Page:The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 1.djvu/226

 himself right. In the case of the Gujarati speakers the matter is still more serious. There is not a single Gujarati interpreter in the Courts. The interpreter, after great difficulty, manages to get at the sense only of what the witness is speaking. I have myself seen a Gujarati-speaking witness struggling to make himself understood, and the interpreter struggling to understand the Gujarati-Hindustani. Indeed, it speaks volumes for the acuteness of the interpreters in extracting even the sense from a forest of strange words. but all the while the struggle is going on, the Judge makes up his mind not to believe a word of what the witness says, and puts him down for a liar.

III

In order to answer the third question, “Is their present treatment in accordance with the best British traditions, or with the principles of justice and morality, or with the principles of Christianity?” it will be necessary to enquire what their treatment is. I think it will be readily granted that the Indian is bitterly hated in the Colony. The man in the street hates him, curses him, spits upon him, and often pushes him off the footpath. The Press cannot find a sufficiently strong word in the best English dictionary to damn him with. Here are a few samples : “The real canker that is eating into the very vitals of the community”; “these parasites”; “Wily, wretched, semi-barbarous Asiatics”; “a thing black and lean and a long way from clean, which they call the accursed Hindoo”; “he is chock-full of vice, and he lives upon rice.... I heartily cuss the Hindoo”; “squalid coolies with truthless tongues and artful ways”. The Press almost unanimously refuses to call the Indian by his proper name. He is “Ramsamy”; he is “Mr. Sammy”; he is “Mr. Coolie”; he is “he black man”. And these offensive epithets have become so common that they (at any rate one of them, “coolie) are used even in the sacred precincts of the Courts, as if “the coolie” were the legal and proper name to give to any and every Indian. The public men, too, seem to use the word freely. I have often heard the painful expressio “coolie clerk” from the mouths of men who ought to know better. The expression is a contradiction in terms and is extremely offensive to those to whom it is applied. But then, in this Colony the Indian is a creature without feelings!

The tramcars are not for the Indians. The railway officialsmay treat the Indians as beasts. No matter how clean, his very sight is such an offence to every white man in the Colony that he would object to sit, even for a short time, in the same compartment