Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  That an Arab bodyguard had defended Ota Gandhi on that occasion was one of the stories on which his children and grandchildren were raised. We may mark this early link of the Gandhis with the Muslim world, which lay not far across the Arabian Sea and was also connected to a stretching desert that began near Porbandar and extended across Kutch and Sindh into West Asia.

  Possessing a meagre knowledge of written Gujarati and none of English, Karamchand, also known as Kaba, had however a keen grasp of practical affairs. Putlibai, Mohandas’s mother, was his fourth wife. Mohandas, her youngest child, had been preceded by a girl, Raliat, and two boys, Laxmidas and Karsandas. Kaba’s first two wives had each delivered a girl; each wife had died soon after giving birth. The third wife, childless, died early. Muli and Pankunwar were the names of Mohan’s half-sisters.

  When Mohan, or Monia as his parents called him, was four, Kaba moved as diwan to the thakore or ruler of Rajkot and then became diwan in another of Kathiawar’s princely states, Wankaner. Putlibai, other relatives, and a loving nurse named Rambha reared Mohan in the Porbandar house. Monia, terrified of ghosts and spirits, was told by Rambha that the divine name of Rama would drive his fears away. Having ‘more faith in her than in her remedy’, Mohan recited the name but the terrors did not disappear (Autobiography, p. 28).1

  As the favourite child, which he was, of an influential father and of a mother who ‘had strong common sense,’ ‘was well informed about all matters of state’ and of whose intelligence ‘the ladies of the court thought highly’ (A 3), Monia was petted inside and outside his home and probably also in the Dhool Shala (‘School in the dust’) to which he was sent. Among those offering affection to him were Khushalchand, a cousin eighteen years older who had been raised by Kaba and Putlibai and lived in their house, and his wife Deva, who found it hard not to pick up the child, whose partly curly hair and broad face she found attractive.2

  In 1876 or so, Kaba Gandhi returned from Wankaner to Rajkot to join the Rajasthanik court which addressed disputes involving members of Kathiawar’s ruling families. Putlibai moved to Rajkot with her children. Her youngest son, now seven, took his fears with him to Rajkot, yet much love, too, had been stroked and whispered into the child.

  In Rajkot Mohan first went to a primary school and soon thereafter to a taluka or suburban school. In his Autobiography, written when he was in his mid-fifties, he claimed that he could ‘well recollect’ not merely the names but also ‘other particulars’ of the teachers who taught him in the primary school when he was seven or eight (A 4). Because of this capacity to observe and remember, and perhaps some other signs as well, Kaba Gandhi said, when Mohan was ten, that the boy would some day be sent to London for higher education.3

  ‘When I was an urchin of ten,’ Gandhi would recall in his Autobiography, ‘I envied the Brahman lads sporting bunches of keys tied to their sacred threads, and I wished I could do likewise’ (A 351-2). His wish was met, for at this time the Banias of Kathiawar were asserting the right to wear the shoulder-to-waist thread. Mohan wore it and also flaunted a bunch of keys tied to the thread, though he did not need any keys.

  Lacking the sea that in Porbandar evoked a wider world, Rajkot had a parochial flavour. But it had a larger population (about 23,000 in 1879) and was the seat of the Raj’s political agent in Kathiawar. By 1880, Kaba had built for his extended family a large house in Rajkot, with high walls around the compound and a prominent gateway. At the age of eleven or twelve, after passing an entrance examination where he was placed ninth out of seventy boys, Mohan was enrolled in Rajkot’s Alfred High School, where English was the medium of instruction.

  At about this time the governor of Bombay visited Rajkot, and Kaba Gandhi was required by the Resident of Rajkot to appear in European-style stockings and boots at a durbar in the governor’s honour. The ‘disgust and torture’ on Kaba’s face while ‘he was putting his legs into his stockings and his feet into ill-fitting and inflexible boots’ was seen by his youngest boy and lastingly remembered.4 On another occasion Kaba Gandhi objected openly when an assistant political agent, a Briton, spoke discourteously of the Rajkot thakore. Asked to apologize, Kaba Gandhi refused, whereupon he was detained under a tree for some hours.

  In 1947 Gandhi would provide a glimpse of the climate in Rajkot (and the rest of India) in the 1880s: ‘The (1857) Sepoy War was quelled by means of superior force. Outwardly, things quieted down but the hatred against an imposed rule went deep underground… The British established schools and law courts and Indians took to these with enthusiasm… but in spite of this they could not bear the insult or the degradation involved in political subjugation’ (94: 111) .5 In his teenage years in Rajkot, Mohan shared both the enthusiasm and the humiliation.

  The Raj’s cultural and political impositions were matched by rules laid down for their children by parents like Kaba and Putlibai. These rules had a religious or cultural basis. Kaba Gandhi was faithful to the Vaishnava tradition he had inherited, which called for ceremonies at temples of Rama and Krishna. More liberal than some other Modh Banias of his time, Kaba and his wife also went to the ‘rival’ Shiva temple, and their home was often visited by Jain monks. At times Muslim and Zoroastrian friends visited Kaba in his home and talked about their faiths—Mohan thought that Kaba listened ‘with respect and often with interest’ (A 29).

  The worldly-wise Putlibai was also strongly religious and fasted frequently. The Pranami sect to which her parents belonged was said to bear an Islamic influence and did not worship idols, but Putlibai seemed entirely comfortable with the Krishna, Rama and Shiva images honoured by the Gandhis; and she respected Jain monks.

  When Mohan was ‘hardly yet twelve’, Putlibai told her children that they were not to touch Uka, the ‘untouchable’ boy who cleaned the lavatories in the Gandhi house in Rajkot. Apparently, Mohan had ‘tussles’ with her on the question and smiled at her reasoning, yet he tried to obey the injunction. Any accidental contact with Uka or any other ‘untouchable’ called for a cleansing bath.

  If a bath could not be easily had, Mohan was to cancel the ‘unholy touch’, his mother told him, by touching any Muslim passing by (23:42). The second pollution would remove the first. This sense of Muslims as unclean coexisted with Kaba’s willingness to hear about Islam; we do not know what steps, if any, were taken to purify the house after a Muslim’s visit.

  Another firm injunction was against touching or eating meat, from which it followed, and Kaba made this plain, that a medical career was not open to Mohan: it required the dissection of animals. Smoking, too, was forbidden. And like other ‘high-caste’ boys including his brothers, Mohan tied his hair in a shikha or knot at the back of his head.

  Mohan and brother Karsan, two or three years Mohan’s senior but only a year ahead in high school, chafed violently at the rules and secretly broke them. To be ‘unable to do anything without the elders’ permission’ was ‘unbearable’ for Mohan and his brother. They smoked cigarette stumps thrown away by an uncle and pilfered a servant’s coppers to buy bidis. Frustrated by the small supply of stumps and coppers, and hating the secrecy they were forced to maintain, they thought of suicide. Fetching poisonous dhatura seeds from a jungle, they sought blessings at a temple and walked to a lonely corner. But their courage failed them and they chose ‘to put up with the lack of independence’ (A 22-3).

  Though this account was provided decades after the incident, the lines hint that even at the time that Mohan contemplated suicide, he was observing himself, and was amused.

  Yet it is clear that, conscious of his parents’ great love for him, Mohan was experiencing intense emotional conflict. Sung by itinerant showmen, an ‘agonized lament’ of an old blind couple over the death of their caring boy, Shravana, and a picture the showmen displayed of Shravana with a pole on his shoulder, with baskets in which his parents sat hanging at its ends, had gripped Mohan.

  The melting tune moved me deeply, and I played it on a concertina which my father had purchased for me (A 5).


  Remembered by relatives as a hyper-active child, Mohan was stirred, too, by a play to see which he had ‘secured [his] father’s permission’. It told the story of Harishchandra, who clung to the truth even when all his loved ones, and he himself, suffered greatly as a result.

  The play haunted the twelve-year-old boy, who evidently ‘acted Harishchandra to [himself] times without number’ and wept (A 5). Yet the boy who wanted to be like Shravana and Harishchandra was also the boy longing for independence and stealing coppers to experience it. Moreover, his schooling in the English language was isolating him from others in the family, including his father, who knew no English.

  If he argued when not quite twelve with his mother over touching the scavenging boy Uka, he rebelled also against the notion of pollution from contact with Muslims. In 1947 he would assert that his belief in ‘complete brotherhood’ among Hindus, Muslims and Parsis dated back to ‘before 1885’ to ‘before the Congress was born’. ‘At the time that communal unity possessed me, I was a lad twelve years old,’ he added (96: 330).

  That was his age when he joined Alfred High School, which had Hindu, Muslim and Parsi boys and Hindu and non-Hindu teachers. A seventy-eight-year-old man who looks back may of course imagine thoughts in his boyhood that did not exist, yet one has to be impressed by the number of times the older Gandhi spoke of his dreams at the age of twelve.

  When in January 1948, at the start of what would prove to be his last fast for Hindu-Muslim reconciliation, he again recalled his boyhood ‘dream’ of ‘amity’ between Hindus, Muslims and Parsis, he dated that dream to Rajkot and to a time when he ‘never even read the newspapers, could read English with difficulty, and my Gujarati was not satisfactory’ (98: 235). The description fits his opening year in Alfred High School.

  This boy-rebel was also the one, we may mark, who ‘would not be prompted’ when his teacher tried, ‘with the point of his boot’, to urge him to copy a word from a neighbour’s slate, an incident occurring during Mohan’s first year in high school, when an educational officer called Mr Giles, obviously a Briton, was visiting the school on an inspection (A 4).

  In 1882, before Mohan was fully thirteen, he was married to Kastur Makanji Kapadia, a Porbandar girl (with relatives in Rajkot) who was a few months older than he. Karsan and a cousin were also married at the same time. Bunched together for economy, the three weddings took place in Porbandar. The thakore of Rajkot detained Kaba until the last minute but offered stagecoaches that enabled the marriage party to reach Porbandar in three days instead of the usual five. However, the coach carrying Kaba Gandhi toppled over on the final day, and it was a badly injured and heavily bandaged Kaba who went through the ceremonies.

  Excited as the twelve-year-old groom was at his wedding, he did not fail to observe his father’s ‘brave face in spite of his injuries’ and ‘the places where he sat as he went through the different details of the ceremony’ (A 8). Mohan would also remember how he and Kastur sat on the wedding dais, took their seven steps, put sweets into each other’s mouths, and held each other’s hands ‘lovingly and for long’.6 Putlibai took him and Kastur to several Hindu temples in Porbandar, including the Vaishnava haveli and a Shiva temple and also to the shrine of a Muslim fakir.7

  An older Gandhi would blame his father for his ‘Child Marriage’ (the title of the chapter in the Autobiography about the wedding), which cost him a year of school. In 1882, however, Mohan thought only of ‘the prospect of good clothes to wear, drum-beating, processions, rich dinners, and a strange girl to play with’ (A 7).

  But the boy had entered a tempest. Though Kastur was often in her parents’ home—for three years, in all, out of the first five years after marriage (A 11)—Mohan felt desire for her and could gratify it. Yet Kastur, a beautiful and uneducated Modh Bania girl with a will of her own, offered resistance. She also asserted her independence, running without Mohan’s permission to friends and relatives in the neighbourhood, refusing to be taught English and arithmetic by Mohan, and shaming him by her natural courage.

  For his terrors had continued. Haunted by fears of thieves, ghosts, serpents and robbers, the boy-husband ‘did not dare to stir out of doors at night’ and could not sleep without a light near him. ‘Sleeping by [his] side’ was the lovely but resisting Kastur who ‘knew no fear of serpents and ghosts’ and ‘could go out anywhere in the dark’. Mohan felt ashamed of himself (A 17).

  He had read—‘from cover to cover’ (A 9)—booklets, presumably in Gujarati, that discussed subjects like conjugal love, thrift, child marriages and the advantages of long walks in fresh air. The Autobiography does not tell us how he obtained the booklets or who wrote them. Perhaps they were supplied by a high school teacher.

  Implementing the advice on walking, Mohan also seems to have accepted the norm of ‘lifelong faithfulness’—and watched Kastur to ensure that she too observed it. But ‘she made it a point to go out whenever and wherever she liked’. The more Mohan tried to restrain her, the greater the liberty she took. ‘Refusal to speak to one another became the order of the day with us, married children’ (A 9), but Mohan’s male pride also received a blow, though he remained ‘passionately fond’ of his bride and could not remove her from his mind even at school.

  The boy faced other storms. One day, at ‘a corner near the high school’, he heard a white evangelist pour ‘abuse on Hindus and their gods’. Mohan ‘could not endure’ what he heard and refused to go near the man again, and he was also angered by a rumour that a local Hindu converting to Christianity had been forced to eat beef and drink liquor (A 30).

  Another storm came in the shape of Sheikh Mehtab, who was a year older than Karsan and thus three or four years older than Mohan. The son of a jailor employed by the British in the Kathiawar town of Gondal, Mehtab evidently lived only ‘paces away’ from the Gandhis’ Rajkot home. Martin Green’s research tells us that Mehtab’s father, probably a Meman Muslim, earned about twenty rupees a month, compared with the 300 rupees that Kaba Gandhi had been making.8

  A friend and classmate of Karsan in the high school and attracting a ring of admirers, Mehtab was a rakish youth of strength, speed and daring—he ran fast, ran long distances, did the high and long jumps, swam swiftly and ‘could put up with any amount of corporal punishment’ (A 17). 9 In all this he provided a complete contrast to Mohan, who did not play either cricket or football in school, partly because he was needed at home to nurse an increasingly sick father, and also because he shrank from, or was not drawn to, competitive games.

  Nonetheless, in 1883 or 1884, shortly after Mohan’s (and Karsan’s) marriage, Mehtab seems to have selected Mohan as a lad to be captured. We have Mohan’s account of the start and course of his relationship with Mehtab but not the latter’s version. Yet we may guess that Mehtab had heard from Karsan of the ex-diwan’s expectations from, and plans for, Mohan, and also that Mehtab had noticed something a little different in Karsan’s young brother. It is more than likely, for instance, that in school Mehtab had heard of Mohan’s peculiar behaviour during Mr Giles’s visit. To Mehtab, Mohan was strange in a deplorable way but also strong. He was worth capturing.

  To this end Mehtab (joined by Karsan, who had left school after his marriage) mounted a campaign that played on Mohan’s eagerness to repair his male pride. Mehtab knew from Karsan of Mohan’s cowardly fears and of his frustration at Kastur’s independence, and also of Mohan’s annoyance at white rule.

  ‘You have to take meat and wine,’ Mohan was told by Mehtab. That was the only way to drive out the British. Also, meat would toughen Mohan, dissolve his terrors and, even if this last argument was not explicit, help in putting Kastur in her place. Didn’t Mohan know Narmad’s verse, Mehtab asked?

  Behold the mighty Englishman/ He rules the Indian small/ Because being a meat-eater/ He is five cubits tall.

  Mohan admitted he knew the Gujarati verse, which was in vogue in the school. Mohan should also know, Mehtab added, that distinguished Rajkot figures were eating meat. Karsa
n, physically much stronger than Mohan, revealed that he agreed with Mehtab and had indeed eaten meat himself. ‘You know how hardy I am,’ Mehtab went on, ‘and how great a runner too. It is because I am a meat-eater.’ Finally, Mohan was asked whether or not he had the courage to try.

  These conversations, punctuated with assurances of faithful friendship from Mehtab, took place over a period of weeks, during which Mehtab also displayed his swimming and athletic skills to Mohan, who was ‘dazzled’ by Mehtab’s ‘exploits’. In the end Mohan convinced himself that meat would make him and other Indians strong, enabling them to ‘defeat the English and make India free’ (A 16-18), and probably also, though he does not admit it in the Autobiography, help him in his equation with Kastur.

  ‘A day was fixed for beginning the experiment’ and a lonely spot by the river was chosen. Anticipated thrill overcame ‘the shame of hiding like a thief’, and Mohan went with Karsan to the tryst. The goat’s meat brought by Mehtab was ‘tough as leather’ and Mohan could not finish his portion. That night he had a nightmare in which he imagined a live goat bleating inside him.

  But he had committed himself to Mehtab, who on subsequent occasions cooked other delicacies along with meat, and also found access to ‘a State house, with dining hall, tables and chairs, in collusion with the chief cook there’. Mohan started relishing dishes with meat in them. But after about half a dozen feasts spread over a year or so, Mehtab (who paid for them in unknown ways) ran out of funds; and in his home Mohan found it increasingly hard to explain to his mother why he was not eating his dinner.