Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  ‘But Mr Bell rang the bell of alarm in my ear and I awoke.’ Something in the book—we do not know quite what, but once more in a book—set off a string of thoughts. How would English elocution help in India? Could dancing make one a gentleman? As for the violin, it could be learnt even in India. He was in England to study, not to become an English gentleman.

  The ‘infatuation’, as the Autobiography calls it, lasted about three months. After about six dancing and two or three elocution lessons, Mohandas ended his chase. Letters announcing his inability to continue with the lessons and, also, spelling out the thoughts that Mr Bell had triggered, went to the dancing and elocution tutors.

  The truncated elocution course left a lasting benefit: Mohandas learnt to articulate his consonants, enabling future audiences to hear him distinctly. Calling on the violin teacher, Gandhi requested her to ‘dispose of the violin for any price it might fetch’ and confessed that he had been ‘pursuing a false idea’. Apparently, the teacher encouraged Mohandas ‘to make a complete change’ (A 46).

  Ending the ‘infatuation’ was a sort of milestone. Mohandas was sensing that not a personality but an inner firmness was what he needed to develop; not a power to charm or impress with figure or voice, but an internal spirit that holds on to a goal. Begun in November 1888, his London Diary, of which sadly only the opening portion has survived, indicates a wish to reflect, and also to write.

  The Diary’s second sentence—‘The scene opens about the end of April’—could have been the start of anyone’s writing life. Its author enjoys the written word and is aware that he has an interesting story to relate and a feat to record—his making it to England despite obstacles. Yet the writer seems secondary to a man examining himself.

  By April 1889 or so he had resolved to focus on his studies and given up chasing the identity of an English gentleman, but he admits in the Autobiography that he retained ‘punctiliousness in dress’ (A 46). As James Hunt points out in Gandhi in London, those hoping to become barristers were ‘expected to conform to a certain standard of dress’, and Gandhi, who ‘had a fine appreciation of the social drama’, knew ‘the value of fitting his costume to his role’.3

  In any case, the ‘infatuation’ had been well controlled. The dancing lessons were that and no more. Monitoring himself, Mohandas had kept a sharp eye, in particular, on his expenses. ‘I kept account of every farthing I spent, and my expenses were carefully calculated.’ Every item, an omnibus fare, a postage stamp, coppers spent on newspapers, or whatever, was entered into a notebook, ‘and the balance struck every evening before going to bed’ (A 47). ‘The thought of my struggling brother, who nobly responded to my regular calls for monetary help’ (A49), sharpened Mohandas’s effort to economize.

  The decay or loss of much of the Diary and of almost all the long letters that Mohandas wrote to Laxmidas and his mother has removed valuable evidence of Gandhi’s London life. Messages to Kastur, whose inability to read persisted, and to his little boy, were sent via Laxmidas.

  Mehtab not only remained in touch with Gandhi; he seems to have asked from time to time for money, which Mohandas occasionally sent, out of Laxmidas’s remittances to him, but, we must assume, without Laxmidas’s knowledge, at least at the time. Our awareness of this help from London to Mehtab is derived from Pyarelal, who presumably learned of it from Gandhi himself.4

  To return to Gandhi’s budget in London, he soon saw that he could cut his expenses by moving out of his West Kensington lodgings, where he paid for all meals even though he often ate outside. Besides, an important part of etiquette was courtesy, which in practice meant taking the landlady’s daughters out to dinner at times. It also meant paying for their transport while courteously attending parties with them. Moreover, the West Kensington family was not likely to offer many new lessons in etiquette.

  In the summer or autumn of 1889, he moved to a bedroom/living room suite on Store Street. He decided, also, to walk instead of using a conveyance. ‘This habit of long walks (eight to ten miles a day) kept me practically free from illness throughout my stay in England and gave me a fairly strong body’ (A 48). If during some of these walks he thought of Mehtab, we may assume that he smiled at his friend’s thesis about what made a person strong.

  Soon discovering that London had ten vegetarian restaurants apart from the Central, Gandhi walked to them all and sampled their fare. The walking Gandhi would become a familiar image to his London friends, though some also remembered his top hat and expensive clothes. Encountering Gandhi in Piccadilly Circus, another Indian student, Sachchidananda Sinha of Bihar, thought him ‘more interested in fashion and frivolities than in his studies’.5

  Perhaps the encounter occurred when Gandhi was trying out dancing, the violin and elocution, and he may have spoken of these interests to Sinha. But the move to Store Street, which brought him closer to the Inner Temple and to the University of London, had been preceded by a commitment to his legal studies, and by a decision also to sit in January 1890 for the University of London’s matriculation examination.

  Oxford and Cambridge, too, had entered his thoughts, but the time and fees required for a course in either of these universities seemed unaffordable. He was eligible to sit for his Roman law examination in November 1889 but chose to wait until March 1890, a timing influenced by the demands of the matriculation exam, which called for some proficiency in languages totally new to him, Latin and French, as well as in the subjects of English, history, mathematics, physics or chemistry, and geography.

  Studying chiefly by himself but also attending some preparatory classes for matriculation, and framing a timetable ‘to the minute’, Mohandas, at nineteen one of the youngest of the roughly 200 Indians then studying in England,6 bought all the costly textbooks prescribed, rejecting the option of memorizing inexpensive ‘Notes’. He found Latin hard, and the textbooks in law called for a lot of perseverance, although some were ‘full of interest’ and at least one, Joshua Williams’s volume on the principles of real estate, ‘read like a novel’ (A 71).

  While enjoying, on the whole, his demanding studies—‘Nothing like self-preparation,’ he would soon write7—he failed in Latin in December 1889. He therefore had to repeat the matriculation exam in June 1890, when he passed in all subjects including Latin. By this time he had also cleared his Roman law exam, for which a student could read either a summary or the full text of Justinian’s code.

  Gandhi had opted for the latter, reading a book by Thomas Sandars containing a Latin text and an English translation.8 Out of forty-six students, of whom forty passed, Gandhi was placed sixth. In December 1890, the earliest time possible for him, he sat for his four-day bar finals. A month later he heard that he had passed—out of 109 who took the finals, seventy-seven had done so. Now twenty-one, Mohandas was ranked thirty-fourth.

  To return, however, to 1889: In, probably, May of that year, before his move to Store Street, Mohandas went to Paris for the Great Exhibition of 1889-90. (Whether Gandhi’s visit to France occurred in 1890 or 1889 is not entirely clear; but it may be doubted that he spent a week in Paris immediately prior to writing the matriculation exam of June 1890.)

  We know that he lived in a vegetarian boarding house in Paris, walked with a map to wherever he wanted to go, climbed the newly-built Eiffel Tower twice or thrice, and ‘threw away seven shillings’ for ‘the satisfaction of being able to say that [he] had had lunch at a great height’.

  The Eiffel Tower seemed ‘unique’ and ‘novel’ to him, but he was also, or more, impressed by the grandeur, peace and sculptures of Paris’s ancient churches, including the cathedral of Notre Dame. He noticed, too, that ‘the fashions and frivolity of Paris’, about which he had ‘read a lot’, ‘were in evidence in every street’ (A 68-9).

  This ‘reading’ by him is of interest. It was wide, going beyond studies and newspapers, and resulted in his becoming ‘completely fascinated by English literature’, as he would inform Kaka Kalelkar in 1915.9 But we do not know what he read. N
or do we know of the plays he saw, though he clearly saw several. On a 1931 visit to London he would recall that he had ‘worshipped’ the ‘incomparable’ Ellen Terry (53: 348).

  Mohandas also found time to visit (perhaps for a meeting of vegetarians) the English resort town of Brighton. There, in a hotel, he sat at the same table with ‘an old widow of moderate means’, as he remembers her in the Autobiography. (We do not know her name.) The menu being in French, which Mohandas did not as yet follow, the lady helped him identify vegetarian items. The ‘acquaintance ripened into friendship’. She invited him to dine on Sundays at her place in London.

  To help Mohandas ‘conquer his bashfulness’, the old lady introduced him to young ladies and encouraged him to converse with them. ‘Particularly marked out for these conversations was a young lady who stayed with her, and often we would be left entirely alone together.’ At first Gandhi ‘found all this very trying’, but soon he ‘looked forward to every Sunday and came to like the conversations with the young friend’.

  What he did not tell her was that he had a wife and a son back in India.

  Evidently he did not tell that, either, to the West Kensington family with whom he had stayed. The Autobiography admits that Indian youths in England concealed their marriage, and gives reasons. Embarrassment at their early marriage was one. Another was the wish not to be deprived of opportunities ‘to go about or flirt with the young girls of the family in which they lived’, and, possibly, a related gallant desire not to deny the girls similar opportunities.

  Apparently the girls’ parents ‘encouraged’ the ‘more or less innocent’ flirting, which seemed required by a culture where ‘every young man has to choose his mate’. ‘I too caught the contagion,’ Gandhi confesses in the Autobiography. ‘I did not hesitate to pass myself off as a bachelor’ (A 56).

  But he had to reveal the truth when it appeared (to him at any rate) that the lady befriended in Brighton ‘had her own plans’ for him and her ward. According to the Autobiography, after several attempts at drafting and redrafting a letter, he wrote to the lady ‘somewhat to this effect’:

  Ever since we met at Brighton you have been kind to me… You also think that I should get married and with that in view you have been introducing me to young ladies… I should have told you when I began my visits to you that I was married… while yet a boy and am the father of a son. I am pained that I have kept this knowledge from you so long. But I am glad God has now given me the courage to speak out the truth. Will you forgive me? I assure you I have taken no improper liberties with the young lady…

  The Autobiography says that the reply, which came ‘almost by return post’, was ‘somewhat as follows’:

  I have your frank letter. We were both very glad and had a hearty laugh over it. The untruth you say you have been guilty of is pardonable. But it is well that you have acquainted us with the real state of things. My invitation still stands and we shall certainly expect you next Sunday and look forward to hearing about your child-marriage and laughing at your expense (A 58).

  Whether the ‘more or less innocent’ companionship (A 56) lasted weeks or months is not stated in the Autobiography, which relates the story in a chapter called ‘The Canker of Untruth’, where he adds that he ‘never thenceforward hesitated to talk of [his] married state’ (A 58). We do not know the story from the other side, and may guess that ‘a hearty laugh’ was not the only reaction from the young woman.

  Also told in that chapter is an amusing story of an outing with an unnamed young lady in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, later identified by researchers as the daughter of a Mr Shelton, who owned a vegetarian hotel on Madeira Road in Ventnor. Evidently five years or so older than Mohandas, the young lady, who ‘took me one day to the lovely hills round Ventnor’, was ‘flying like a bird’. ‘No slow walker’ himself, Gandhi was nonetheless left far behind, and when it came to descending from a cliff, Miss Shelton, despite her ‘high-heeled boots’, ‘darted down like an arrow’ while Mohandas could only ‘scramble to the bottom, crawling at intervals’.

  Having ‘stood at the foot smiling and cheering me and offering to come and drag me’, Miss Shelton offered a ‘loudly laughed bravo’ when Mohandas finally reached level ground. It seems plain that the amusement provided (and felt by the author) in the Autobiography was also felt, along with embarrassment, at the time—perhaps January 1890.10

  The story’s inclusion in the ‘Canker of Untruth’ chapter suggests that Miss Shelton did not at this time know of Gandhi’s marriage. It is obvious that young Gandhi enjoyed these meetings with members of the opposite sex, even if one part of him was insecure about his way with them, and another part guilty at concealing his marriage.

  The Autobiography mentions Gandhi coming across, in London, ‘two unmarried theosophists’, whom he calls ‘brothers’. James Hunt’s research indicates that in fact the two were an uncle-and-nephew pair, Bertram and Archibald Keightley. They took Mohandas, probably in August or September 1889, to meet Annie Besant, the Irishwoman who had just moved from radicalism to theosophy and was very much in the news, and Helena Blavatsky, a co-founder of the theosophical movement. The Keightleys had told Gandhi that Mme Blavatsky was in great joy over the ‘capture’ of Annie Besant.

  Intrigued, he says, about the thinking of a ‘former atheist’, Gandhi went to hear a public speech by Annie Besant and was struck by her remark, made in answer to a charge of inconsistency, that she would be content with an epitaph that she lived and died for truth.11 Mohandas also read Blavatsky’s book, sympathetic to Hinduism, Key to Theosophy, and was pleased with its rejection of the notion entertained by several Englishmen he had run into that ‘Hinduism was rife with superstition’ (A 60).

  He also attended meetings of the London Indian Society, founded by two men who had presided over the Indian National Congress, Naoroji (for whom Gandhi was carrying a letter of introduction) and W.C. Bonnerjee. We may mark, too, that within months of his arrival in England he had started cutting out and preserving items from newspapers that interested him.

  Saying this to his future secretary, Pyarelal, Gandhi would add that during his student days in London he ‘closely followed’ newspaper reports of criminal trials as also the proceedings of the Commission on Irish Crimes and Lord Russell’s brilliant cross-examination that exposed forgeries and vindicated the Irish leader, Parnell.12

  After passing the matriculation exam in June 1890, and thereby gaining a sense of accomplishment, he spent a four-week holiday in Brighton, where, among other things, he learnt to cook. Keener than ever to economize, he now moved from his two-room apartment on Store Street to a single room in Tavistock Street, at eight shillings a week. However, as Hunt points out, both Store and Tavistock Streets were areas of middle-class or well-to-do housing; and Gandhi admits in the Autobiography that he could not compete in frugality with some other Indian students in London, one of whom stayed ‘in the slums in a room at two shillings a week’, eating a two-pence meal of cocoa and bread (A49).

  While living in his Tavistock Street room, Gandhi invested in a stove, cooked oatmeal porridge for breakfast, ate lunch out, and had bread and cocoa at home for dinner. The meals cost him a total of a shilling and three pence a day. (Despite the economies, the London project would cost the Gandhis a total of Rs 13,000, or about a thousand pounds, two-and-a-half times the estimate given by Dave, the family friend.)

  The bar finals of December 1890 were only some months away, but the Gandhi of the second half of 1890, and of the less tense first half of 1891 (he left for India in June 1891) was very active socially and intellectually. The vegetarian movement absorbed a good deal of his time, and he also explored religious avenues.

  Another diversion was provided by a visit to London (probably in the summer of 1890) by the Gujarati poet, Narayan Hemchandra, to whom Gandhi offered company and assistance. Because of his unusual appearance, Hemchandra, a light, short man in ‘a clumsy pair of trousers, a wrinkled, dirty, brown coat… a tasselled woollen
cap, and a long beard’, his ‘round face scarred with small-pox’—to quote from the sketch Gandhi drew years later in the Autobiography—‘was bound to be singled out in fashionable society’, as Gandhi would put it (A 64). Mohandas taught Hemchandra English and at times cooked for him.

  Discussing with Hemchandra a famous dock strike that had ended in September 1889 through the effort of Cardinal Manning, Gandhi recalled a tribute once paid to Manning by Prime Minister Disraeli (who had died eight years earlier), whereupon Hemchandra decided that the cardinal was a man he had to meet. A note Gandhi wrote produced an appointment, and at a short interview Mohandas translated, for the cardinal, the poet’s Gujarati words. It was his custom, Hemchandra said, ‘to visit the sages of the world’ (A 66).

  But Hemchandra did something for Gandhi too. Demonstrating to Mohandas that earnestness was as effective as polish, Hemchandra stayed in Gandhi’s mind, eliciting, thirty-six years later, a whole chapter in the Autobiography.

  At some point in the fall of 1890, the uncle-and-nephew pair of theosophists, the Keightleys, sought Gandhi’s help with the Bhagavad Gita. They were reading Edwin Arnold’s translation, The Song Celestial, and wanted, with Gandhi’s aid, to understand the Sanskrit original.

  Though Mohandas had studied some Sanskrit in Alfred High School, his knowledge of the language was meagre. As for the Gita, he had not read it, not even in Gujarati. He conveyed these facts to the Keightleys but read the Gita with them nonetheless, in English and Sanskrit, and developed an interest in the text. (For the rest of his life, he would speak of Arnold’s as the best English version of the Gita.)

  The Keightleys next told Gandhi of Arnold’s book on the Buddha, The Light of Asia, which Mohandas read with ‘even greater interest’. At the suggestion of a ‘good Christian from Manchester’, whom Gandhi had met in a vegetarian boarding house, he also read the Bible, buying it, ‘along with maps, concordance, and other aids’, from the man from Manchester. He found the Old Testament heavy going, especially the Book of Genesis, but the Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament ‘went straight to [his] heart’ (A 60).