Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  Gandhi allowed that the shepherd had a flaw – one, not more. For ‘while a Brahmin would have his bath twice a day, and a Vaisya once a day, a shepherd would have only one bath a week’. Otherwise, it was ‘very rare to see any deformity in him … Without being fierce as a tiger, he is yet strong and brave and as docile as a lamb. Without being awe-inspiring, his stature is commanding. Altogether, the Indian shepherd is a very fine specimen of a vegetarian, and will compare very favourably with any meat-eater so far as bodily strength goes’.38

  For someone who never heard English at home, who began learning the language only at the age of eleven, and whose Matriculation marks were so mediocre, Gandhi’s prose was surprisingly clear and direct. Noteworthy is his passing chastisement of colonial rule (for promoting the sale and consumption of alcohol) and his praise of the way of life of the shepherd. There were communities of pastoralists in Kathiawar, who came after every monsoon to graze their flocks in the large gau-char, or pastureland, that lay outside most towns in the region.39 Gandhi would have seen them here, and also met them during fairs and festivals, when shepherds came peddling their wares. It may also be that he was influenced by the current of romantic anti-industrialism present in the thought of Henry Salt, and of friends of Salt like Edward Carpenter, who, like William Wordsworth and John Ruskin before them, believed that the farmer and shepherd represented a purer, more natural way of life as compared to the businessman or factory worker.40

  Now that he was in print, the novice writer wanted more. The series on Indian vegetarians was followed by three articles on Indian festivals.41 The first series was then reprised for a different journal, in a long essay on ‘The Foods of India’ which ended with the hope that ‘the time will come when the great difference now existing between the food habits of meat-eating in England and grain-eating in India will disappear, and with it some other differences which, in some quarters, mar the unity of sympathy that ought to exist between the two countries’. ‘In the future,’ thought this Indian visitor to England, ‘we shall tend towards unity of custom, and also unity of hearts’.42

  Gandhi’s involvement with the vegetarians of London was far more important to him than is commonly recognized. Had he not joined their Society, he would have kept to his compatriots, as Indian students abroad were wont to do at the time (and sometimes still are). These first, close friendships with English people expanded his mind and his personality. He learnt to relate to people of different races and religious beliefs, to mix, mingle and eat with them, and even to share a home with them.

  The London vegetarians provided Mohandas Gandhi with his first exposure to collective social action and with his first public platform. Gandhi’s published oeuvre covers dozens of volumes and ranges across many different subjects. It is a striking if little noticed fact that his writing career began with these lucid, informative and surprisingly confident series of essays on the foods and festivals of India. For his Bombay Matric and his Inner Temple barrister’s certificate, Gandhi had to cram a mass of facts and bring them out in the order required by the examiners. But in crafting these articles for The Vegetarian, he had to apply his mind more intelligently; the facts within him had to be shepherded into a coherent, persuasive argument for an audience with backgrounds very different from his own.

  Gandhi the cultivator of friendships across racial and religious boundaries; Gandhi the organizer and mobilizer; Gandhi the writer, thinker and propagandist – all these Gandhis were first displayed in and through his membership of that famously obscure body, the Vegetarian Society of London.

  As the readers of The Vegetarian were being introduced to the foods of India, a more widely read weekly was presenting a very different picture of the subcontinent. This was the Illustrated London News, which regularly ran items on India, on such topics as shikar (polo), and the pacification of hill tribes. The issue of 28 February 1891 printed a sketch of a turbaned maharaja in a palanquin, passing supplicants on the street holding out their palms for alms. The portrait carried the headline: ‘Riches and Poverty: A Sketch in an Indian Bazaar’.

  In truth, the city in which the weekly was printed also had its extremes of riches and destitution. This ‘metropolis of wealth and grandeur, culture and sophistication was also a hell of starving, degrading and heart-rending poverty’. London in the nineteenth century was marked by a ‘vast extent of misery and distress’, which to a contemporary observer was ‘evidence of the rotten foundation on which the whole fabric of this gorgeous society rests, for I call that rotten which exhibits thousands upon thousands of human beings reduced to the lowest stage of moral and physical segregation …’ There was also another side to London, represented most vividly in the parties of the elite, which were distinguished by ‘the fact that some of the men and practically all the women [had] made the pursuit of pleasure their main occupation in life’. In these parties, as the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray acidly observed, mothers brought ‘their virgin daughters up to battered old rakes … ready to sacrifice their innocence for a fortune or a title’.43

  Mohandas Gandhi had no entrée into high society, into the balls and salons of the great houses in St James’s or Grosvenor Square. Nor did he rub shoulders with the labouring poor, whether in their homes in the East End, or in the factories and sweatshops where they worked. Gandhi’s encounters with English society were with the people in the middle. The three addresses he is known to have stayed in – Store Street, Tavistock Street and St Stephen’s Gardens – were all marked on Charles Booth’s 1889 ‘map of London poverty’ as being areas of ‘middle-class, well-to-do’ housing. Here he met, perforce, with landladies and shopkeepers, and on a more voluntary basis with the dissenters and radicals who came likewise from the middle classes.44

  In religious terms, Gandhi’s London experience was quite varied. He socialized with Hindus and with Theosophists, saw the odd atheist, and even attended service at a Congregational Church in Holborn. His social life was more constrained. The only rich man he met was Arnold F. Hills, owner of the Thames Iron Works, and founder and funder of The Vegetarian.45 Meanwhile, the closest this law student got to the working poor was to listen to their great spokesman in the House of Commons, Charles Bradlaugh.

  When he came to London, Gandhi was carrying a letter of introduction to Dadabhai Naoroji, the Parsi liberal who was the ‘undisputed leader’ of the Indian community in the United Kingdom. 46 It seems he was too shy to seek a private audience, but he often heard Naoroji speak at public meetings. At these meetings he also heard Bradlaugh, a friend of India and Indians, one of the ‘most strenuous and picturesque figures’ of British politics, a ‘self-assertive propagandist of Secularism and Republicanism’, a man ‘who came from the people and retained to the last some habits of speech which marked him out as a Londoner of the humbler classes’.47 ‘Every Indian [in London] knew Bradlaugh’s name’, remembered Gandhi in his autobiography. When the radical died in the first week of February 1891, Gandhi took a day off from his studies to attend the funeral at Woking. Bradlaugh was actively irreligious; and many atheists had turned out for the funeral. The Indian was struck more by the fact that ‘a few clergymen were also present to do him the last honours’.48

  On that journey to Bradlaugh’s funeral, Gandhi passed the first mosque ever built in England. Modelled on the Moti Masjid in Agra, this had some fine wood-carvings and a body of worshippers who included Queen Victoria’s Hindustani teacher. Opening its doors in the autumn of 1889, the mosque lay just outside Woking and was clearly visible to travellers on the train from London.49

  On the ship to London, and in his first few months in the city, Gandhi was much taken by the need to dress well. He wore his morning coat on visits to friends, brushing and ironing it beforehand. The collars of his shirts were always properly starched. His shoes were immaculately polished.

  The longer he stayed in London, however, the more Gandhi came to see the need to live more simply. The austere aesthetic of the Vegetarian Society was one rea
son; a second, the obligation not to be a burden on his family. While the rupee (or pound) value of their assets has not come down to us, we know that by Indian standards the Gandhis were upper middle-class. Kaba Gandhi was surely paid a handsome salary as Diwan of Porbandar and Rajkot. Over the generations, the family had acquired property and jewels as well. However, Kaba’s early death made the Gandhis less secure. Mohandas’s brothers had failed even to matriculate. The family’s hopes were now invested in the youngest son; hence the taking of a loan and the pawning of jewellery to send him to qualify as a barrister in London.

  In Gandhi’s first year in England, his living expenses amounted to about £12 a month. In his second year he brought this down to £4 a month. He stopped starching his shirts, inspired by ‘some unconventional gentlemen in England who have ceased adoring the fashion as a goddess’. He stopped wearing drawers in summer, thus saving on his washerman’s bill. He walked everywhere rather than rely on public transport. To save on stamps, he began sending postcards home rather than placing letters in envelopes. He shaved himself rather than go to a barber. He stopped buying newspapers, and read them in the public library instead.

  To aid his experiment in simple living, Gandhi bought a book by a Dr Nichol, called How to Live on Six Pence a Day. He set himself a slightly less daunting target: ‘to get good, nutritious, healthy and palatable [vegetarian] food for 9s[hillings] per week’. To meet it, he stopped drinking tea and coffee, and resolved only to buy fruits and vegetables that were in season.

  He was encouraged by the example of some great Englishmen who had radically cut down on their living costs. Charles Bradlaugh had exchanged a large house for two small rooms, before denying himself further, by lodging above a music shop. Of Cardinal Manning it was said that ‘his ordinary meal, in public or private, is a biscuit or a bit of bread and a glass of water’. Despite their frugality, noted Gandhi admiringly, the world knew both men to be ‘clever intellectually’ as well as ‘strong in body’.50

  On 10 June 1891, with those seventy-two dinners eaten – or half-eaten – Mohandas K. Gandhi was formally called to the bar. The next day he enrolled at the High Court. The same night he gave a farewell dinner to his fellow vegetarians, booking a room for twenty in a restaurant in Holborn. Here, as the Society’s journal reported, ‘Mr Gandhi, in a very graceful though somewhat nervous speech, welcomed all present, spoke of the pleasure it gave him to see the habit of abstinence from flesh progressing in England, related the manner in which his connection with the London Vegetarian Society arose, and in doing so took occasion to speak in a touching way of what he owed to Mr Oldfield.’ Later, in an interview he gave to the journal, Gandhi admitted that he had ‘left many things undone’ in his years in London. But as he returned home, he carried the ‘great consolation with me that I shall go back without having taken meat or wine, and that I know from personal experience that there are so many vegetarians in England’.51

  The following morning Gandhi took a train from Liverpool Street Station to the London docks. The ship that was to carry him back to India was an Australian steamer, the Oceana, a ‘vast floating island’ weighing 6,000 tons. This took him to Aden, where he transferred to the SS Assam, which was bound for Bombay.

  Gandhi wrote about the return journey for The Vegetarian. Since he was seeing the same things again, the account lacks the enchantment and sense of wonder that characterized his narrative of the voyage out of India. He noted that while the staff on the Oceana were polite and neat, the Portuguese waiters on the Assam ‘murdered the Queen’s English’, and were ‘also sulky and slow’. He was one of only two vegetarians on board; between them, they pressed the steward to provide ‘some vegetable curry, rice, stewed and fresh fruit from the first[-class] saloon …’ The eager Indian convinced the secretary of the ship’s committee to allot him ‘a quarter of an hour for a short speech on vegetarianism’. The request was granted, and the talk scheduled to preface the next musical evening. In preparation, Gandhi ‘thought out and then wrote out and re-wrote’ a text aimed at what he anticipated would be a hostile audience. In the end the concert was cancelled, and ‘so the speech was never delivered, to my great mortification’.

  The SS Assam carrying, among other things and persons, M. K. Gandhi, Barrister-at-Law, arrived in Bombay on 5 July 1891. The monsoon had just broken. The passengers disembarked amidst the rain and the wind, soaked to the skin.52

  3

  From Coast to Coast

  When Mohandas Gandhi landed at Bombay on his return from England, he was met at the docks by his elder brother, Laxmidas. They proceeded to the home of Dr Pranjivan Mehta, his fellow student in London. Mehta was from a prosperous family of jewellers, who lived in the central Bombay district of Gamdevi, in a large two-storey house with long balconies and carved wooden pillars.1

  En route to Dr Mehta’s house, Gandhi’s brother told him that their mother Putlibai had died a few months previously. The family had not wired him in London, lest the news should distract him from his studies. Hearing the news now was a ‘severe shock’ to Mohandas.2 Putlibai had been reluctant to allow him to go abroad, and worried he would transgress in matters of morals and diet. He had returned, law degree in hand, and without ever having had meat, alcohol or sex in London. Now he could not tell his mother of these achievements.

  In Bombay, at hand to console Mohandas, was a relative of Dr Mehta’s, then resident in the family home. Known as Raychand or Rajchandra, he had had a mystical experience when young, and had acquired a reputation as a poet and a student of the Jain scriptures.3

  As a Jain teacher, Raychand led a simple, even austere, life, although his renunciation was different from and possibly deeper than the norm. While all Jains were vegetarian, the more devout did not even eat onions or garlic, and took great pains not to injure living beings, covering their mouth with a handkerchief lest an insect popped in. There were Jain hospitals for injured birds. Renunciation could take ostentatious forms; as when a wealthy merchant gave away his property in front of an admiring crowd of community members.

  Raychand, however, dismissed orthodox Jainism as the ‘religion of the mouth-covering (muh patti) rather than the soul’. The obsession with formal vows distressed him. He argued that even a householder could practise renunciation, providing for his wife and children while himself cultivating an inner detachment from worldly pleasures.4

  Raychand was the son-in-law of Pranjivan Mehta’s brother. He was a jeweller by profession, combining running a shop with the reading of scriptures and the writing of poetry. Although but a year older than Mohandas Gandhi, he inspired admiration and awe. He was introduced to Gandhi as a shatavadhani, one who could remember a hundred things. There was a time when he would demonstrate this skill in public. Lately, however, he had devoted himself to religious pursuits. He knew the Jain and Hindu scriptures intimately, and had also read many texts in Gujarati on Islam and Christianity.5

  For his first few days in Bombay, Gandhi stayed indoors with Raychand. To amuse him and distract him from his bereavement, Raychand put on a private exhibition of his prowess. The visitor from London was asked to write down paragraphs in several languages and read them out. Raychand reproduced the paragraphs and sentences in exactly the same order. Gandhi was greatly impressed. More than thirty years later, he recalled the impact the Jain scholar made on him:

  His gait was slow, and the observer could mark that even while walking, he was engrossed in thinking. There was a magic in his eyes. They were very sharp; there was no confusion in them. Concentration was engraved in them. His face was round, lips thin, nose neither sharp nor flat, constitution lean, stature medium, complexion not quite fair. His appearance was that of a calm and quiet person. His voice was so sweet that no one would get tired of listening to him. He was always smiling and gay. Inner joy was pictured on his face. He had such a thorough command over language that I do not remember he had ever to search for words while expressing his opinion.

  Speaking with (and listening to
) Raychand made Gandhi ‘realise that school is not the only place where memory can be cultivated, that knowledge also could be had outside schools if one has a desire, an intense desire, to gain it …’6

  After a week spent with Raychand, Mohandas proceeded with his brother to the town of Nasik. His fellow Modh Banias had still not forgiven him for travelling to London. To placate them he took a purificatory swim in the river Godavari and then proceeded to Rajkot, where he hosted a dinner for the leading Banias of the town. It was also in Rajkot that he was reunited with his wife and son, whom he had not seen for three years.

  Photographs of Mohandas Gandhi as a young man are scarce; and photographs of his wife as a young lady are practically non-existent. Later pictures, taken when she was in her thirties and forties, show a round-faced woman of undistinguished appearance. One biographer, however, comes up with the enjoyable fantasy that when Mohandas met Kasturba after his return from London he ‘was captivated by his wife’s beauty’. Apparently, she was

  enchanting … to behold. Her smooth skin, her large eyes framed by thick lashes, her tiny figure, shapely and supple as ever under the soft folds of her bright-coloured sari! How beguiling it was to watch her comb her long, gleaming, black hair; to study the simple grace of her movements; to hear, at every step, the musical tinkle of the tiny silver bells that encircled her slender bare ankles.7

  This is an inspired piece of mind-reading, for which no source is or could be given. Gandhi’s account in his autobiography is altogether more prosaic. He writes of their reunion that ‘my relations with my wife were still not as I desired. Even my stay in England had not cured me of jealousy. I continued my squeamishness and suspiciousness in respect of every little thing …’ Other evidence (the fact that Kasturba was soon pregnant) suggests that they did at least resume sexual relations. Meanwhile, encouraged by his experiences in England, Gandhi introduced changes in the household’s cuisine, introducing cocoa and oatmeal into the daily diet.8