‘Give Till It Hurts’: Durban's Indians and The First World War

Abstract

In October 1913 approximately 20,000 Indian workers joined Mahatma Gandhi's campaign of resistance against the South African government. This was a spontaneous outburst against terrible working conditions and a realisation that the £3 poll tax on free Indians meant perpetual indenture. The findings of the Solomon Commission of Enquiry resulted in the Indian Relief Act of 1914, which abolished the tax but left the status of Indians essentially unchanged. World War I broke out shortly after Gandhi's departure to India. This paper will examine the reaction of Indians to the war and its impact on them in the context of ongoing racial oppression and exceedingly arduous economic conditions. This is not a stay in the genre that seeks to recover black involvement in South African wars. Rather, the war will form the backdrop for a narrative about the deep divides among Indians, and about social and political mobilisation in the vacuum left by Gandhi. In so doing, this study will question the taken-for-granted classification of Indians as a homogenous racial group. Historically, use of the appellation 'Indians' has inferred that the attribute 'Indianness' united them as a collectivity inopposition to whites and Africans. This study will seek to deconstruct this notion by examining the class, religious, ethnic, language and other cleavages among Durban's Indians in the years immediately following Gandhi's departure from South Africa, differences that surfaced during debates over, and involvement in, the war. This study will also add to our understanding of a period that has been neglected because the historiography of Indian South Africans has tended to focus on specific individuals or particular epochs. In the existing literature, the stay usually stops in 1914 with Gandhi's departure for India, and is taken up in the mid-1930s when a younger generation of lndian leaders came to the fore.