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have passed for a European city on an African coastline. Unlike plantation labourers, Indian traders tended to be based in the towns, where they conducted their business and, increasingly, bought land and built houses. In 1870 there were 665 Indians in Durban, who between them ran two shops and owned property worth £500. By the end of the century, there were 15,000 Indians in Durban, who ran more than 400 shops and owned property worth more than £600,000. The British were alleged to be a nation of shopkeepers, but in this place at this time they were being given a run for their money. 27
    The demographic challenge was as real as the economic one: whereas in 1870 there were five Europeans to every Indian living in Durban, by 1890 the ratio was closer to two to one. The pattern was similar in other towns of Natal, where, again, Europeans constituted about 40 per cent of the population and the Indians a threatening 20 per cent. As Robert Huttenback has written, this ‘increasing urban concentration of Indians particularly frightened and offended many European settlers to whom it connoted both domestic propinquity and increased commercial competition’. 28
    To social proximity and economic rivalry was now added a third challenge – political competition. In 1891, following the decision to grant ‘responsible government’, the Governor of Natal had espied a very distant threat from the unenfranchised Africans. ‘The danger in the future,’ he wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, ‘would arise from the awakening of the Native mind – guided as it only too probably might be by unscrupulous political agitators – to the fact that its interests are not directly represented in the Colony: but this, I think, is a contingency that may fairly be left to be grappled with when it arises’. 29 The Governor could scarcely have anticipated that it would be Indian minds that would be awakened first, their aspirations stoked and articulated by a political ‘agitator’ who – at the time this prediction was made – was a shy and diet-obsessed law student in London.
    This student was now the Secretary of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC). In August 1895, the NIC celebrated its first anniversary. Presenting a report on the first year of the organization, Gandhi noted its spread to other towns: apart from Durban, branches had been opened in Pietermaritzburg, Verulam, Newcastle and Charlestown. Subscriptions of £500 had been collected; Gandhi thought at least £2,000 were needed to ‘put the Congress on a sure footing’. Cash was supplemented by gifts in kind, with ‘Parsee Rustomjee stand[ing] foremost in this respect’. Rustomjee was a spice and dry goods trader in Durban, who had supplied the Congress with lamps, paper, pens, a clock, and labour to clean the hall where it met. Other Gujaratis were also active in donations; however, as the Secretary noted, ‘the Tamil members have not shown much zeal in the Congress work’. 30
    The energetic Rustomjee was born in Bombay in 1861. He came to Natal in his early twenties, and at first worked in an Indian store in Verulam. He then set up his own business, which expanded rapidly – by1893 (when Gandhi arrived) he was one of Durban’s largest merchants. His full name was Jivanji Gorcoodoo Rustomjee. Although a Zoroastrian by faith, he worshipped often at the shrine in Durban of Datta Peer, a Tamil Muslim who had arrived in the colony as an indentured labourer before becoming a Sufi mystic. A story current in Indian circles claimed that Parsee Rustomjee was once charged with the import of saffron, then a white monopoly. He prayed at the shrine of Datta Peer, whereupon the saffron in his warehouse miraculously turned to cardamom, confounding the customs inspectors. 31
    After Mohandas Gandhi established himself in Durban, Parsee Rustomjee became a devotee of the Hindu lawyer, and hence a steadfast supporter of the Natal Indian Congress. Congress meetings were