1
‘YOU ARE STANDING NEAR the corner of a public road,’ wrote Gandhi, remembering the India of his childhood at the time of the winter festival of Divali. He continued:
Mark the shepherd trotting 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, follows him. Soon after you see a crowd of little maids, with small earthen vessels resting on cushions placed on their heads... Then observe that big man with white whiskers and a big white turban, with a long reed pen thrust into his turban. He has a long scarf wound round his waist with a silver inkstand adjusted in the scarf. He, you must know, is a great banker.1
This was the world into which Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 in the harbour town of Porbandar. He was of the Vaishya caste of merchants, artisans and landowners, ranking third in the spiritual hierarchy of the four major divisions of Hindu society, after the Brahmin and Kshatriya but above the Sudra. Of this caste, he was from a subsection, the Bania, who were usually merchants—so many were that the British took to using the term Bania to mean ‘merchant.’ Within this group, with the usual complexity of Indian social organisation, Gandhi’s family were of a further subdivision, the Modh.
Gandhi says his forebears had originally been grocers but by the time he was born they were settled into public service. Since the time of his grandfather Uttamchand Gandhi, the men in his family had been prime ministers in the princely states of Kathiawar, the peninsular part of Gujarat that juts out into the Arabian Sea. It was the same part of the province from which the merchant family of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Gandhi’s great adversary, came.
Mohandas Gandhi was the youngest of three sons and one daughter born to Putlibai, the last wife of Karamchand Gandhi who was prime minister of Porbandar at the time of Gandhi’s birth. He was later to be prime minister of Rajkot and of Vankaner. There were some two hundred princely states in Kathiawar, but only fourteen of them had what passed for an independent political system, allowed to function so long as they remained within limits set by the British political agent who acted as their ‘adviser.’
The qualities that Gandhi admired in his father were that he was truthful, brave and generous. On the negative side, he remarked that his father was short-tempered and ‘to a certain extent he might have been given to carnal pleasures.’2 Gandhi reflected these traits: he was certainly brave, the more so for having had to overcome shyness even up to adulthood; he was very generous with his skills, in helping those such as the South African Indian labourers; and he took a preoccupation with the truth to metaphysical levels. His definition was that the truth he aspired to was ‘truthfulness in word, but truthfulness in thought also, and not only the relative truth of our conception, but the Absolute Truth, the Eternal Principle, that is God.’3
On the other hand, of the traits he singled out as those he did not respect in his father, Gandhi was rarely short-tempered with members of the public, though he was often so with his wife and other members of his family. Perhaps partly from a desire to distance himself from his father’s ‘carnal’ nature, Gandhi made a point of being abstemious about alcohol, tobacco and meat-eating; and he carried out exercises to control his sexual appetite. He was to take such sexual exercises, and public reports of them, to levels that many considered obscene.
His father was religious in a general sense, without training or regular ritual until the end of his life when he took to reading the great religious and philosophical poem the Bhagavad Gita daily. Gandhi’s mother was a far more profound influence in this area. He remarked: ‘If you notice any purity in me, I have inherited it from my mother, and not from my father.’4 She was exceedingly religious—Gandhi wrote of her ‘saintliness.’5 This expressed itself in going to the temple daily, maintaining both spiritual and physical cleanliness via rituals in bathing and defecation; never eating without saying prayers; and keeping the fasting period over the four months of rains, the Chaturmas. Gandhi noted that ‘to keep two or three consecutive fasts was nothing to her.’ She contrived ingenious new fasts for herself; during one Chaturmas, instead of eating one meal a day she would eat only every alternate day; another time, she would not eat unless she had seen the sun. This was a test to the young Gandhi, who would stand staring at the sky while the sun was obscured by rain in order to rush in and tell his mother as soon as the sun had come out, so that she could eat that day. She would run out to see with her own eyes, but if the sun was no longer visible she would keep to her vow. ‘That does not matter,’ she would say, ‘God does not want me to eat today,’ and she would return to her duties. The effect on Gandhi was to instil in him the perception of a close connection between religious observance and everyday life, something he would always display as a mature man. He was introduced into the discipline of fasting, which is an integral part of the Hindu and Jain religions (as it is, with its variations of Lent and Ramadan, in the Christian and Muslim religions). Gandhi was to take fasting to a new level.
It was from Putlibai that Gandhi acquired his meticulous regard for cleanliness and neatness. There was also some universalist element in her influence, as her parents had been members of the Panami sect which aims at combining the best elements of Islam and Hinduism. Putlibai was, however, an orthodox Hindu in matters of caste. She told her children they were not to touch the ‘untouchable’ boy who cleaned the lavatories; if they had accidental contact with an untouchable, they had to take a ritual bath; if that were not practicable, touching a passing Muslim would pass on the uncleanness. As he grew older, he came to argue with Putlibai: ‘I told my mother that she was entirely wrong in considering physical contact with Uka [the untouchable] as sinful,’ he recalled.6 Gandhi considered that if God was everywhere, then God was in the untouchable too. His Hinduism was monotheistic: all the gods of the pantheon were aspects of a single divine entity.
Gujarat was one of the main homes of members of the ancient Jain religion for whom the principle of non-injury to living beings is sacrosanct, and who also stress spiritual independence and non-violence. The Jains are significant scholars, having founded some of the most ancient libraries in India. Gandhi did not take up the passion for learning in early life; he did not, for example, read the Bhagavad Gita until he was in his twenties, in 1890, and then he read it in an English translation. He showed an entirely natural tendency to take what he found attractive from his influences and discard the rest; in his case this was unusual in that what he wanted was the moral message, not the adventure that was also to be found in religious stories.
He was moved by improving tales from Hindu literature, feeling that they were not mere fancies, but moral examples to copy. He singled out the stories of Shravana, who was so devoted to his aged parents that he carried them on pilgrimage; and that of King Harishchandra, who never told a lie and always kept his word. Harishchandra’s moral fortitude led him into situations in which he had to give away his kingdom, then to sell his wife and son and finally himself into servitude. This behaviour was praised by the gods, and his virtue rewarded. Gandhi remarked that he was haunted by the story and wished to go through the trials of Harishchandra for the sake of truth.
When Gandhi was about seven, his father moved the family to Rajkot where he had been appointed prime minister and a member of the Rajasthanik Court, which had been set up by the British to settle local disputes. Gandhi was therefore exposed to the operation of government, both of the British and of the princely states. Until the very end of Gandhi’s lifetime two-fifths of the territory of India and one-fifth of the population were under the governance of local rulers. The rest was ruled by the British directly with the Viceroy, at the top of the administrative hierarchy, representing the Crown.
Gandhi later remarked that he was probably an indifferent pupil all he could remember about his first school was having difficulty with multiplication tables. Nor was there anything memorable about his studies at primary school. He remembers himself as being so shy that he would make sure to be at school as it opened and run home as soon as the school day finished in order that he did not have to talk to anyone, for he feared their ridicule. He was small and frail, afraid of ghosts, thieves and snakes, and could not go to bed without a light. His nurse told him in times of fear to repeat ‘Ramanama—the name of God. He never forgot this lesson, and in later life described the practice as ‘a sun that has brightened my darkest hour.’7 He was heard to repeat the name of God aloud at times of physical attack.
Gandhi had three siblings: an elder sister, Raliatbehn who was born in 1862, and two brothers, Laxmidas (1863) and Karsandas (1866). His early playmates were his family members, particularly Karsandas. Together they chafed at the restrictions put on their independence, nurturing their resentment that they had to ask permission for everything they did. They started smoking, first discarded ends thrown away by an uncle, then they took to stealing money from a servant (presumably accessible because of the expectation of honesty in the house) in order to buy cigarettes. Their puerile lack of judgement was demonstrated by their next exploit—they were so frustrated by their lack of freedom that they decided to kill themselves and obtained the seeds of a poisonous plant from the jungle. But they lost courage and did not take the seeds; Gandhi later said this exploit led him to think little of threats by others to commit suicide.
While he was still a child Gandhi’s parents set about finding a wife for him, following the usual practice in Kathiawar (and other parts of India) of ‘betrothal’ to a suitable girl. He was betrothed three times, the death of the first two girls demonstrating why this custom prevailed: it was wise to ‘reserve’ a future spouse for fear there would be none left of appropriate caste and social standing when the time for marriage came.
Betrothal was an established practice in a place where marriages were arranged by parents. Gandhi had been betrothed for the third time when he was seven in 1876, but may not even have been told about it. Child marriage was not a necessary part of this procedure, though it was culturally acceptable. Gandhi’s marriage at the age of thirteen was the subject of continuing disgust to him. He described it as one of the ‘bitter draughts’ he had to swallow in the course of setting down the truth about his life. ‘I can see no moral argument in support of such a preposterously early marriage,’ he wrote.8
Indeed, Gandhi had utter contempt for Hindu marriage customs, which he related to waste, not seeing any pleasure or even apparently any point in it.
The parents of the bride and bridegroom often bring themselves to ruin... they waste their substance, they waste their time. Months are taken up over the preparations—in making clothes and ornaments and in preparing budgets for dinner. Each tries to outdo the other in the number and variety of courses to be prepared. Women, whether they have a voice or not, sing themselves hoarse, even get ill, and disturb the peace of their neighbours. These, in their turn, quietly put up with all the turmoil and bustle, all the dirt, and filth, representing the remains of feasts, because they know that a time will come when they will also be behaving in the same manner.
This is not merely a criticism of child marriage but also seems to show intolerance of the attention given to marriages—part of Gandhi’s general impatience with the things that ordinary people find important. He also shows here a trait that would develop in adult life: an intolerance of the marriage bond itself, suggesting the relative unimportance of the relationship with spouse and family compared with a more transcendental union with the deity, and a connection to humanity at large.
Gandhi’s wedding in 1883 was particularly unfortunate for one not too impressed with the things of this world, as his family decided to marry him, his brother Karsandas and his cousin of similar age in a triple ceremony. In this way the cost would be shared between Gandhi’s father and uncle, and the expenditure and trouble would be over all at once—a boon for the two men, who were advancing in age and wanted to dispatch the business of marrying off their last children as expeditiously as possible.
As the wedding approached, his father was kept at work by official business until, in the end, he had to make the five-day journey from Rajkot to Porbandar in three days. His coach toppled over and Karamchand was severely injured, but as all the plans were already made the wedding took place, in a hall hired for the purpose. His father’s injury later gave Gandhi another reason to reflect on his wedding with distaste, but at the time it simply meant interesting clothes, music and ceremonies and ‘a strange girl to play with.’ He was taken out of school for his marriage, missing about a year of education in preparation for the event.
Kasturbai Kapadia was the same age as Gandhi. She was born in April 1869 so at the time of their marriage in May she was fourteen, he thirteen. Gandhi later saw fit to ‘severely criticise my father for having married me as a child’ (though the criticism was not made in his father’s presence). At this time in Britain the age of consent was thirteen and the age of marriage was twelve for a girl and fourteen for a boy; a marriage such as Gandhi’s could have taken place in Britain, though in fact custom precluded such early marriages. Gandhi’s was far from being a child marriage by Kathiawar standards—most girls were married by the age of eight.
Kasturbai too (the form Kasturba was used after she assumed control of her own household) had been born in Porbandar, to a trader in cloth, grain and cotton and one-time mayor of Porbandar, Golkaldas Kapadia, and his wife Vraikunwerba. They also were of the Modh Bania sect (indeed, Gandhi and Kasturbai would not have been married by their parents if they had not been compatible in this way). Their home was close to that of the Gandhis, though they would not have played together as they grew up. When he was not at school Gandhi was free to go into the streets to follow a ceremonial parade or climb trees in the nearby courtyard temple, whereas Kasturbai was not sent to school or allowed to play outside but kept at home learning how to be a mother and housekeeper. The improving stories she would have been told were of good wives such as Anasuya who remained chaste when her virtue was tested, and Sita who was faithful to her husband Rama through many tribulations.
Kasturbai brought with her a cedar chest filled with new clothes and a teak box containing gold jewellery. Before the wedding the bodies of the bride and bridegroom were anointed with turmeric, almond, sandalwood and cream by family members of the same sex. In a Sanskrit ceremony held at a time that was propitious according to astrological predictions, the young couple took their first seven steps together, speaking lines on the significance of each until, on the final step, Gandhi proclaimed that step signified ‘that we may ever live as friends’ and Kasturbai responded: ‘It is the fruit of my good deeds that I have you as my husband. You are my best friend, my highest guru, and my sovereign lord.’9
That night, he reported, they were too nervous to face each other, though his brother’s wife had explained to him the basics of sex and he hints that someone must have coached Kasturbai. ‘Oh, that first night,’ he writes, ‘two innocent children all unwittingly hurled themselves into the ocean of life.’10 Gandhi’s later repudiation of his sexual nature makes him reluctant to describe any but a few details of his ‘carnal desire’; he writes: I propose to draw the curtain over my shame.’ In fact he seems to have had a normal healthy sexual appetite, the expression of which had, despite his youth, been sanctioned by local custom and by his family. The revulsion was something he brought to the affair himself, in later reflection.
It was not as if the young people were all alone against the world—very far from it: they lived in Gandhi’s family house in Rajkot, a household under the control of his beloved mother. Fortunately for the young bride, Putlibai was not the tyrannical mother-in-law so resented by new brides. Young husbands and wives were supposed to ignore each other during the daylight hours: expressions of affection were considered indecent; they were together only in their small bedroom. Lacking experience in the field of marriage, Gandhi would read small pamphlets discussing conjugal love, thrift, child marriage and other such themes. He remarked: ‘It was a habit with me to forget what I did not like, and to carry out in practice whatever I liked.’ One principle he gleaned from these pamphlets was the duty of a husband to be faithful to his wife. He embraced this notion, and extended it to her, insisting on her fidelity. This was no burden, but he began to be jealous of any commitment other than to himself, to insist on her staying in the house, telling her she could not go anywhere without his permission. She refused to accept such unreasonable restrictions and continued going to the temple and on visits to friends. ‘More restraint on my part resulted in more liberty being taken by her,’ Gandhi wrote, ‘and in my getting more and more cross.’ This adolescent playing on the authority of a husband was redeemed, in Gandhi’s eyes, because his severities were based on love and his wish ‘to make her live a pure life, learn what I learnt.’
Kasturbai had had no formal education, and was illiterate, so Gandhi set about improving her. He came up against barriers, for she was ‘not impatient of her ignorance,’ so what teaching he had time for, in the evenings, ‘had to be done against her will.’ As well as her reluctance, he also regretted that ‘lustful love’ left him no time for instruction. Her education remained rudimentary, something Gandhi later blamed on their active sex life: ‘I am sure that, had my love for her been absolutely untainted with lust, she would be a learned lady today.’
After the break for his marriage Gandhi continued at high school, where he had progressed to being an above-average pupil and had earned the affection of his teachers. He was rarely punished, but if he was, the shame of having merited it he felt to be worse than the penalty. In time the medium of instruction became English and he also progressed to learning Sanskrit, which he found difficult but eventually rewarding as it was the language of the Hindu holy books.
Gandhi rebelled no more than the usual adolescent against this upbringing: he was led into bad habits in the company of a friend of his brother, Sheikh Mehtab, an older boy whom Gandhi had the conceit to imagine he could reform. He said as much to his wife, his mother and his brother, who advised against his association with the boy. Mehtab appears in the Autobiography as a dark double of Gandhi—embracing all the evils that Gandhi samples but resists, he is the tempter in the morality tale that is Gandhi’s life. He is not named in the Autobiography, doubtless because when the recollections were published, in the 1920s, Gandhi did not want to highlight the fact that one of the few entirely negative characters in his life was a Muslim at a time when he was promoting Hindu–Muslim unity.
Mehtab, hardy and athletic, attributed his strong constitution to eating meat. He also attributed the dominance of the British over India to their diet. This was not an outlandish view. A verse of the time translates:
Behold the mighty Englishman
He rules the Indian small,
Because being a meat-eater
He is five cubits tall.
Gandhi was impressed by this cure for national ills: ‘It began to grow on me that meat-eating was good,’ he said, ‘that it would make me strong and daring, and that, if the whole country took to meat-eating, the English would be overcome.’11 Thus as a teenager he was already thinking of ridding India of the imperial presence—and he already thought diet had a large part to play in politics.
His parents were of the majority, Vaishnava, form of Hinduism, in which meat-eating was proscribed, and the influence of Jainism with its extreme respect for all forms of life was strong. One day, goaded by the urge for ‘food reform’ and the thrill of making a new departure in life, Gandhi sat on a riverbank with Mehtab and tried to eat some goat’s meat with his bread. It was tough and he was sick; he had a sleepless night, with dreams of a live goat bleating inside him. His friend persevered, Gandhi convinced himself that meat-eating was a duty, and in the setting of an attractive dining-room and given meat delicacies cooked by a chef, Gandhi found a taste for these dishes. The meat-eating phase lasted for perhaps half a dozen meals spread over a year, when he was fourteen or fifteen. Meat was no longer physically offensive to Gandhi by the end of this time, but lying to his parents and deceiving them as to why he had no appetite for family meals he found unbearable. His resolution of this dilemma—not wanting either to lose his friend or to lie to his parents—was to assure Mehtab that, though it was essential to eat meat and to take up the cause of national food reform, he would not do so until his parents were dead so he would not have to lie to them.
These chapters of his autobiography read like ‘the temptations of Gandhi’: he tells of how he was misled into smoking, stealing, meat-eating and sex but found ultimate sanctity in rejecting these diversions from the true path. He even remarks that the suspicions he developed about Kasturbai were nurtured by Mehtab, as if Gandhi himself was not responsible, did nothing wrong except when tempted. In recounting this time, fifty-five years later, he recalled that Sheikh Mehtab ‘kept me under his thumb for more than ten years. On his suggestion, I came to doubt the character of Ba [Kasturbai]. I broke her bangles, refused to have anything to do with her and sent her away to her parents.’12
Sheikh Mehtab was the son of a jailer employed by the British, and so of a far less wealthy family than Gandhi’s. Why did this friend spend so much money on Gandhi? He took him for restaurant meals and once even paid for him to visit a brothel. There has to be a suspicion that Gandhi was a more than willing participant in these social adventures: he felt frightened—‘he threatened me many times,’ he said—but also admiring and in awe of Mehtab.13 He was far from the only sensitive youngster who was led astray by bad company. In the brothel the shy young man could not perform: ‘I went into the jaws of sin, but God in his infinite mercy protected me against myself,’ he wrote; ‘I was almost struck blind and dumb in this den of vice.’14 He sat on the bed near a prostitute but was tongue-tied; he does not say what efforts she made to stimulate him, but in the end she lost patience and, insulting him, showed him the door. He took the trouble in recounting this to say there had been four ‘similar’ incidents in his life—presumably ones in which he may have had sex outside of his marriage—‘and in most of them my good fortune, rather than any effort on my part, saved me.’
These teenage misdemeanours were all petty transgressions, but of biographical interest because of Gandhi’s guilty pondering over them. Most people (and most legal systems) are content to overlook minor transgressions committed when moral faculties are not fully formed. Gandhi the man was interested in the development of this moral process; he wanted to know how it had changed him. The comparative value he placed on his transgressions is interesting. He repeatedly returns to sex (including sex within marriage) as shameful; he dwells at length on the sin of meat-eating; yet he passes over in one line the act of stealing pennies from a poor man, which many people would consider beneath contempt. Gandhi says this happened when he was twelve or thirteen—he is more concerned about his theft at the age of fifteen of a gold piece from his brother. This crime troubled him so much that he swore never to steal again and to make a confession to his father. He could not bring himself to speak, so he wrote it down and handed the paper to Karamchand, expecting him to be volubly angry. In fact his father wept and said nothing, leaving a deep impression on Gandhi who concluded that ‘a clean confession, combined with a promise never to commit the sin again, when offered before one who has the right to receive it, is the purest type of repentance... From that day, truth-telling became a passion with me.’15
Karamchand had been ill for some time, and his son had to return home from school to take his turn in nursing him; he had never fully recovered from his injuries in the coach crash at the time of the wedding, and had a fistula on his neck that was unresponsive to treatment. An English surgeon had recommended an operation but the family’s local physician had advised against it. Gandhi saw to his father’s medicines, dressed his wound and fed him. Sometimes his duties would be relieved by other members of the family, including Karamchand’s brother, who came to visit and would insist on sleeping by the sick man’s bedside.
He took over on the night of 16 November 1885, sending Gandhi to bed. The teenager was eager to have sex with Kasturbai, whom he woke up for the purpose. In a few minutes, however, a servant came to the door. Gandhi sprang out of bed to be told, ‘Father is no more.’ He ran to his father’s room to see Karamchand dead. He bitterly regretted that his father had not died in his arms—‘it was my uncle who had this privilege.’16 Gandhi compounded his grief for his father’s death with guilt that he had not been present and with the ‘shame of my carnal desire even at this critical hour of my father’s death, which demanded wakeful service.’ He could never forgive himself for having been ‘in the grip of lust’ at that moment. Even at the age of fifty-six when he wrote his memoir of the event, he was still dwelling on it: ‘It took me long to get free from the shackles of lust, and I had to pass through many ordeals before I could overcome it.’ Gandhi added that Kasturbai had been pregnant at the time, and the child she bore lived only a few days. This too he blamed on himself: ‘Nothing else could be expected. Let all those who are married be warned by my example.’
The family now had a serious problem: the pension Karamchand had received from the ruler of Rajkot no longer arrived and Gandhi’s elder brothers held only minor legal positions. They did not have the command of English necessary for a senior government post like their father’s, now that the British were so prominent in the political system. Karamchand had spent money as he had earned it; he left some property but little else.
The family now looked to Gandhi to carry their fortunes forward. He would have to get into higher education and land a well paid job to help support them. He was an above average though not a spectacular student at high school, which he attended with the help of scholarships. He was one of four applicants who passed the matriculation examinations for Samaldas College, where he was admitted in January 1888 at the age of nineteen.
He was lonely and homesick at college in Bhavnagar, ninety miles from Rajkot, where he was living alone for the first time in his life. Lessons were conducted in English, which was a struggle for him; the teaching was pitched at a level higher than his, so he could not follow well and his marks were poor. Time earlier lost from his studies for his wedding and while tending to his father in his illness cannot have aided Gandhi’s performance as a student. He was to progress in later life by applying discipline and determination to his studies, but he was never a gifted scholar.
Kasturbai was pregnant again, with their first son who would survive, Harilal, so thoughts of impending fatherhood may well have also had an effect on him. At the end of the first term when he returned home he discussed his problems with the family, whose fortunes depended so much on his efforts. In the absence of Karamchand the family was relying for counsel on a friend, Mavji Dave, who was a learned Brahmin with more than a little worldly wisdom. He said that if Gandhi overcame his obstacles and continued to study at college he would get a BA degree, but that would not qualify him for high office—he would not be able to follow his father and become a prime minister. What he should do was to go to London and study to be a barrister at the Inns of Court. A three-year course would bring great rewards.
There were barriers to overcome: the cost would be three or four thousand rupees, a fortune for a family that had struggled to send the youngest son to college ninety miles away. There was also the fact that an orthodox Hindu should not cross the sea for fear of ritual pollution, and his mother’s very real fears that Gandhi would mix with women, drink alcohol and eat meat if subjected to the temptations of London life. If Kasturbai had an opinion, it is not recorded; her son was born in the spring of 1888 while preparations were being made for Gandhi’s future.
Gandhi described thinking to himself: ‘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 civilisation.’17 Thirsting for experience, he ‘jumped at the proposal’ to send him to London, though he was uncertain whether he should study for the law or for medicine, which he preferred. His family were firm on this, however, not wishing for religious reasons for Gandhi to have anything to do with dissection; also, they considered that medicine would not be so suitable if he was to follow in his father’s footsteps as a prime minister. But the choice of career did not suit Gandhi’s nature—it took a long time before he was even a passable lawyer. On the other hand, he was naturally attracted to healing: he took every opportunity to engage voluntarily in health-related work—in tending to the wounded in wartime, in sanitation work, in nursing his friends and family and trying out his home remedies for their ailments.
If he was aiming for a post in the Indian administration, it was reasonable to look first to the British for assistance in his studies as they controlled not only British India but the princely states, via their political agents. There was a British agent in Porbandar, where the family was known because of Karamchand’s work and where his brother Tulsidas lived. Gandhi therefore went to Porbandar and called on his uncle, hoping for a letter of recommendation to the political agent, but he was unsuccessful. Tulsidas was unhappy with the appearance of Indians who returned from England as barristers. He said they adopted a European lifestyle—their clothing, food, smoking cigars—and it was all distasteful to him.
Gandhi therefore wrote direct to Frederick Lely, the political agent, who invited the young man to his home. The official had made no arrangement for a special audience with Gandhi, but saw him nonetheless there and then. Gandhi bowed low and delivered the few sentences he had prepared for this, his first interview with an English gentleman, speaking (somewhat foolishly for someone who wished to study in England) in Gujarati. Lely simply told him: ‘Pass your BA first and then see me. No help can be given you now.’18 While it is comical to think of this administrator lightly casting aside Gandhi, who would later have so much to do with the dismantling of British India, from his own point of view Lely had made a sensible decision. For the best return, Lely’s limited funds needed to be spent on excellent scholars, and Gandhi was a poor candidate. He had chosen to try to go to England because of difficulties with his studies in India; though Lely doubtless did not know this, his attitude was calculated to winnow out such candidates. Furthermore, Gandhi came with no recommendation except that he was his father’s son, and Karamchand’s other two sons had not excelled themselves.
Gandhi returned to Rajkot crestfallen, thinking of his options. His elder brother Laxmidas in whom he had always put his faith should be able to help. Perhaps, Gandhi thought, he could sell Kasturbai’s jewellery. Back home, he now faced renewed opposition from his mother, still fretting that Gandhi would be subject to moral temptation in England. She asked the advice of a Jain monk friend who had been a Modh Bania before he had converted. His solution was to put her son under oath. Gandhi duly vowed not to touch wine, woman or meat while he was away, and his mother gave her permission. ‘Sleeping, waking, drinking, eating, walking, running, reading, I was dreaming and thinking of England,’ he recalled.19 With some self-knowledge he wrote at the age of nineteen: ‘I am not a man who would, after having formed any intention, leave it easily.’20
He and his family spent the spring and summer of 1888 contacting friends and family to raise the necessary money. Finally there was sufficient—it was all the money the family of Karamchand had. It was so rare for a young man from Rajkot to go to England that his high school held a send-off in his honour. He had prepared a few words of thanks, but was so shy and unused to public performance that he could scarcely stammer them out. ‘I remember how my head reeled and how my whole frame shook as I stood up to read them,’ he wrote.21 His farewell to his family, at his home on 10 August, was even more harrowing. He wrote: ‘My mother was hiding her eyes, full of tears, in her hands, but the sobbing was clearly heard... I was among a circle of some fifty friends. “If I wept, they would think me too weak; perhaps they would not allow me to go to England,” soliloquised I; therefore I did not weep, even though my heart was breaking.’ Last came the leave-taking from Kasturbai. Since it was contrary to custom for him to see or speak to her in the presence of friends he had to see her in a separate room. ‘She, of course, 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.”22
Laxmidas and Gandhi’s friends, including Sheikh Mehtab, travelled with him as far as Bombay where the brothers stayed at the home of their sister Raliatbehn. At that moment the Indian Ocean was stormy, a ship had recently been lost, and it was felt advisable for Gandhi to wait for a few weeks before he travelled. While he was there, as soon as other Modh Bania caste members heard of his expedition he could not go out without being pointed and stared at, or jeered at by passersby.
The head man of the community, who had been on good terms with Gandhi’s father, focused the unease of the Modh Bania. He called a general meeting of the caste, to which Gandhi was summoned. The head man presented his prejudices as religious obligations: ‘Our religion forbids voyages abroad,’ he said, explaining that it was not possible to live among Europeans without compromising Hinduism. Gandhi recounted the vows he had made to his mother and said he felt the caste should not interfere. The head man swore at him and declared: ‘This boy shall be treated as an outcaste from today. Whoever helps him or goes to see him off at the dock shall be punishable with a fine.’23
With Gandhi now an outcaste, and others who supported him threatened with the same, the young man’s situation was precarious. ‘Even the chosen few who had supported me through thick and thin left me alone,’ he said.24 He became more anxious than ever to sail, in case some other problem impeded him. This was prescient, for when he found a ship and asked his brother-in-law for the money that had been left in his safekeeping for Gandhi, the brother-in-law refused. He said he could not afford to lose caste—he must not help Gandhi to travel. Gandhi solved this religious impasse by asking a friend to loan him the money for his passage and for clothes. His brother-in-law repaid the loan, thereby not helping Gandhi directly, and religious purity was inviolate.
He sailed from Bombay on 4 September 1888. For the first time he was in the company of British people; all but one of the others in the second-class saloon where passengers mixed were British (though he wrote that they were ‘English,’ which was a common confusion in his work). He shared a cabin with the only other Indian.
In India Gandhi had worn a long cloth jacket over cloth trousers, and a turban. His hair was tied in a shikka, or knot, but he abandoned this for the trip to London, fearing it would expose him to ridicule. Wanting to blend in as far as possible with British society, he bought British clothes including a necktie which he ‘abhorred’—but which he ‘delighted in wearing later’—and a jacket which, as it was shorter than the Indian equivalent, stopping above the behind, he ‘looked upon as immodest.’25 There is a picture taken of him with slicked-down hair and a clear parting, wearing a three-piece suit with a wing collar and a bow tie, looking very much the middle-class Englishman.
This was his first time in the company of a mass of British people and he did not do well: he was unaccustomed to speaking English and he could not follow their remarks, nor reply even when he understood, He had to frame every sentence in his mind before he could bring it out. He could not use knives and forks and was not bold enough to enquire which dishes at mealtimes were meat-free.
He was advised by Indian friends before he left that he would not be able to face the British climate without eating meat; he was also warned that without liquor he would be numbed with cold and that smoking was obligatory. A kind fellow passenger who accompanied him to the dining-table also advised him that he would have to start eating meat, now or in England, but he resisted. On board, he was surprised and fascinated by everything; he found lavatories bemusing—‘We do not get water there and are obliged to use pieces of paper.’26 On first entering a lift, in London, he thought it was a small room in which he was to wait, until it began to rise. When he stepped ashore at Tilbury on 29 September he was inappropriately dressed for the weather, in a white flannel suit, the only one of the passengers so attired. Thus inexperienced and unprepared, he took a train to London.
The relationship of India to Britain was (and continues to be) a complex one, eliciting a variety of responses on each side. At base, Britain was an occupying foreign power. The British had displaced other European powers in the race to dominate India, but had also displaced the Moguls, the previously successful conquerors. Twelve years before Gandhi’s birth the 1857 mutiny of Indian troops had aimed to expel the British and to re-install the decadent Mogul emperor (though the former was a more clearly defined aim than the latter). The mutiny had been sparked by rumours that rifle cartridges—the ends of which had to be bitten off—had been prepared with the use of pork or beef tallow, and so were taboo to Muslims and Hindus respectively. This rumour (and others, including that cook-house flour had somewhat improbably been contaminated with cow and pig bone-meal) found a ready audience in resentful soldiers who had previously mutinied over other matters. Those who spread the rumours had succeeded in uniting India’s Hindu and Muslim populations in a common cause of complaint—this was the grail of nationalist agitations that was never again to be so firmly grasped: Gandhi was one of many who failed to unite the religions of India into anti-British feeling, except for very short periods.
After the 1857 rebellion had been suppressed, the British Crown took direct control of the nation under a viceroy appointed by the queen. Britain gained an Indian market for her goods, particularly cotton; there were jobs for British expatriates, especially for those of ability but limited means, to run the railways, to build roads and bridges and to become officers in the army. By 1930 there were some 7,500 retired British officials drawing £3.5 to £4 million in pensions from the Indian revenue. India supplied a vast standing army and massive reserves of volunteers who could be called upon to go anywhere in the Empire to defend British interests.
India gained relative internal peace, post, road and rail systems and other infrastructure, and a continually developing administrative and legal system. The disparity between what these two nations gained from the relationship is obvious: once India had its functioning infrastructure, there was no more need for the imperial power. For Britain, however, there was no end in sight to the need for money, a market and an imperial army.
The vast majority of Indians who were engaged in agricultural work had had no more contact with the British than they had with their own princes—the patterns of village life were woven without much reference to rulers. Indian reactions to Britain among the middle class varied widely, from violent antipathy at one extreme to a loyalty that extended to adopting British manners, dress and attitudes at the other. Most were selective, as was Gandhi in the 1880s, taking what seemed valuable from Britain in terms of modernity, but also largely maintaining religious and social traditions.
The long-standing lesson of the 1857 mutiny was that violence would not succeed in expelling the British, who would always be militarily stronger. Gandhi was always an Indian nationalist. What he eventually brought to the scene was a uniquely Gandhian approach to nationalism that had been crafted over the twenty-six years he spent out of India (excepting short periods) after he first left the subcontinents shores in 1888. At this time, adopting Western ways along with a Western education was still the way forward.