| THE TOLSTOY FARM:
GANDHI'S EXPERIMENT IN "COOPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH"
Published in South African Historical Journal,No. 7
Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948) attributes
| THE TOLSTOY FARM:
GANDHI'S EXPERIMENT IN "COOPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH"
Published in South African Historical Journal,No. 7
Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948) attributes the success of the final phase
of the satyagraha campaign in South Africa between 1908 and 1914
to the "spiritual purification and penance" afforded by the Tolstoy Farm.
He devotes a considerable number of pages in Satyagraha in South Africa
to the discussion of the day-to-day activities on the farm as the experiment
appeared important to him, even though it had not enjoyed much "limelight".
I have serious doubts as to whether the struggle could have been prosecuted
for eight years, whether we could have secured larger funds, and whether
the thousands of men who participated in the last phase of the struggle
would have borne their share of it, if there had been no Tolstoy Farm.
Contrary to the suggestion of political training at the Tolstoy Farm,
there is little description of how life at the settlement specifically
and directly helped to mould political defiance in the individual. Gandhi
chose rather to stress the training of self-discipline which in his view
assisted the individual in his spiritual and moral growth. As in his Sabarmati
Ashram (1916-1933), which must have been uppermost in his mind
when he reflected on his South African experiences, so at the Tolstoy
Farm Gandhi considered the individual's struggle with himself closely
related to his quest for political freedom.
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 rul