Gandhi Before India Read online

  In Bhavnagar, Mohandas was homesick (for his wife, and also for his mother’s food) and suffered from frequent headaches. When the first end-of-term examination was held in April 1888 he appeared for only four papers out of seven. Even these he did not do well: in English, for example, he got a bare 34 per cent.48

  Mohandas returned home for the summer vacation. A family friend came visiting, a ‘shrewd and learned’ Brahmin named Mavji Dave. He advised Putlibai to withdraw her son from the Samaldas College and send him to London to qualify as a barrister instead. The BA took four or five years, whereas one could qualify as a lawyer in half that time. With a barrister’s certificate from London, said Mavji Dave to Mohandas’s mother, ‘he could get the Diwanship [of Porbandar] for the asking’.49

  The idea did not at first appeal to Putlibai, who wanted to keep her son closer to home. But Mohandas found the idea compelling. He was to write that ‘the desire to go to England … completely possessed me’. One does not know why he took so quickly to the proposal – perhaps he had been reading Gujarati travelogues of journeys to Europe and America, which were then gaining wide currency.50

  Had Gandhi’s father still been alive the idea of going to London might never have occurred to him, for his successful conquest of the Bombay Matriculation had already made Mohandas one of the best educated young men in the Peninsula. ‘In point of education,’ wrote one British official in disgust, ‘Kathiawar ranks very low. Few of the chiefs can read or write; and the persons who manage their affairs know little or nothing beyond their immediate sphere. Books are rare and are not appreciated.’51 Once Mohandas showed reluctance to carry on with his BA in Bhavnagar, his father would have found him a job instead, using his contacts to place his (by local standards) extremely learned youngest son in the service of a Maharaja keen to impress the British by modernizing his administration. So Mohandas would scarcely have thought of going on for further studies abroad. Even if he had, his father would have dismissed the idea out of hand. There existed, among orthodox Hindus, a horror of travel abroad, of losing caste by crossing the polluting ocean, the kala pani. Among Banias the prejudice was even more intense, since outside India they found it hard to maintain the strict food taboos that regulated their lives.

  At this time, the Indians most ready to travel abroad were Parsis, instinctive Westernizers who were not Hindus at all. Some brave Brahmins and Kshatriyas had also ventured overseas. The first valued textual learning (a sphere in which the West was clearly in the lead); the second were keen to acquire British manners and thus ingratiate themselves with the overlord. On the other hand, the caution and conservatism of the Banias made them the least likely candidates for foreign travel and Western education.

  Mohandas’s uncle, Tulsidas, hearing of his desire to travel abroad, sought to dissuade him. Barristers who came back from England, he said, ‘know no scruples regarding food. Cigars are never out of their mouths. They dress as shamelessly as Englishmen.’ Mohandas’s father had similar views; had he been alive, he would have imposed them more vigorously. But with Kaba Gandhi dead, it was his wife Putlibai who would have the final say. Mohandas pressed her to agree. She consulted a holy man she trusted: a Modh Bania-turned-Jain monk named Becharji Swami. The Swami said the boy could proceed to London, so long as he promised that he would not eat meat or drink wine, or be unfaithful to his wife. After an oath to this effect was administered, the mother gave her consent.52

  There was, however, a further problem – the fact that education in London was expensive. Mohandas thought of asking the State of Porbandar for financial assistance. The previous year (1887), the disgraced Rana had his status restored, on condition that he stayed outside the state. He was a ‘hopelessly bad ruler’; but it was thought that making him a prince of the ‘First Class’ would ‘reconcile the Rana to residence in British India’. While the ruler lived in Bombay, the administration of Porbandar passed into the hands of a British official, Frederick Lely.53

  Mohandas travelled to Porbandar to ask the Administrator to fund his education in London. Lely flatly refused to help, despite the long connection that the Gandhis had with the kingdom of Porbandar. Mohandas’s elder brother, Laxmidas, then offered to help raise the money. The shortfall would be made up by pawning the family jewellery.

  So with the money in hand and his mother’s blessing, Mohandas prepared to go to London. On 9 August 1888, his old high school in Rajkot organized a farewell for him. The function was reported in a local newspaper, which noted that ‘Mr Gandhi is the first Bania from Kathiawar who proceeds to England to prosecute his study for the Barrister’s Examination.’ His classmates hoped that ‘you will make it an object of your special care and attention to promote the interests of India in England at the same time that you compete for medals and prizes’. In reply, Mohandas said he trusted that ‘others would soon follow his example and on return from England would devote themselves … to the noble work of regenerating India’. The speeches made, the good wishes offered and received, the ‘party broke up with the customary distribution of betel leaves, nosegays, etc.’.54

  In that same, heady summer in which the decision was taken to send Mohandas Gandhi to London, his wife Kasturba gave birth to a baby boy. We do not know the exact date of birth; it appears to have been sometime in the month of July. The infant was named Harilal. On 10 August 1888, the day after he had taken leave of his old school, Mohandas bid farewell to his wife and mother (and son), and proceeded to Bombay.55

  As he waited for a berth on a ship to London, Mohandas found he had attracted the ire of the Modh Banias of Bombay. The head of the community in Bombay, who had known Kaba Gandhi, warned the son that he would be excommunicated if he travelled to England. Word of the warning got around, so that Mohandas was, as he wrote shortly afterwards, ‘hemmed in by all sides. I could not go out without being pointed and stared at by someone or other. At one time, while I was walking near the Town Hall, I was surrounded and hooted [at] by them, and my poor brother had to look at the scene in silence’.56

  To settle the matter, a ‘huge meeting’ of the Modh Banias was called. Mohandas was seated in the middle, while community leaders ‘remonstrated with me very strongly and reminded me of their connection with my father’. The boy answered that he was going overseas to study, and that he had promised his mother not to touch a strange woman, or drink wine, or eat meat. The elders were unmoved. For his transgression, the boy would be treated as an outcaste; anyone who spoke to him or went to see him off would be fined. But, as the transgressor recalled, ‘the order had no effect on me’. On 4 September 1888, a month short of his twentieth birthday, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi sailed for London.57

  2

  Among the Vegetarians

  As a boy in Porbandar, Mohandas Gandhi often saw boats sailing in and out of the port. But the first ship he actually stepped on to was the one that took him to London. The experience was exciting enough for the young man to maintain – also for the first time – a diary, twenty pages of which were devoted to the passage across the ocean.1

  The ship’s name was the SS Clyde. It left Bombay at five o’clock on the evening of 4 September 1888. An hour later the dinner bell rang. Mohandas was accompanied to his table by Triambakrai Mazumdar, a boy from Junagadh (and a Brahmin from the sound of his name) who was also proceeding to London to study. The young Gandhi wore a black coat and carried his own food – Gujarati sweets and savouries that his family had packed for him. His friend was dressed more casually, and was content to eat the ship’s fare.

  This arrangement continued for the first forty-eight hours. Fortunately, Mohandas then found a native sailor who was willing to cook him rice and dal. The sailor also provided rotis, but since the man’s hands were dirty, the student – a fastidious Bania – preferred to use the English bread for dipping instead.2

  During the day, Mohandas watched the sailors at work (their ‘dexterity’, he found, was ‘admirable’), played around with the piano (again, for the first time – th
ere seems to have been no music in the Gandhi household in Rajkot), and took the air on the deck above. One day he stayed on past sunset and saw how, on account of the waves and what they reflected, ‘the moon appeared as if she was moving here and there’. Then the stars appeared; their reflection in the water gave him ‘the idea of fireworks’.

  When they berthed at Aden, the passengers rented a boat to take them ashore. Mohandas was impressed by the Protectorate’s buildings, but less so by the landscape. In a whole day in Aden, he ‘saw not a single tree or a green plant’. That evening the SS Clyde entered the Red Sea. Like many others before and since, Mohandas marvelled at the Suez Canal and the ‘genius of a man who invented it’. When they anchored at Port Said, he discovered that he had definitively left his homeland behind him. For ‘now the currency was English. Indian money is quite useless here’.

  A fellow passenger told Mohandas that once they left the Suez Canal, the weather would change: as they got closer to Europe, the only way to beat the cold would be to eat meat and drink alcohol. Mohandas stuck to his diet of rice and lentils. Three days later they reached Brindisi. It was evening, and as the passengers came ashore the gas lamps were being lit. Everyone was speaking Italian. Mohandas was unimpressed by the railway station – it was not as ‘beautiful’ as those built back home by the Bombay Berar and Central Indian Railway. However, the railway carriages were bigger and better appointed.

  At Brindisi, adding to the list of novel experiences, Mohandas was accosted by a local who (presumably speaking in English) said: ‘Sir, there is a beautiful girl of fourteen, follow me, sir, and I will take you there, the charge is not high, sir.’ The Indian avoided him. The next stop was Malta. Here Mazumdar and Mohandas hired a carriage to take them around. They saw an old church and the local museum, which displayed weapons of war and a chariot that had once carried Napoleon Bonaparte. Three days later they arrived at another colonial outpost, Gibraltar, where they were impressed by the quality of the roads.

  Mohandas Gandhi’s diary of his voyage to London is unusually attentive to the landscape. Roads, buildings and vegetation are described with care. Nature had distributed its gifts very differently than in his native Kathiawar. In the towns he had seen en route the hand of man appeared to work very differently too. When the ship reached the port of Plymouth, Mohandas suddenly felt cold. It was eleven at night, and winter was approaching. He reflected that, despite the warning and inducements along the way, he had reached England without betraying the three promises – not to eat meat, drink alcohol or have sex with strangers – that he had made to his mother in Rajkot.

  From Plymouth, the ship proceeded to its final destination. On 29 September, three weeks after it had left Bombay, the SS Clyde berthed at the newly built Tilbury Docks. Mohandas and Mazumdar disembarked, and boarded a train to travel the twenty miles to London. Their first night in the city was spent in the Victoria Hotel on Northumberland Street, next to Trafalgar Square.3

  London in 1888 was a great imperial city. Queen Victoria had lately observed the Golden Jubilee of her reign. The empire she presided over had planted its flag in the four corners of the world. Even some countries not ruled by Great Britain recognized her superiority. Not long after Mohandas Gandhi arrived in London, the Shah of Persia came visiting. The cover of a popular magazine showed the foreign monarch calling on the Queen in Windsor Castle. Victoria was sketched as small, stout and plain; in fact, as unprepossessing as she really was. With his lissom frame and his stylish clothes, the Shah looked rather grand in comparison. What gave the game away was their respective postures – Victoria sat on her throne, while the foreigner bowed low to kiss her hand.4

  London in 1888 was also a great industrial city. Its factories made lamps and chocolates, shoes and clothes, and a thousand other things besides. The products manufactured in London and the products consumed by Londoners came in and out of the port. The SS Clyde was one of a staggering 79,000 vessels that docked in the city in the year Gandhi arrived. Apart from the passengers on board, these ships carried 20 million tonnes of cargo, valued at £200 million.5

  Finally, London in 1888 was a great international city. No city in the world had more people – about 6 million in all, twice the number in Paris – or more nationalities represented in them. There was a large and growing population of Irish Catholics; Germans, Czechs and Italians came looking for work; Ukrainians, Poles and Russians came fleeing persecution. The metropolis was ‘perhaps the most cosmopolitan city in Europe’, and in its crowded streets, one could hear ‘the twanging inflections of Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians … [and] the unfamiliar enunciations of Asians and Africans’.6

  Among these foreigners in London were about 1,000 Indians. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Indians who came to or settled in England were mostly of working-class origin. They were sailors and dockhands, domestic servants and sepoys. There was a ‘tom-tom man’ named Ram Singh who played the drum in the streets. However, there were also a few aristocrats, drawn from the class of Maharajas and Nawabs. Then, from the 1850s, an increasing number of Indians came seeking a professional qualification in medicine or, more often, the law.

  The two most influential Indians in London at the time of Mohandas Gandhi’s arrival were Dadabhai Naoroji and Abdul Karim. Naoroji, a Parsi, moved to London in 1855, as the agent of a trading company. Over time, his interests in business were superseded by his work in politics and social reform. In 1888, he set up a forum to represent Indians in the United Kingdom, which, the next year, was named the British Committee of the Indian National Congress (which had been founded in Bombay in 1885). An Indian whose influence was more discreet was Abdul Karim, a Muslim from Agra who worked on Queen Victoria’s staff. Tall and light-skinned, he taught the Queen Hindustani, with digressions into Indian religion. The Queen thought her teacher ‘really exemplary and excellent’; under his direction, she had begun greeting Indian visitors in their own language.7

  The daily round of activities in London reflected the city’s capacious internationalism. An Asian potentate would come calling; the zoo would acquire its first hippopotamus. One month there was an exhibition on the abolition of the African slave trade; the next month a different gallery displayed a Javanese village. The local press took a global view of politics – carrying stories on an insurrection in Crete and a revolution in Brazil – and of economics, as in accounts of wine-making in Chile or of the California gold-rush.8

  En route to London, Mohandas had wired an acquaintance with the date of his arrival. This was Pranjivan Mehta, a doctor from Morbi, a town close to Rajkot, now studying to be a barrister in England. The evening after Gandhi reached London, Dr Mehta came to see him at the Victoria Hotel. As they spoke, Mohandas picked up the visitor’s hat and started feeling its felt. A look from Dr Mehta stopped him, and gave Mohandas his first lesson in English etiquette. ‘Do not touch other people’s things,’ Dr Mehta told him. ‘Do not ask questions as we usually do in India on first acquaintance; do not talk loudly; never address people as “sir” whilst speaking to them as we do in India; only servants and subordinates address their masters that way.’9

  The hotel was expensive, so Gandhi and Mazumdar shifted to the home of another man from Morbi, one Dalpatram Shukla. Shukla lived in the suburb of Richmond, eleven miles up the Thames. They boarded with Shukla for a few weeks, before Mohandas found lodgings in West Kensington with a widow whose husband had served in India. She lived in a Victorian terraced house, four storeys high, with a railway line running behind it. The steam trains were distinctly audible from within the home.

  The Bania lodger found the food hard to stomach – how long can one survive on bread and milk? Fortunately, while walking around the city, he found some vegetarian restaurants – one on Farringdon Street, another in High Holborn. He also invested in a portable stove, to cook with in his room. Oatmeal boiled in water and eaten with milk or fruit served as a handy breakfast; lunch was eaten out; while for supper Mohandas made himself
soup and rice. 10

  On 6 November 1888, Mohandas Gandhi registered himself at the Inner Temple, one of four Inns of Court in London, located just west of the City and close to the river, in ‘rather an ill-defined district in which graceful but dingy buildings of diverse pattern and of various degrees of antiquity, are closely grouped together and through [which] wind crooked lanes, mostly closed to traffic, but available for pedestrians’.11 Three days after joining the Inner Temple, Mohandas wrote to his brother Laxmidas that ‘in spite of the cold I have no need of meat or liqour. This fills my heart with joy and thankfulness.’

  This is one of only three letters written by Gandhi from London that have survived. The other two, written shortly afterwards, were sent to British administrators in Porbandar, asking them again to finance his education. His brother Laxmidas had budgeted £666 for his time in London; now, after living there for two months, he thought he needed £400 more. ‘English life,’ wrote Mohandas to the Administrator in Porbandar, ‘is very expensive.’ The Ranas had shown scant interest in modern learning, but ‘we can naturally expect that education must be encouraged under the English Administration. I am one who can take advantage of such encouragement.’12

  The letters were disregarded. Mohandas, and Laxmidas, would have to find the money themselves.

  To qualify as a barrister, Mohandas had to pass two examinations, the first to be taken after he had kept four ‘terms’, the latter after he had kept nine. The terms were held in the months of January, April, June and November – the shortest lasting twenty days, the longest thirty-one. Mohandas had to attend a minimum of six dinners each term, and a total of seventy-two dinners in all. This practice allowed apprentice lawyers to meet and speak with their colleagues and superiors. It also made up for an institutional deficiency: the fact that, unlike Oxford and Cambridge universities, the Inns were not residential.