A successful meeting was held in Poona. The leaders of both the parties attended and spoke in support of my cause.
I then went to Madras. There I saw Sir (then Mr Justice) Subrahmanya Aiyar, Shri P. Anandacharlu, Shri G. Subrahmanyam, the then editor of the Hindu, Shri Parameshvaran Pillai, editor of the Madras Standard, Shri Bhashyam Iyengar, the famous advocate, Mr Norton and others. A great meeting too was held. From Madras I went to Calcutta, where I saw Surendranath Banerji, Maharaja Jyotindra Mohan Tagore, the late Mr Saunders, the editor of the Englishman, and others. While a meeting was being arranged in Calcutta, I received a cablegram from Natal asking me to return at once. This was in November 1896. I concluded that some movement hostile to the Indians must be on foot. I therefore left my work at Calcutta incomplete and went to Bombay, where I took the first available steamer with my family. S. S. Courland had been purchased by Messrs Dada Abdulla and represented one more enterprise of that very adventurous firm, namely, to run a steamer between Porbandar and Natal. The Naderi, a steamer of the Persian Steam Navigation Company, left Bombay for Natal immediately after. The total number of passengers on the two steamers was about 800.
The agitation in India attained enough importance for the principal Indian newspapers to notice it in their columns and for Reuter to send cablegrams about it to England. This I came to know on reaching Natal. Reuter’s representative in England had sent a brief cablegram to South Africa, containing an exaggerated summary of my speeches in India. This is not an unusual experience. Such exaggeration is not always intentional. Very busy people with prejudices and prepossessions of their own read something superficially and then prepare a summary which is sometimes partly a product of imagination. This summary, again, is differently interpreted in different places. Distortion thus takes place without any one intending it. This is the risk attending public activities and
