Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
He left Bombay on the 4th of September 1888, a month before his nineteenth birthday. The
Indian messiah-in-waiting had chosen his personal advancement over his religion. He crossed
these dark waters an outcast, but against all his expectations London would awaken in
a young Gandhi a spiritual spark that his own country could not. As he approached Tilbury
docks there were no regrets, only ambition. ‘On the boat I had thought that white clothes
would suit me better when I stepped ashore, and therefore I did so, in white flannels’.
As he stepped ashore in his crisp white linen suit, the height of that ambition was to experience
England, and to transform himself into an English gentleman. He was ready to soak up
what London had to offer. ‘He was rather shy young man, but he portrayed
himself there for very much as a young Englishman. He dressed in very western clothes’.
This is the place where Gandhi became a lawyer, London’s Inner Temple. I was shown around
by its sub treasurer, Patrick Maddams. You couldn’t practice law at the time anywhere
at the British Empire unless you were attached to one of the Inns of Court in London.
‘You can see his arrival here in 1888, the sixth of November, and he was admitted to
the Inn through a fee to cover his three-year study for 140 pounds, 11 shillings and 5 pence.
One of the reasons he chose to come to the Inner Temple was that our fees were higher
than the other inns, and so therefore he concluded it must have been better’.
‘So he thought that was a very good thing?’ ‘He thought it was a very good reason indeed’.
His time at the Inner Temple was to leave an indelible mark on Gandhi; not just because
of his studies but because of what he ate. ‘So this is the dining hall. And he would
have had to have his dinner here to fulfil the requirement?’
‘It was a requirement to be called to the bar that you have 24 dinners a year. He was
there for 3 years so that’s 72 dinners’. ‘It couldn’t have been easy for him though
with being a vegetarian’. ‘Well, he wasn’t, because..., given his
undertaking to his mother that he would abstain from alcohol and that he would abstain from
meat. And I think that was a general feeling in mid-Victorian polluted London that you
couldn’t survive without alcohol and meat’. In fact Gandhi was in real danger in wasting
away. He lived on boiled cabbage in the Temple dining rooms and bread and jam in his lodgings.
He was not a vegetarian by conviction but he made a promise to his mother. And on such
little things history turns, for the decision to keep this promise was of great consequence.
It began the transformation from Victorian gentleman to reformer. It reconnected him
to Gujrat and it gave those childhood notions of non-violence and truth a new purpose.
You might think that a foreign student in late-Victorian London might have found it
difficult to locate a vegetarian hostelry, but looking at this map, in fact there were
several places catering for Gandhi’s specific dietary requirements. His discovery of these
vegetarian establishments no doubt did him a power of good, but their real significance
was in Gandhi’s political awakening, for at the time vegetarian restaurants were at
the heart of London’s lively and fashionable world of reform. Tristram Stuart is the author
of a history of vegetarianism. ‘This is really interesting to me that there
were several vegetarian restaurants in this area at the time that he lived’.
‘The record suggests that there were up to 34 in London in the 1880s. It’s still
regarded as fairly cranky and extreme but there is a body of political reformers who
are involved in the vegetarian movement. They see it as a key, in fact, to reform the human
nature and human behaviour. They regard it, eating meat and eating blood, as the way in
which violence and aggression enter the human body and influences behaviour’.
‘So, for everyone becomes vegetarian you automatically start to have a more gentle
society’. ‘Perhaps you’re right. That was something
that he picked up in London from these radical social reforming contemporaries’.
‘And those ideas become so central to the way that we think of him today, one has to
wonder how his thinking would have been had he not encounter this scene in London’.
‘Well, precisely, we know that before he came to London, he was actually convinced
that eating meat was a key to making Indian strong and that was the way of kicking out
the British. The exact reverse becomes the case. By the time he’s left London, he’s
convinced that vegetarianism is the key and non-violence is the technique that he is going
to use to boot the British out of India’. Gandhi got much more out of London than he
bargained for. He now understood vegetarianism in a social, political, and ethical context
and how closely related it was to a Himsa – non-violence. But London had yet more
to offer. It was here that Gandhi gained a new, deeper understanding of the childhood
notion of Satia - truth. It came from an unexpected religious source. Gandhi became an active
member of the vegetarian society contributing articles to its magazine. This introduced
him to the great and the good of London society where he was exposed to the leading reformers
and the new religious ideas if the day. In Gandhi’s old stamping ground in west London
I met Cathryn Tidrick, an authority on his defining influences. She told me about a movement
attracting much attention in Gandhi’s London, the Theosophical Society and its founder,
one Madame Blavatsky. ‘She thought that all the religions of the
world were essentially different versions of one fundamental, underlying religion, like
the perennial religion, perennial philosophy.’ ‘And all that stroke a chord with Gandhi,
did it?’ ‘He’s very attracted by the idea because
he could see the Hinduism was being taken seriously. It began to make him think about
the idea of the religions cross-fertilizing each other, I think. Madame Blavatsky took
ideas from Christianity as well as Hinduism. She took ideas from other places, but particularly
from Christianity and Hinduism, and Gandhi began to see how you might express religious
ideas in different ways’. As with vegetarianism, Gandhi was rediscovering
his own heritage through western eyes. It stimulated a thirst for spiritual knowledge,
for ultimate truth. And it was here that he read two