Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  Some at least of his prejudice against Christianity evaporated in London. The Christians he was meeting seemed likeable, and he attended church services a number of times. Charles Spurgeon, who spoke in the Tabernacle, the Congregationalist Joseph Parker, and Frederick William Farrar, the Bombay-born temperance advocate who would become dean of Canterbury after Gandhi’s return to India, were some of the famous preachers he heard while in London.

  He took something from them. In 1907 or 1908 he would tell Joseph Doke, the Baptist minister in South Africa who became his first biographer, that Parker, whose noontime sermons on Thursday he went many times to hear, helped him in his rejection of atheism.

  Part of the London Gandhi, independent and curious, was clearly looking for the right religion to follow. Though not his central pursuit in London, this was a question on his mind. Most of his Christian encounters were outside England’s mainstream Anglican or Roman Catholic churches, and, men like Joseph Parker apart, with Britons who combined their Christianity with vegetarianism. The man from Manchester from whom Gandhi bought the Bible was a vegetarian, as was Josiah Oldfield, an eloquent theology graduate from Oxford (and a future barrister and doctor) who moved to London while Gandhi was studying law.

  Possibly the ‘only Englishman with whom the young Gandhi lived on a basis of friendship and equality’,13 Oldfield, who was six years older, had heard of Gandhi from Dr Pranjivan Mehta, and sought him out. The two met in the summer of 1890, which is when Oldfield became the editor of The Vegetarian, published by the London Vegetarian Society (LVS). In September 1890 Oldfield invited Gandhi to attend ‘the greatest event of organized vegetarianism, the International Vegetarian Congress’.14

  Right after this conference Gandhi was elected to the executive committee of the London Vegetarian Society. And from March 1891 until his departure three months later for India, Gandhi and Oldfield ‘took rooms together’ at 52 St Stephen’s Gardens, Bayswater, as Oldfield would later recall.15

  When Gandhi confessed to Oldfield that he was wondering which religion to follow, the Englishman said, ‘Why not Christianity?’16 But the searching Gandhi was in no hurry and seemed also to be looking for Christians who would acknowledge that truth was not necessarily confined to their faith.

  As for the theosophists he had met, they did not seem to privilege one religion over another, and they respected aspects of Hinduism. This he liked, but he could not share the theosophists’ interest in occult powers. From Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-Worship, recommended by an unnamed friend, he learnt something about the Prophet of Islam.

  This reading should be seen together with Mohandas’s participation in meetings in London of the Anjuman-e-Islam, founded in 1886 for Muslim students by an Indian barrister, Abdullah Sohrawardy.17 We know, of course, that even in Rajkot Gandhi was interested in Hindu-Muslim friendship.

  The name of at least one Muslim student he befriended in London is known: Mazharul Haq from Bihar, a future president of the Muslim League.18 In London Gandhi noticed that some Muslim students were attracted by ideas of Pan-Islamism.19 Among other Indian students he got to know were Keshavrao Deshpande, a Maharashtrian Brahmin, and Pestonji Padshah, a Parsi, both studying law.

  Towards Hinduism, he was, at this stage, tentatively loyal. People who were likeable and seemed to have a standing in British society valued the culture he had inherited. Hinduism was respected by the theosophists, and vegetarianism was embraced by them and other Britons he was meeting. Men like Oldfield, while openly committed to Christianity, were strongly supportive of his vow against meat. All this raised the standing of Hinduism in his mind, yet the London Gandhi, like the Rajkot Mohan, was too rational to accept all that went under the name of Hinduism.

  The one clear religious conclusion he had come to was that God existed. He recognized, and rejected, his atheistic side. Mohandas had indeed admired the pro-India views of Charles Bradlaugh, Britain’s famous advocate of atheism, and on 30 January 1891 he went to Bradlaugh’s funeral, as, he thought, ‘every Indian residing in London did’ (A 63). But what Mohandas had experienced, heard, read and thought in London produced a verdict against atheism (A 60-61).

  In 1947, when he was seventy-seven, Gandhi would say that ‘at the age of twenty or twenty-one it became a dream of mine to attain… a state of mind [which] cannot be affected even in dire circumstances or at the moment of death’ (93: 228). Gandhi does not tell us what triggered the desire, whether it was an incident like the ejection from the Holborn restaurant by Shukla, or a religious text read or heard in London, or something else.

  He had cleared his bar finals by the time of the Bradlaugh funeral. Having sat for these from 15 to 20 December 1890, he learnt on 12 January that he had passed. All he now needed to do for being called to the bar was to pay for and attend twelve more dinners at the Inner Temple. Otherwise, the five months that lay ahead were entirely free. Because he did not drink, Mohandas was in demand at the dinners, where each table for four was given two bottles of port or sherry or, at times, champagne.

  Told on the voyage to England that life there was dependent on meat, Gandhi saw instead that Britain’s vegetarians had given him new life. Through them he found friendship, a field of activity and a platform for writing and speaking. As we will see, they also linked him to politics.

  In other ways, too, the vegetarians were useful to him. In Paris, Brighton, the Isle of Wight, and for a spell also, it would seem, in London, he had stayed in a vegetarian hotel or boarding house; and in London he became, for the rest of his life, something of a food scientist, experimenting with different varieties of vegetarian food. Soups that he had at first despised for their apparent dullness were later seen as nutritious and even tasty—he learnt from his experiments that ‘the real seat of taste was not the tongue but the mind’ (A 50).

  The pickles and sweets from Rajkot that he had sent for no longer seemed indispensable. He tried out a starch-less diet, strongly recommended by some of his vegetarian friends, of milk, cheese and eggs, but stopped eating eggs after a few weeks because he was certain his mother’s ‘definition of meat included eggs’ (A 51). He also rejected tea and coffee as non-nutritious and possibly harmful, and substituted cocoa for them. Food, in a variety of aspects, was a major part of his life in England.

  But the English vegetarians, whose interest in diet was linked to a wider idealistic concern, were also an important part of his social and intellectual world. Apart from the friendship with Oldfield, Mohandas also valued the chance to get to know a wealthy industrialist who provided much of the funding for the LVS and The Vegetarian, Alfred Hills, chairman of the Thames Iron Works, a shipyard that built battleships and other vessels.

  A devout Christian, Hills wanted The Vegetarian to be a ‘radical yet rational reformer’ that would address England’s ‘national vices and sorrows’, including ‘the congestion of our great cities, with its attendant curses of debauchery and disease’ and ‘the housing and feeding of our starving poor’.20 Another friend Gandhi found through the vegetarian movement was Thomas Allinson, a doctor who had invented a breakfast cereal and a wholemeal bread.

  From these and other friends, and from the literature to which they introduced Gandhi, he learnt of Tolstoy, John Ruskin, Thoreau, Emerson and Edward Carpenter, though it does not seem that in London he read any of their writings.

  It was Hills who first persuaded Mohandas to write for The Vegetarian. Between February and April 1891 Gandhi would write nine articles for the journal, with the encouragement, no doubt, of its editor, Oldfield. It is in these articles, and in talks and interviews he gave in 1891 to vegetarian groups and journals, that we glimpse what we have failed so far to see in the London Gandhi—his political and philosophical side.

  The subjects for these articles and talks are strictly non-political, ‘Indian Vegetarians’, ‘Some Indian Festivals’, ‘The Foods of India’, and so forth, but he makes suggestive forays into the broader field of life in India under British rule.

  In
the first part of ‘Indian Vegetarians’ he speaks of ‘salt, a heavily-taxed article’ (The Vegetarian, 7 Feb. 1891) and in a later part, saying that ‘those who have learnt a little bit of English have picked up English ideas here and here’, he adds, ‘Whether this is for the worse or the better must be left to the reader to judge.’

  In this article he also says that ‘one of the most greatly-felt evils of the British rule is the importation of alcohol—that enemy of mankind, that curse of civilization’, and takes care to point out that both Hindus and Muslims are unhappy that ‘the Government, it seems, instead of stopping, are aiding and abetting the spread of alcohol’. Also indicative are references in the article to ‘so-called educated Indians’ and to ‘the poor’ who are ‘the greatest sufferers’ (The Vegetarian, 14 March 1891; emphasis added).

  A piece by him on Divali and Holi claims that during such festivals ‘a serious attempt is made’ to patch up ‘old family quarrels’, ‘old debts are paid up’ where possible, and ‘alms are freely given’. ‘It will be easily seen that good and far-reaching consequences cannot fail to flow from such holidays, which some cry down as a relic of superstition and tomfoolery, though in reality they… tend to relieve a great deal the dull monotony of life among the toiling millions’ (The Vegetarian, 4 April 1891).

  In his talk on ‘The Foods of India’, given on 2 May 1891, he wants his British audience to realize that they are listening to one from India as a whole, not a part thereof. So he says something about the foods of Bengal and of ‘the southern and northern provinces’ in addition to what is eaten in western India. And he informs British vegetarians that whereas their vegetarianism was a question of choice, that of many in India was a matter of necessity. Stating that the poor in India were ‘compelled to live on vegetable foods because they cannot afford to pay for meat’, Gandhi adds:

  There are millions in India who live upon one pice—i.e. one-third of a penny—a day… These people have only one meal per day, and that consists of stale bread and (repeating a phrase previously used) salt, a heavily-taxed article.

  The ending of this talk is also of interest:

  In conclusion, I further hope that the time will come when the great difference now existing between the food habits of meat-eating in England and grain-eating in India will disappear, and with it some other differences which, in some quarters, mar the unity of sympathy that ought to exist between the two countries. In the future, I hope we shall tend towards unity of customs, and also unity of hearts (The Vegetarian Messenger, 6 May 1891; 1: 35-38. Emphasis added).

  If the vegetarian movement gave him opportunities to make political points, he also felt confident enough to assert, on the basis of ‘my personal experience’, that ‘English Vegetarians will more readily sympathize with the Indian aspirations’ and indeed that ‘the vegetarian movement will indirectly aid India politically also…’ (The Vegetarian, 28 April 1894; 1: 125ff.)

  Contained in ‘a letter to Indian students’ published in The Vegetarian three years after he left London, this was an assessment Gandhi had made while in London. It suggests that young Gandhi kept an interested eye on the attitudes to India of different kinds of Britons. His own political stance in London was of one who aspired steadily, if also quietly and indirectly, for Indian rights but also valued India’s British connection.

  Revealing the political strand in London’s Mohandas, the vegetarian involvement also trained him in the basics of politics—organizing meetings, enlisting allies and patrons, raising resources, getting the word out. The London of 1890-91, when Gandhi joined in ‘lecturing at clubs and public meetings’ and arranging suppers of ‘lentil soup, boiled rice and large raisins’, was, as Oldfield would later point out, ‘a fine training ground’ for Gandhi.21 On his part, Gandhi would acknowledge Oldfield’s role in encouraging him towards a public life.22

  Though nervousness while addressing an audience remained a problem for Mohandas, he was willing to step forward. When Oldfield asked him to stand for a place in the executive committee of the LVS, Gandhi agreed and was elected. And he took an initiative of his own.

  ‘Full of the neophyte’s zeal’, as he puts it in the Autobiography, he started ‘a vegetarian club’ in the London neighbourhood where he and Oldfield had taken rooms. Oldfield would remember the new unit as ‘the West London Reform Society’. At the instance, it would seem, of Gandhi, who took the secretary’s role, Oldfield became the president, and Sir Edwin Arnold, who apparently lived in the vicinity, the vice-president (A 52).

  If initiative is integral to public life, so is conflict. Two of Gandhi’s esteemed friends, Hills and Dr Allinson, differed sharply over a publication by Allinson, A Book for Married Women, propagating artificial birth control. Opposed to Allinson’s prescription, Hills asked the executive committee to remove the doctor from the LVS. Though Gandhi supported Hills’s viewpoint, he opposed Allinson’s removal, arguing that ‘the exclusion of anti-puritans’ was not part of the declared objects of the LVS.

  Another committee member read out Gandhi’s statement after a nervous Mohandas had failed to do so himself. However, ‘Dr Allinson lost the day’, and ‘in the very first battle’ of this kind Gandhi found himself ‘siding with the losing party’ (A 54).

  Connecting him to politics, London’s vegetarian movement was yet greater than politics. Joining the religious to the political dimension, and the ethical to the dietary, it satisfied an inner need in Mohandas and strengthened him. He was aware, though, that mainstream England thought of vegetarians as faddists.

  Anxieties assailed him as departure neared. He was no longer the person who had left Rajkot in 1888. One part of him was very English now. After three years in a great city he had grown to like, how would he cope in provincial Rajkot? How would he reconnect with his mother, wife, son, siblings, the wider family and caste, his friends?

  He worried also about professional prospects. He had heard that Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, who was said to dominate the Bombay bar, ‘roared like a lion’ in the courtroom, but Gandhi could not picture himself roaring anywhere (A 73). Could a timid man like him who knew virtually nothing of law in India succeed there?

  On 21 April he read the paper mentioned earlier, ‘The Foods of India’, at the Waverley restaurant. The Vegetarian reported: ‘After congratulating the previous speaker (a Mrs Harrison) and apologizing for his paper… [Mr M.K. Gandhi] began to read it. He was rather nervous in the beginning’ (1: 35).

  By now Tryambak Mazmudar had reappeared. On 5 and 6 May he and Gandhi attended a vegetarian conference in Portsmouth where, on 6 May, Gandhi was scheduled to present his paper again.

  In the Autobiography Gandhi says that the house into which he and Mazmudar were billeted in the port town was of questionable reputation, though the conference organizers ‘did not know anything about it’. Returning to this lodging after the opening day’s conference, Gandhi and Mazmudar had dinner. What followed is in the Autobiography:

  After dinner we sat down to play a rubber of bridge, in which our landlady joined, as is customary in England, even in respectable households. Every player indulges in innocent jokes as a matter of course, but here my companion and our hostess began to make indecent ones as well. It captured me and I also joined in.

  Just when I was about to go beyond the limit, leaving the cards and the game to themselves… [my] good companion uttered the… warning: ‘Whence this devil in you, my boy? Be off, quick!’…

  I fled from the scene. To my room I went quaking, trembling, and with beating heart, like a quarry escaped from the pursuer (A 62-3).

  In the Autobiography, where he refers to the incident as ‘the first occasion when a woman other than my wife moved me to lust’, Gandhi calls Mazmudar’s warning ‘blessed’, adds that it was God who sent it through Mazmudar, and adds also that while fleeing ashamed from the scene, he ‘expressed gratefulness within myself to my friend’.

  That night he did not sleep. He doubtless remembered his mother and his vow to her, and K
astur. There were other thoughts:

  Should I leave this house? Should I run away from the place?.. What would happen to me if I had not my wits about me? I decided to act thenceforth with great caution; not to leave the house, but somehow leave Portsmouth (A 63).

  He seems to have reckoned that an abrupt departure from the house might invite suspicion. He would go through with the second day of the conference, read his paper, and then, quietly and quickly, leave Portsmouth.

  This is just what he did. On 6 May he gave his talk and left for Ventnor, where too he was scheduled to speak, on 11 May. There were other talks in the London area—he had after all become a celebrity in the world of English vegetarians.

  Though harbouring guilt over what had happened in Portsmouth, he tackled his engagements better than is suggested in the Autobiography, which claims that extreme nervousness silenced him at Ventnor and again at a farewell occasion he organized in London. Contemporary accounts unearthed by researchers do not fully corroborate the Autobiography’s version.23

  Recalling the Portsmouth surge of lust in the Autobiography, Gandhi says that at the time he only ‘vaguely understood that God had saved me’. Neither then nor in the Autobiography did he explore a link between the surge and his anxieties.

  Aware of Mohandas’s fears about practising law in India, a friend (not named in the Autobiography) advised him to seek the counsel of Dadabhai Naoroji, the London-based ex-president of the Indian National Congress. Gandhi had respectfully heard Naoroji at meetings of Indian students and, after much diffidence, handed to the old man the introduction he had been carrying from September 1888. But he could not bring himself to trouble Naoroji over his personal worries.