Читать книгу The Story of My Experiments with Truth. An Autobiography онлайн

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So here too there was fighting in store for me.

Abdulla Sheth explained to me why some Indians were required to take off their turbans. Those wearing the Musalman costume might, he said, keep their turbans on, but the other Indians on entering a court had to take theirs off as a rule.

I must enter into some details to make this nice distinction intelligible. In the course of these two or three days I could see that the Indians were divided into different groups. One was that of Musalman merchants, who would call themselves ‘Arabs’. Another was that of Hindu, and yet another of Parsi, clerks. The Hindu clerks were neither here nor there, unless they cast in their lot with the ‘Arabs’. The Parsi clerks would call themselves Persians. These three classes had some social relations with one another. But by far the largest class was that composed of Tamil, Telugu and North Indian indentured and freed labourers. The indentured labourers were those who went to Natal on an agreement to serve for five years, and came to be known there as girmitiyas from girmit, which was the corrupt form of the English word ‘agreement’. The other three classes had none but business relations with this class. Englishmen called them ‘coolies’, and as the majority of Indians belonged to the labouring class, all Indians were called ‘coolies’, or ‘samis’. ‘Sami’ is a Tamil suffix occurring after many Tamil names, and it is nothing else than the Samskrit Swami, meaning a master. Whenever, therefore, an Indian resented being addressed as a ‘sami’ and had enough wit in him, he would try to return the compliment in this wise: ‘You may call me sami, but you forget that sami means a master. I am not your master!’ Some Englishmen would wince at this, while others would get angry, swear at the Indian and, if there was a chance, would even belabour him; for ‘sami’ to him was nothing better than a term of contempt. To interpret it to mean a master amounted to an insult!