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.