Deciding that lying to parents was worse than not eating meat, he told Mehtab that the experiment was over; but he told himself that he would resume meat-eating once the parents ‘are no more and I have found my freedom’. This meat-eating phase probably lasted from some point early in 1884, when Mohan was a few months over fourteen, to early 1885 (A 17-20).
Here we may note Gandhi’s report in the Autobiography that another high school friend of his (a Parsi boy, some think),10 with whom Mohan had formed a close friendship, forsook Mohan, ‘though I never forsook my friend’, after Mohan had ‘made friends’ with Mehtab (A 16).
Two texts he read at about this time affected Mohan. The creation story in the Manusmriti, which he found among his father’s religious books, not only ‘did not impress him very much’, it made him ‘incline somewhat towards atheism’ (A 30). Given his parents’ uncompromising vegetarianism, he was also puzzled by positive references to meat in the Manusmriti.
But a stanza by the Gujarati poet Shamal Bhatt in a school book gripped his imagination and lodged itself in his memory:
For a bowl of water give a goodly meal;
For a kindly greeting bow thou down with zeal;
For a simple penny pay thou back with gold;
If thy life be rescued, life do not withhold…
And return with gladness good for evil done (A 31).
Soon, help was needed by Karsan, who had notched up a debt of twenty-five rupees. On his arm Karsan wore an armlet of solid gold. Mohan clipped a bit of metal out of it, and the debt was cleared.
Whether it was that he could not live with the knowledge that he had cheated his parents on more than one front, or because something unusual had been stirring inside him for a while, Mohan now (in about the middle of 1885) did another peculiar thing: he confessed his theft of gold.
Mohan did not dare to speak to the former diwan of Porbandar, Rajkot and Wankaner. What he did was to write out a confession and tremblingly hand it to his father while Kaba, suffering from a fistula, lay on a plain wooden plank. According to the Autobiography, Mohan did not fear being beaten, for evidently Kaba had never beaten any of his sons. The Autobiography claims that Mohan’s chief fear was that a shocked Kaba would hit himself.
The confession said that his father would now know that his much-loved son was merely a common thief. But the son would steal no more and was asking for forgiveness and also for adequate punishment. The note closed with a request that the father should not punish himself.
I was trembling as I handed the confession… He read it through, and pearl-drops trickled down his cheeks, wetting the paper. For a moment he closed his eyes in thought and then tore up the note. He had sat up to read it. He again lay down. I also cried. I could see my father’s agony. If I were a painter, I could draw a picture of the whole scene today. Those pearl-drops of love cleansed my heart and washed my sin away (A 23).
Biographical or autobiographical literature from nineteenth-century Kathiawar, or India as a whole, contains few accounts of a similar confession, which was remembered in the family for long, including by Mohan’s sister Raliat, later a critic of some of her brother’s attitudes.
Very few spaces, and very few incidents, in a joint family like that of the Gandhis, were private. Certainly, Mohan’s confession was not, and we can only speculate on how Karsan reported the confession to Mehtab, or on what Kastur made of it.
It was a brave deed, and yet (as Erikson points out) the Mohan of this confession seems to be in control. Any anxiety in his mind relates not to what might happen to him, but to what might happen to his father.
We should mark, too, what this confession was not—it did not admit his very recent meat-eating. As the Autobiography acknowledges, ‘My parents never knew that two of their sons had become meat-eaters’ (A 20). Mohan did not confess that sin because it would have been too much of a shock to his parents, and also because he fully intended to resume meat-eating in the future.
Which, then, is the real fifteen-year-old? The boy-husband afraid of the dark? The timid-looking youth on whom Mehtab’s exploits cast a spell? The penitent and brave son who can decide what he will admit and what he will not, and who can calmly study the impact of his apology on his father? A person is many persons. The third Mohan was the reason for Mehtab’s pursuit of him, while the first offered hope that Mohan could be caught.
From the time of his wedding until Kaba’s death at the end of 1885, i.e. from the age of about thirteen to when he was sixteen, Mohan seems to have spent some time each day attending on an increasingly sick father, who had given up his position with the Rajasthanik court shortly before the triple wedding, and who never fully recovered from the injuries sustained in the stagecoach accident.
Mohan’s caring and nursing tasks—massaging his father’s legs and feet, dressing the fistula that had grown on Kaba’s neck, compounding and administering drugs, and so on—cut into, or cut out, walks, games with school friends, the possibility of going out to see a play, or reading something he liked. ‘As soon as the school closed, I would hurry home and begin nursing him’ (A 13).
Obtaining, on one occasion, his father’s permission to go to a play, Mohan heeded an instinct and left for home before the play started. He found that Kaba had needed him. A similar permission was never sought again.
Despite the price he paid, Gandhi would claim in the Autobiography and elsewhere that he ‘loved to do this service (of nursing his father)’ (A25). There has to be some truth in the claim, for the lad performing these chores continued in older age to take every chance to nurse people, including political opponents. (Erikson suggests that Mohan acquired an upper hand over the one he nursed, his father in Rajkot and others later.)
Yet this three-year period included the phase of Mohan’s adventure with meat. During that phase of about twelve months, and even after the adventure was suspended, the devoted yet independent son at the father’s bedside was carrying the weight of a big secret. Some lightness of heart doubtless followed the confession episode, and Mohan would have been moved by Kaba’s words, uttered not long before his death, that ‘Mohan here will keep up my reputation. He will increase the fame of our lineage.’11
Yet we should recognize the multiplicity of feelings about the father—not all loyal or kind—residing inside a son-nurse who is also recognized, though the youngest, as the father’s heir. Mohan liked going to a play but could not go; he liked to read interesting books but where was the time?
Recalling his boyhood in a letter he would write from prison (25 March 1909) to his second son Manilal, Gandhi would say: ‘Of amusement after I was twelve, I had little or none’ (9: 318). In this letter he would claim that nursing his father gave him joy, but that joy was surely joined by unexpressed disappointment. Our inwardly ‘amused’ boy was also, in another layer of himself, a sad boy.
One pull away from the father would be memorably and frankly recorded by Gandhi: ‘Every night whilst my hands were busy massaging my father’s legs, my mind was hovering about [my] bedroom. I was always glad to be relieved from my duty, and went straight to the bedroom after doing obeisance to my father’ (A 25). An unsurprising outcome was that when he and Kastur were sixteen, she became pregnant.
Kaba’s health worsened. ‘Ayurvedic physicians… tried all their ointments, hakims their plasters, and local quacks their nostrums.’ Finally, a British physician suggested surgery in Bombay, but the family physician ruled that at his age Kaba would not survive it.
Shortly before eleven o’clock on the fateful night, Tulsidas, Kaba’s brother, who had come from Porbandar to be of support, offered to relieve Mohan, who was massaging his father. Accepting the offer, Mohan ‘went straight to the bedroom’ and roused the pregnant Kastur, who was fast asleep. In five or six minutes there was a knock on the door, and a servant told Mohan that his father was no more.
Running to his father’s room, and wringing his hands in wretched shame, Mohan told himself that ‘[Father] would have died in my a
rms’ had his carnal desire not cheated him of the privilege, which Tulsidas had faithfully earned. Mohan’s devotion to his parents had been ‘weighed and found unpardonably wanting’ (A 26). These circumstances of his father’s death, and the fact that ‘the poor mite’ to which Kastur in due course gave birth died in three or four days, would leave a permanent mark on Mohan’s attitude to sex.
Almost from the very start of their child-marriage, Mohan tried to educate Kastur and to help her become a life-partner in a ‘modern’ sense. The sexual or carnal element, as he calls it, was of course there, strongly so. He underlines that fact, calling himself a ‘lustful’ husband (A 10). But there was also a longing for mutual strengthening, a wish for a beloved who would also be a lover, not merely in a sexual sense but also in the psychological one, a partner who would help him become what he longs to be, even as he tries to ‘develop’ her.
‘I wanted to make my wife an ideal wife,’ Gandhi says in the Autobiography, referring to his early years with Kastur. ‘My ambition was to make her… learn what I learnt and identify her life and thought with mine.’ (Emphases in the original.) But she was ‘illiterate’ and ‘not impatient of her ignorance’. Also, the ‘ambition was all one-sided’.
My passion was entirely centred on one woman, and I wanted it to be reciprocated. But even if there was no reciprocity, it could not be all unrelieved misery because there was active love on one side at least (A 10-11).
These are strong sentences, acknowledging the pressure in young Mohan’s attempts to turn Kastur into an active sharer of his life and goals, and breathing disappointment that the passion, which here clearly includes but goes beyond sexual passion, was not reciprocated.
He tried hard to teach her, but time and opportunity were hard to find, for in that joint-family house in Rajkot elders were always around, and in their presence there was no question of his even talking to her, let alone teaching her (A 11). Moreover, ‘the teaching had to be done against her will’. She resisted him uncompromisingly, and he totally failed. Later, he blamed his carnal desire, arguing that without it he would at least have had more time, in the privacy of their bedroom, to teach her.
We are speaking of a boy in his teens who, while given to unmanly fears is yet conscious of some deep inner stirrings. We may speculate that he senses longings going beyond his joint family and thinks that this pretty wife that has come to him can help realize them if he can but educate her.
After long and difficult years, and in ways he might not have thought of in Rajkot, she would indeed become a valuable ally; but in Rajkot in the mid-1880s she resisted strongly, and Mohan reacted with an even stronger effort on his part. It would have been wiser to accept Kastur as she was, and let her be, but with Kastur in Rajkot Mohan was not wise. He was only a disappointed, frustrated and overeager teenager.
This reality was well understood by Mehtab, who persisted with his approaches to Mohan despite the end of the meat experiments. His closeness to Mohan was not liked by Putlibai, or by brother Laxmidas, or by Kastur. All three, the Autobiography tells us, warned Mohan that Mehtab (who is not named in the Autobiography) was bad company. Writes Gandhi:
This companion was originally [Karsan’s] friend. They were classmates. I knew his weakness, but I regarded him as a faithful friend. My mother, my eldest brother (Laxmidas), and my wife warned me that I was in bad company. I was too proud to heed my wife’s warning. But I dared not go against the opinion of my mother and my eldest brother.
Nevertheless I pleaded with them saying, ‘I know he has the weakness you attribute to him, but you do not know his virtues. He cannot lead me astray, as my association with him is meant to reform him. For I am sure that if he reforms his ways, he will be a splendid man. I beg you not to be anxious on my account.’ I do not think this satisfied them, but… they let me go my way.
The fact that Kaba Gandhi is not mentioned suggests that the discussion took place either when he was quite ill or after his death. We can be fairly certain, given family customs in the Kathiawar of the time, that the three family members talked separately to Mohan, rather than in one session. As for the ‘weakness’, mentioned in the singular, the meaning seems plain. The Gandhis viewed Mehtab as a loose character who might corrupt Mohan.
It is of interest, nonetheless, and indicative of Mohan’s standing, that the sixteen-year-old is allowed by his mother and a much older brother to ‘go his own way’. Older relatives are deferring to this lad.
Challenged by his mother, Laxmidas and Kastur, Mohan claimed that the friendship was meant to reform Mehtab. He would seek to turn Mehtab into a ‘splendid man’ by his own standards, different from Mehtab’s, even though Mohan clearly envied Mehtab’s capabilities.
As to what ‘really’ motivated Mohan in this relationship, Gandhi offers one clue: ‘As one is always dazzled when he sees in others the qualities he lacks himself, I was dazzled by this friend’s exploits. This was also followed by a strong desire to be like him… Why should not I also be as strong as he?’ (A 17)
Another clue is presented in a glimpse provided by an older Gandhi in 1927: ‘I have a vivid recollection,’ he said, referring to his school days, ‘of boys who put on an air because they had athletic skill and had physical power’. But ‘their pride went before destruction, because weaker ones, realizing their haughtiness, segregated them… and so they really dug their own graves’ (40: 70). This is clearly a description of Mehtab, who was struck off the rolls of Alfred High School in 1884, and suggests that sympathy for a ‘segregated’ Mehtab may also have entered Mohan’s mind.
In 1942 he would recall another motivation: ‘I believed even at [a] tender age that… it did not matter if I made no special effort to cultivate friendship with Hindus, but I must make friends with at least a few Muslims’ (83: 190).
Other factors, too, may have been at work. Apart from hoping, in Mehtab’s company, to become ‘as strong’ as him, Mohan may have received from Mehtab an affirmation he did not receive from Kastur. For all his mischief, Mehtab had some virtues, to which Mohan referred in those discussions with his mother and Laxmidas. Though these virtues are not named in the Autobiography, an ability to affirm faith in Mohan’s future role may have been one. In addition, we shall soon see, Mehtab provided some amusement to Mohan.
Moreover, some of Mehtab’s progressive views were to the liking of Mohan, who had reacted against his family’s acceptance of untouchability, accepted the principle, if no longer the practice, of meat-eating, and was increasingly critical of his and Karsan’s early marriages. Mehtab’s stand for the new against the old appealed to Mohan. Both boys wanted ‘reform’ in Indian customs; the two disliked the hierarchies in the India around them, except for the one between men and women; and no matter how vaguely, both dreamt of Indian freedom.
In the Autobiography Gandhi writes of how his relationship with Kastur was undermined by Mehtab, who ‘fanned the flame’ (A 21) in Mohan of unfounded suspicions about Kastur, causing the husband to level cruel accusations at her. As for Mehtab’s well-known success (related in the Autobiography) in taking Mohan to a Rajkot brothel, it relied on two simple arguments: you will prove your manliness, and your wife will come running after you if she knows you can go elsewhere.
This brothel incident probably occurred in 1886, perhaps when Kastur was in her parents’ home. Mehtab took his friend to the place of ill fame, paid the money and sent Mohan in. The woman was all prepared, but Mohan froze, sitting tongue-tied ‘near the woman on her bed’. She showed him the door with abuses and insults. Mohan felt ‘as though my manhood had been injured, and wished to sink into the ground for shame’.
Later he would thank God for this escape from the ‘jaws of sin’, while admitting that ‘the carnal desire was there, and it was as good as the act’ (A 20). But at the time he was ashamed at failing a test of manhood, not at visiting the brothel.
The warnings of his mother and Laxmidas had been vindicated, but Mohan did not shake Mehtab off. Upset by his ‘failur
e’ with the prostitute, he failed also to perceive Mehtab’s mischief. And he continued to imagine qualities in Mehtab, enjoy his friendship, and fancy that he might reform him.
The Mohan emerging from this reading, entering his late teens with prestige in his circle, curiosity about the world around him, a peculiar strength, a weakness for a questionable character, and surprising fears, is different from the popular image of a timid unimpressive pious boy awaiting a life-enhancing experience.
Much of the blame for this other picture must go to Gandhi himself, for in the Autobiography he mixes frank recollections of his boyhood and youth with the contrition of a later period. (‘Autobiography’ is a misleading description; what Gandhi wrote was a chronological account, ending in 1920, of his ethical and spiritual experiments.) The contrition of an older Gandhi and descriptions of lessons learned long after the events described surround the candid recollections and can conceal them, just as accounts of his early fears envelop the revelations of his strength as a lad.
Unless it is carefully read, the self-deprecating Autobiography can also incorrectly suggest that Mohan was a mediocre student. He was one of only two reaching matriculation out of the thirty-eight who had passed the high school entrance examination with him, though when in 1887 he cleared the matriculation, journeying for the first time to Ahmedabad in order to do so, he was placed 404th out of about 3,000 in western India, a decent yet not a great rank. But in Ahmedabad he was deprived of the emotional and logistical support of his family.
‘Sure, I was the leader of the boys in my class,’ an older Gandhi said to a close colleague, D.B. or ‘Kaka’ Kalelkar, who wanted to know more about his Rajkot boyhood than the Autobiography conveyed.12 The reference was to his all-round standing in his class, not to his academic performance.
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 3
