TRIBUTE
Legacy of struggle
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Moulvi Ismail Ahmed Cachalia, who stepped beyond the verge on August 8 at the age of 95, straddled two centuries and two continents. What was remarkable was his bearing the legacy of two cultures — African and Asian. He has left us at a time when India and South Africa confront formidable challenges in terms of governance, poverty alleviation and social incohesion, says GOPAL GANDHI.
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Moulvi Cachalia meeting the then West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu in Pretoria, 1997 (the writer is at centre).
MICHELANGELO would have liked to paint or sculpt him.
Not just because his face, wreathed by a white beard of rare gentleness, had a hand-carved perfection to it. Or because his pair of ocean-travelled eyes seemed to say "I have seen, seen it all". But because his entire countenance, bearing, mien, were compelling. Like that of some Old Testament figure who has been drawn into the New, a friend of some past nobility that has stumbled onto a newborn's crib. The subject for a Basilica's murals.
Moulvi Ismail Ahmed Cachalia, who stepped beyond the verge on August 8 at the ripe age of 95, straddled two centuries and two continents. Yet even more remarkable than his Afro-Asian reach or his 19th Century glaciation into the 20th, was his bearing the legacy of two cultures as if it were a chalice of divine essences. It could not have been otherwise, for he was born to a moment when a thirst meets the quenching of it. That thirst was the deeply-felt sense of wrong among the Indians in South Africa. And the quenching was the electrifying struggle for political and social rights launched by the community from 1908 to 1914. The struggle was called satyagraha by its harbinger, Mohandas Gandhi. But "Gandhibhai", as the 39-year-old barrister was called by his colleagues in South Africa, was a leader among leaders, striving with others of rare courage, acumen and perseverance playing pivotal roles.
Ismail was born on December 5,1908, to Ahmad Mohammad Cachalia, a "merchant prince" of Johannesburg who had been elected to the Transvaal British Indian Association and who, because of his political beliefs, not only courted imprisonment but suffered financial ruination. A.M. Cachalia, was Chairman of the body of which Barrister M.K. Gandhi, was Secretary — a hierarchy that carries its lesson. Give up politics and continue to prosper, A.M. Cachalia was told. Stay with politics and be sure you will be sent into bankruptcy, he was threatened. And into that reasury — of impoverishment — he walked with the élan of a wedding-guest bearing the gift of his convictions. "I have never," Gandhi was to write in 1923-24 of Ismail's father, "whether in South Africa or in India, come across a man who could surpass Kachhalia in courage and steadfastness."
Gandhi never praised for form or effect. He weighed his reasons on scales that could count not just gross weight but the minuscule grammage of real worth. He said of his valued colleague, "He was a strict orthodox Mussalman, being one of the trustees of the Surti Meman mosque. But at the same time he looked upon Hindus and Mussalmans with an equal eye ... "
Mahatma Gandhi (first row left) with Cachalia (first row right), in 1914. Bhawani Dayal Sannyasi, Editor, The Pravasi is standing.
At the time of Ismail's birth, the father, A.M. Cachalia, was, predictably enough, in prison — the Johannesburg Fort Prison — with Gandhi and other satyagrahis of the extraordinary calibre of Thambi Naidoo. Soon others of the stature of Sorabji Shapurji Adajania, the Parsi barrister-colleague of Gandhiji, were to join the proceedings. The home Ismail came into and grew up in was, therefore, one in which the Holy Koran resounded as did the verses of a revolutionary politics. Revolutionary, but meticulously non-violent and scrupulously non-sectarian. The Cachalia's was a threshold through which Indians of all denominations could enter for the furtherance of their common objective. The struggle for Indians' rights was also an effort to weld the Hindu and the Muslim, the Tamil and the Gujarati, the Indian Christian with the Indian Parsi, together into a cohesive whole for the redressal of their grievances. This endeavour moved to higher levels of achievement until, in 1914, General Smuts had to give in.
And Mohandas Gandhi was enabled to return to his "native" India to give defining impetus to the burgeoning struggle there, while entrusting his paper Indian Opinion and the Phoenix Settlement to H.S.L. Polak and Albert West from whom his extraordinarily committed son, Manilal Gandhi, was to take over shortly thereafter.
Gandhi came to South Africa a barrister, Nelson Mandela has said, and "we returned him to India to become the Father of a new nation". That alchemic process, young Ismail witnessed from close.
Completing his early education in Johannesburg, he too decided to go to the "mother country". He studied there at the seminary in Deoband, scripture and Arabic, but stayed in touch with his father's friend, now acknowledged as the Mahatma. The non-cooperation movement in India, which owed not a little to the experience gained by the satyagraha in South Africa was then at its zenith. And Ismail, now an "Aalim" (priest) and a budding Moulvi, was drawn to it. We do not know if the Mahatma had a hand in his decision to return to Johannesburg but return Moulvi Cachalia did, in 1931. Joining his younger brother, the articulate and popular Yusuf in a soft goods business, he teamed up with him in no time in the "hard goods" business of resistance — by now widened as was natural and right, to include all the oppressed people of apartheid South Africa. Racism, his father and Gandhi, had taught him was not just wrong but evil. Silence or acquiescence, his faith told him, was exactly the same.
What their father had been to Gandhi's satyagraha, the brothers Ismail and Yusuf became to the wing of the resistance led by Dr. Yusuf M. Dadoo and Dr. G.M. Naicker. By 1946, Moulvi Cachalia was a leader among leaders of the front rank, like Nana Sita, in the Indian Passive Resistance Movement in which as many as 2,000 Indians courted arrest. The initiative led Gandhi, then engrossed in the pre-independence throes of India, to send a message endorsing it categorically.
The Indian South African cause had now became part of the much larger struggle of the Africans against White oppression. In Chief Lutuli, the African National Congress had found a leader as committed to non-violence as the Mahatma himself. But the apartheid regime's responses to the new challenge were an "advance" to those that had been shown to Gandhi, Cachalia, Naidoo and others of the earlier generation. Brutal repression, going beyond jailings and floggings, to torture, abduction and murder had become second nature with Pretoria. The historic Defiance Campaign of 1952 saw Moulvi Ismail Cachalia take the position of Deputy Volunteer-in-Chief, working closely with Nelson Mandela, the Volunteer-in-Chief. Moulvi earned a suspended sentence of 18 months and was banned from any participation in the Congresses. But he remained undaunted.
Quality cannot be hid. By now India was free, though Gandhi was gone, felled by the very cult of division he had resisted in South Africa and India. But Nehru was there — a historian no less than Prime Minister.
And when in 1955, the African National Congress and the South African Indian Congress decided to send a delegation to the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung it chose Moses Kotane and Moulvi Ismail Cachalia as its two representatives. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru arranged for their travel.
Kotane and Moulvi first went to London, where the London-based Indian South African activist Vella Pillay introduced them to Krishna Menon who helped them reach India and meet Nehru. On being told of the arrival of the South Africans at his office, as Kotane himself told Vella Pillai, Nehru rushed out "even without his shoes on" to greet them in the visitors' room. There is no doubt that in Bandung the Prime Minister of India introduced these two South Africans to other delegations as representatives of what had been — and was — one struggle in two countries, on two continents.
Moulvi Cachalia at the dedication of Valliamma's restored grave in Johannesburg, 1997.
Back in South Africa, in the 1960s, Moulvi faced imprisonments and intolerable banning orders. By now apartheid repression had gained world notoriety. Moulvi was able, through a hazardous gambit, to escape to Botswana from where he got to India to become Deputy Chief Representative of the ANC in New Delhi, under Alfred Nzo (later South Africa's first Foreign Minister).
It was to take four more decades of resistance, including an armed resistance that forswore harm to innocents, for South Africa to throw off the yoke, for the resistance which grew out of the Indian satyagraha and the ANC's extraordinary struggle, with that of other African bodies like the PAC, to triumph. By that time, of course, Nehru was gone, Dadoo was gone, Naicker was gone. But, alongside a new generation of South African fighters stood Moulvi Cachalia — a transformational and trans-continental figure.
And the city which had "housed" the senior Cachalia and Naidoo in the Fort in 1908 now saw a younger Cachalia — Firoz — and a younger Naidoo — Indres — take their seats in the Gauteng Assembly, even as Manilal Gandhi's daughter Ela took hers in Cape Town as the MP for Phoenix.
Many friends of his like Abdul Minty implored the Moulvi to make the new South Africa, the rainbow nation, his home. He did not demur but did something very like him, very inclusive, very creative. He now distributed his time between the two, spending some months of the year in South Africa, among his friends and family and some months in his native Navsari in Gujarat, India, among his equally large number of friends and family there.
India was the Moulvi's Devaki and South Africa, his Yashoda. There was no conflict, only celebration in the duality.
When the present writer was privileged beyond his deserving to be India's High Commissioner in Pretoria (1996-1997) he was told by his secretary one day, "A Moulvi has come to see you". A Moulvi? I must go and meet a learned visitor in the waiting room downstairs, I said to myself, and walking past the Mahatma's and Madiba's newly installed portraits in the Chancery I saw not just a Moulvi but the Moulvi, Moulvi Cachalia rising to greet me. I reproduce what I mailed my friend the historian and veteran organiser of multilateral, especially the United Nations, support to the South African resistance, Enuga S. Reddy: "Dear E.S., A quick line to say the Moulvi Cachalia has just left after a call in the office. I said to him I should be calling on you, Sir. But no, he said, I am to do that. And so he came. What a handsome man, what a gentle man, what a good man! I have requested him to arrange for an occasion at his father's grave when I can be present with him and witness the Fateha being recited."
Around that time, the Consulate General of India in Johannesburg headed by Skand Tayal catalysed an extraordinary piece of heritage conservation. The graves of two Indian satyagrahis from the struggle's last phase in 1913-14, the incomparable Valliamma and the lesser known Nagappen, long out of sight in Johannesburg's principal cemetery of Braamfontein, were re-discovered and restored, by energetic local architect-archivists at the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council. At the new dedication, both veterans were present together — Walter Sisulu and Moulvi Cachalia, bringing to mind Gandhiji's own presence in one of his last public appearances in South Africa, at the original dedication, on July 15, 1914. The image of the two — one an African and the other an Indian — together, commemorating two Tamil martyrs in the cause of justice in South Africa, will ever be etched in my memory.
Jyoti Basu visited South Africa in July 1997, not only in his capacity of Chief Minister of West Bengal but a Communist leader of world renown. President Mandela who remembered the gigantic welcome he had been given by a gathering of at least a million people in Kolkata in 1990, received a call by the octogenarian visitor, outside of protocol norms.
Not only that, the Government of South Africa gave Chief Minister Basu the kind of welcome and attention reserved for visiting Prime Ministers. Our Embassy, naturally, hosted a reception and, among the many who attended, was, Moulvi Cachalia.
I can never forget the meeting of the two leaders, the courtesy they showed to each other and to all that they, individually and as representatives of the peoples of India and South Africa, stood for.
Over the last five years, many a stalwart of the Indian-African struggle in South Africa whom I had the honour of knowing has crossed over: Natoo Babenia, Gadija Christopher, Dr. K. Goonum, Govan Mbeki, Ismail Meer, J.N. Singh and in recent days, Walter Sisulu. The Moulvi was very close to Walter and Albertina Sisulu. Like them he was a giving and a forgiving person. Not for them the tinsel of power, the bauble of office.
Like Walter, the Moulvi reflected the difference between stature and status.
Son to revolution, brother to revolutionaries, Moulvi Cachalia has left us at a time when India and South Africa confront formidable challenges in terms of governance and poverty alleviation. But above all, in terms of social incohesion.
A thirst had been felt in South Africa and the founding of the Natal Indian Congress (1894) and the African National Congress (1912) began the quenching of it. There is, however, a condition worse than an unslaked thirst, it is an inner parching which is not acknowledged and left unattended. The ex-colonies of the world, faced by their internal challenges and, at the same time, by the ferocious rapacity of a globalised market seeking a new economic imperium, are in that worse-than-thirst state.
But if there is one lesson that the Cachalias, Adajanias, Naidoos, Valliammas, Nana Sitas, Nagappens, Dadoos, and Naickers — no less than the Gandhis and Mandelas of South Africa — have taught, it is this, that their legacy of struggles is self-renewing, and "freedom's battle though baffled oft, is ever won".
Gopal Gandhi is the Ambassador of India in Norway. This piece is based on an article published in The Sunday Independent, Johannesburg.
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