Chandigarh: In the early stages of the Indian national movement, much before it had entered its mass agitation phase, or even much before the main political work came to consist of the active mobilization of the people, the main nationalist task was that of politicization of the masses through political propaganda and education, and formation and propagation of nationalist ideology to counter colonial hegemony.
The indigenous Press proved to be the chief instrument for carrying out this task, that is, for arousing, training, mobilizing and consolidating nationalist public opinion. Powerful newspapers emerged during these years under distinguished and fearless journalists. In fact, there hardly existed a major political leader in India who did not possess a newspaper or was not writing for one in some capacity or the other.
Mahatma Gandhi came to be associated with journalism and press-media right from his South Africa days. Given the quantity, and quality, of what Gandhi wrote in several of his journalistic publications in the span of odd 45 years beginning 1903, one might say that there was a fifth calling to Gandhi’s illustrious career—the calling of a journalist and media-person. As a fearless and committed journalist and editor, Gandhi wrote well, and he wrote a great deal.
From 1903 to 1914, and again from 1919 to 1948, he published weekly newspapers in Gujarati, English and other languages. Indian Opinion marked Gandhi's apprenticeship as a journalist and media person. In India he would go on to publishing many other journals, Young India, Navajivan, Harijan and his experience with Indian Opinion would prove crucial, and stand him in good stead.
In 1893, at Gandhi’s initiative, Natal Indian Congress (NIC) was founded in order to safeguard local Indian community’s interests and to acquaint Englishmen in South Africa and England and the people and Government of India with the deteriorating condition of Indians in South Africa.
For some time, NIC had wanted a newspaper of its own to put forward local Indians’ grievances, but early attempts in 1896 proved fruitless. Now, the post-Boer War situation had made the need for a newspaper all the more urgent. Thus, it was under these circumstances that Gandhiji, along with his key political co-workers and associates, decided to launch the weekly newspaper the Indian Opinion.
Thus, Indian Opinion, started by Gandhiji in June 1903 from Durban, though he was based and practising law in Johannesburg at the time, initiated Gandhi’s long, enduring, and fruitful active association with journalism and mass media. Indian Opinion was launched with a view—and in response to the growing demand and need in South Africa—to voice effectively the feelings and sentiments of local Indians against racial intolerance of the apartheidist white regime.
Moreover, Gandhi was fully seized of the necessity, and significance, of a newspaper to carry out a struggle ‘which chiefly relied upon internal strength’. Gandhi had come to realise it fully well that in the absence of a newspaper neither was it possible for Gandhi and his political co-workers to effectively educate the local Indian community and nor could they keep Indians all over the world informed of the course of events in South Africa in any other way.
Therefore, Mohandas K. Gandhi, the 34 year old lawyer based in Johannesburg at the time, with the help of two other key individuals—Madanjit Vyavaharik, an ex-school teacher of Bombay, and now the owner of the International Printing Press, and Mansukhlal Hiralal Nazar, a journalist from Bombay, known to Gandhiji since 1897, and the first editor of Indian Opinion—brought out the first issue of the Indian Opinion on 4 June 1903 (though it was only on 6 June 1903 that it could be released).
Right from its beginning Indian Opinion was published in four languages—English, Hindi, Gujarati, and Tamil. While Nazar and Madanjit saw to the practicalities of producing the newspaper, whereas much of the newspaper was written by Gandhiji himself. Despite Gandhi’s overbearing control, M.H. Nazar played an important role in strategizing the content and policy of the paper.
The combined result was that Indian Opinion, right from its first issuance, came to be well received by both the local Indian and the black population of Natal as it sought to raise some pertinent questions concerning their immediate social, political, and economic plight in apartheidist South Africa. Gandhi wrote both extensively and intensively covering all such issues of socio-political significance as both the Indians and the black people of South Africa found themselves to be faced with on routine bases.
Mohandas K. Gandhi, like on everything else, had a very well-defined, clear cut, to the extent of being straight-jacket, ideas on Journalism. Journalism, or good-Journalism, in the eyes of M.K. Gandhi, was a noble profession. In his opinion, a newspaper had three sharply described objectives to serve in society: The first, according to Gandhiji, is to understand the plight, situation and circumstances, and feelings of the masses, and, then, to give effective expression to them. The second objective of journalism, as per Gandhi, is to arouse among the people certain desirable socio-political sentiments and attitudes through education and awareness.
The third objective is to fearlessly expose the defects and deficiencies of the colonial state and its oppressing and exploiting apparatuses and to make people ready to resist and fight it. To ensure that his newspapers remained true these ‘Gandhian journalistic ethics’, his newspapers never carried any advertisements and depended solely on subscription from readers.
The significance of Indian Opinion lies not in its size, but in its content. Over its entire 58 year existence, the Indian Opinion’s subscribers averaged at about 2000. The highest number in any one year was 3500. This might be explained, at least partly, in terms of the size of the local Indian population in Durban-Natal. Indian Opinion was also not the first Indian newspaper in Natal. A short-lived weekly newspaper Indian World in 1898 had preceded it. And in May 1901 P.S Aiyar, a Tamil journalist, had begun a Tamil-English weekly Colonial Indian News which could survive only up till 1903.
Moreover, Africans in colonial Natal had also been publishing newspapers for some time now. But Indian Opinion proved to be far more significant—socially, historically and politically—than any other local newspaper of the time. The chief contributing factor for which was that it was launched at a time when, just after the South African War, all blacks felt disappointed with the British rule and were deeply concerned about the utter failure of the new order in bringing about improvements in their political, social and economic status.
Gandhi, on the other hand, as he was, was all committed and dedicated to improving the position of black people especially at a time when whites were moving in the exact opposite direction towards forming a Union of South Africa within which blacks had such limited rights.
Indian Opinion began its journalistic life by adopting a very moderate tone and temperate attitude towards state and officialdom. It profusely proclaimed `unfailing faith in British justice', and its commitment to ‘temperate constitutional means and efforts to seek redress for Indians'. It needs to be remembered that it was the period when Gandhiji firmly believed that the British empire was essentially and inherently good, and based on the value of justice, fairness, racial equality, and freedom. And that whatever, and wherever, deficiencies were there, they were aberrations introduced by the colonial administration, for instance, apartheidist South Africa.
Gandhi, at that juncture, had full faith in Queen Victoria’s promise of 1858, after the ‘Great Revolt of 1857’, of equality of all British subjects irrespective of ‘race or creed’. So, he was sure that the justice which was denied to local Indian community and to the blacks of South Africa could be achieved if it was sought through constitutional means. And unapologetically, at the time, combined with this, there were pragmatic reasons enough to be this cautious, too. For, in those days, if any newspaper had, advertently or otherwise, offended the apartheidist Natal government with an insalubrious article ill-suited to colonial taste, it would be left with no other choice but to shut down. Thus, for the time being at least, Gandhi and his political co-workers were extremely careful not to offend white officialdom but, rather on the contrary, to secure their support to improve the position of local Indians. And hence Gandhi’s stress on representations, and petitions to press for redress of the difficulties faced by Indians in South Africa. The primary concern, however, was the protection of Indians against injustice.
The true historical significance of Indian Opinion lies in the fact that its pages provide a valuable historical record of the disabilities that Indians suffered under apartheidist colonial rule in South Africa. It also provides an invaluable record of the social, economic, and political life of the Indian community. It started publishing news and views concerning South African Indians including reports on discriminatory law cases, letters to editors of local press correcting adverse reports about Indians, important happenings in India, and contributions on social, moral and intellectual subjects.
It represented an alternate voice to that of newspapers such as the Natal Mercury which were often hostile to Indian interests. But things were to change soon. As in the course of his political evolution, Gandhi would move quickly from political petitioning to active resistance, his newspaper, Indian Opinion, also underwent a formidable morphism.
One significant moment in the paper's history came in 1904 when Gandhi relocated it to his newly settled commune—the Phoenix Settlement—Gandhi’s first ‘Ashram’—a little distance away from Durban. Under the influence of Leo Tolstoy and John Ruskin’s ideas, Gandhi, developing distaste for city life, had chose to live a simple, austere, and community life informed by manual labour. At Phoenix Settlement the press workers began to be governed by a new work ethic—the Gandhian ethics—in working jointly to produce Indian Opinion. Thus, from this time onwards, the history of Indian Opinion becomes intertwined with Phoenix, Gandhi's first communal settlement. At Phoenix the rhythm of life came to be dictated by the production of the paper.
Gandhi used Indian Opinion for propagating the writings and ideas of Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, John Ruskin and other great thinkers who had influenced his own evolution and the struggle that he was carrying on for the basic rights of the Indian community in South Africa. Indian Opinion played a particularly significant role in the early years of the twentieth century by fostering the idea of one united Indian community and a national identity. `We are not, and ought not to be, Tamils or Calcutta men, Mohammedans or Hindus, Brahmins or Banyas, but simply and solely British Indians', Indian Opinion would exhort its readers. The columns of Indian Opinion were full of cases dealing with the many and varied disabilities suffered by Indians in South Africa and against which Gandhiji was continuously fighting. In every issue, two or more editorials, a few short comments dealing mostly with Indian problems or discriminatory law cases, and a correspondence column, were the weekly feature.
Indian Opinion especially highlighted the poor conditions under which indentured Indian labourers worked. Indian Opinion was quick through its editorials to point out the cases of harsh treatment of labour by their employers. Whenever they occurred, such incidents were reported with full gravity and sincerity. Indian Opinion also kept a close eye on the astoundingly high rate of suicide then. A special campaign to end this system of wholescale oppression and exploitation was launched. It was in this context that H.S.L. Polak, the then editor of Indian Opinion, and a close friend of Gandhi, visited India to mobilise support.
Thus, with time, political activism became an established tradition on the part of Indian Opinion and its editors along with journalism. And this was what came to distinguish Indian Opinion from all other 20th century newspapers. All but one of its editors spent time in jail. This tradition began during the Satyagraha campaign between 1906 and 1913. It was during this novel campaign that the newspaper came into its own. By this time, Gandhi’s faith in the British Empire’s inherent sense of justice and fairness had been eroded, and he, now, progressively moved from the state of patient petitions and humble appeals towards the militant challenge of a prolonged resistance movement in South Africa. The files and columns of Indian Opinion duly reflected this change. Thus, while in 1903–04 its aims had simply been to educate whites in South Africa about Indian needs and wants, but from 1906 onwards, it became the chief vehicle for challenging state laws and urging defiance of the same when these were clearly found to be unjust.
It was this aspect, endeavour, and concern of this tiny newspaper produced from a farm, which elevated it to its status of being historically most significant newspaper, as it became intricately intertwined with, and reflected with the fidelity of a mirror, Gandhi's transformation to a mass movement leader and his philosophy of Satyagraha.
Right from its inception, Gandhi had been using the Indian Opinion for propagating the writings and ideas of Tolstoy, Thoreau, Ruskin, and Emerson and many other great thinkers who had influenced his own personal evolution along with the struggle that he was carrying on for the basic rights of the Indians in South Africa. But now, from September 1906 onwards, the newspaper had become unmistakably militant in its tone and outlook by publishing inspirational stories of struggle and resistance, and openly began to urge people to ready themselves to make big sacrifices in their own quest to fight Injustice and Untruth. Gandhi—who by 1909 had spent 177 days in jail—and there would be more to come—began to extoll the virtues of prison life through the pages of Indian Opinion, and urged its readers to lead a life of austerity, and not to pursue wealth at a time when there was a higher moral calling at hand.
Although Indian Opinion began by advocating the socio-political rights of the Indians in South Africa, yet it also focussed on the disabilities of the blacks in South Africa. It strove to focus particularly on the devastating provisions of the Land Act of 1913 and the pass struggles of Africans. Nonetheless, the newspaper made it a point of concern for itself that the African achievements too were celebrated. In the 1950s especially under the editorship of Manilal Gandhi, Gandhi's second son, the newspaper evolved further in its socio-political scope and became more focussed on human rights rather than the rights of Indians only. In the process, it became a central medium for disseminating the meaning of Satyagraha and of propagating Gandhism.
This trend further strengthened under the editorship of Sushila Gandhi who took over after Manilal’s death, and remained in charge until Indian Opinion published its last issue on 4 August 1961 Gandhi was absolutely right in holding the view that Satyagraha would have been impossible without the office and instrument of Indian Opinion, for it was a key mobilising device. So as we acknowledge the importance of satyagraha as a weapon that evolved on South African soil, in inspiring many anti-colonial, anti-imperial, anti-apartheid movements and movements for social, political and economic justice justice, so should we acknowledge the historical significance of Indian Opinion as a newspaper, and along with that, the significance of the role of Gandhi as a journalist and media-person. It was in the pages of Indian Opinion that Gandhi published his book Hind Swaraj which set out his vision for an independent India.
Thus, Gandhi, not only left an indelible mark on the history of humankind as a political leader of masses or statesman or social reformer but also as an ethical, dedicated and committed journalist and media person. The noble objectives upheld by him in journalism are a model for media professionals and institutions. Gandhiji was certainly a journalist, and an editor, with a difference.
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