M.K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law

by DiSalvo, Charles R.

  FASHIONABLE WESTERNIZATION: THEOSOPHY AND VEGETARIANISM

  When he arrived in London, Gandhi was thrust into a world where he was a stranger looking to be accepted. The world of the Inns, with its dinners, costumes, formality, and long tradition of catering to the educated, wealthy, and noble, was an upper-class world to which this relatively uneducated boy from the colonial backwaters of India was unaccustomed, but which he was eager to explore. Gandhi’s understanding of the privileged status to which barristers were entitled may have led him to see his mission in England to learn and take on the customs of the elite. After all, he had been sent to England to attain the lofty status of barrister for one reason only: to come home and provide financial leadership for the family. Thus, it is likely that Gandhi believed that becoming a barrister required of him different tastes and manners. Accordingly, he experimented in 1890 with top hats, starched collars, silk shirts, striped trousers, gold watch chains, leather gloves, walking sticks, patent leather shoes, spats, and evening suits.32 The private lessons in dance, elocution, violin, and French that he took for a brief time can be similarly explained.33 With time, however, Gandhi came to his senses, realizing that a dandy was not who he was, nor who he needed to be, in order to be called to the bar and to practice in India. Here his pledge to his mother to avoid wine, meat, and women might have fortified him with the beginnings of the independence he needed to escape the full grasp of British upper-class mores. Yet the attraction of belonging to a privileged group gripped him still. It was in his study of theosophy and his embrace of the cause of vegetarianism that he discovered a way to bridge the distance between faithfulness to himself and things Indian, on the one hand, and, on the other, his attraction to the higher strata of British society where, at least at the edges, theosophy and vegetarianism were thriving.

  Theosophy in Gandhi’s time was a religious philosophy with roots in the teachings of the Russian-born medium Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.34 She, along with an American, Henry Olcott, founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. Theosophy argued that all religious traditions “hold in common many religious, ethical, and philosophical ideas.” It purported to explain the commonality of all religious thought by resort to the notion that an ancient band of “great spiritual Teachers (themselves the outcome of past cycles of evolution) acted as the instructors and guides of the child humanity of our planet, interpreting to its races and nations the fundamental truths of religion in the form most adapted to the idiosyncrasies of the recipients.”35 The truth that they passed on to Blavatsky and her followers was divine wisdom, the Greek for which (theos and sophia) gave rise to the name of this body of thought.

  The openness of theosophy to all the great religious traditions included an embrace of Hindu ideas, which in turn led theosophy to a pantheistic understanding of God, an emphasis on the oneness of all people, and a belief in human perfectibility. One could see how readily each of these notions might appeal to a young Hindu stranded in an alien culture far from home.36 Gandhi tells us he was introduced to theosophy by two friends who asked him for help in reading Sir Edwin Arnold’s The Song Celestial, a poetic translation of the Bhagavad Gita. The friends thereafter took him to Theosophical Society meetings and eventually to a talk given by Annie Besant, a follower of Blavatsky and a leading theosophical theorist of her time, whose speeches emphasized brotherhood, tolerance, and the spiritual nature of people.37 The talk Besant delivered the night Gandhi was in the audience defended theosophy against its critics, causing Gandhi to later write: “The words she uttered . . . as she rose to answer the charge of inconsistency have never faded from my memory. She said as she wound up her great speech that she would be quite satisfied to have the epitaph written on her tomb that she had lived for truth and she died for truth.”38 Gandhi made it a point to read Blavatsky’s The Key to Theosophy. The effect of this reading was to stimulate in him “the desire to read books on Hinduism” and to disabuse him “of the notion fostered by the missionaries that Hinduism was rife with superstition.”39

  Despite this interest, Gandhi felt that he did not have sufficient time to continue his religious explorations while examinations were looming. Thus, it appears that the period of Gandhi’s most intense involvement with theosophy came to an end sometime before December 15, 1890. And when his examinations concluded on the 20th of December 1890, it was not theosophy that reclaimed his attention, but vegetarianism.

  Gandhi’s initial interest in vegetarianism resulted from a blend of pragmatism and principle. To secure her blessing for the trip, he had promised his mother he would not touch meat. Keeping this pledge caused him to endure a fairly lengthy trial, stretching from the time he boarded the SS Clyde in early September to late October 1888, during which time he ate meals that were meatless but nutritionally inadequate for this eighteen-year-old man-child. On the Clyde, an English fellow passenger importuned him to eat meat, claiming that it was “so cold in England that one cannot possibly live there without meat.”40 Gandhi politely turned away the advice, saying that if what the passenger was saying were true, he would simply pack up his bags and return to India before violating his vow. Gandhi’s fidelity to his pledge (as well as his fear of having to speak English) resulted for some days in his eating spartan meals in his cabin, meals consisting of nothing more than sweets and fruits brought from home, before other arrangements could be made. After finding his initial lodging in England at the Victoria Hotel, Gandhi apparently had little luck there, reporting that he paid the princely sum of £3 for his short stay and got very little to eat for it. He was forced to continue eating from his store of Indian sweets and fruits. Even after Gandhi left the hotel and secured private, less expensive rooms, he found that all the meatless dishes put in front of him were “tasteless and insipid.” This, plus a serious case of homesickness, left this young man lying in bed at night, wondering whether he had erred in leaving home, pining over the loss of his mother’s affections, and unable to check the rivers of tears flowing down his cheeks.

  Gandhi had come to England with several letters of introduction, including one addressed to Dr. Pranjivan Mehta, a medical doctor as well as a barrister-in-training himself, who hailed from near Gandhi’s hometown. Mehta quickly recognized Gandhi’s need for some social context, for he convinced him to move and take on a roommate, all in preparation for eventually taking quarters with an English family. Mehta’s argument was that Gandhi, after all, had come to England not so much to get an education as to gain “experience in English life and customs,” something life with a family would provide. Gandhi soon thereafter moved in with Dalpatram Shukla, another law student from Gandhi’s region. It became Shukla’s job to train the young Gandhi in English ways—in the course of which he could not get Gandhi to eat meat. Despite his profound dislike for the landlady’s nonmeat dishes, Gandhi resisted sampling her meat dishes. Seeing Gandhi’s resistance, Shukla lost his temper and exploded: “Had you been my own brother, I would have sent you packing. What is the value of a vow made before an illiterate mother, and in ignorance of the conditions here?”41 Gandhi, however, remained steadfast—and hungry. After a month of training in English ways, save meat eating, Mehta and Shukla found a family in West Kensington willing to board Gandhi. Again, he found the meals insipid and complains in his autobiography that he continued to “practically . . . starve.”42 But eventually the day came when his landlady informed him that there were vegetarian restaurants in London. Gandhi seized on this information and found, to his great happiness, the Central Restaurant off London’s Farringdon Street. He related later that the very sight of the restaurant filled him with joy.

  What Gandhi found for his soul, however, was to become even more important than that evening’s meal. On his way in to the Central he noticed a window display featuring Henry Salt’s Plea for Vegetarianism. He devoured not only a hearty meal but Salt’s book, which, he later states, turned his life around:

  From the date of reading this book, I may claim to have become a vegetar
ian by choice. . . . I had all along abstained from meat in the interest of truth and of the vow I had taken, but had wished at the same time that every Indian should be a meat-eater, and had looked forward to being one myself someday, and to enlisting others in the cause. The choice was now made in favour of vegetarianism, the spread of which henceforward became my mission.43

  His “appetite for dietetic studies” whetted by Salt, Gandhi “went in for all books available on vegetarianism.”44 Eventually Gandhi found new rooms (he was constantly moving during his London student days) in order that he might economize by cooking for himself. By mid-1890 Gandhi was able to report that he “enjoyed the best of health and had to work very hard if not the hardest as there were only five months left for the final examination.”45 During this pre-exam period Gandhi was invited by Josiah Oldfield, a leading vegetarian whose acquaintance Gandhi had made earlier, to a vegetarian conference to be held in September 1890. As a result of his participation in this conference, Gandhi was almost immediately invited to become a member of the Executive Committee of the London Vegetarian Society (LVS), an invitation he accepted. With exams looming, however, Gandhi appears not to have taken much of a role on the committee.46

  After the completion of his final examinations, by contrast, Gandhi was a beehive of vegetarian activity. Giving a preview of the prodigious output of writing for which he would later become known, Gandhi produced a series of articles for The Vegetarian, the weekly journal of the LVS. First he wrote a series of six essays on the practice of vegetarianism in India. This series was followed by a series of three articles on the festivals of India. Gandhi then delivered a speech titled “The Foods of India” before the LVS and had it printed thereafter in the Vegetarian Messenger, the society’s Manchester voice. Gandhi also gave a two-part interview to The Vegetarian. In addition, he found time to get embroiled in the inner politics of the LVS, to start up a local vegetarian club with his friend and eventual roommate Josiah Oldfield, and to make appearances in a number of forums on behalf of vegetarianism.

  This intense round of activity closed out Gandhi’s time as a student in London. In the months since his bar finals, while his fellow students were learning to draft conveyances and pleadings in chambers, Gandhi’s involvement with the vegetarian movement was schooling him in ways of “organizing and conducting institutions.”47

  He also was learning something about himself with no little import for a young barrister’s future, a lesson with ominous implications for the career that his family had chosen for him.

  He was terrified, sometimes to the point of paralysis, of speaking in public.

  TWO

  * * *

  The Barrister Who Couldn’t Speak

  No client would be fool enough to engage me.

  GANDHI

  FOR SOMEONE WHO CLAIMED TO be in love with London, Gandhi’s behavior might easily be counted as strange. He received his call to the bar on June 10, was sworn in before the High Court on June 11, and on June 12 he was on a boat for India. Perhaps this was Gandhi the responsible son, one who knew that every extra day in London was an added burden on the family finances. Indeed, this might have been a Gandhi who knew that such expenses were doubly problematic: not only was he exhausting his family’s capital, but he had no prospects of replenishing the family coffers any time soon.

  UNPREPARED TO PRACTICE

  Gandhi’s family had sent its most promising son to England to obtain the elevated status of barrister and the lifestyle that accompanied it. Those who had sacrificed to put Gandhi through his legal training in England expected to be rewarded for their sacrifices upon Gandhi’s return to India.1 His faithful brother, Lakshmidas, in anticipation of Gandhi’s arrival home as the wealthy barrister, embarked upon a course of upgrading his family’s living style even before Gandhi’s return,2 a pretense Gandhi himself endorsed and furthered when he introduced European clothing and food to his family in Rajkot upon his arrival there. Surely, under these circumstances, Lakshmidas cannot be blamed for thinking that Gandhi would establish for himself and his family the comfortable life of a prestigious barrister. Gandhi, however, came back after three long and expensive years in England wholly unprepared to make a return to his family. He carried with him the title of barrister—and precious little else.

  To begin with, he had no knowledge of Indian law. Despite a prolonged British effort at codification, the operation of a significant part of the legal system continued to be governed by a body of traditional Hindu and Muslim law that applied to succession, inheritance, marriage, adoption, guardianship, family relations, wills, gifts, and partition. Many practitioners would consider these basic aspects of practice, yet Gandhi had no knowledge of them.

  Not only was he unacquainted with important aspects of the doctrinal side of the law, but Gandhi also had equally little knowledge of its practical side, having forgone the opportunity to apprentice. One cannot overstate the paucity of his practical knowledge. One example might suffice. The most basic written instrument in the practice of law is the complaint, the document a plaintiff files against a defendant to begin an ordinary civil suit. While Gandhi’s family expected him to start up a “swinging practice” forthwith, the fact was, as he confessed to himself, “he had not even learnt how to draft a plaint.”3

  SETTING UP SHOP IN BOMBAY

  Gandhi was brutally honest about his position in 1891 when he later wrote in his autobiography: “To start practice in Rajkot would have meant sure ridicule. I had hardly the knowledge of a qualified vakil4 and yet I expected to be paid ten times his fee! No client would be fool enough to engage me. And even if such a one was to be found, should I add arrogance and fraud to my ignorance, and increase the burden of debt I owed to the world?”5 Faced with these rather serious disabilities, and seeing nothing for an inexperienced barrister in Rajkot, Gandhi decided to shift operations to Bombay, where he hoped to accomplish three goals: to remedy his deficiency in Indian law, to obtain some knowledge of the workings of the Bombay High Court, and to pick up a few cases.

  Gandhi’s study of Indian law proved to be the easiest of these tasks. He set about studying Mayne’s Indian Law, which he read with “deep interest.”6 He had no similar luck plowing through the Civil Procedure Code, a failure readily forgiven by anyone who has attempted to study civil procedure—the driest of subjects—as an abstract matter, as opposed to learning it in the context of simulated or actual cases. The Evidence Act, by contrast, held more of Gandhi’s interest, perhaps because he knew that one of the giants of the Indian bar, Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, had memorized the act by heart.

  Gandhi’s experience observing arguments before the High Court was neither productive nor uplifting. With nothing at stake for himself or for a client in the proceedings, there was little to hold his interest. Moreover, Gandhi had insufficient knowledge of the law in general or the argued cases in particular to be able to follow, much less learn from, the line of the arguments. For any neutral party observing appellate arguments, one wit has observed, the experience is about as stimulating as being a lighthouse attendant. Thus, it is not surprising that Gandhi’s main occupation while at the High Court was to sleep, a habit shared by so many other “observers” that Gandhi actually came to think it was “fashionable to doze in the High Court.”7

  Neither Gandhi’s attempt to learn Indian law nor his study of the High Court’s workings was a demanding enough activity to occupy his complete attention. Reminiscent of his experiments with top hats and French-language lessons, he used his free time to play the wealthy barrister. He hired one Ravishankar to cook for him at his residence. Gandhi quickly learned that Ravishankar knew little about cooking, and so, with the initiative that hallmarked so much of his life, he threw himself into running the kitchen along with his pupil, teaching Ravishankar something about vegetarianism along the way.

  A FAILURE OF NERVE

  With his days passing in such desultory fashion, it is no wonder that Gandhi leapt at the chance to represent an actual p
aying client in court when a defendant in a civil case, an individual by the name of Mamibai, asked Gandhi to represent her. Little did Gandhi realize how terribly unprepared he was by nature or experience to advocate a client’s cause in open court.

  To be an advocate for a client in court requires a fair amount of confidence in one’s ability to engage without hesitation in the rambunctious and fractious give-and-take of the courtroom. It requires a lawyer to be a public person, one who is not afraid to stand before a judge and argue, one who is not afraid to take on opposing lawyers and parties, one who is not afraid to vigorously defend one’s position or to attack an opponent’s position—all in public. In sum, the lawyer as a public person is one who has no lack of nerve.

  In the year 1891 twenty-two-year-old Mohandas K. Gandhi, barrister at law, lacked nerve. As a result, his representation of Mamibai ended in failure and embarrassment. Mamibai’s case was being processed at the lowest level of the judicial system, the equivalent of what is called small claims court in some jurisdictions.8 Because Mamibai was the defendant, the first task of Gandhi’s courtroom career was to cross-examine the witnesses for the plaintiff. As Gandhi stood up to conduct his first cross-examination as a barrister, he was gripped with fear. He became dizzy from stage fright and his head began to reel. His heart sank. Even his eyesight failed him. He could not get control of his panic. He was unable to ask a single question. He staggered to his seat and told the client’s agent that he could not go on. Then, unnerved, he stumbled out of the courtroom in disgrace.

  A HISTORY OF FEAR

  Gandhi’s extreme discomfort in his role as a courtroom advocate was the predictable end point for a person who only rarely was able to find his voice in public. From the time Gandhi was a high school student (and probably before), public speaking had almost always reduced him to a nervous, quivering bowl of mush. Just before Gandhi set sail for London in 1888, his high school classmates in Rajkot held a farewell celebration in his honor. In his autobiography Gandhi recalls that he had difficulty reading his prepared notes, that he was dizzy from nervousness, that he stammered and that “his whole frame shook.”9 Such a reaction should have been expected from Gandhi, inasmuch as he was an extremely shy and timid youth, avoiding not only the rigors of childhood sports but even the casual company of other children.