially the last two. She remained weak for long periods of
time after giving birth. Having witnessed his wife’s agony during childbirth,
Gandhi worried about having sexual relations, fearing Kasturba would become
pregnant again and took a vow of celibacy. Kasturba must have been relieved at
this news!
Meanwhile,
Gandhi 1903 onward, Gandhi got very busy with Sataygraha and imprisoned many
times by General Smut. He was also involved in myriad activities to help
improve the condition of the Indian indentured labor and other Indian diaspora
to live with justice and dignity. On the other hand he was constantly trying to
correspond and let the British Empire know how the racial discrimination had
ruined the lives of his countrymen living in South Africa. He had constantly kept the leaders in India
abreast with the developments.
In 1913, the
Satyagraha campaign was revived, helped by three specific issues. The first
issue came in March 1913, when the Supreme Court issued a judgment, affecting
the legal status of Indian marriages. The ruling virtually nullified
non-Christian marriages. The second issue was the passing the Immigrant
Regulation Act on August 1st 1913. Gandhi opposed this act based on four
grounds. First, people with an indentured background dating after 1895 could
lose the right to settle in South Africa. Second, the Act removed the right of
those Indians born in South Africa to enter the Cape. Third, it did not
recognize Hindu and Muslim marriages, so a wife in India could not join her
legally resident husband in South Africa. Fourth, it required Indians
travelling through the Orange Free State to sign a declaration that they would
not settle in the province. The third issue was the failure of the South
African Parliament to repeal the 3-pound tax on all indentured-expired Indians
over the age of sixteen, after promising it would do so. These three issues
aroused the majority of the Indian population.
Gandhi came to
fully understand the power women could bring to Satyagraha in South Africa. He realized
that women could be leaders in Satyagraha, because it required a stout heart
that came from suffering and faith.
By then,
however, Kasturba had made up her mind to join the movement and she was
prepared to suffer the consequences. She told Gandhi: “What defect is there in
me which disqualifies me for jail? I also wish to take the path to which you
are inviting the others”. With three other women and twelve men, she crossed
the Transvaal border without a permit on 15 September 1913 becoming the first
woman Satyagrahi to lead the nonviolent movement from the front. The women along
with Kasturba went willingly to Maritzburg prison to serve their sentence in
the prison and underwent hard labour.
Kasturba’s
last days in South Africa were spent in celebrations. She stood with her
husband in receptions; they were garlanded with flowers, photographed with
officials and hailed by cheerful crowds. On 18 July 1914, she sailed for England,
before going back to India. Back in India, Kasturba Gandhi became increasingly
involved in India’s political struggle for independence. She assisted her
husband in numerous ways, and also adopted causes of her own, appealing to
Indian women. When Gandhi became involved in his Satyagraha campaign in India
in 1917, over the condition of indigo farmers in Champaran, Bihar, Kasturba
joined him and worked with farmers’ wives and daughters and became involved in
a district-wide sanitation campaign.
Kasturba tried
to reach Indian women with a special message of self-reliance by spinning on
the Charkha (Spinning Wheel). She also joined Gandhi during meetings when she
could, sitting next to him and spinning. This influenced other women in
participating in meetings. In 1991 during the Civil Disobedience movement of a
nation-wide boycott of foreign-made goods by staging public bonfires, Kasturba
insisted on burning her favorite sari.
Gandhi’s campaigning did not go unnoticed by
British officials and he was arrested and tried on 18 March 1922 for six years
of imprisonment after “The Great Trial” which was so called because of the power of Gandhi’s arguments. He was
sentenced to six years in prison. Following the trial, Kasturba made an appeal
in Young India, published on 23 March 1922. She urged Indians to follow
Gandhi’s program to ensure its success despite his imprisonment. She encouraged
people to give up foreign cloth and to persuade others to do so, women to spin
and produce yarn, and merchants to stop trading in foreign goods.
In 1930 , when
Gandhi launched the Salt march and broke
the salt law establishing a government monopoly on the manufacture of salt, as
men were being arrested Kasturba
believed it was up to women to continue the
civil disobedience campaign. She left the running of the ashram to others and
resumed her travels, urging women to take part in a new phase of civil
disobedience: the picketing of government-owned liquor store. She believed that
women were better qualified than men to lead the campaign because policemen
would hesitate to arrest women, and Indian men would be reluctant to cross a
women’s picket line. Her pleas were persuasive and liquor sales fell
tremendously.
With the
suspension of Civil liberties by the British rulers, a high number of Indians
were arrested in January and February 1932.
Kasturba was also arrested at Sabarmati ashram, along with other women.
This was her first incarceration in India, but it would not be the last. Later she took up the Harijan (Untouchable)
cause. On December 1932, she represented her husband at the opening of an
anti-Untouchability Conference in Madras. From there, she went on a tour of the
region to plead for Untouchable rights. However, by the end of the year, she
was sent back to prison in February 1933, presumably for disregarding a
government warning to refrain from civil disobedience. She was now regarded as
much as a threat as Gandhi by British officials because of her ability to
involve women.
In 1939,
Kasturba became involved in a women’s protest against the rule of the Thakore,
the Rajkot local prince and she urged women in Rajkot to join the protest and
stand up for their rights. She was however arrested on 3 February 1939 by the
Thakore officials.
In 1942 with
the outbreak of the Second World War, Gandhi launched a new civil disobedience
campaign called ‘Quit India‘ against Britain’s refusal to allow Indians to
express their opinions on the war. After
Gandhi give a speech in early August he was arrested and immediately Kasturba decided
to do it in his place. She delivered her address in front of an estimated
100,000 persons and was taken to prison soon after. Kasturba was imprisoned in
Aga Khan Palace in Pune with her husband for the last years of her life. Her
health had deteriorated drastically and she died in Aga Khan Palace on
22 February 1944, after suffering from numerous heart attacks. She was 74 years
old.
Sarojini Naidu
described her as “The living symbol of Indian womanhood. Never once did her
feet falter or her heart quail on the steep path of perpetual sacrifice, which
was her portion in the wake of the great man whom she loved and served and
followed with such surpassing courage, faith and devotion. She has passed from
mortality to immortality and taken her rightful place in the valiant assembly
of the beloved heroines of India’s legend, history and song”.
On the
International Women’s Day and the 150th Birth Anniversary of
Kasturba and Mahatma Gandhi, it is indeed a time to remember her sacrifice and
selfless life of serve establishing the highest power of womanhood, the ‘Stree
Shakti’!
8th March 2019
Rome, Italy
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