COLONIAL UNREASON: GANDHI’S REACTION TO THE PLAGUE AND PERSECUTION IN COLONIAL SOUTH AFRICA

Abstract

During his stay in Colonial South Africa over a period of almost twenty-one years, he witnessed a wanton exhibition of colonial unreason by the British. The ‘colonial unreason’ involves the process of legitimization of irrationality in order to achieve control over the colonised subjects. This paper, therefore, deals with Gandhi's reaction to the discriminatory treatment and severe persecution of the British Indians by the colonial dispensation over the outbreak of plague both during and after the second Boer war (from 11 October 1899 to 31 May 1902). Gandhi wrote extensively about the unleashing of discriminatory action against the British Indians in colonial South Africa as the coloniser apprehended or more often accused maliciously the community of having carried the plague virus. Several measures were taken to punish the Indians apart from the prevailing colonial coercion. In the name of precaution or prevention, punishments and unlawful segregation were taken up as the new normal. This was nothing new in the colonial normative. It was rather a rigorous intensification of the already prevailing colonial modes of control. The champions of reason, liberalism and human rights legitimized unreason as an instrument of control or public safety. In the name of prevention, persecution became the norm. This research revisits the plague in South Africa through the writings of Gandhi in order to understand the colonial apathy against the British Indians.