Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  He did, however, approach (again on the advice of a friend) the jurist and orientalist Frederick Pincott, described in the Autobiography as ‘a Conservative but [with a] pure and unselfish affection’ for Indian students. Pincott ‘laughed’ Gandhi’s ‘pessimism away’ and said that everyone did not have to have the dominance and brilliance of ‘a Pherozeshah Mehta’. Honesty and industry would suffice.

  Pincott’s ‘smiling open face’ entered Gandhi’s memory, and he felt reassured (A 74). Though a celebrity in a circle, and admired there for his commitment, Gandhi was in need of encouragement. He was fortunate to receive it from Pincott.

  Pincott also recommended books by Lavater and Shemmelpennick that would help Gandhi in ‘reading a man’ from his face or head, an ability that he said lawyers should have (which was also an ability Gandhi was interested in), as well as the volumes by Kaye and Malleson on the 1857 rebellion: an Indian lawyer should know India’s history, Pincott said. Buying the Lavater book, Gandhi also studied Shakespeare’s physiognomy, but ‘did not acquire the knack of finding out the Shakespeares walking up and down the streets of London’ (A 74). His anxieties had not banished his ability to be amused.

  Shortly before his departure, Gandhi was interviewed for The Vegetarian by its editor, Josiah Oldfield. The interview, referred to previously, is revealing, urbane, honest and appealingly modest. In it Gandhi describes the reason for coming to England—‘In a word, ambition’; how he ‘exacted’ the consent of some relatives—the exercise was ‘nothing else’; how he showed to his mother, of whom he was ‘the pet’, ‘the exaggerated advantages of coming to England’; and how ‘an old friend of my father… fanned the fire that was burning within me’.

  Gandhi recalled his thinking before leaving India: ‘If I go to England not only shall I become a barrister (of whom I used to think a great deal), but I shall be able to see England, the land of philosophers and poets, the very centre of civilization.’

  Three years on, he frankly admits that it was ‘ambition’ that brought him to England, but now he seems to smile at that drive, and also at barristers. Added Gandhi, ‘You will perhaps be astonished to hear that I am married. The marriage took place at the age of twelve’ (1:42-44; The Vegetarian, 13 June 1891).

  In conclusion (Gandhi went on), I am bound to say that during my nearly three years’ stay in England, I have left many things undone, and have done many things which I perhaps might have left undone, yet I carry one great consolation with me, that I shall go back without having taken meat or wine… (The Vegetarian, 20 June 91)

  Apart from the fact that the Portsmouth episode was fresh in the young man’s mind, it would have been indelicate to claim in a newspaper interview that he had also managed—a close shave notwithstanding—to keep the vow about women.

  He had done more. He had enjoyed living in London, observed (with a fairly sharp eye, we must assume) its personalities and cross-currents, studied the British mind, dipped into English literature, and mingled with some gifted (if also unusual) individuals. Gaining skills that could help him in law and public life, yet retaining much of his shyness, he had also reflected on his goals and embraced interests bigger than himself. While experiencing embarrassments and a jolt, he had also nurtured an earlier ability to be amused by himself and the world, built promising connections, and could count some solid attainments.

  On 5 June Gandhi hosted a private farewell dinner for his friends in Room XIX of the luxurious Holborn restaurant, at the south-west corner of Holborn and Kingsway,24 the very place from which, about three years previously, Shukla had ousted him for wanting to ask a waiter if the soup was vegetarian. What is more, Gandhi got the Holborn to serve, for the first time, a wholly vegetarian meal. The attendees, Hills, Oldfield and other pillars of vegetarianism, were delighted with ‘the new experiment’ (A 54). Mohandas liked the taste of his little coup.

  Music, too, had been arranged by him, and there were speeches. In the Autobiography Gandhi thinks that because of nervousness he could only utter the first sentence of a short speech he had rehearsed, but on 13 June 1891, The Vegetarian published a slightly different report:

  At the close, Mr Gandhi, in a very graceful though somewhat nervous speech, welcomed all present, spoke of the pleasure it gave him to see the habit of abstention of flesh progressing in England, related the manner in which his connection with the LVS arose, and in so doing took occasion to speak in a touching way of what he owed to Dr Oldfield.

  Oldfield said at the dinner that Gandhi had provided a lesson of ‘patient, persistent overcoming of difficulties, in pursuit of an aim’.25 On 10 June 1891 Mohandas was called to the bar. Two days later, he boarded first a train at Liverpool Street station and then, at Tilbury Docks, a ship going East.

  I could not make myself believe (he would soon write) that I was going to India until I stepped into the steamship Oceana, of the P & O Company. So much attached was I to London and its environments, for who would not be? London with its teaching institutions, public galleries, vegetarian restaurants, is a fit place for a student and a traveller, a trader and a ‘faddist’—as a vegetarian would be called by his opponents. Thus it was not without regret that I left dear London (1: 50-51).

  The suave tone evident during Gandhi’s final weeks in England also permeates the two short articles that he wrote about (and probably during) the voyage back to India. Their author (perhaps hoping to develop his writing skill) affects a (very British) mocking, snobbish and understating style. His articles refer to ‘a crowd of dirty-looking beggars’ who ‘pester’ passengers in Malta, ‘rogues and rascals’ encountered in Port Said, and waiters who ‘murder the Queen’s English’ and ‘are the reverse of clean’.

  Gandhi describes the meals in a day of ‘an average passenger’: the pre-breakfast tea and biscuits, a huge breakfast, its elements detailed, an ‘easily digestible’ lunch (‘dinner’) with ‘plenty of mutton and vegetables, rice and curry, pastry and what not… fruit and nuts’, followed by ‘a ‘refreshing’ cup of tea and biscuits at 4 p.m.’ and ‘a ‘high tea’ at 6.30 p.m.—bread and butter, jam or marmalade, or both, salad, chops, tea, coffee, etc.’ Thereafter, since the sea air was ‘so very salubrious’, ‘the passengers could not retire to bed before taking a few, a very few—only eight or ten, fifteen at the most—biscuits, a little cheese and some wine or beer’.

  Some very nice ladies and gentlemen [travelled] in the first saloon. But it would not do to have all play and no quarrel, so some of the passengers thought fit to get drunk almost every evening (beg your pardon, Mr Editor, they got drunk almost every evening, but this particular evening they got drunk and disorderly).

  He also wrote of a speech that he was all set to make on board (on vegetarianism of course) but did not because the evening ‘devoted to speeches and concerts’ never came off. Asked to be humorous in his speech, Gandhi replied (he wrote) that he ‘might be nervous but humorous I could not be’. But the man writing this knew that he was being amusing.

  This time freely mingling with others and helping to organize some common activities, Gandhi persuaded the crew to provide vegetable curry, rice or brown bread, and fruit for the two vegetarians, including himself, on board. The other passengers, British and Indian, seemed to like and respect him.

  He was, in his own words, a student, traveller, trader and ‘faddist’, but also, now, an Indo-Anglian. Trader meant a Bania, an element of his never-forgotten Indian identity, while the ‘fads’ he had acquired were at least partly of British origin. And the style he was employing, in his life on board and in the articles, was of a sophisticated young man aware of a modernizing world. (In the summer of 1891, a new century was not too far off.) His comments, while again revealing an interest in what was going on around him, ended on a serious note:

  What a human cargo was on the Oceana and the Assam! (Bombay-bound passengers were moved in Aden to the Assam.) Some were going to make fortunes in Australia… some, having finished their studies in England, were going to
India to earn a decent living. Some were called away by a sense of duty, some were going to meet their husbands in Australia or India… and some were adventurers who, being disappointed at home, were going to pursue their adventures, God knows where (1: 50-56).

  During the journey, he says in the Autobiography, he was ‘taxing’ himself, being ‘a reformer’, ‘as to how best to begin certain reforms’, starting no doubt with the Rajkot household. But underneath a nonchalant exterior he was aware of two troubling questions: how would his caste receive him (he had heard in letters of continuing objections), and how would he start a career?

  The sea was rough as the Assam approached Bombay. ‘Almost every passenger was sick; I alone was in perfect form, staying on deck to see the stormy surge, and enjoying the splash of the waves’ (A 75). In Mohandas, an inner storm matched the outer one, but he says he felt ready to face both.

  There was indeed something to face on landing, which occurred in pelting rain. After initial prevarications, Laxmidas, who met his younger brother off the boat, revealed that Putlibai was no more. She had died, aged around forty-one, not long after hearing that her son had passed the bar finals, but the family spared Mohandas ‘the blow in a foreign land’.

  ‘Most of my cherished hopes were shattered,’ Gandhi says in the Autobiography (75), without spelling out these hopes. Perhaps he had wished to become a diwan in her lifetime, or dreamt of even more; he certainly wanted to tell her that he had kept the vows.

  ‘My grief was even greater than over my father’s death… But… I did not give myself up to any wild expression of grief. I could even check the tears, and took to life just as though nothing had happened.’ We have seen that while in England he had wished to cultivate an ability to endure shock or danger.

  Rajchandra. Laxmidas took his brother to the home of Dr Pranjivan Mehta, whose return to India had preceded Gandhi’s, and who introduced Mohandas to his relatives. One of these was Rajchandra, who had just married a daughter of Dr Mehta’s older brother. Two years older than Gandhi, Rajchandra, who had a Bania father and a Jain mother, was a Kathiawari soon to win fame as a Jain scholar-saint.

  In 1891, at the age of twenty-three or twenty-four, he was already known as a poet, as a jeweller of unimpeachable integrity and for memory feats. Vain about his English, and about what he knew of Latin and French, Mohandas wrote out a series of European words and technical terms, read them aloud, and challenged Rajchandra to repeat them. Rajchandra did so faultlessly.

  The experience brought the barrister closer to earth. As Gandhi would later confess, ‘Having been to England made a man feel that he was heaven-born.’ The ‘binding spell’ of England was broken ‘a little’ by Rajchandra’s performance.26

  At Laxmidas’s urging and also because of his mother’s wish, Mohandas went through a ritual of ‘cleansing’ himself of the sin of crossing the seas. Performed in Nasik in Maharashtra, the ritual bridged a divide between the Gandhis and much of the Modh Bania community, though the leaders of one section were not appeased. They demanded a fine that Mohandas refused to pay. The result was that his sister Raliat and her husband, and the parents of Kastur, who belonged to the minority group, were not allowed to offer Mohandas even a glass of water in their homes.

  To suit the homecoming barrister, Laxmidas had had the Rajkot home whitewashed. A ceiling had been installed under its tiled roof. Chairs and tables and china had been bought. Tea and coffee were already being used. It was expected that increased expenses would be more than offset by the large income that Mohandas would pull in. Though doubtful about some of the spending, the reformer added his innovations such as cocoa, oatmeal and European clothes.

  There is no suggestion in the Autobiography or elsewhere of an ecstatic reunion with Kastur in 1891. He renewed the attempt to educate her and again met with resistance. Mohandas’s response was less than patient, and his ‘jealousy’, ‘squeamishness’ and ‘suspiciousness’ (to use his words in the Autobiography) were revived.

  Whether Mehtab again had a role in inciting these feelings is not known. The Autobiography is silent on the subject; in fact Mehtab is not mentioned in the short account Gandhi gives of experiences between his return from England in 1891 and his 1893 departure for South Africa. But we should assume that Mehtab, who re-enters the narrative in South Africa, was around, and interacting with Gandhi, in Rajkot in 1891.

  What we know (from the Autobiography) is that Mohandas was indeed harsh to Kastur. On one occasion he sent ‘her away to her father’s house, and consented to receive her back only after I had made her thoroughly miserable’ (A 79). His attitude was ‘pure folly’, says the Autobiography, but of this realization there was no sign in the early 1890s.

  He had a more satisfying reunion with his child Harilal, now over three, and enjoyed ‘playing and joking’ with the boy and with the children of Laxmidas, carrying them on his shoulders and teaching physical exercise ‘to make them hardy’ (A 79). In 1935 he would also say:

  In 1891, after my return from England, I virtually took charge of the children of the family and introduced the habit of walking with them—boys and girls—putting my hands on their shoulders. These were my brothers’ children (Harijan, 21 Sept. 1935; 67: 434-6).

  This is the tactile Mohandas, who finds it natural, like many of his people in Kathiawar and other parts of India, to touch or hug intimates, even as he is careful and reserved with others.

  Expenses were mounting—‘new things were added every day’—but there was no income. Why would anyone in Rajkot pay ten times the fees of a local vakil to a barrister who knew nothing of Kathiawar’s laws? It was decided, presumably between Laxmidas and Mohandas, that the barrister should try his luck in Bombay and at least familiarize himself with the high court there and with Indian law.

  Renting, from November 1891, an apartment in Girgaum in the heart of Bombay, he hired a Brahmin cook whose culinary skills were inferior to his own, but at least Gandhi had some company. European vegetarian dishes too were made in the kitchen of the modernizing Indian. Treating Ravishankar ‘as a member of the family rather than a servant’, Gandhi became his teacher.

  To reduce expenses, but also because he had acquired a habit, Mohandas walked about three miles daily to the high court and back, instead of using a tramcar or a carriage. (He thought the walking helpful even when the sun was hot, and the reason for his remaining fit.)

  In the high court, he met Sir Pherozeshah Mehta and other lawyers and made friends among them, but attracted no clients. The awe of men like Mehta that appears in Gandhi’s autobiographical recollections masks a desire to match those he calls the ‘stalwarts’. In Bombay he was unnerved, he claims, to be reminded of Mehta’s ‘prodigious memory’ and Badruddin Tyabji’s ‘wonderful power of argument’ (A 81), but the remark betrays a wish to compete in their league.

  When at last he was engaged at the small causes court by a defendant called Mamibai, for a fee of thirty rupees, a storm of fear hit him and he could not cross-examine the plaintiff’s witnesses. ‘My head was reeling and I felt as though the whole court was doing likewise.’ He sat down, returned his fee and made his exit.

  But when another client, a poor Muslim from Porbandar whose land had been confiscated, wanted a memorial drafted, Gandhi drew up a text that his friends praised. It fetched no fee, but he felt he was competent at something.

  Urged to pay a commission to touts for bringing clients, Gandhi refused. ‘Even that great criminal lawyer, Mr So-and-So, who makes three to four thousand a month, pays commission,’ he was told. Mohandas answered that he would be content with 300 rupees a month. ‘Father did not get more.’

  He looked for a part-time job, if possible of a literary kind. Seeing an advertisement by ‘a famous high school’ (we do not know its name) for someone who would teach English for an hour a day, he applied for the seventy-five-rupees-a-month post. Certain that his skills were more than adequate, he went ‘in high spirits’ when called for an interview but was rejected because he di
d not possess a BA degree. ‘But I have passed the London matriculation with Latin as my second language,’ he pointed out. A ‘graduate’ was wanted, he was told, not anyone who could teach English (A 82).

  His discontent in Bombay was not assuaged by stories that barristers had to ‘vegetate five or seven years’ before enjoying a decent practice. After six frustrating and money-losing months, he wound up the Girgaum establishment and returned to Rajkot.

  Yet Bombay 1891-92 was not a total waste. For one thing, he had read, liked and digested the Evidence Act and Mayne’s Hindu Law. Secondly, he had deepened his friendship with Pranjivan Mehta’s family and in particular with Rajchandra.

  The poet-jeweller and the lawyer discussed ethics and philosophy, and Gandhi liked the Jain doctrine that ‘maybe’ was a valid position and that reality had many sides. But he was struck most by Rajchandra’s ‘equipoise’ and by the fact that ‘the centre round which his life revolved’ was ‘the passion to see God face to face’.

  ‘The moment he finished his business,’ Gandhi would later recall, this shrewd ‘connoisseur of pearls and diamonds’ would open a religious book or start entering reflections of an ethical or spiritual nature into his diary. On his part Rajchandra also responded to Gandhi, who would say in the Autobiography:

  There was no business or other selfish tie that bound him to me, and yet I enjoyed the closest association with him. I was but a briefless barrister then, and yet whenever I saw him he would engage me in conversation of a seriously religious nature (A 76).