Going beyond Gandhi’s ‘inner circle’ of relationships: Satyagraha House, Hermann Kallenbach and Gandhi’s sons

Abstract

The domestic dwelling known as The Kraal, inhabited briefly by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and his closest friend in South Africa, Hermann Kallenbach, in the early twentieth century, and remade a century later as a boutique guesthouse and museum named Satyagraha House, is the point of reference for a set of critical engagements with the work of heritage and historical narrative, questions of time and space, family legacies, photographs and letters. Two historians are invested in telling the smaller stories that are often hidden, and here they argue for a narrative of interaction that goes beyond Gandhi’s relationship with Kallenbach. Through reflections on the exhibits and rooms at Satyagraha House as well as the heritage site’s location within the surrounding space of Johannesburg, they argue for extending the Kallenbach story to his relationships to Gandhi’s sons. The conversation is interspersed with extracts of epistolary relationships that then establish a series of links across time, space and archives, radiating beyond Johannesburg, to the Inanda countryside, to ashrams in India, internment camps in wartime England, and to Israel.

L’habitat domestique connu sous le nom de The Kraal, dans lequel Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi a vécu brièvement avec son meilleurs ami Hermann Kallenbach en Afrique du Sud au début du vingtième siècle et refaite un siècle plus tard en une maison d’hôte à cachet et musée appelée Satyagraha House, est le point de référence pour un ensemble d’engagements essentiels avec le travail de récit du patrimoine historique, des questions de temps et d’espace, d’héritages familiaux, de photos et de lettres. Deux historiens sont investis dans le récit des histoires plus courtes souvent cachées, et ils défendent ici un récit d’interaction qui va au-delà de la relation de Gandhi avec Kallenbach. A travers des réflexions sur les pièces exposées, les salles de Satyagraha House et l’emplacement du site patrimonial dans l’espace environnant de Johannesburg, ils déclarent qu’il faut étendre l’histoire de Kallenbach à sa relation avec les fils de Gandhi. La discussion est parsemée d’extraits des relations épistolaires qui établissent ainsi une série de liens entre le temps, l’espace et les archives qui rayonnent au-delà de Johannesburg vers la campagne d’Inanda, les ashrams en Inde, les camps d’internement en période de guerre en Angleterre et Israel.

Keywords:

• Satyagraha House
• The Arcades Project
• Walter Benjamin
• Mohandas Gandhi
• Hermann Kallenbach
• Gandhi’s sons

Mots clés:

• Satyagraha House
• Le projet des Arcades
• Walter Benjamin
• Mohandas Gandhi
• Hermann Kallenbach
• fils de Gandhi

Acknowledgements

Jill Weintroub acknowledges the support of the Wits School of Governance’s Life in the City Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme as well as the supervision of Professor Noëleen Murray, University of the Witwatersrand. Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie thanks Paolo Israel of the History Department, University of the Western Cape, for sharing readings on experimental history writing, and Leslie Witz for prodding her to attend the workshop and to write this reflection; Eric Itzkin and Lauren Segal for responding to requests for details about the planning for Satyagraha House. Both authors thank their anonymous reviewers for generous and useful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1094-8682

Jill Weintroub http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3385-2926

Notes

1 The collection is now held in the National Archives of India in New Delhi.

2 In 1911 Isaiah Shembe founded the Ibandla Nazeretha Church at Ekhuphakameni in Inanda, one of South Africa's largest indigenous churches. Manilal had a good relationship with the leadership.

3 We thank reviewer 2 for this suggestion. Shimon Lev is working on a project to uncover more about Ritch.

4 In 1921, a religious sect led by Enoch Mgijima refused to move from illegally occupied land in Queenstown in the eastern Cape and was then fired upon by police leaving 183 dead and 100 wounded. In an editorial in Indian Opinion, Manilal brought an Indian perspective to the event comparing it with the firing of police on the defenceless in Jallianwalla Bagh in the Punjab in 1917 (Dhupelia-Mesthrie 2004, 157).