A letter to the editor
October 25, 2024
Gandhi’s Collected Works contain 98 volumes, which average 480 pages. He was such a prolific writer that some cover as little as three months of work! But most of his early prose has been lost; all the significant extant writing for the first 27 years of his life fits into the first volume. Personal letters are almost nonexistent, but during those first years in South Africa, there were a handful of letters to the editor published in local papers.
One of these was written on October 25, 1894. Gandhi had recently agreed to stay on in Natal to organize the Indian community. Racism, as it would be for another century, was commonplace in the white-run South African government. One editorial recently published by The Times of Natal so irked Gandhi that he had to respond.
“Rammysammy” was the editorial’s title, and it related to Natal’s attempt to pass legislation denying voting rights to Indians. According to an 1886 book on Anglo-Indian terms, the alliterative Rammysammy was a corrupt form of Ramaswami (“Lord Rama”) used as a generic name for Hindus. As an editorial title, Gandhi charged it it showed “studied contempt towards the poor Indian.”1
One reason Gandhi may have been extra perturbed was the editorial referenced a petiton he had drafted to the British opposing the legislation and “put upon [it] … an interpretation it was never meant to convey.” Seeing his work misinterpreted—in print—to assign malicious motives could be the reason he responded in kind.
His letter went after the editorial’s author individually with many personal statements: “You, … in order to enjoy the fullest pleasures derived from offering an insult… show that you acknowledge them [Indians] to be intelligent people and yet would keep them under [your] foot.” Gandhi assigned the author racism as a motive, seeking to deny the franchise to Natives and Indians simply “because they have dark skin. … So long as the skin is white it would not matter to you whether it conceals … poison or nectar.”
Even his appeal to Christianity as a place for common ground was adversarial. “[T]his [superficiality], I presume, you would call Christianity. You may; [but] it is not Christ’s. … ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’ said the Master. His [so-called] disciples in the Colony would improve upon the saying by inserting ‘white’ after ‘little.’ … Sir, may I [suggest] …. you reread your New Testament?”
It would be another 20 years before he earned the honorific of Mahatma—”great soul.”
When has an insult brought out your negative side?
Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Letter to “The Times of Natal”, October 25, 1894) pp 182-183