by Robert Payne
The examinations were scarcely more difficult than eating dinners. He was required to take two examinations, one in Roman Law and the other in Common Law. Textbooks were prescribed, but few troubled to read them, preferring to read “cramming” notes which were easily available. It was generally agreed that a bright student could “cram” Roman Law in a couple of weeks, while the more arduous Common Law took two or three months. The examination papers were not designed to trip the candidate and were made deliberately easy. Mohandas took his studies very seriously, and spent a good deal of money on the prescribed textbooks.
His chief problem was still his lack of facility in English. On Dalpatram Shukla’s advice he cultivated the regular reading of newspapers, spending about an hour a day glancing Over The Daily News, The Daily Telegraph and The Pall Mall Gazette. Travel stories, with plenty of illustrations, fascinated him. He had never read newspapers before, and thus a whole new world opened out to him. Only a few months before, Alfred Harmsworth had begun to publish Answers to Correspondents, and this racy magazine, which grew racier every year, amused and delighted him. “It was smutty, but witty and very readable always,” he said later. He rejoiced in murder trials and read them avidly. In particular, there were the long reports of the trial of Mrs. Maybrick accused of murdering her husband with arsenic. The trial of Richard Piggott accused of forging a letter implicating Parnell in the Phoenix House murder also aroused his interest, and he was particularly struck by Charles Russell’s cross-examination of Piggott. The cross-examination was so deft and relentless that Piggott broke down completely. Mohandas was learning through the newspapers his first lessons in cross-examination.
It was a time when Home Rule for Ireland was being violently debated. In 1886 Gladstone had attempted with his Home Rule bill to grant Ireland a measure of autonomy, but the bill was defeated chiefly because the Ulstermen threatened to come out into open rebellion if it were passed. Gladstone was determined to advance the Irish cause, but even with his immense prestige he was incapable of exerting any influence. The Indian students in London watched Ireland carefully: if Ireland could wrest its freedom from the British government, then India too might be able to elect its own government and rule itself. Mohandas had come to England at a crucial time.
But although he read the newspapers with considerable care, his chief interest was in learning English, not in studying the social scene. No one reading his account of his London years in his autobiography would guess that England was going through a period of social upheaval. He was strangely self-centered, timid, and lonely, weeping at night whenever he remembered Rajkot and Porbandar and his abandoned family. Above all, he was concerned with food and the keeping of his vow. Food—the proper food, the most nutritious food, the food which did least harm to the physical system—became an obsession with him, and more than fifty years later, after countless experiments with food, he would still spend many long hours supervising experiments in nutrition without, so far as anyone has been able to discover, knowing more than a few elementary facts about the complex chemistry of digestion or human metabolism.
From his Anglo-Indian landlady he heard of vegetarian restaurants, but since they were rarely advertised he was unable to find them. One day, walking from the Inner Temple along Fleet Street and up Farringdon Street, he chanced upon one of the few vegetarian restaurants then open in the center of London. He leaped with joy. At long last he had found what he had been seeking with all his heart and soul. There were some pamphlets under a glass window near the door, among them A Plea for Vegetarianism by H. S. Salt. He bought the pamphlet for a shilling, then walked into the dining-room, where he consumed a large and satisfying vegetarian meal. For the first time since he had come to England, he was no longer hungry.
During the following weeks he read most of the available vegetarian literature, including the two books which were regarded as classics in their field: Howard Williams’s The Ethics of Diet and Dr. Anna Kings-ford’s The Perfect Way in Diet. They are rather ecstatic and idealistic works, which assume as a matter of course that vegetables were supplied by God to fill men’s needs and that vegetarians are in some way in tune with God’s infinite purposes, while non-vegetarians are morally corrupt and outside the pale. There are frequent appeals to Shelley, Thoreau and Ruskin. Mohandas read the books with the feeling of someone receiving a heaven-sent gift, overjoyed to learn that even among Englishmen there were some who could understand the vow he had given to the Jain priest.
Not all his friends shared his enthusiasm. One day his Richmond friend invited him to a dinner to be followed by a visit to the theater. Diliner was at the Holborn Restaurant at the comer of Kingsway, and once more Mohandas found himself in a place of fearful luxury, the first palatial restaurant he had entered since leaving the Victoria Hotel. The waiter served soup. Mohandas was suspicious, summoned the waiter and asked if it was vegetable soup. His companion was outraged. “You are too clumsy for decent society!” he exploded. “If you cannot behave yourself, you had better go. Feed in some other restaurant and wait for me outside.” Mohandas was not in the least dismayed by the outburst. There was a vegetarian restaurant nearby, and he thought he would settle down to an appetizing vegetarian dinner and then accompany his friend Shukla Saheb to the theater. But the vegetarian restaurants always closed early, and that night he went without his dinner.
The truth was, of course, that he could not afford to spend much money on food or on anything else. The total sum of money available to him from the family property and the sale of his wife’s jewelry was about £666 over a period of three years, and he realized that he needed about £350 a year if he was to pay all his fees, buy all his textbooks, entertain all his guests, and wear the clothes suitable to a young lawyer. Two months after reaching England, he sketched out a letter to Mr. Lely, which he sent off to Laxmidas for his approval. In the letter Mohandas reminded the British agent that they had already discussed the possibility of financial aid, and he now felt the time had come to make a formal request:
In order to live here comfortably and receive good education, I shall require an extra help of £400. I am a native of Porbandar and as such that is the only place I can look up to for such help.
During the late rule of H.H. the Rana Saheb, very little encouragement was given to education. But we can naturally expect that education must be encouraged under the British Administration. I am one who can take advantage of such encouragement.
I hope, therefore, that you will please render to me some pecuniary help, and thereby confer great and much needed obligation on me.
Nothing, of course, came of this appeal, and a similar appeal to Colonel Watson, the political agent at Kathiawar and a close friend of his father, remained unanswered.
The experiments in vegetarian food were followed by experiments in truth. Being shy and nervous, he was a prey to the motherly instincts of many old and middle-aged women and the advances of younger women. An old woman who helped him to read the menu in a Brighton hotel invited him to dine with her every Sunday when he returned to London, an invitation which he willingly accepted. Regularly, every Sunday, he would dine with her, and every Sunday he would be introduced to some unmarried girls who were also invited to dine. Some of them were coy, and the old lady delighted in leaving him alone with them. Tongue-tied, almost speechless, he would somehow attempt a conversation only to find himself caught up in inextricable confusion, his words misunderstood and his very silences regarded as breathless adoration. One particular girl had already been chosen as his future bride. In this dilemma he decided after many sleepless nights to declare the true state of affairs and composed a letter to the old lady begging her forgiveness for not having told her that he was already married and the father of a son. Then he waited in trepidation for her reply, afraid that he would no longer be invited to the Sunday dinners. It was a long and laborious letter, written with his heart’s blood. The old lady sent a kindly reply, saying that she was not in the least outraged by his confessi
on and expected him to come to dinner as usual. “We shall look forward to hearing all about your child-marriage,” she replied, “and to the pleasure of laughing at your expense.” Mohandas was inclined to treat the affair with the utmost seriousness. “God wanted to rid me of the canker of untruth,” he wrote later, not without some self-congratulation over the dangers so perilously avoided.
But these were afterthoughts: the reality lay in poverty, loneliness, hunger and the torments of his own conscience. Even at the meetings of the National Indian Association, where Indian students gathered to attend lectures, entertain one another and meet visiting dignitaries, he usually crept into a corner, rarely speaking unless spoken to, conscious of some strangeness in himself which kept him apart from everyone else. Only shock treatment could induce him to come out of his shell. This shock treatment was administered one day by a visiting Gujarati poet called Narayan Hemchandra, a small, heavily bearded, round-faced pockmarked man, who dressed as he pleased and behaved with complete indifference to social custom. He wore queer clothes: a pair of baggy trousers, a long brown wrinkled coat, no necktie, a woolen cap with a tassel. Mohandas had read his poems, and was sufficiently impressed by them to want to make the man’s acquaintance.
Narayan Hemchandra entered his life like a breath of mountain air. The strange man with the shapeless nose and the pockmarks scratched all over his face wanted to read all the poetry that had ever been written and to translate the best of it into Gujarati. Since he was a good poet, he had never felt the slightest inclination to learn grammar; for him “to run” might just as easily be a noun and “horse” could just as easily be a verb. He had a ferocious intellectual appetite, intended to learn English, French and German at once and to travel in a leisurely fashion over the world. He knew or thought he knew Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi and Hindi, and had translated the works of Debendranath Tagore, the father of Rabindranath, from Bengali into Gujarati, but this was clearly only a beginning. What especially impressed Mohandas, who tried to teach him some English, was his simplicity and single-minded devotion to literature. He lived on a pittance, always appeared in the same worn clothes, and was always good-humored and down-to-earth. They took their meals together, for they were both vegetarians, and learnedly discussed the intricate mechanics of the English language. When Mohandas asked him why he continued to wear nondescript garments, Narayan Hemchandra answered: “You civilized fellows are all cowards. Great men never look at a per-sons exterior. They think of his heart.”
These words were carefully filed away for future reference. In time Mohandas would find himself sharing the same attitude to clothes.
But in a photograph taken shortly after his arrival in England, probably in the spring of 1889, he wears the regulation uniform of a student at the Inner Temple: a high starched wing collar, a bow tie, a starched shirt, a stiff black coat and waistcoat. In this uniform he looks ill at ease, with an oddly puzzled expression in the eyes and a downward curve of the thick, sensual lips. He has made himself as appealing as possible to the photographer, for the hair is neatly slicked down and parted slightly right of center according to the fashion of the time, and he wears his clothes with considerable grace even though part of the stiff collar is biting into the neck. But the eyes seem to be at war with the mouth, the ears stick out alarmingly, and there is more than a hint that he is desperately nervous, as he searches unavailingly for something beyond his grasp. He looks in fact like one of those students who will never amount to very much.
The English Gentleman
ABOUT THIS TIME a strange alteration in Gandhi’s character took place. It was so strange, and so inexplicable, that in later years he would find himself shaking his head and wondering how it all came about Quite suddenly he decided to abandon his habitual modesty and to present himself as an English gentleman in full regalia. Indian students in London were surprised by the transformation, and wondered whether he had inherited a fortune, for he suddenly appeared among them wearing a high silk top hat which was so “burnished” that it shone like a mirror, a flashy rainbow-colored tie under which there could be seen a shirt of fine striped cambric. He wore a morning coat, a double-breasted vest, dark striped trousers, patent-leather boots and spats. To complete the attire he carried a pair of leather gloves of the finest quality and sported a silver-mounted cane.
It was not only the outer man who had been transformed; the inner man was also changed almost beyond recognition. He walked with a jaunty step, smiled often, sang the latest songs, and presented himself as a man of the world. He spent hours admiring himself in the mirror every day, parting his rebellious hair in the approved manner, showing himself to advantage. He seemed not to be alarmed by the crippling expense of appearing as a man of fashion—the morning suit, tailored in Bond Street, cost ten pounds, and the top hat cost nineteen shillings. Since he also needed a watch-chain, he wrote to his brother and asked for a double chain of gold to complete his attire.
To appear as a man of fashion was merely the beginning. In addition it was necessary to learn the arts of fashion, and accordingly he sought out a tutor to teach him French, and another to teach him elocution. He attended dancing classes, paying three guineas to the instructor, but after six lessons he decided regretfully that his feet were incapable of following the music, and he abandoned them. It was a time when people still held musical soirées, and he decided he would learn to play the violin. Another three guineas was spent on buying a violin, and he obtained the services of a young woman as music teacher, only to learn after a few lessons that he had no gift for scratching out tunes on a violin. “The violin was to cultivate the ear, it only cultivated disappointment,” he wrote later. He begged his music teacher to dispose of the violin at any price it might fetch, and wondered aloud whether he had not been pursuing false ideas. The music teacher was sympathetic, sold the violin for him, and helped him to understand that he would accomplish nothing by adopting the manners and foibles of a fashionable man about town.
These strange aberrations lasted for about three months, but certain habits persisted. Although he lost the desire to dress flashily, he acquired a liking for good clothes which did not leave him for many years. It was at this time, too, that he imagined he possessed a gift for elocution, and studied the Standard Elocutionist of Alexander Melville Bell, the father of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. It was a sad business, and he soon wearied of it “Mr. Bell rang the bell of alarm in my ear and I awoke,” he wrote, and the student of elocution went the way of the student of the dance and the violin.
The infatuation with English finery had its origins perhaps in his loneliness and poverty, the knowledge that he belonged to a small and unhappy minority lost in the drab streets of crowded London. He was not alone in being infected with the disease, for it was observed that other Indian students would suddenly dress up like peacocks and parade their feathers for a few weeks or months. Then the infatuation would pass, as they saw that they gained neither status nor girl friends by their display, with only their debts and their broken hopes to remind them of their days of dubious triumph.
With the realization that he was gaining nothing by aping the English gentleman, there came the certain knowledge that he was living above his means. He began to examine his living habits closely, and came to the conclusion that the thirty shillings he spent weekly for board and lodging in an Anglo-Indian household in West Kensington was very largely wasted money. He had no very great liking for the people in the boardinghouse. The rules were strict; he had to be punctual at meals, and there was an unwritten rule that from time to time he should take out the members of the family to dinner. He sometimes dined out alone; there were afternoon teas to be paid for; and he was spending ten shillings a week on extra meals not included in the boardinghouse budget. He was spending about twelve pounds a month on food and lodging, and he felt the time had come to reduce his expenditure by a half. He realized that a good deal of the money spent at the boardinghouse was being paid for the priv
ilege of their company, and this privilege was one he could afford to dispense with. He would move elsewhere. He rented two rooms and cooked his own breakfast and supper, which consisted of oatmeal porridge and cocoa. He saved money by walking where previously he had always ridden in a conveyance, calculating that he now walked eight or ten miles a day, to the improvement of his health and appetite. He had been prodigal of money in the past, but now he took careful account of his expenses. Every day he would draw up a list of the moneys he had spent, even to the postage stamps and the pennies paid for newspapers. This, too, was a habit which never left him. Writing about these days many years later, he permitted himself the luxury of moralizing on the subject of debits and credits. “Let every youth take a leaf out of my book and make it a point to account for everything that comes into and goes out of his pocket, and like me he is sure to be a gainer in the end,” he wrote. Sometimes, when he was world famous, a visitor to one of his ashrams would find him bent over his writing desk and solemnly adding up the expenses of the day.