Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, a city on India’s western coast on the Arabian Sea, in Kathiawar (or Kathiawad), a peninsula in the state of Gujarat. The Kathiawar Agency was a political unit that was part of the Bombay Presidency in British colonial India. Porbandar was the seat of one of the small princely states of Kathiawar in British India.
Gandhi was born into relative privilege. In terms of the traditional Hindu hierarchical fourfold caste (varna) classification (Brahmins, Khastriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras), he was a member of the Vaishya caste of farmers, merchants and businesspeople. In fact the name ‘Gandhi’ means ‘grocer’, which apparently had been the family occupation generations earlier. His grandfather, father and uncle served as ‘prime ministers’ (Diwans) to princes of Porbandar and other small Kathiawar states. The Gandhis could be described as middle class and as welcoming diverse cultural and religious experiences.
More specifically, the Gandhis were members of the Hindu Modh community and are identified with the Bania caste or subcaste of merchants, traders and moneylenders. Although Gandhi’s ethical, spiritual and political life depart from traditional caste patterns, many have noted his Bania business skills in paying attention to practical details and making practical decisions, carefully arranging his expenditure of time and money, organizing the most detailed matters in his ashrams (his ethical and spiritual residential communities) and other institutions and skilfully raising funds and bargaining and negotiating to resolve conflicts.
Most of what we know about Gandhi’s youth comes from his Autobiography.1 While very revealing as to Gandhi’s self-image and evolving values and priorities, it may be best to take some of his descriptions with a grain of salt. As Gandhi himself states, he does not intend to present a traditional or normal autobiography. He is selective in presenting experiences that make moral and spiritual points and that can serve as lessons for others. In addition Gandhi’s autobiography tends to be unbalanced in being extremely self-critical. In fact, throughout his life, he feels the need to share his weaknesses and failed experiments with truth, often not unlike some of the writings in St Augustine’s Confessions. It is tempting at times to respond, ‘don’t be so self-critical, you’re only a child’, ‘you’re only human’, in ways perhaps not unrelated to the severe manner in which Gandhi often treats his four children. Finally, even in Gandhi’s writings, one may question whether his portrayal of himself as such a timid, fearful, cowardly, mediocre son and student is completely accurate. For example, the fact that he is so dedicated to nursing his father or that he stands up to and defies his caste elders, who object, threaten and impose severe sanctions on him if he leaves to study law in England, challenges the accuracy of the frequently accepted portrayal of Gandhi’s youth as mediocre and cowardly.
Gandhi respects and admires his parents. Mohan’s grandfather, Uttamchand Gandhi, was the Diwan of Porbandar, and was succeeded as Diwan by his father, Karamchand Gandhi, called Kaba (1822–1885). Kaba Gandhi was later appointed Diwan of Rajkot and Vankaner districts in Gujarat. Gandhi remembers his father as a person of principle, as truthful, brave, incorruptible, concerned more with virtue than with wealth, but also short-tempered. As with other Hindus in that part of Gujarat, the Gandhis are followers of Lord Vishnu and Gandhi’s favourite deity, throughout his life, is Rama, an avatar or incarnation of Vishnu. As a Vaishnava Hindu, Gandhi’s father is also very open-minded, tolerant, and respects other cultural and religious approaches. This means that young Gandhi is exposed to many Jains, Parsis, Muslims and others who visit his father’s house, and Gandhi repeatedly emphasizes such contextualized experiences as shaping his later pluralistic and inclusive views of religion, politics and culture.
It is for his mother, Putlibai (1822–1891), that Mohan reserves unqualified praise and admiration. She is Karamchand’s fourth wife, the first three having died. Mohan is her fourth and youngest child. His older brothers are Laxmidas and Karsandas and his sister is Raliatbehn. Putlibai belongs to the Pranami faith, a Hindu tradition usually associated with Krishna Vaishnava devotion, but which reads the Muslim Qur’an and preaches tolerance and the equality of all religions. Mohan reveres his mother. He describes her as deeply religious, as a saint, with a strong personality and the will to undertake difficult fasts and extreme vows as part of her self-purification. She is a strong role model for Mohan and shapes many of his later ethical and spiritual values and practices. However, it is important to recognize that M. K. Gandhi, even when he goes to England to study law in 1888 aged nineteen, is not particularly knowledgeable about religion in general or Hinduism in particular. In fact he reads and studies his favourite text and ‘spiritual guide’, the Bhagavad-Gita, for the first time when he is in London.
There are several dramatic experiences of an ethical and religious nature in Mohan’s childhood. Mohan describes how he is full of fear of ghosts, spirits and the dark, as well as fears that his teachers or other students will criticize or make fun of him. A family servant, a nursemaid named Rambha, comes to his aid by teaching him the Ramanama, the repetition of the God Rama’s name. This Rama mantram, which the mature Gandhi uses as a remedy for the rest of his life, allows him to become increasingly calm and focused, to
overcome his doubts and fears and feel that God is filling him with strength and direction. It allows him to change what is negative into joyful, fearless, loving, transformative experiences.
Gandhi describes two similar incidents. Although he does not like to read beyond his school assignments, he happens to see his father’s copy of Shravana Pitribhakti Nataka, a play about Shravana’s devotion to his blind parents. He later sees a picture of Shravana carrying his parents. Shravana’s devotion and the agonized lament of his parents over his death leave an indelible impression. Similarly, Gandhi is deeply moved by the play Harishchandra, with the ideal of a willingness to go through all kinds of ordeals in order to follow the truth.
Here one observes the seeds of later developments in Gandhi’s personality, character and commitments. On the one hand, he is a remarkable moralist, always looking for exemplary models of ethical living and character transformation, and courageously following nonviolence and truth wherever they take him. On the other hand, he has limited curiosity and interest in book learning and theory, aesthetic experiences and other worldly phenomena that do not seem to him to have such practical moral and spiritual transformative value. As compared, for example, with Tagore, Gandhi seems to have a narrow, limited focus but, once he becomes convinced of the ethical and spiritual potential of any new contextualized experience, he pursues it with incredible energy, perseverance and creativity.
At the age of six Gandhi enters school in Porbandar, and the next year, when his family moves to Rajkot, he continues his education there through high school. As previously mentioned, Mohan, on the whole, seems to be an unremarkable student, with many fears and other weaknesses, extreme timidity and shyness, no interest in sports and limited intellectual motivation. However, he does have a deep sense of the need to respect his parents, teachers and other elders, and to be honest and to always tell the truth.
As he approaches thirteen Mohan has an arranged marriage to Kasturbai Makanji. A few months older than Mohan, her name is usually shortened to Kasturba (and Kastur) and she is often affectionately named Ba (Gujarati ‘mother’). Richard Attenborough’s remarkable movie, Gandhi, which is most responsible for making Gandhi known in the West, provides an idealized view of Gandhi’s relationship with Kasturba, with the exception of one very brief scene in South Africa when he angrily drags her from his house after she resists carrying out, emptying and cleaning the chamber pot of a Christian untouchable. Such idealization, with Kasturba’s obedience and worship of her husband, is far from the truth. In fact, because of his own later self-criticism and remorse, Gandhi makes outlawing child marriages, as well as the uplifting of the status of women as equal partners, among his major concerns.
Gandhi and Kasturba’s long relationship was dynamic and complex, often tumultuous and conflicted, but later evolves into a remarkable partnership. It is not easy being the immature Mohan’s child-bride. In oppressive patriarchal ways he is self-centred, extremely insecure and jealous, and assumes that he is the master who can boss his young wife around and control everything she does. He assumes that she is there to be the object of his uncontrolled carnal desires. Even several decades later, when the relationship has matured, Gandhi takes the final vow of brahmacharya (usually translated as complete celibacy and chastity, but in a fuller sense, renouncing and controlling all of the ego-desires and passions). It does not seem to have occurred to him that he should have discussed this with his wife beforehand, rather than simply announcing that he informed her of this that day and she accepted it. And, of course, being the wife of the world-famous Mahatma was not always an easy task.
What is remarkable is that the illiterate Kasturba, even as a child-wife, has a strong will and emerges as a remarkable person in her own right. Gandhi develops tremendous admiration for her, even claiming that she is his role model and teacher of ahimsa, love and nonviolence, especially since she is able to be patient and firm while undergoing voluntary suffering during the years that he is insensitive and oppressive. Years later, she engages actively in marches and imprisonment and in constructive transformative work. The relationship between Gandhi and Kasturba is closest during the last period of their lives together, and he and numerous others have noted how he is blessed to have had such a patient, strong, virtuous wife, helpmate, comrade and life-partner.
Particularly confusing, and the continuing source of debate, is Gandhi’s rather ambiguous relationship with a Muslim youth, Sheikh Mehtab, a friend of Gandhi’s older brother Karsan in Rajkot, who focuses on the need to win over and change Mohan.2 Mehtab is a loose character, with many personality flaws, but Mohan admires his contrasting physical prowess, athletic ability, strength and speed, daring and progressive views on many issues. Gandhi’s mother, wife and brother Laxmidas warn him that Mehtab is ‘bad company’, but Mohan seems dazzled by Mehtab’s perceived strengths and claims he is going to reform his weaknesses. The older boy plays on Mohan’s cowardly fears, sows seeds of doubt and jealousy about Kasturba, reinforces his sense that he has the right to dominate his wife and takes Mohan to a brothel. The unsettling relationship finally ends decades later in South Africa when Gandhi is called from his law office to find Mehtab with a prostitute in his house.
The best-known incident involving Sheikh Mehtab involves his determination to ‘reform’ Mohan by getting him to eat meat. Mohan and other students are familiar with Narmad’s Gujarati verse: ‘Behold the mighty Englishman / He rules the Indian small / Because being a meat-eater / He is five cubits tall.’ Mehtab finally convinces Mohan that only by eating meat will he become strong like him, overcome his fears and be able to stand up to the British. At fourteen Mohan finally agrees to commence his goat-eating experiment. He ends the experiment after a year because he decides that lying to his strict vegetarian parents is worse than not eating meat, although he will be able to resume meat-eating after they are no more. Gandhi, so famous for his strict vegetarianism, as an essential part of his nonviolence, was at this point a vegetarian by family and caste inheritance and pressure. Only later, in London, did he become convinced of the health benefits and the ethical, philosophical and spiritual justification of a vegetarian diet.
Mohan describes the dramatic confession of a theft when he is fifteen. For three years, from the time of his wedding until Kaba’s death in 1885, Mohan devotes time every day to nursing his sick father, who suffers from a fistula and other painful ailments. Although he describes how such daily nursing denies him the amusements and other aspects of youth, he claims that such selfless service brought him great joy, as it did throughout his later life. Gandhi notes that he would have enjoyed becoming a doctor, but his family and caste prohibited such ‘unclean’ bodily work and he is steered instead to law.
During this time his brother Karsan incurs a debt, and Mohan clips some gold from an amulet his brother wears in order to clear the debt. Tormented by guilt, Mohan decides to confess the theft of the gold, but he dare not speak to his father. Instead he hands a written confession to Kaba, who is lying on a plank suffering from his fistula. As he describes in his autobiography, Mohan confesses, promises that he will steal no more, asks for forgiveness and punishment and is most concerned that his father will not suffer by punishing himself for his son’s wrongdoing. Kaba reads the confession and ‘pearl-drops trickled down his cheeks, wetting the paper. For a moment he closed his eyes in thought and then tore up the note.’ Mohan, who also cries, can see his father’s agony. This leaves an indelible memory. ‘Those pearl-drops of love cleansed my heart and washed my sin away.’ For Gandhi, this was a lasting memory of pure love and ahimsa.
The other dramatic final experience with his father does not leave such a positive memory. Mohan and Kasturba are sixteen and she is pregnant. As Kaba’s health greatly deteriorates, Mohan confesses that while he massages his father’s legs every night, he is driven by carnal desires and returns immediately to his bedroom. On ‘the dreadful night’, Kaba’s brother Tulsidas offers to relieve Mohan, who accepts the offer, goes straight to his bedroom, and awakens Kasturba. In a few minutes there is a knock on the door and a servant tells Mohan that his father has just died. Rushing back to his father’s room, miserable, full of self-blame and shame, Mohan claims that but for his animal passion that blinded him, his father ‘would have died in my arms. But now it was my uncle who had had this privilege’. This shame of his lustful carnal desire, even at the hour of his father’s death, ‘is a blot I have never been able to efface or forget’. His undoubted devotion to his parents ‘was weighed and found unpardonably wanting because my mind was at the same moment in the grip of lust’. Gandhi concludes this autobiographical account of his ‘double shame’ by noting that ‘the poor mite that was born to my wife scarcely breathed for more than three or four days. Nothing else could be expected.’ As he sometimes does, Gandhi gives a karmic causal relation, attributing such human and even natural disasters to his and other human sins and evil.
The psychologist Erik Erikson and many others focus on this formative traumatic incident in analysing Gandhi’s repressed and unhealthy attitude toward sex and other bodily desires.3 Such explanations are not fully convincing. After all, Kasturba and Gandhi go on to have four sons: Harilal (1888–1948), Manilal (1892–1956), Ramdas (1898–1969) and Devadas (1900–1957); he does not take the brahmacharya vow until sixteen years after the incident; he struggles all of his life with his sexual and other desires, and there are many traditional Hindu and other contextual influences that shape his rather ascetic, renunciation approach to sex and ‘lower’, ‘animalistic’, ego-driven desires. For example, in experimenting with renunciation and taking the brahmacharya vow Gandhi is very conscious of his need to control and conserve his sexual and other energies as part of self-purification and to access the maximum focused energy necessary for selfless service in political, social and other struggles.
In 1887 Mohandas passed his matriculation examination in Ahmedabad and entered Samaldas College at Bhavnagar, but he remained in college for only one term. At that time, Mavji Dave, an old family friend and advisor, suggested to the family that Mohandas be sent to England to become a barrister. This appeals to Gandhi and to his family, who are convinced that three years of legal studies in England will then lead to Gandhi’s succession to the position of Diwan and to economic success upon his return to India.
There is one big obstacle: in terms of his caste-based Modh Bania community restrictions and his family, especially his mother’s, concerns, there is apprehension that a traditional Indian will invariably sin by going abroad. This obstacle is finally overcome when Mohandas agrees to take three sacred vows in the presence of the Jain monk Becharji Swami: not to touch meat, wine and women. His mother then gives her permission. The timid Mohan is remarkably determined and even brave as he defies the caste orders forbidding him from going abroad, even when the caste elders then declare him an outcast and warn that anyone helping him will be subject to fines.
On 4 September 1888, before his nineteenth birthday and shortly after the birth of his first son, Harilal, Gandhi sets sail alone from Bombay to study law at University College, London, reaching the capital on 28 October. His three years studying law to become a barrister that culminate with his being called to the Bar on 10 June 1891 can be seen as a period of considerable transition, personal experimentation and the sowing of seeds that later blossom into his radical transformation. Before coming to England he is a shy timid youth, rarely travels and has very limited intellectual and cultural horizons. In England he encounters new, diverse, challenging contextual situations and has a new freedom, not possible in previous traditional Bania Gujarat contexts, to experiment and gain some greater understanding of who he is and what he believes.
In England Gandhi is for the first time exposed to many Western ethical, social, political, economic, legal and constitutional writings, priorities and values, and experiential ways of being in the world. Many of these he later rejects as false, illusory, superficial, violent, immoral and anti-spiritual, but some of these Western experiences provide him with lasting skills and values, including his critiques of much of traditional hierarchical India. In England he is also exposed, often for the first time, to ideas that later influenced many of his essential ethical and spiritual writings and to his own personal realization of what is of lasting value for him from his own Indian tradition, including his critiques of dominant modernity. What later develops from this initial transitional period and matures in South Africa and in India is Gandhi’s new, dynamic, open-ended philosophy and practice, grounded in his commitment to truth and nonviolence. This emerging Gandhi nonviolent paradigm, with its world view and view of human nature and its way of being in the world, will encompass both Western and Indian/Eastern contextual influences and will provide us with challenges and possible solutions allowing us to rethink how we deal with our most pressing contemporary crises.
Gandhi’s description of his legal studies is unremarkable. He joins the Inner Temple, one of London’s four Inns of Court, to study for the Bar, and although this programme is prestigious, it is not very demanding. What is easily overlooked, especially because of Gandhi’s later condemnation of modern Western legal practice as adversarial, violent and divisive, is the invaluable role his British legal training plays in his later life. His legal knowledge and especially his acquired skills are great assets in allowing him to organize nonviolent campaigns, to prepare legal briefs and positions inside and outside the courtroom and to negotiate skilfully in South Africa and in India.
Far more interesting and revealing with regard to the three years in England is what Mohandas experiences outside his legal studies, starting with a brief period of about three months in which he is determined to become a proper English gentleman. English colonial rule gave some Indians the view of English superiority, physical prowess and more advanced civilization, and Gandhi follows a common pattern of trying to mimic an English lifestyle. He buys an expensive tailored suit and a silk top hat, takes lessons in proper elocution, French language, dancing and the violin, and focuses on changing his physical appearance. Largely because he cannot afford such an expensive lifestyle and feels awkward and unfulfilled by these changes he gives up on this experiment. He commits himself to being a student and he begins to experiment with a less expensive, simplified, more self-sufficient lifestyle that includes long walks and vegetarian dietetic experiments. During his years in England, despite temptations and a few close calls, he manages to uphold his three vows of not touching meat, alcohol or women.
The two most interesting features of Gandhi’s experiences in England focus on vegetarianism and religion. Upholding his vegetarian vow, he struggles with his diet before finding vegetarian restaurants in London. He begins reading books on vegetarianism, becomes active in the London Vegetarian Society, gets to know leading vegetarian authors and activists, contributes articles to the society’s magazine, The Vegetarian, and takes somewhat of a leadership role. At first Mohandas, who has been vegetarian by family and caste inheritance and not by personal choice, is mainly attracted to the health benefits of a vegetarian diet. He then develops an ethical, philosophical and religious understanding and commitment. He begins to experiment with different kinds of vegetarian diets and this becomes a lifelong commitment. His vegetarianism, as an essential part of the need to control his palate and food consumption, becomes a key for Gandhi’s self-purification and realization of reality through nonviolent truthful living.
Although Mohandas had been raised in a tolerant and open-minded home, he really knows very little about his own Hinduism or other religions. Two theosophists, the Keightley brothers, ask Gandhi’s help with reading the Bhagavad-Gita. Although the Gita becomes his favourite text and his ethical and spiritual manual for daily living, he had never previously read it. He joins the Keightleys in reading Edwin Arnold’s translation, The Song Celestial, and uses his limited knowledge of Sanskrit to work with the original. The brothers then tell him of Arnold’s The Light of Asia on the Buddha, and he reads this with even greater interest.
For the first time Gandhi begins to study Christianity and other religions. Earlier he had a negative view of intolerant, exclusive, judgemental Christian missionaries who attack Hindus as sinful idol worshippers. The theosophists he meets seem to respect all religions, including Hinduism, and his closest Christian contacts, many of whom are committed vegetarians, present a more appealing version of Christianity. He is urged to read the Bible and reading the New Testament’s Sermon on the Mount especially moves him.
These new transitional experiences shape Gandhi’s later views of the underlying unity and equality of all religious paths and the fact that all organized religions express both lofty ethical and spiritual teachings and also the impurities of intolerance, hatred, oppression and violence. These experiences begin a process in which Gandhi identifies with nonviolence, tolerance, unifying interrelatedness and other principles and values he considers most worthy in his Hinduism, while criticizing and reforming its many impurities. With regard to Christianity, Gandhi begins to appreciate and embrace Christian values, as seen in the Sermon on the Mount, the exemplary model of a selfless, loving, voluntarily suffering, nonviolent Jesus, and various interpretations, especially as presented in the writings of Leo Tolstoy. What is also fascinating is how various Christians are attracted to Gandhi, whether the Baptist minister Joseph Doke in South Africa, his first biographer, the Anglican priest Charles Andrews, one of his closest associates in South Africa and India, or the many who see Gandhi as the most Christ-like human being of their times or of any time during the past 2,000 years.
Two days after being called to the Bar, Gandhi sails for India on 12 June 1891. Upon his arrival home, he receives the ‘severe shock’, more painful than his father’s death, that his beloved mother had died while he was abroad. His family had attempted to protect him from the suffering by withholding the news until his return.
Gandhi applies for admission to the Bombay High Court but his legal practice in Rajkot and Bombay is very disappointing. Lacking knowledge of Indian law and still tormented with personal timidity and insecurity he becomes known as a ‘briefless barrister’. Although he was challenged and grew through his transitional experiences in England, his life at this point has no real direction and there is no indication of a successful legal career in India.
What occurs to transform so radically this rather unremarkable youth and young lawyer, with no obvious potential for future greatness, into the larger-than-life Mahatma, the most influential proponent of nonviolence in the contemporary world?