XIII. 'INDIAN
OPINION'
Before I proceed with the other intimate European
contacts, I must note two or three items of importance.
One of the contacts, however, should be mentioned at
once. The appointment of Miss Dick was not enough for my
purpose. I needed more assistance. I have in the earlier
chapters referred to Mr. Ritch. I knew him well. He was
manager in a commercial firm. He approved my suggestion
of leaving the firm and getting articled under me, and he
considerably lightened my burden.
About this time Sjt. Madanjit approached me with a
proposal to start Indian Opinion and sought my
advice. He had already been conducting a press, and I
approved of his proposal. The journal was launched in
1904, and Sjt. Mansukhlal Naazar became the first editor.
But I had to bear the brunt of the work, having for most
of the time to be practically in charge of the journal.
Not that Sjt. Mansukhlal could not carry it on. He had
been doing a fair amount of journalism whilst in India,
but he would never venture to write on intricate South
African problems so long as I was there. He had the
greatest confidence in my discernment, and therefore
threw on me the responsibility of attending to the
editorial columns. The journal has been until this day a
weekly, In the beginning it used to be issued in
Gujarati, Hindi, Tamil and English. I saw, however, that
the Tamil and Hindi sections were a make-believe. They
did not serve the purpose for which they were intended,
so I discontinued them as I even felt that there would be
a certain amount of deception involved in their
continuance.
I had no notion that I should have to invest any money
in this journal, but I soon discovered that it could not
go on without my financial help. The Indians and the
Europeans both knew that, though I was not avowedly the
editor of Indian Opinion, I was virtually
responsible for its conduct. It would not have mattered
if the journal had never been started, but to stop it
after it had once been launched would have been both a
loss and a disgrace. So I kept on pouring out my money,
until ultimately I was practically sinking all my savings
in it. I remember a time when I had to remit ?75 each
month.
But after all these years I feel that the journal has
served the community well. It was never intended to be a
commercial concern. So long as it was under my control,
the changes in the journal were indicative of changes in
my life. Indian Opinion in those days, like Young
India and Navajivan today, was a mirror of
part of my life. Week after week I poured out my soul in
its columns, and expounded the principles and practice of
Satyagraha as I understood it. During ten years, that is,
until 1914, excepting the intervals of my enforced rest
in prison, there was hardly an issue of Indian
Opinion without an article from me. I cannot recall
a word in those articles set down without thought or
deliberation, or a word of conscious exaggeration, or
anything merely to please. Indeed the journal became for
me a training in self-restraint, and for friends a medium
through which to keep in touch with my thoughts. The
critic found very little to which he could object. In
fact the tone of Indian Opinion compelled the
critic to put a curb on his own pen. Satyagraha would
probably have been impossible without Indian Opinion.
The readers looked forward to it for a trustworthy
account of the Satyagraha campaign as also of the real
condition of Indians in South Africa. For me it became a
means for the study of human nature in all its casts and
shades, as I always aimed at establishing an intimate and
clean bond between the editor and the readers. I was
inundated with letters containing the outpourings of my
correspondents' hearts. They were friendly, critical or
bitter, according to the temper of the writer. It was a
fine eduction for me to study, digest and answer all this
correspondence. It was as though the community thought
audibly through this correspondence with me. It made me
throughly understand the responsibility of a journalist,
and the hold I secured in this way over the community
made the furure campaign workable, dignified and
irresistible.
In the very first month of Indian Opinion, I
realized that the sole aim of journalism should be
service. The newspaper press is a great power, but just
as an unchained torrent of water submerges whole
countrysides and devastates crops, even so an
uncontrolled pen serves but to destroy. If the control is
from without, it proves more poisonous than want of
control. It can be profitable only when exercised from
within. If this line of reasoning is correct, how many of
the journals in the world would stand the test? But who
would stop those that are useless? And who should be the
judge? The useful and the useless must, like good and
evil generally, go on together, and man must make his
choice.
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