Gandhi Before India (8 page)

He had now cleared his exams, but he was still some dinners short of the Temple’s prescribed total of seventy-two. He could not return to India until he had attended (albeit not enjoyed) those remaining dinners.
His friend and flatmate, Josiah Oldfield, now persuaded him to spend his last days in London writing for
The Vegetarian
.

It is not uncommon for a writer’s first work to appear in a low-circulation niche magazine. But how many can claim that their debut in print took the form of a six-part series? Through February and March 1890,
The Vegetarian
carried the byline of M. K. Gandhi, under the heading, ‘Indian Vegetarians – I, II …’ etc. An introduction to the caste system inaugurated the series. A later essay explained how Asian vegetarianism differed from its European counterpart. ‘Unlike the English, the Indians do not take each dish separately, but they mix many things together.’ Moreover, ‘each dish is elaborately prepared. In fact, they don’t believe in plain boiled vegetables, but must have them flavoured with plenty of condiments, e.g., pepper, salt, cloves, turmeric, mustard seed, and various other things for which it would be difficult to find English names unless they be those used in medicine.’ The Indian diet was richer and more varied, except in one respect – for ‘the fruit, yes, the all-important fruit, is sadly conspicuous by its absence in the above-mentioned specimen dishes’.

Gandhi’s essays took apart some common myths and misconceptions. If Hindus ‘as a rule are notoriously weak’, this was not because of the absence of meat in their diet. The fault was that of the ‘wretched custom of infant marriage’, which by making girls of twelve have children by boys of sixteen, tended to ‘tell on the strongest constitutions’. The writer also had choice words to say about alcohol, which he termed an ‘enemy of mankind’ and a ‘curse of civilization’, and incidentally also ‘one of the most greatly-felt evils of the British Rule’ in India.

Having criticized child marriage – through personal experience – and alcohol – by seeing its effect on other Indians – the writer then turned to a lyrical appreciation of the shepherd, in his view the perfect specimen of
Homo Indicus
. His vegetarian diet, and his daily routine in the fields and forests, made the shepherd’s ‘an ideal mode of life. He is perforce regular in his habits, is out of doors [with his flocks] during the greater part of his time, while out he breathes the purest air, has his due amount of exercise, has good and nourishing food and last but not least, is free from many cares which are frequently productive of weak constitutions.’

Gandhi allowed that the shepherd had a flaw – one, not more. For ‘while a Brahmin would have his bath twice a day, and a Vaisya once
a day, a shepherd would have only one bath a week’. Otherwise, it was ‘very rare to see any deformity in him … Without being fierce as a tiger, he is yet strong and brave and as docile as a lamb. Without being awe-inspiring, his stature is commanding. Altogether, the Indian shepherd is a very fine specimen of a vegetarian, and will compare very favourably with any meat-eater so far as bodily strength goes’.
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For someone who never heard English at home, who began learning the language only at the age of eleven, and whose Matriculation marks were so mediocre, Gandhi’s prose was surprisingly clear and direct. Noteworthy is his passing chastisement of colonial rule (for promoting the sale and consumption of alcohol) and his praise of the way of life of the shepherd. There were communities of pastoralists in Kathiawar, who came after every monsoon to graze their flocks in the large
gau-char
, or pastureland, that lay outside most towns in the region.
³⁹
Gandhi would have seen them here, and also met them during fairs and festivals, when shepherds came peddling their wares. It may also be that he was influenced by the current of romantic anti-industrialism present in the thought of Henry Salt, and of friends of Salt like Edward Carpenter, who, like William Wordsworth and John Ruskin before them, believed that the farmer and shepherd represented a purer, more natural way of life as compared to the businessman or factory worker.
⁴⁰

Now that he was in print, the novice writer wanted more. The series on Indian vegetarians was followed by three articles on Indian festivals.
⁴¹
The first series was then reprised for a different journal, in a long essay on ‘The Foods of India’ which ended with the 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,’ thought this Indian visitor to England, ‘we shall tend towards unity of custom, and also unity of hearts’.
⁴²

Gandhi’s involvement with the vegetarians of London was far more important to him than is commonly recognized. Had he not joined their Society, he would have kept to his compatriots, as Indian students abroad were wont to do at the time (and sometimes still are). These first, close friendships with English people expanded his mind and his personality. He learnt to relate to people of different races and religious beliefs, to mix, mingle and eat with them, and even to share a home with them.

The London vegetarians provided Mohandas Gandhi with his first exposure to collective social action and with his first public platform. Gandhi’s published oeuvre covers dozens of volumes and ranges across many different subjects. It is a striking if little noticed fact that his writing career began with these lucid, informative and surprisingly confident series of essays on the foods and festivals of India. For his Bombay Matric and his Inner Temple barrister’s certificate, Gandhi had to cram a mass of facts and bring them out in the order required by the examiners. But in crafting these articles for
The Vegetarian
, he had to apply his mind more intelligently; the facts within him had to be shepherded into a coherent, persuasive argument for an audience with backgrounds very different from his own.

Gandhi the cultivator of friendships across racial and religious boundaries; Gandhi the organizer and mobilizer; Gandhi the writer, thinker and propagandist – all these Gandhis were first displayed in and through his membership of that famously obscure body, the Vegetarian Society of London.

As the readers of
The Vegetarian
were being introduced to the foods of India, a more widely read weekly was presenting a very different picture of the subcontinent. This was the
Illustrated London News
, which regularly ran items on India, on such topics as
shikar
(polo), and the pacification of hill tribes. The issue of 28 February 1891 printed a sketch of a turbaned maharaja in a palanquin, passing supplicants on the street holding out their palms for alms. The portrait carried the headline: ‘Riches and Poverty: A Sketch in an Indian Bazaar’.

In truth, the city in which the weekly was printed also had its extremes of riches and destitution. This ‘metropolis of wealth and grandeur, culture and sophistication was also a hell of starving, degrading and heart-rending poverty’. London in the nineteenth century was marked by a ‘vast extent of misery and distress’, which to a contemporary observer was ‘evidence of the rotten foundation on which the whole fabric of this gorgeous society rests, for I call that rotten which exhibits thousands upon thousands of human beings reduced to the lowest stage of moral and physical segregation …’ There was also another side to London, represented most vividly in the parties of the elite, which were distinguished by ‘the fact that some of the men and practically all the women [had] made the pursuit of pleasure their main occupation in
life’. In these parties, as the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray acidly observed, mothers brought ‘their virgin daughters up to battered old rakes … ready to sacrifice their innocence for a fortune or a title’.
⁴³

Mohandas Gandhi had no entrée into high society, into the balls and salons of the great houses in St James’s or Grosvenor Square. Nor did he rub shoulders with the labouring poor, whether in their homes in the East End, or in the factories and sweatshops where they worked. Gandhi’s encounters with English society were with the people in the middle. The three addresses he is known to have stayed in – Store Street, Tavistock Street and St Stephen’s Gardens – were all marked on Charles Booth’s 1889 ‘map of London poverty’ as being areas of ‘middle-class, well-to-do’ housing. Here he met, perforce, with landladies and shopkeepers, and on a more voluntary basis with the dissenters and radicals who came likewise from the middle classes.
⁴⁴

In religious terms, Gandhi’s London experience was quite varied. He socialized with Hindus and with Theosophists, saw the odd atheist, and even attended service at a Congregational Church in Holborn. His social life was more constrained. The only rich man he met was Arnold F. Hills, owner of the Thames Iron Works, and founder and funder of
The Vegetarian
.
⁴⁵
Meanwhile, the closest this law student got to the working poor was to listen to their great spokesman in the House of Commons, Charles Bradlaugh.

When he came to London, Gandhi was carrying a letter of introduction to Dadabhai Naoroji, the Parsi liberal who was the ‘undisputed leader’ of the Indian community in the United Kingdom.
⁴⁶
It seems he was too shy to seek a private audience, but he often heard Naoroji speak at public meetings. At these meetings he also heard Bradlaugh, a friend of India and Indians, one of the ‘most strenuous and picturesque figures’ of British politics, a ‘self-assertive propagandist of Secularism and Republicanism’, a man ‘who came from the people and retained to the last some habits of speech which marked him out as a Londoner of the humbler classes’.
⁴⁷
‘Every Indian [in London] knew Bradlaugh’s name’, remembered Gandhi in his autobiography. When the radical died in the first week of February 1891, Gandhi took a day off from his studies to attend the funeral at Woking. Bradlaugh was actively irreligious; and many atheists had turned out for the funeral. The Indian was struck more by the fact that ‘a few clergymen were also present to do him the last honours’.
⁴⁸

On that journey to Bradlaugh’s funeral, Gandhi passed the first mosque ever built in England. Modelled on the Moti Masjid in Agra, this had some fine wood-carvings and a body of worshippers who included Queen Victoria’s Hindustani teacher. Opening its doors in the autumn of 1889, the mosque lay just outside Woking and was clearly visible to travellers on the train from London.
⁴⁹

On the ship to London, and in his first few months in the city, Gandhi was much taken by the need to dress well. He wore his morning coat on visits to friends, brushing and ironing it beforehand. The collars of his shirts were always properly starched. His shoes were immaculately polished.

The longer he stayed in London, however, the more Gandhi came to see the need to live more simply. The austere aesthetic of the Vegetarian Society was one reason; a second, the obligation not to be a burden on his family. While the rupee (or pound) value of their assets has not come down to us, we know that by Indian standards the Gandhis were upper middle-class. Kaba Gandhi was surely paid a handsome salary as Diwan of Porbandar and Rajkot. Over the generations, the family had acquired property and jewels as well. However, Kaba’s early death made the Gandhis less secure. Mohandas’s brothers had failed even to matriculate. The family’s hopes were now invested in the youngest son; hence the taking of a loan and the pawning of jewellery to send him to qualify as a barrister in London.

In Gandhi’s first year in England, his living expenses amounted to about £12 a month. In his second year he brought this down to £4 a month. He stopped starching his shirts, inspired by ‘some unconventional gentlemen in England who have ceased adoring the fashion as a goddess’. He stopped wearing drawers in summer, thus saving on his washerman’s bill. He walked everywhere rather than rely on public transport. To save on stamps, he began sending postcards home rather than placing letters in envelopes. He shaved himself rather than go to a barber. He stopped buying newspapers, and read them in the public library instead.

To aid his experiment in simple living, Gandhi bought a book by a Dr Nichol, called
How to Live on Six Pence a Day
. He set himself a slightly less daunting target: ‘to get good, nutritious, healthy and palatable [vegetarian] food for 9s[hillings] per week’. To meet it, he stopped
drinking tea and coffee, and resolved only to buy fruits and vegetables that were in season.

He was encouraged by the example of some great Englishmen who had radically cut down on their living costs. Charles Bradlaugh had exchanged a large house for two small rooms, before denying himself further, by lodging above a music shop. Of Cardinal Manning it was said that ‘his ordinary meal, in public or private, is a biscuit or a bit of bread and a glass of water’. Despite their frugality, noted Gandhi admiringly, the world knew both men to be ‘clever intellectually’ as well as ‘strong in body’.
⁵⁰

On 10 June 1891, with those seventy-two dinners eaten – or half-eaten – Mohandas K. Gandhi was formally called to the bar. The next day he enrolled at the High Court. The same night he gave a farewell dinner to his fellow vegetarians, booking a room for twenty in a restaurant in Holborn. Here, as the Society’s journal reported, ‘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 abstinence from flesh progressing in England, related the manner in which his connection with the London Vegetarian Society arose, and in doing so took occasion to speak in a touching way of what he owed to Mr Oldfield.’ Later, in an interview he gave to the journal, Gandhi admitted that he had ‘left many things undone’ in his years in London. But as he returned home, he carried the ‘great consolation with me that I shall go back without having taken meat or wine, and that I know from personal experience that there are so many vegetarians in England’.
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