A term in Samaldas College in Bhavnagar, another of Kathiawar’s ‘princely’ towns, ninety miles south-east of Rajkot, followed. Mohan would have liked a college in Bombay, but the family’s fortunes had taken a dive after Kaba’s illness and death, and Bhavnagar it had to be. But he was unhappy and homesick there. When, after the first term at Samaldas College, he returned to Rajkot for the break, an old family friend, ‘a shrewd and learned Brahmin’ called Mavji Dave, told Mohan, Laxmidas and their mother that the only way to restore the family’s prestige was to implement Kaba’s old thought: Mohan should go to London (A 32).
In the Autobiography Gandhi says that ‘nothing could have been more welcome to me’ and that he ‘jumped at the proposal’. But he said even more in the Diary he wrote soon after arriving in London: ‘Before the intention of coming to London was actually formed, I had a secret design in my mind of coming here to satisfy my curiosity of knowing what London was’ (Diary entry, 12 Nov. 1988; 1: 2). Before Dave had spoken, Mohan had imagined London (as he would recall in an interview in England in 1891) as ‘the home of philosophers and poets, the very centre of civilization’. Mavji Dave had only ‘fanned the fire that was burning in me’.13
So this timid son of conservative parents had been ‘secretly designing’ a journey to England. It was Jayshankar Buch, a student in the Bhavnagar college, who first put the thought into his mind (Diary; 1: 3).
Erikson has speculated that curiosity regarding London, the exciting metropolis, was not surprising in a young male in a conservative corner of the Empire. We may speculate in addition that it was not surprising in an Indian youth resenting if also admiring British rule. What history books he read in Alfred High School and Samaldas College we do not know, but much later (while in England in 1931) he would recall that
as a schoolboy I had to pass a paper in history also, and I read that the page of history is soiled red with the blood of those who have fought for freedom… (1 Dec. 1931; 54: 221)
In school he had also read (he would say in 194314) Byron’s line that ‘freedom’s battle once begun’ is ‘bequeathed from bleeding sire to son’.
Mohan’s curiosity is not casual, it is earnest; it is a curiosity about a foe that has humiliated Indians but that cannot merely be hated, for it forms ‘the very centre of civilization’. He said to Dave, his mother and Laxmidas that he wanted to go to England as soon as possible, and qualify for the medical profession. Laxmidas interjected that a Vaishnava could not do that. ‘Father never liked it… He intended you for the bar.’
‘I want you to be diwan,’ Dave said to Mohan, ‘or if possible something better’ (A 33). Unlike a doctor, a barrister could become a diwan. (Dave’s phrase, ‘or something better’, is indicative of the potential the eighteen-year-old Mohan conveyed at least to some observers.) Law was acceptable to him, Mohan said, and Dave ended his visit with a strong exhortation to Putlibai and Laxmidas to send the lad to London, adding that Rs 5,000, or about 400 pounds, would cover the passage, studies and three years of stay in England.
Mohan ‘began building castles in the air’ (A 33). In fact, to use his own words, whether ‘sleeping, walking, drinking, eating, walking, running, reading’, he was now ‘dreaming and thinking of England’.15
However, Putlibai asked Mohan to travel to Porbandar and seek the consent of his uncle Tulsidas, who was now the head of the wider Gandhi clan. Putlibai thought though that Tulsidas—like her late husband a former diwan of Porbandar—would withhold permission. Supporting the England plan, Laxmidas said that in Porbandar Mohan should also try to meet Frederick Lely, the Political Resident, and ask for aid. Lely had a good opinion of Tulsidas Kaka, Laxmidas added, and in any case the Gandhis were entitled to help from Porbandar state.
Mohan set off for Porbandar, a five-day bullock-cart journey across risky stretches inhabited by supposedly dangerous tribes. Mohan should have felt frightened, ‘but my cowardice vanished before the desire to go to England’. Along the way, in Dhoraji, the young man in a hurry switched to a seat on the back of a camel.
Arriving in Porbandar, he did obeisance to his uncle (that was the custom), described the Dave proposal and sought permission. Tulsidas said that at his age, when he was ‘at the threshold of death’, he could not support an irreligious act. Indians returning from England knew no scruples regarding food, ‘cigars were never out their mouths’, and ‘dressed shamelessly’. Yet if Mohan’s mother let him go, that was up to her.
Mohan’s request for a letter of introduction to Lely was also turned down by Tulsidas, though he said that Mohan could mention their kinship to Lely. A letter from Mohan elicited an appointment in Lely’s home.
When Mohan turned up there, Lely was climbing a stairway. Having practised carefully for this first meeting with a British official and nursing high expectations (he had his dream and was moreover the grandson of Ota Gandhi), Mohan ‘bowed low… saluted Lely with both hands’ and spoke the Gujarati sentences he had rehearsed. From where he stood a curt Lely replied that Porbandar state was poor. Adding, ‘Pass your BA first and then see me,’ Lely hurried up the stairs (A 33-4).
Returning to Rajkot, a bitterly disappointed Mohan next tried his luck with the thakore and with Colonel J. W. Watson, the Raj’s political agent in Kathiawar. While the thakore donated a photograph of himself, Watson gave ‘a trivial note of introduction which he said… was worth one lac of rupees’ (1: 7). In his London Diary Mohan would soon write that these responses made him laugh, and also that the memory of ‘the fulsome flattery which I had to practise about this time made me quite angry’ (1: 8).
Not all Indians in their late teens would have reacted thus in 1888, when British supremacy was a given. That was the year when John Strachey, a senior custodian of the Raj who once acted as Viceroy, declared:
This is the first and most essential thing to learn about India—that there is not, and never was, an Indian, or even any country of India, possessing according to European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious.16
Strachey was responding to, among other things, the creation three years earlier of the Indian National Congress. A group of lawyers, doctors and other intellectuals from different parts of India had formed the body, thanks to the goading of a Scotsman called Allan Octavian Hume, who had experienced the 1857 Revolt in Etawah in the United Provinces. The Congress, of which Mohan was evidently aware, sought greater rights for Queen Victoria’s Indian subjects and also hoped for Indian unity.
We do not know what Mehtab was doing all this time, except that the Diary written in London tells us that before Mohan left Rajkot for Porbandar, the two had a wrangle, it is not clear over what. ‘I was always quarrelling with my friend Sheikh Mehtab,’ Mohan would write (1:4).
‘Quite engrossed in thinking about the quarrel’, Mohan tripped while walking on a Rajkot lane and ‘banged [my] head against a carriage’. A little later Mohan fainted and lay unconscious for about five minutes; companions thought he had even died. Perhaps Rajkot’s oven-like summer contributed to the incident, yet the tiff had clearly weighed heavily on Mohan’s mind.
While Mohan was in Porbandar, Mehtab performed, in his own style, some money-related errands for Mohan in Rajkot. As Mohan would soon note down in his London Diary,
My friend Sheikh Mehtab who, I should say, is full of tricks, reminded Meghjibhai of his promise and forged a letter with my signature in which he wrote that I stood in need of Rs 5,000 and so on… (1: 4-6)
Though Meghjibhai, a relative of the Gandhis who had indicated that he might help, was taken in at first, the ploy failed. Astute as always, Putlibai had told Mohan that he would ‘never get any money from [Meghjibhai]’ (1: 3-4). According to the Diary, Mohan managed to see the funny side of these obstacles to his dream, and also to make his mother laugh heartily, including at Mehtab’s tricks—an ability to be amused was joined to the resolute chase of a dream.
Though many voices questioned the London project, including some in the Kathiawar pr
ess, Dave did not let up, and neither did Mohan. The options of taking a loan or selling the wife’s jewellery were considered. The second was also an accepted course, especially if the ornaments had come from the husband’s family.
Laxmidas said ‘he would find the money somehow’ (A 34). This proved hard, however, and at one point in the summer of 1888, Laxmidas (possibly also influenced by the public criticism) asked Mohan to give up the London idea. Coming from one who was not only ‘generous to a fault and loved me as a son’ but also, after Kaba’s death, the head of the immediate family, this advice should have been demoralizing (A 34). But Mohan rejected it. Revising his stance, Laxmidas scraped together some funds.
Yet Putlibai, who had made careful inquiries, was troubled. She asked Mohan—with good reason, as we know, even if she did not—whether he could live in England without meat and without liquor.
He would swear, Mohan said, that he would. ‘In a distant land?’ the practical Putlibai asked. It was only when Becharji Swami, a Modh Bania who had become a Jain monk and who, like Dave, was an adviser to the family, said that he would ‘get the boy solemnly to take… three vows’ that Putlibai relented.
Becharji Swami administering the oath, Mohan vowed not to touch wine, woman or meat, and Putlibai voiced, or gestured, her permission. She also tied a string of tulsi beads round her son’s neck, a token of her plea to Providence for his protection.
The vow could not have been pleasant for Mohan, who at this point seemed convinced, inside his mind, of meat’s benefits, was yet to feel really guilty about his visit to the brothel, and, despite an early acceptance of ‘lifelong faithfulness to the wife’, might well have been curious about charms that London might offer. Yet this lad who remembered not only his secrets but perhaps also his response to the tale of Harishchandra, knew that the unwelcome vow had bound him.
Kastur, our subject’s spouse, to whom a boy, Harilal, was born in the spring of 1888, does not feature in these discussions about her husband’s plans, even though they will make a large difference to her. Like most other Indian wives of her time and of later times, she is expected to accept what her husband (and her mother-in-law) decide. We have no evidence that Mohan asked for Kastur’s views on his plans. Another name, too, is absent from these accounts: Karsan. Discontinuing school after his marriage and drifting steadily downward, he seemed in no position to offer counsel to his younger brother.
‘It was an uncommon thing,’ Gandhi would later record, ‘for a young man from Rajkot to go to England’ (A 35). His friends and presumably his teachers arranged an address to him at the high school. Mohan ‘stammered out’ a reply in Gujarati. His ‘head reeled’ and his ‘whole frame shook’ (A 35).
This reaction in a youth who did not lose his poise at his first-ever encounters with men like Lely, Watson and the Rajkot prince, calls for reflection, especially as the quaking Mohandas reappears at times during the next dozen or so years, trembling before gatherings in England, a courtroom in Bombay and before larger meetings in Bombay and Calcutta.
Alternating with this shaking Mohan is the resolute young man. Where he faces a hurdle or a foe, or is one-on-one with another, Mohan seems fearless. However, before a group of people, whether peers, friends or strangers, he often seems terrified—often, but not always. Shyness is a big element in this fear, and he is afraid of being laughed at.
Behind the shyness may be detected an awareness that he cannot impress or please and also that impressing or pleasing an audience will not satisfy him. Even in his late teens he seems to sense that his surroundings—his peers, his people—are asking something more of him.
The timid Mohan is also the seeing and listening Mohan who after his arrival in England would with words sketch scenes from Kathiawar, including
‘the shepherd trotting onward in his milk-white suit, worn for the first time, with his long beard turned up beside his face and fastened under his turban, singing some broken verses,’
‘a herd of cows, with their horns painted red and green and mounted with silver,’
‘a crowd of little maids, with small earthen vessels resting on cushions placed on their heads,’ including one ‘spilling some milk from her vessel,’
‘the great banker’ with ‘white whiskers and a big white turban, with a long reed pen thrust into his turban [and] a long scarf wound round his waist with a silver inkstand adjusted in the scarf,’
as well as—let us mark—people who ‘have only one meal per day, and that consists of stale bread and salt’.17
The witness of hardship around him and of other street scenes was also, we notice, observing his father and teachers (as also his fellow-students) and watching caste and religious divides. Referring, two months before his death, to his early years in Porbandar and Rajkot, Gandhi would claim, ‘I saw everything that happened there’ (97: 428). Not, obviously, to be taken literally, the large claim should nonetheless enter our reconstruction of Mohan’s teenage years. Perhaps the trembling and aware Mohans are interrelated.
The send-off at Rajkot (for Bombay en route to London) was portrayed by Mohan in the Diary he wrote after arrival in London:
Many had come to bid me farewell on the night. Messrs. Kevalram, Chhaganlal Patwari, Vrajlal, Harishankar, Amolakh, Manekchand, Latib, Popat, Bhanji, Khimji, Ramji, Damodar, Meghji, Ramji Kalidas, Naranji, Ranchhoddass, Manilal were among those who came. Jatashankar, Vishvanath and others may be added (1: 8).
Actually, therefore, the now-timid-now-audacious teenager observing his surroundings is also a leader in his limited world. That many should see him off is not surprising by itself—departures for London were not everyday affairs in Rajkot in 1888. What is striking is Mohan’s lack of surprise about the send-off. He takes it for granted, and the way he reels off the names of persons who ‘were among those who came’ certainly suggests a leader in the making, if not one already made.
The Kathiawar Times published (on 12 July 1888) an English translation of what Mohan had said in the high school: ‘I hope that some of you will follow in my footsteps, and after your return from England you will work wholeheartedly for big reforms in India’ (1:1). Though he has solemnly taken the triple vow, the eve-of-England Mohan still wants ‘big reforms’.
After arriving in London Mohan would describe his parting from his wife, son and mother. Putlibai cried, but the son successfully fought back his tears. Kastur ‘had begun sobbing long before’. ‘I went to her and stood like a dumb statue for a moment. I kissed her, and she said, “Don’t go.” What followed I need not describe’ (Interview in The Vegetarian of London, 13 June 1891; 1: 45).
The Mohan who copes next with old and new obstacles in Bombay is unrecognizably different from the image of the uncertain teenager. He had arrived in Bombay along with Laxmidas (who carried the money that he had put together), Mehtab and a couple of others. Learning that it would be weeks before a ship left for England, Laxmidas returned to Rajkot, entrusting the money to Kastur’s brother, who lived in Bombay.
Also living in Bombay were a number of other Modh Banias, most of whom disliked the idea of someone from their community crossing the seas and living and eating in the company of impure whites—thus far no Modh Bania had committed that sin. When Mohan, waiting for news of a sailing, showed up in their areas, they jeered at him. A community meeting was convened and Mohan summoned before it. ‘Nothing daunted and without the slightest hesitation’, Mohan went. The Sheth who presided was a distant relative and had been close to Kaba Gandhi. In front of a large audience he addressed Mohan:
In the opinion of the caste, your proposal to go to England is not proper. Our religion forbids voyages abroad… One is obliged there to eat and drink with Europeans!
Answering that he did not agree that going to England was against their religion, Mohan also mentioned his vow, taken before Putlibai, ‘to abstain from three things you fear most’. ‘We tell you,’ the Sheth rejoined, ‘that it is not possible to keep our religion there’.
‘I am
helpless,’ the eighteen-year-old replied. ‘I cannot alter my resolve.’
‘Will you disregard the orders of the caste?’
‘I am really helpless. I think the caste should not interfere.’
‘Incensed,’ the Sheth ‘swore’ at Mohan, who sat unmoved. The Sheth then pronounced his order that Mohan was henceforth an outcaste and anyone helping him or seeing him off at the dock would be fined a rupee and a quarter (A 36-7).
To Laxmidas’s credit, he sent word from Rajkot that despite the Sheth’s order Mohan continued to have his permission to go, but Kastur’s brother lost his nerve and refused to hand over the money. At this Mohan asked Ranchhoddas Patwari, a Modh Bania friend living in Bombay, for a loan to cover his ‘passage and sundries’ and requested Patwari to recover the loan from Laxmidas.
Patwari agreed (another indication of Mohan’s standing), and Mohan bought his passage, Western-style clothes (including a short jacket and a necktie) and foodstuff. In the Autobiography he writes of an unnamed ‘friend who had experience in the matter’ who ‘got clothes and other things ready’. This may be a reference to Mehtab, who was in Bombay and was, we know, the one who could get ‘things ready’ for Mohan. From what we know of Mehtab, he could very well have claimed ‘experience in the matter’ of clothes for England.
Mohan took care, also, to get rid of his shikha or hair-knot, fearing that it would ‘expose [him] to ridicule’ in England (A 352). After writing letters to his family that he asked Mehtab to carry to Rajkot, Mohandas sailed from Bombay on 4 September 1888 on the P & O liner, Clyde.
He was carrying four letters himself. Introducing Mohandas, the letters were addressed to Pranjivan Mehta and Dalpatram Shukla, Kathiawaris in London at the time, Ranjitsinhji, a prince from Jamnagar (another ‘yellow’ tract in Kathiawar) who had acquired fame in England as a cricketer, and Dadabhai Naoroji, a founder of the Congress who was in London to promote awareness about India.
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 4
