Gandhi used South Africa’s meals classes in India

Posted On Oct 5, 2021 By admin With Comments Off

Gandhi Square in Johannesburg is named because Mohandas Gandhi’s office was there. There is an engaging statue of him there as a young man, striding to work in barrister’s robes. Ziegler’s restaurant, where he ate, was also there, though when I went looking for it I found the site was now an office building. But close by there was a Gandhi’s Kitchen restaurant advertising its ‘Chicken Special’.This was unfortunate since Ziegler’s was vegetarian. That’s why Gandhi ate there and even, according to the third volume of Pyarelal’s very detailed biography, invested in it. After it failed, he invested 1,000 pounds in a vegetarian restaurant started in 1904, which also failed, leaving Gandhi in serious financial difficulties. Anyone who’s ever lost money in the food business might take comfort in knowing that Gandhi did too. The Gandhi remembered this weekend is, of course, the leader of Indian independence and his South African career is little known, beyond a few anecdotes.Yet it is fascinating since it shows, like that Johannesburg statue, an unfamiliar Gandhi, struggling to find himself and experimenting in many things, including his food.86722315The importance of food can be seen in how, when Gandhi first came to South Africa, he identified himself as a Barrister-At-Law and a member of the London Vegetarian Society. The society had been crucial for Gandhi, enabling him to meet people beyond the Indian student network, and exposing him to the range of radical ideas held by many vegetarians, including opposition to the British Empire.There were few vegetarians in South Africa, even though Gandhi noted in a letter to a Durban newspaper “in a comparatively hot country like Natal, where there is a plentiful supply of fruits and vegetables, a bloodless diet should prove very beneficial in every way”. But these few soon got to know and support each other, in places like the Johannesburg restaurants. Gandhi may have lost money there, but gained friends, like Albert West and Henry Polack, who were among his earliest supporters, and bridges to the European community.Above all, there was Hermann Kallenbach, a Jewish architect who Gandhi soon made a firm vegetarian and possibly his first real disciple. Kallenbach helped Gandhi build the Phoenix settlement, where they were able to experiment with growing their own food, and trying out different vegetarian diets. Gandhi experimented in South Africa with rawfood diets and products that would today be called gluten-free, like banana flour.But Gandhi’s food experiences were not just personal. As he fought for the rights of Indians in South Africa, he started understanding the importance of food in activism, both as essential sustenance and a means of protest.86722325In 1913, he organised a march of Indian labourers to the Transvaal, where they were excluded by law. He learned the importance of planning food for the march, enlisting Indian traders along the way to supply rations and in this way, become part of the struggle. Years later, he would set out for Dandi inspired by this first march.After Gandhi’s activism landed him in jail, he learnt how to handle his captors. Prisoners were at their mercy, but were also their responsibility, which meant keeping them alive. The diet was not suited for Indians, least of all Gandhi who was then eating only “bananas, tomatoes, raw groundnuts, limes and olive oil. It meant starvation for me if the supply of any one of these things was bad in quality”, as he wrote in his book Satyagraha in South Africa. Alarmed at this prospect, the prison doctor ordered them all, even adding nutritious imported products like Brazil nuts. It was a lesson in activism that Gandhi would later use in India.Oppressors can deny victims almost everything, but not food (unless they want them dead, and even then, it’s simpler to kill than to starve them). That gives food a power which victims can use to fight back, and from fasts to salt, it was a power that Gandhi would go on to use in full.