Mohandas’s cabin-mate was Tryambakrai Mazmudar, a vakil or pleader from Junagadh (another princely state near but larger than Porbandar). ‘An experienced man of mature age’, as the Autobiography describes him, Mazmudar hoped, like Mohan, to become a barrister. Learning that Mazmudar was travelling by this ship, Mohan had asked for a berth in his cabin.
Twenty-two years later, speaking of the youth, one month shy of nineteen, whom he had met on the Clyde, Mazmudar would recall that young Mohan (Mazmudar called him a ‘child’) was ‘obstinate’ and had untypical18 ‘strength’. ‘There is no one more truthful,’ added Mazmudar. ‘But along with truth he has a lot of ego. Only what he says is the truth.’19
Both qualities, strength and obstinacy, were claimed by Mohan in his London Diary:
I must write that had it been some other man in the same position which I was in, I dare say he would not have been able to see England (1: 9).
But I am not a man who would, after having formed any intention, leave it easily (1: 4).
Chapter 2
London and Identity
1888-91
On the voyage to England Mohandas struggled to speak in English—‘I had to frame every sentence in my mind before I could bring it out’ (A38)—and to eat with knife and fork. Not knowing what on the ship’s menus was meat-free, and too shy to ask, he survived on the sweets and fruits he was carrying until Mazmudar coaxed some Indians on the crew to cook dal for him and Mohandas.
Despite Mazmudar’s advice that he should move around and get to know people, Mohandas avoided the dining room and the deck, staying in his cabin except when it was safe to ‘venture up’ to a more or less empty deck. One night he thought diamonds were dancing in the waves below him. Since diamonds could not float, perhaps they were shiny creatures of the sea? Realizing that a clear night’s stars were being reflected, he ‘laughed at [his] folly’ (Diary; 1: 10).
The London Diary would record this little experience and also his occasional attempts with the piano on board, his admiration of the efficiency with which life was organized on the ship, and his sense of marvel and curiosity at the construction of the Suez Canal through which the Clyde passed—the Canal’s engineers had competed with nature, he felt, and he wanted to figure out just how they had carved it.
Word of his vows spread quickly across the vessel, and Indian and European passengers warned that ahead of him lay a climate where no one could live without meat and liquor—certainly not without meat. He would find this out, he was told, if not on the Red Sea then in the Mediterranean, and without question on the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel. The different seas came and went, and Mohandas survived.
At a halt in Brindisi a man accosted ‘black’ men like Mohandas and said, ‘Sir, there is a beautiful girl of fourteen, follow me, sir, I will take you there, the charge is not high, sir.’ Though ‘puzzled’, Mohandas seems to have answered ‘calmly and boldly’ that he did not want the girl and asked the man ‘to go away’ (Diary; 1: 13). In Malta, the next port of call, he saw tapestries for the first time, ‘very old paintings that were not paintings’.
Towards the end of the voyage an English passenger called Jeffreys wrote out a note that Mohandas had not taken meat: he had been advised in Bombay to obtain such a testimonial. But since such certificates were also offered to those eating meat, the piece of paper lost ‘all its charm’ for Mohandas (A 39).
Having worn a black suit while on board, Mohandas emerged, on landing, in white flannels and found that he was ‘the only person wearing such clothes’. Whether in choosing what to wear he was following his own instincts or the (mischievous?) advice of the friend who helped him obtain the suits (Mehtab?) is not known.
From Tilbury, where the ship landed on 29 September 1888, Mohandas, Mazmudar and another passenger named Abdul Majid (who had travelled first-class) took a train to the heart of London (perhaps to Trafalgar Square), and from there a cab (a horse-driven four-wheeler) to Victoria Hotel. Noticing others leave their bags with a travel agent at Tilbury, Mohandas had done likewise, but at the hotel a Mohandas impatient to get at his black suit was told that it would take two nights for his bags to reach him.
Victoria Hotel, one of London’s grandest hotels at the time, ‘dazzled’ him. He was bowled over by the rows of lights, by the lift—he was seeing one for the first time—and by the room to which he was taken. ‘I thought I could pass a lifetime in that room,’ he would write before long (1: 16 & 83).
But he also noticed ‘the dignified air’ in which Abdul Majid, whose dress ‘was perhaps worse than that of the porter’, had asked ‘the porter of the Victoria Hotel to give our cabman the proper fare’. The manager asked Majid, who appointed himself the leader of the trio of visiting Indians, whether they wanted rooms on the second floor. ‘Mr Majid,’ Mohandas would soon write in his Diary, ‘thinking it below his dignity to inquire about the daily rent said yes. The manager at once gave us a bill of six shillings each per day and a boy was sent with us.’
Not sure that his words fully conveyed his amusement (at Majid and at his own white flannels), Mohandas would add in the Diary: ‘I was all the time smiling within myself’ (Diary; 1: 16). Amusement was not, of course, his only emotion; he felt overwhelmed, as we have seen, by the hotel’s splendour, the Bania in him was troubled by the size of the bill, and he was annoyed, if also amused, by his white clothes. Yet we should note this evidence of the inwardly smiling Mohandas arriving in London.
A telegram that Mohandas had sent from Southampton brought a London-based Kathiawari to Victoria Hotel on the evening of Mohandas’s arrival in London. Pranjivan Mehta, one of the four to whom Mohandas had been given letters of introduction, was a Jain who had graduated from Grant Medical College in Bombay. Older than Mohandas by a few years, he was studying both law and higher medicine in London.
This Victoria Hotel meeting would lead to a lifelong friendship, but its start was not very propitious. After laughing at Mohandas’s white clothes, Mehta showed irritation when, without asking for permission, Mohandas picked up Mehta’s top hat and caressed its fur the wrong way. Mohandas put the hat down and received a warning about English etiquette.
Breaching one of its rules, though not legally a crime, was worse. Anyone hoping to do well in England had to observe the rules, and the way to learn them, Mehta said, was to move as a paying guest into an English home. But since Mohandas was too raw for such a move, he should first apprentice under an Indian already placed with a British family.
This other Indian was quickly identified: Dalpatram Shukla, another of the four for whom Mohandas had letters. A Brahmin Kathiawari, and also hoping to become a barrister, Shukla was willing to accept Gandhi, and so, evidently, was Shukla’s English ‘family’. After a couple of days in Victoria Hotel, and some more days in cheaper rooms that he and Mazmudar had jointly rented, Mohandas moved into the home in Richmond where Shukla was living.
In those ‘cheaper rooms’, where Mohandas crossed his nineteenth birthday, he had overcome a torrential attack of homesickness.
I would continually think of my home and country. My mother’s love always haunted me. At night the tears would stream down my cheeks, and home memories of all sorts (including, we may surmise, of Kastur and Harilal) made sleep out of the question. It was impossible to share my misery with anyone… I knew of nothing that would soothe me. Everything was strange—the people, their ways, and even their dwellings. I was a complete novice in the matter of English etiquette… There was the additional inconvenience of the vegetarian vow. Even the dishes that I could eat were tasteless and insipid. England I could not bear, but to return to India was not to be thought of. Now that I had come, I must finish the three years, said the inner voice (A 40).
This is from the Autobiography, written thirty-seven years later. Yet the recollection has the ring of reality: his London Diary too makes several mentions of his ‘bold and dearest mother’, his ‘dear, dear mother’ and so forth (1: 6-8). However, the nineteen-year-old
rejected the homeward pull.
Like Mehta, Shukla was keen to break the newcomer into English ways. The youth who in Rajkot had never read newspapers started enjoying, from his Richmond days, the hour he spent every day in reading three—the conservative Daily Telegraph, the liberal Daily News and the audacious Pall Mall Gazette, the editor of which, William T. Stead, was sent to jail (within months of Gandhi’s arrival) for his role in exposing how prostitutes were being recruited. With their stories, and differing perspectives, on Victorian England’s tensions between workers and bosses, and between England and Ireland, the newspapers, introduced to him by Shukla, nurtured the political strand in Mohandas. They also quickly improved his English.
Shukla strove also, ‘day in and day out’, to rescue his new friend from the vegetarian vow. A pledge made before an illiterate mother, and in ignorance of the conditions Mohandas was now facing, was valueless, he argued. ‘You confess to having eaten and relished meat,’ Shukla added. ‘You took it where it was absolutely unnecessary, and will not where it is quite essential’ (A 42).
Daily realities supported Shukla’s reasoning. While the oatmeal porridge that Mohandas was given for breakfast felt adequate, the unvarying, unappealing contents of lunch and dinner (spinach and two or three slices of bread) left him hungry. Though ‘a good eater’ and possessing ‘a capacious stomach’, he felt it would go against etiquette to ask for additional slices (A 41).
Yet the nineteen-year-old resisted Shukla’s pressure. ‘The more [Shukla] argued, the more uncompromising I became.’ Confronting Shukla with ‘an eternal negative’, Mohan at this time also turned, so he says in the Autobiography, to some kind of prayer. ‘Not that I had any idea of God’, but ‘daily I would pray for God’s protection and get it’ (A42). He remembered his maid Rambha and recited the name of Rama. His ability to survive those difficult weeks without meat seemed to give Mohandas a sense that a higher power was helping him, starting a process whereby, he would later say, he ‘crossed the Sahara of atheism’ while a student in London (A 61).
In another bid to save Gandhi, Shukla read aloud passages from Bentham’s Theory of Utility, but Mohandas asked him to stop. ‘Pray excuse me,’ he said. ‘I admit it is necessary to eat meat. But I cannot break my vow. Give me up as foolish or obstinate. A vow is a vow.’ After this Shukla, who had no problems himself with drinking, smoking or eating meat, seemed to cease his effort, though his anxiety about Gandhi in England remained.
Richmond being far from the centre of London, Mohandas moved, in November of 1888, to 20 Baron’s Court Road, West Kensington. This was the four-storey home, in a long row of attached houses, of a widow and her two daughters. Behind the row roared London’s District Line trains.
In this West Kensington home, located for him by Shukla and Mehta, Mohandas spent several months. Informed by Mohandas of his vow, the landlady, who had spent a few years in India, tried out some vegetarian cooking but could not satisfy either the palate or the stomach of her lodger. At times the daughters would serve Mohandas an extra slice or two, ‘but little did they know that nothing less than a loaf would have filled me’ (A 42). Mohandas was too shy to ask for more.
But the youth from Rajkot was enjoying his walks, often doing several miles a day, eating his fill of bread in cheap restaurants, looking forward to his legal studies, observing and perhaps smiling more than we may know, and feeling fairly confident in the Empire’s capital. He was enjoying the newspapers, and also Alfred Harmsworth’s Answers to Correspondents, finding it ‘smutty but witty and very readable always’, as he seems, decades later, to have told Pyarelal.1
The London he had come to was alive with ideas and movements. From here Victoria reigned over an expanding Empire. That Anglo-Saxons were the world’s supreme race and Christianity the greatest religion was assumed in London, and also, at the time, in much of Europe and in America, but browns and blacks were not disliked in England, partly because there were so few of them.
There was also, in some circles, an interest in Asian thought and religions, in part inspired from across the Atlantic by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other groups espoused socialism, or women’s rights, or Irish rights, or atheism, or a universal religion of one form or another, or a return from a problematic industrialization to a simpler life on the land, or prescribed a variety of vegetarian diets for sound health. These ideas and debates touched Gandhi, who also followed a controversy sparked off by some of Oscar Wilde’s writings published at this time.2
The Inner Temple, where Gandhi had enrolled, was one of four Inns of Court (all situated close to the city of London’s western walls) with a history that went back to the thirteenth century. Mehta, who would become Mohandas’s closest Indian friend in London, and Shukla had joined the somewhat less expensive Middle Temple. Those desirous of being called to the bar had to pass two sets of written-and-oral examinations, one in Roman law and the other in Common law, and attend six dinners a term for twelve terms spread over three years.
The course was prestigious and advanced but not arduous. Almost everything depended on personal study—there was no such thing as campus life, and there were not many classes or lectures to attend. Because time was needed to find one’s feet, an Indian aspirant for the bar usually waited several months after arrival in England to begin this personal study in earnest. This was certainly the case with Mohandas.
In, most probably, November or December of 1888, on one of his wanderings on foot far from West Kensington, Mohandas hit upon the Central, a vegetarian restaurant off Farringdon Street. It was a sight that filled him with the ‘joy that a child feels on getting a thing after its own heart’. Before entering the dining room, however, he bought—‘for a shilling’—Henry Salt’s Plea for Vegetarianism that was on display at the entrance. At the Central he ate his ‘first hearty meal since… arrival in England’, and his feeling was that ‘God had come to my aid’ (A 43).
Reading Salt’s book ‘from cover to cover’, Gandhi became a vegetarian by choice. Once more a text had pointed a path to him. Mohandas’s wish that all Indians should become meat-eaters, and his hope that one day, freely and openly, he himself would resume eating meat were now fully behind him. His appetite whetted by Salt’s book, he ‘went in for all books available on vegetarianism and read them’, including studies by William Howard, Anna Kingsford and Thomas Allinson, and thought of dietetic experiments he would make himself.
Learning of his fellow-Kathiawari’s new enthusiasm, Shukla was well and truly perturbed. This bright youth brought to London to study for the bar—light in build, thick-lipped, big-eared, broad-cheeked, and eager-faced, charming in his peculiar stubborn way—was reading irrelevant, head-muddling stuff, speaking of pointless experiments, and giving every sign of turning into a crank.
Another effort to save him, an imaginative one, had to be made. Shukla asked Mohandas to join him for an evening at the theatre (he knew that Mohandas liked London’s plays), to be preceded by dinner at the Holborn restaurant. Perhaps glitter and culture, mixed with straight talking-to, would pull the young man back from the brink. After all, as Shukla surely knew, Mohandas had been ‘dazzled’ by the Victoria Hotel.
The first big restaurant in which he found himself, the Holborn seemed ‘palatial’ to Mohandas. Moreover, it was ‘a very big company of diners in the midst of which my friend and I sat sharing a table between us’ (A 44). After the first course, soup, had been placed on the table, Gandhi summoned the waiter, whereupon Shukla asked Gandhi what the matter was. ‘I want to know whether the soup is vegetarian,’ said Gandhi.
Shukla exploded. ‘You are too clumsy for decent society,’ he exclaimed. ‘If you cannot behave yourself, you had better go. Feed in some other restaurant and await me outside.’ Out Mohandas went. Walking to a vegetarian restaurant close by, Gandhi found it closed. He waited for Shukla and went with him to the play (we do not know its name) on an empty stomach, and neither he nor Shukla said a word about what, in the Autobiography, Gandhi characteristically calls
‘the scene I had created’ (A 45).
According to the Autobiography, Gandhi’s relations with Shukla were unaffected by this ‘last friendly tussle we had’. Yet the accusation of ‘clumsiness’ had needled Mohandas, who reacted by wanting to demonstrate his elegance not only to Shukla but also to himself. As the Autobiography puts it, he informed Shukla of a resolve ‘to become polished and make up for my vegetarianism by cultivating other accomplishments which fitted one for polite society’ (A 45).
He would become ‘an English gentleman’! New clothes bought at Army and Navy Stores and a ten-pound evening suit from Bond Street replaced the ‘unsuitable’ outfits brought from Bombay. A chimney-pot hat was obtained for nineteen shillings. The ready-made tie was discarded, and the art of putting on a tie was learnt. A letter went to Laxmidas in Rajkot for a double watch-chain of gold. And Mohandas spent ten minutes every day ‘before a huge mirror’ arranging his tie and parting his hair ‘in the correct fashion’ (A 45).
Since looks alone did not make an English gentleman, Gandhi also engaged tutors for dancing, French, the violin and elocution. Four years after ending his ‘reform’ experiment with meat in Rajkot, he seemed engaged in a wider, more dramatic experiment in London. (We may note, in connection with the violin, that the young man was interested in music: apart from playing that haunting lament on a concertina, he had been attracted by bhajans sung while, nursed by him, his father lay ill.)
He paid three pounds for a term’s dancing lessons, another three pounds for a violin, unstated fees for French and violin lessons, a preliminary fee of a guinea to a man teaching elocution, who began with a speech by Pitt, and another unknown sum to buy Bell’s Standard Elocutionist.
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 5
