WHEN GANDHI ARRIVED in London the aristocratic Lord Salisbury led the Conservative party as prime minister; the previous year Queen Victoria had celebrated fifty years on the throne. The stately buildings in Whitehall ultimately administered four hundred million people. London was the greatest city in the world, at the centre of the first truly global empire.
Viewed from that perspective, the Empire seemed unbreakable, a thing to wonder at rather than to attack. But the cracks were already apparent. The ongoing unrest in Ireland had already convinced the most far-sighted that home rule was the only solution. The London match-girls, amongst the most downtrodden and ignorant workers, had successfully held a strike to improve their pay and conditions earlier in 1888. The year after Gandhi arrived the dockers would strike, halting trade through the centre of the Empire.
These manifestations of discontent may seem remote from the self-image of the shy student from Kathiawar who landed at Tilbury, but Gandhi is known to have followed the Irish progress to independence through the press; he would seek, and receive, an audience with Cardinal Manning to congratulate him on his conciliatory role in ending the dock strike. He also met the match-girls’ leader Annie Besant in London, and later worked beside her for Indian independence when she took her own path to mysticism in Madras.
British culture as centred on London offered other manifestations of uncertainty. The established Church continued its struggle against the forces of rationalism as represented by the Darwinists, and the best-selling author Marie Corelli was writing books discussing the masculine and feminine nature of God, reincarnation, and the role of the occult in evolution. The London that Gandhi had entered brimmed with insistent new ideas—of the socialist Social Democratic Federation, the Society for Psychical Research, the Theosophical Society and the Anti-Vivisection Society. He could not have arrived at a time of greater challenge and excitement than the last decade of the nineteenth century.
On his arrival Gandhi went by train to central London with a companion he had met on the boat, to the luxurious Victoria Hotel, which had been recommended to them. His new friend accepted the first rooms offered at the first price—six shillings a day. To give an idea of the value of money: there were twenty shillings to the pound and the dockers had been striking for a minimum wage of half a shilling (sixpence) an hour—though they often got only three hours’ work a day.
A network of Indian expatriates supported newcomers, and Gandhi carried letters of introduction to several people to ease his entry into British society. One of his contacts was Dr Pranjivan Mehta, who was studying law as well as taking an advanced course in medicine. When he called to see Gandhi in his hotel on his first night there, he felt the young man was something of a barbarian—he was touching Mehta’s clothes with puerile interest, and his English was poor. Mehta was also concerned at the cost of the hotel, and arranged for Gandhi to live with an English family that took in boarders.
Gandhi’s hotel bill for the few days he was there was for £3, which shocked him; he had around £400 for his entire three-year trip. He had been eating in the hotel even though he found the food unpalatable, and was surprised that he still had to pay for dishes he had ordered even if he had not eaten them.
Gandhi was to have a problem finding food—the English landladies’ boiled vegetables without seasoning were all but inedible. They were also intended as an accompaniment to a meat dish. He was too shy to make his needs better known and would fill up on bread but would not ask for more vegetables. He was at an extra disadvantage because he still considered meat-eating was essential to achieve national freedom; his vegetarianism was a result only of his vow to his mother to abstain. He was urged to abandon the promise—‘What is the value of a vow made before an illiterate mother, and in ignorance of conditions here?’ a friend asked, but for Gandhi a vow was inviolable.1
He wept with homesickness during this time of boarding with different families, in Richmond and West Kensington. But he started reading newspapers, an important contribution towards the political education of someone who had not previously had any acquaintance with current affairs.
After taking some time to orientate himself in the new country, Gandhi enrolled at the Inner Temple, one of the four Inns of Court. The qualifications for being called to the Bar were to pass examinations in Roman and common law and to attend a number of dinners at the appropriate Inn. There was little by way of formal training; most depended on personal study. Gandhi does not seem to have particularly enjoyed the medieval Inns of Court, though he spent many days working in the library of the Inner Temple, thus saving on coal to heat his rooms. He ate the compulsory dinners in the Inner Temple Hall where, surprisingly considering his difficulty elsewhere, it was possible to order vegetarian fare. He discovered abstinence had its rewards: as each table was supplied with the same amount of wine, he was a welcome guest at the tables of those who enjoyed it, since they could drink the ration supplied for him. He bought and studied the recommended books, discovering that many students got by using tutors or cramming notes, never having to read the textbooks—‘question papers were easy and examiners were generous.’2 His study of English common law, incorporating criminal and civil law, gave him an appreciation of the concepts of equal rights before the law, indicating that there were values within which the government must operate.
His struggle to find suitable food ended when he came across a vegetarian restaurant, the Central on St Bride Street, off Farringdon Street, where he began to eat, feeling that ‘God had come to my aid.’3 He bought a copy of the proselytising A Plea for Vegetarianism by Henry Salt. Salt was a socialist, a former Eton schoolmaster who wore sandals (unusual at the time) and attempted to live the simple life with his wife, a Sanskrit scholar called Kate Joynes, on the smallest amount of money possible.
Gandhi was glad to have found a vegetarian meeting place, but looked with disdain at vegetarians who were obsessed with their health and talked of nothing but disease. He was moving towards the incorporation of vegetarianism into a spiritual scheme of his own devising, but one which would draw much from his London experiences. As noted earlier, he had previously considered vegetarianism a moral necessity but a meat diet to be ‘scientifically’ superior. He was now converted to the superiority of the vegetarian diet, joined the London Vegetarian Society in 1890 and met with other enthusiasts. He began to read vegetarian magazines and was invited by the editor of The Vegetarian, Josiah Oldfield, to attend the International Vegetarian Congress in September 1890. Within this network Gandhi discovered a great freedom: he could eat in vegetarian restaurants and travel around the country using vegetarian-orientated accommodation, as advertised via the society. He later moved into rooms at Oldfield’s residence in Bayswater. Gandhi commented enthusiastically about his friend: ‘I have seen him work at the rate of sixteen hours or more per diem. He was, when I saw him last, living on bread, figs and water.’4 Oldfield said: ‘Those were happy days, of consciousness that we were helping to make the world better.’5
By 1891 Gandhi was defending vegetarianism in articles in The Vegetarian and ascribing the weakness of India to other causes, including child marriage which supposedly produced weak offspring and a strain on the young parents.6 In his search for perfect nutritional equilibrium he was prey to every food fad, whether or not there was any rational basis for it. ‘There was in those days,’ he records, ‘a body of opinion which regarded tea and coffee as harmful and favoured cocoa’—cocoa, then, it was.7 The seed for all his future experiments in diet, he recorded, was sown in London (presumably he did not include his Indian experiences with meat-eating as experiments). He also invented diets of his own, giving up starchy foods, living on bread and fruit alone, then on cheese, milk and eggs.
Gandhi’s involvement with what were thought of as food cranks disconcerted Dalpatram Shukla, another Kathiawari in London, who wanted his young friend to become a sophisticated man of the world. One evening he took Gandhi to the theatre, preceded by a restaurant meal at which he was embarrassed when Gandhi called the waiter to ask if the soup was vegetarian. Gandhi decided in response to his friend’s discomfiture at his ‘making a scene’ that, though he could not relent over meat-eating, he would nevertheless become an English gentleman.
He therefore upgraded his wardrobe, at considerable expense. He bought a top-hat and an evening suit and set about reforming his manners. He was advised he had to learn to dance and to speak French, so he signed up for lessons. He found dancing difficult, so bought a violin and hired a teacher in order to acquire a taste for Western music. He also engaged an elocution teacher. This ‘infatuation, as he called it, lasted around three months, after which he dispensed with the services of all his teachers—typically, again taking an extreme position. In fact elocution lessons for someone not a native English speaker would at the time have been of real value—the fact that he did not think he needed them meant he did not see his future as including making speeches in English, but one of working in the Indian courts or in Indian public service as his father had. Despite dispensing with the ‘charm school’ accessories he retained a ‘punctiliousness in dress’; and he did so for years, he maintained—certainly throughout his time in Britain he was the image of the ‘brown Englishman.’8 An Indian in London described him at this time: ‘Gandhi was wearing a high silk top hat brushed “burnish bright”, a stiff and starched collar (known at that time as the Gladstone), a flashy tie displaying all the colours of the rainbow, under which there was a fine striped shirt. Gandhi wore a morning coat, a double-breasted vest [waistcoat], dark striped trousers to match, patent leather boots and spats. He carried leather gloves, and a silver-mounted stick.’9
He was now becoming more concerned about the dwindling of his funds. Living with a family was proving too expensive, so he took rooms, probably in Store Street; he would walk to wherever he had to be, covering distances of eight to ten miles a day, and started cooking some of his meals at home. He enjoyed the discipline of progressively reducing his expenses: ‘I kept account of every farthing I spent, and my expenses were carefully calculated.’ He was eventually able to live on around a shilling a day for food.10 He also reduced the variety of foods he was eating, as a matter of discipline rather than expense, and stopped using the spices sent to him from India, becoming instead enamoured of boiled spinach.
He once fell ill with bronchitis and a doctor was sent for who advised Gandhi he must eat meat for his strength. He brought beef tea to the supine Indian and told him he must either drink it or die. ‘I had to reply,’ recalled Gandhi, ‘that if it were God’s will that I should die, I must die, but that I was sure it could not be God’s will that I should break the oath that I made at my mother’s knee before I left India.’11
He also decided on a course of study to fill the time when the Bar examinations were not absorbing him, and took the London Matriculation, a general exam that increased his store of general knowledge at no particular cost. He organised his timetable to the minute and worked hard at subjects such as Latin and science; though he failed the examination the first time he took it (flunking the Latin paper), he repeated the papers and passed in June 1890.
Every student should go to England to study because so much could be learned, he remarked, not because of what was there but what was not: ‘Whilst he is in England he is alone, no wife to tease and flatter him, no parents to indulge, no children to look after, no company to disturb.’12 Gandhi was already seeing personal freedom in terms of being free from his family, something that would be a continuing theme in his dealings with his relations.
Gandhi did not move in literary circles when he was in London (as his later friend Sarojini Naidu did), but he read some of the fiction of the day including Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, later remarking: ‘A great crime committed by a man has been known to change his face in such a way as to stamp the crime on it,’ as if the truth of literature could be read as literal fact—just as he also recounted the events of Indian religious stories as if they were about historical characters.13 Of the writer he commented: ‘Wilde saw the highest Art simply in outward forms and therefore succeeded in beautifying immorality.’14
In December 1890 he sat for the Bar finals, which took place over four days, and early the next year he found he was one of the three-quarters of candidates who had passed. He was required to stay in London to complete the requirements for the Bar, but was now free to step up his involvement with the Vegetarian Society.
Gandhi had letters of introduction to four people, including Dadabhai Naoroji, a Parsi intellectual and cotton trader who was also from Gujarat. Naoroji was to become the first Asian member of parliament, representing Finsbury Central from 1892 to 1895 (his election campaign would be helped by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who was at that time studying law in London). Gandhi did not present his letter to Naoroji until very late in his stay in London, feeling he had no right to trouble such a great man, and though the veteran accepted his young admirer warmly, Gandhi could not bring himself to take up Naoroji’s offer of assistance.
The British Committee of the Indian National Congress was founded in July 1889 but Gandhi does not seem to have attended any of its meetings; he did, though, attend meetings of the London India Society that discussed ‘political, social and literary subjects relating to India’ and acted to acquaint the public in England of Indian opinion ‘on all important questions that might arise from time to time.’15 The society had been set up by Naoroji in 1865 so it was a mature institution by the time Gandhi attended its meetings. Naoroji visualised the constitutional progress of India through the just and fair administration of the British, guided by their sense of fair play. It was a position that took at face value the Liberal project of enlightened rule. When India was not well governed, Naoroji criticised it as ‘unrighteous and un-British.’16
Gandhi’s main activity in London was with the Vegetarian Society. He was elected to the executive committee in September 1890, but he proved a disappointment to them: though he was fine at talking to individuals, he was too shy to open his mouth in a committee meeting. ‘It often happened that just when I mustered up courage to speak, a fresh subject would be started,’ he wrote.17 The Vegetarian Society confirmed his belief in diet as a reforming force. He also encountered there opponents of alcohol, and felt confident in proclaiming that in India ‘One of the most greatly-felt evils of British rule is the importation of alcohol—that enemy of mankind, that curse of civilisation; he was later to similarly curse tobacco.18
The society was largely funded by a wealthy ironworks owner, Arnold Hills, who practised his own brand of paternalistic capitalism and promoted extreme puritanism in matters of tobacco, alcohol and sex. His form of Christianity, which has been said to have been influential in Gandhi’s thinking, was of the perfectibility of man: people could become like Jesus by controlling the body’s unruly appetites. In Essays on Vegetarianism Hills promoted a ‘Gospel of Vitality’ which involved eating ‘vital foods’ such as uncooked fruit, vegetables, nuts, pulses and grains to cultivate ‘vital force.’ He believed that cooking impaired the power of the sun’s rays that were stored in foods and advised eating vegetables raw. He explained: ‘it is not enough to abstain from the indulgence in dead and stimulating foods; under the gospel of Vegetarianism, we listen to the beatitudes of Vital Food and Vital Drink.’19 Gandhi tried an experiment in vital food in Bombay in 1892 and in Pretoria in 1893, but it was hard to digest and left him feeling hungry and sick—the sort of reaction that must tell even the most enthusiastic experimenter that something is wrong.
Part of the preservation of vital force in Hills’s view was in refraining from sex, except specifically for procreation. Sex ‘has been given for its own special purpose, and for no other. It may not be abused for pleasure; it may not be indulged for passion.’20 It was at the Vegetarian Society (and in Hills’s tracts in The Vegetarian) that Gandhi first encountered this doctrine of extreme puritanism with regard to sex, a principle that was not present in his family’s Hinduism. Even more extreme was another belief of Hills that celibacy should be maintained even after marriage, so-called ‘chastity within the marriage bond’; this was to form a mainstay of Gandhi’s organisation of his own model societies in later life.21
A leading member of the Vegetarian Society was Thomas Allinson, a doctor of medicine and the founder of naturopathy which promoted health through exercise, fresh air, a vegetarian diet and the avoidance of alcohol, tobacco, coffee and tea. Thus far everything fitted with Hills’s views, but out of sympathy for the over-fecund Victorian woman borne down by repeated pregnancies, he also promoted birth control. Gandhi became involved in the argument between these two, which culminated in a motion for the expulsion of Allinson from the society. Gandhi tended to sympathise with Hills in opposing birth control, but he thought it was improper for Hills to exclude a man ‘simply because he refused to regard puritan morals as one of the objects of the society’.22 Gandhi put his thoughts in writing and went to the committee meeting with his speech in his pocket, but again he did not feel bold enough to present it, and the chairman had it read by someone else. Allinson lost the day and was expelled; later he was struck off the Medical Register for his advanced views, and he set up the whole-grain bakery that still bears his name.
In London, at least from his own account, Gandhi seems to have indulged his preoccupation with food, but he does not record extensive ponderings on sex, such as would preoccupy him in later life. Once at a vegetarian conference in Portsmouth in 1890 he was put up in a lodging house that also operated as a brothel. When conversation in the parlour took a racy turn, Gandhi remembered the vow he had made to his mother and fled the scene, though he remarked that it was ‘the first occasion on which a woman, other than my wife, moved me to lust.’23 Apart from this he reports little by way of sexual diversion except visits he would make every Sunday to the home of an elderly lady who had befriended him, and who was eager to introduce him to young women and to impress on him the merits of marriage. ‘Flirting’ was encouraged, and he was often left alone with one young woman in particular. Finally he could bear it no longer and, still too shy to trust himself to speak in person, he sent a letter to his hostess confessing that he was married with a son, saying: ‘Will you forgive me? I assure you I have taken no improper liberties with the young lady.’24 The old lady responded with good humour, and he continued to be invited to her house. Gandhi felt his punctilious regard for the truth had freed him from moral disaster. It is, incidentally, worth remarking on the absence of racial prejudice evinced in his encounters with ordinary British families during his time in London. If there was unpleasantness, he does not remark on it, in sharp contrast to his later descriptions of his South African experiences.
It was in religion that, separated from the orthodox Hinduism of his caste, Gandhi made the most progress while in London. He contrived to acquaint himself with the world’s major religions and even read a book promoting atheism. He read parts of the Bible, given to him by a vegetarian Christian. He found the Old Testament sent him to sleep but delighted in the New, particularly the Sermon on the Mount. His studies in this field were without much system. He read about Mohammed in Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero Worship; about Buddha in Edwin Arnold’s popular poem The Light of Asia; and would first be introduced to the Bhagavad Gita in another of Edwin Arnold’s verse translations, The Song Celestial. Gandhi had such confidence in Arnold that he believed its sentimental depiction of Buddha with animals demonstrated his superiority over Jesus, because of Buddha’s thereby proven love for all life, not merely for humans. In fact such scenes as Buddha carrying a sick lamb were Arnold’s invention and have no basis in Buddhist texts. Gandhi started a vegetarian club in Bayswater when he lived there, with himself as secretary and Oldfield as president, and he invited Arnold, also a vegetarian and living locally, to be vice-president; the club went well for a time, before Gandhi moved from the area. He must have met Arnold on several occasions, but there is no record of it.
Gandhi was introduced to the original Sanskrit version of the Bhagavad Gita by two members of the Theosophical Society, Bertram and Archibald Keightley, an uncle and nephew whom he probably met through his vegetarian connections. They were reading Arnold’s translation but wanted some idea of whether the translation was a good one so asked Gandhi’s help. He had to admit that he had not read the poem in any form and his knowledge of Sanskrit was poor, but he could put what scholarship he did have at their service. Thus it was that he became acquainted with the work that was to be his guide in future life, the exemplar of spiritual truth for him and the subject of daily reading.
The Keightleys (who are described as ‘both unmarried,’ perhaps a euphemism for homosexual) made their West London home available to Madame Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy, and introduced Gandhi to her. He read Blavatsky’s Key to Theosophy, which strengthened his attachment to Hinduism. Though he hardly knew her, Blavatsky was significant in Gandhi’s life for two reasons: first, because she headed an organisation that promoted Hindu thought in England, and therefore reinforced his conviction that the values of his homeland were not to be discarded in a rush to ‘modernise.’ Second, theosophists were also having an influence on the Indian independence movement, devotees playing a prominent role in the founding of the Indian National Congress.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was born in Russia in 1831 of prominent parents and took to travelling early in life, including to India and Tibet. Thus religiously invigorated, she settled in the United States, there meeting a former colonel, Henry Olcott, who was writing on spiritualism. Together they and some like-minded individuals founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 in New York. The society was dedicated to a universal brotherhood of humanity without regard to sex, race or creed. It aimed to encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy and science and to investigate unexplained laws of nature and the powers said to be latent in man. The group moved to India and in 1882 set up their permanent headquarters in Adyar, near Madras. Despite being somewhat discredited by the exposure of fake psychic phenomena, theosophy exerted a powerful influence, particularly on social reformers of a spiritual bent such as Annie Besant whose reading of Blavatsky’s work converted her from atheism—something that impressed Gandhi, for whom books were always a strong influence. He also heard Besant speak in London, and was struck by her final comment that she would be ‘quite satisfied to have the epitaph written on her tomb that she had lived for truth and died for truth.’25 On Blavatsky’s death in 1891, Besant became one of the organisation’s leaders and was elected president in 1907. Part of theosophy’s message was that the highest wisdom in the world belonged to the East, and was not all contained in the past but maintained in the present day by living masters, or mahatmas.
Gandhi writes that he did not join the theosophists, but independent evidence attests to his having become an associate member on 26 March 1891, one of a number of instances when Gandhi’s Experiments with Truth diverges from the truth as it is generally understood.26
Spiritually, Gandhi was following his own path towards perfectibility, remarking later that it was at the age of twenty or twenty-one, when he was in London, that he first aspired to attain ‘a state of mind [which] cannot be affected even in dire circumstances or at the moment of death.’27 In pursuit of this goal he sought a guru, or spiritual guide, to enthrone in this heart, as he put it. He felt that there must be ‘ceaseless striving after perfection. For one gets the Guru that one deserves. Infinite striving after perfection is its own reward. The rest is in the hands of God.’28 It almost goes without saying that such a strong-willed character as Gandhi never did find anyone to be his perfect spiritual guide; he would continue as a lone seeker, offering his insights to others.
Gandhi’s knowledge of European countries other than Britain was limited, but he went to Paris for the World Exhibition in May 1889 and spent a week there. He ascended the Eiffel Tower and visited Catholic churches, where he was impressed by the devotion of the worshippers, just a closed door away from the noise and bustle of the capital’s streets.
Before leaving for India he gave a farewell dinner to members of the Vegetarian Society but, as so often, was too shy to give a speech: he said his mind went blank when he rose to deliver his prepared words and he felt he had embarrassed himself, but contemporary records demur. In fact, Gandhi frequently presents himself as more shy and incapable than he actually was: in spring and summer 1891 he several times gave his paper ‘The Foods of India’ to audiences interested in vegetarianism in different parts of southern England or spoke on other matters, though he does remark that in Ventnor he was overcome with shyness and a colleague had to read his paper.
His vegetarian friends responded thus to his departure: ‘there was no sign of sorrow, because all felt that though Mr Gandhi was going back to India, yet he was going to a still greater work for vegetarianism, and that on the completion of his law career and his final success, congratulations to him should take the part of personal wailings.’29 Vegetarianism, dietary experiment and fasting were at least as important to Gandhi himself as non-violence, which is popularly considered to be his legacy.
Gandhi’s vegetarianism was not separate from his general world view; he advised other Indians: “The Vegetarian movement will indirectly aid India politically... inasmuch as the English Vegetarians will more readily sympathise with the Indian aspirations (that is my personal experience).’30 He believed in the principle, supported by British Liberals, of increasing Indian participation in government, taking the best from British civilisation and presenting in return the best of the East.
He left London strengthened by his vows to his mother which, under great pressure, he had managed to keep, plus a knowledge of formal organisations through the Vegetarian Society and of religious proselytising through the theosophists and Arnold Hills. He also left it with ideas, promoted by Henry Salt and in the work of Edwin Arnold, of human perfectibility: that a person by his own efforts could develop spiritual power. What is lacking from records of this time is any strictly political thought or any contribution towards improving the working of the law. There was no evidence from his time in London that Gandhi, twenty-two when he left, would become a great political leader, and certainly none that he would become a great lawyer. He was called to the Bar on 10 June 1891, enrolled in the High Court on the 11th, and on the 12th he left the country via Tilbury on the steamship Oceana. ‘It was not without deep regret that I left dear London,’ he said.31