Was there not just a touch of vanity,

however, in that public declamation

that he was ready to die rather than
surrender? This was, after all, but
two months since he had risked death
daily without flinching in order to
bear wounded soldiers from fields of
carnage. Sergeant-Major Gandhi,
who fearlessly led his ambulance corps
into the center of battle unarmed,
would hardly tremble were he now faced
with prison or flogging in so
[ 59 ]
Gandhi's Passion
righteous a cause. Like the bravest of
British officers he admired, he would
do his duty. Bravery, as he told them, was
the "distinctive virtue of the British,"
and much of Gandhi's psyche had indeed
by now become British to
the core. The rest of him, which remained
Hindu and Indian, had also
changed. His April 1906 letter to
Lakshmidas made that clear: "I have no
desire for worldly enjoyments of any type.
... If I have to face death ... I

1
shall face it with equanimity." He had
steeled himself, like a true yogi,
impervious
to personal family feelings or to any
pleasures of the flesh, devoid
of desire, material or sexual, living simply
to serve the community, whose
spokesman and foremost advocate he
had become, working only for public
purposes. Thus uniting within his battle-
hardened body the rock of British
martial courage and the steel of a naked
Sadhu's yogic indifference to heat
and cold, beds of nails or burning coals,
Gandhi sublimated all his powers
and potent sexual energy, pitting himself
against discriminatory anti-Indian
laws enacted by racial bigots. Fearing
nothing, loving no one, neither wife,
nor eldest son, nor older brother, he had
made himself invulnerable to
physical coercion of any kind and to
human temptations that so easily
lured men of weaker resolve from their
sacred vows.
Three thousand Indians attended the

2
mass meeting in Johannesburg's
packed Empire Theatre, where Gandhi so
forcefully spoke, unanimously
passing resolutions, calling upon the
Legislative Council to withdraw its
ordinance,
and warning that if so "tyrannical" a law
was passed the entire Indian
community would "prefer gaol" to abiding
by it. The Council was not
moved to change its ordinance, however.
Nor was Victor Alexander Bruce,
the Earl of Elgin, former viceroy of India,
now colonial secretary of state,
moved to withhold Great Britain's
approval. Indeed, the Transvaal's
governor,
William Waldegrave Palmer, the Second
Earl of Selborne, conveyed
the news of Lord Elgin's approval to
Gandhi's association in mid-
September. That news came as a
bombshell on the very eve of Gandhi's
planned departure for England. Many
members of the community feared
that if he left them they might "waver" and

3
take out registration certificates
under the Black Act.37 Others insisted,
however, that Gandhi must go and
voted to provide him with funds to do so,
even as Lord Elgin, through Lord
Selborne, informed Gandhi that no useful
purpose would be served by
sending a deputation to him. Gandhi
immediately replied that his community
must adhere to its "resolve to resist the
Ordinance."38 So on October
1, 1906, Gandhi and Haji Ally, president of
Johannesburg's Hamidiya
Islamic Society, boarded the Cape Mail
and two days later sailed from
Cape Town aboard the S.S. Armadale
Castle for London.