‘Serene and industrious’: Prabhudas Gandhi recalls working on a newspaper with his uncle, MK Gandhi

While at home, I didn’t get to go to the press along with others, however much I wanted to; those heavy afternoons were spent reading and doing lessons on Father’s instructions. Going to the press every day was an inviolable rule for Bapuji, but in view of my medical condition, he had granted me permission to skip the press session and settle for a long siesta.

Accordingly, I slept for a couple of days in deference to his wishes, but then I couldn’t keep my rising desire on leash and began to attend the press sessions, where Bapuji allotted me the work of dissing – a type of distribution in printing jargon.

Just as individual characters have to be assembled to form lines of words before printing, post-print, they must be returned to their correct cases. The process of dissing is more boring than assembling the type in a composing stick, perhaps as boring as separating cotton fibres from the seed, but just as important. I understood the immense importance of the work I was assigned, but the sheer tedium of it wore me out. I tried all means, fair and foul, to get rid of the assignment and try my hand at something easier and more interesting. But the compositors didn’t let me have my way. They stacked up old galley proofs in front of me – work that would take months together to complete – and averred that I wouldn’t get to assemble type before I became expert at the process of dissing. How else, they asked, would they know I had memorised the places for different characters? Other boys, I saw, were assembling characters with a practised hand, and Devdas was the undisputed master of the art. As I watched him putting together all the interesting articles of Indian Opinion, I burned with jealousy. The compositors often pointed out the finesse with which he worked and taunted me for being a scatterbrain. Embittered and enraged, I began to look upon the entire press as my adversary. When Bapuji demanded reports from the compositors about the progress each of us was making, they praised others and disparaged me openly as an unskilled, slow learner.

It would hardly make any difference to the press if I didn’t contribute meaningfully, but to Bapuji, it meant a lot if I was unproductive. He retorted, “Sleep at home if you are sleepy. But dozing off at work is not acceptable.” At the press, we were not permitted to talk with one another – not a bit. And no one could do it even on the sly, for Bapuji’s table was so strategically placed that even a slight murmur reached his ears. Despite the rule, if someone was caught chatting, Bapuji would call him and ask searching questions about the topic under discussion, the amount of work done and left to be done, and so on. After such relentless grilling, the person at fault never again dared to let so much as a sigh trip off his mouth.

The general atmosphere in the press, thus, remained serene and industrious. No room for haggling or lethargy. At intervals, Bapuji went around, inspecting the pace and quality of the work being done. He may have turned a blind eye to lethargy or horsing around on the farm, but none of it would be tolerated in the press – oh no. During those two hours, nobody ever forgot, not even in a weak moment, that Bapuji was the boss – an absolute ruler, if you will. During the prayer meeting, he took stock of everyone’s work and asked for an explanation if targets were not achieved. As a result, over time, all the boys had become seasoned professional – nay, veritable experts – in different jobs performed at the press.

But, as I said, I remained the inefficient one among them. I began to look out for ways to transform my reputation. And, to a small extent, I succeeded in doing that – not by hard work, but by playing foul. I would steal moulds, go out under the excuse of peeing, and throw them far away into the stream: four lines on day one; then, emboldened, eight lines the next; and eventually as many as twenty-five lines. Everybody wondered how my dissing speed had increased overnight. But most of them took heart from it, saying, “Well done!” Thus, I cleared all the galleys – throwing away some moulds and making a mess with the others – and was given the work of assembling. Though my theft was not discovered, I had to bear the undesirable consequences of my shirking. I turned out a messy compositor.

While composing, I would invariably make five to seven mistakes in every line. My habit of rushing through writing at school and missing out letters in the bargain had evidently rubbed off on my composing skills. During the dissing procedure, I had messed up my cases so thoroughly that mistakes happened almost as a rule. What else would one expect when the slot for “A” gave you “T” and that of “T” gave “Y”? Such a magic spell had I cast on all the cases that every slot gave me any and every possible type. In the beginning, I was given the probationary task of preparing dummies of Indian Opinion to ascertain the level of my efficiency. But, as expected, I took more time – at least four times more – correcting the composed text than setting the types. So Bapuji finally found me a novel task befitting my skills and will: typesetting the bhajans we sang in the evening prayer, since they weren’t available in print anywhere in South Africa.

That project progressed at a snail’s pace. It took me three months to typeset 30 bhajans, but ultimately, a book titled Ethical Poems was brought out, with composition credits to yours truly. I began to move around in my vanity van with a copy of the book to impress people who cared to listen, completely forgetting that I had borne Bapuji’s reprimands and shed tears on several occasions during prayer meetings where he had proofread my work loud enough for the audience to hear and smirk. Then, he would snap, “How can a human commit such and so many errors? Go slow, check every single type before setting it. Do you know, even then one wouldn’t take as much time as you have taken for this shabby work?” My eyes would start dripping before he was done with his admonition. But I didn’t allow those reproaches to play spoilsport now.

We worked two hours a day in the press, but not so on Friday, when we slogged the whole of the afternoon printing, cutting, pinning and folding the newspaper, which got published on Saturday. Everyone worked shoulder to shoulder that day to ensure that everything was done in time. The boys competed with one another generally about who folded the most copies in record time, but one day we decided to hold a formal competition among cutters and pinners. 40 to 50 folded copies would be placed in two stacks in the machine and duly pressed by an iron plate. Then, by working a wheel, the edges of the newspaper could be evenly cut. Two boys had to work in sync to carry out the processes efficiently. For pinning the copies, there was another huge machine, exactly like a sewing machine, except that the reel atop it had coiled steel wire instead of cotton thread. The copy had to be placed across a steel plate by one worker, and then the other would press the pedal by foot so that the pages got properly stapled at two places on the folding line.

Kuppu and I looked after the “pinning”. The cutters placed a stack of sixty to eighty copies before us, and we stapled them one by one. By the time we finished, they had cut and kept another lot ready for pinning. But we expedited the pinning in such a way that the cutters clearly lagged behind in dispatching supplies. They, in turn, began to pressure the folders to speed up. A veritable chain reaction of grumbling and griping was unleashed. Thrice, we had to wait for our supplies, and I thought we were inching towards victory. As we finished the last lot and I broke into cheerful cries, the cutters plonked a heap of fifty copies in front of us and began to smirk in triumph. I turned pale amidst their taunts and hoots of laughter. I burst into tears, but the merciless ribbing from both peers and elders continued unabated.

While leaving, Kuppu told me about our rivals’ cheating; they had kept aside a few copies from every lot and then placed the booty before us at the last moment. Trembling with fierce anger, I went straight to Bapuji to complain. He scolded them briefly in the evening prayer, and my outrage subsided. I had forgotten about the whole thing when, after a month, Bapuji commented in one of his discourses on Ramcharitmanas: “He was not like Prabhudas to go complain on insignificant matters. So brave were those people that they settled their disputes among themselves.” Bapuji’s taunt set the gang of my adversaries off on a ribbing spree, calling me a “backbiter” for a few days. But I endured it all without a word and abjured the habit of snitching once and for all. I have given a prolix account of this episode as it reflects Bapuji’s knack for keen observation, the minute attention he gave to pedagogy and his unflinching faith in the need to train the heart along with the mind and the body.

Excerpted with permission from The Dawn of Life: MK Gandhi in South Africa, Prabhudas Gandhi, translated from the Gujarati by Hemang Ashwinkumar, Penguin India.