Gandhi Before India (9 page)

The following morning Gandhi took a train from Liverpool Street Station to the London docks. The ship that was to carry him back to India was an Australian steamer, the
Oceana
, a ‘vast floating island’ weighing 6,000 tons. This took him to Aden, where he transferred to the SS
Assam
, which was bound for Bombay.

Gandhi wrote about the return journey for
The Vegetarian
. Since he was seeing the same things again, the account lacks the enchantment and sense of wonder that characterized his narrative of the voyage out of India. He noted that while the staff on the
Oceana
were polite and neat, the Portuguese waiters on the
Assam
‘murdered the Queen’s English’, and were ‘also sulky and slow’. He was one of only two vegetarians on board; between them, they pressed the steward to provide ‘some
vegetable curry, rice, stewed and fresh fruit from the first[-class] saloon …’ The eager Indian convinced the secretary of the ship’s committee to allot him ‘a quarter of an hour for a short speech on vegetarianism’. The request was granted, and the talk scheduled to preface the next musical evening. In preparation, Gandhi ‘thought out and then wrote out and re-wrote’ a text aimed at what he anticipated would be a hostile audience. In the end the concert was cancelled, and ‘so the speech was never delivered, to my great mortification’.

The SS
Assam
carrying,
among other things and persons, M. K. Gandhi, Barrister-at-Law, arrived in Bombay on 5 July 1891. The monsoon had just broken. The passengers disembarked amidst the rain and the wind,
soaked to the skin.
⁵²

When Mohandas Gandhi landed at Bombay on his return from England, he was met at the docks by his elder brother, Laxmidas. They proceeded to the home of Dr Pranjivan Mehta, his fellow student in London. Mehta was from a prosperous family of jewellers, who lived in the central Bombay district of Gamdevi, in a large two-storey house with long balconies and carved wooden pillars.
¹

En route to Dr Mehta’s house, Gandhi’s brother told him that their mother Putlibai had died a few months previously. The family had not wired him in London, lest the news should distract him from his studies. Hearing the news now was a ‘severe shock’ to Mohandas.
²
Putlibai had been reluctant to allow him to go abroad, and worried he would transgress in matters of morals and diet. He had returned, law degree in hand, and without ever having had meat, alcohol or sex in London. Now he could not tell his mother of these achievements.

In Bombay, at hand to console Mohandas, was a relative of Dr Mehta’s, then resident in the family home. Known as Raychand or Rajchandra, he had had a mystical experience when young, and had acquired a reputation as a poet and a student of the Jain scriptures.
³

As a Jain teacher, Raychand led a simple, even austere, life, although his renunciation was different from and possibly deeper than the norm. While all Jains were vegetarian, the more devout did not even eat onions or garlic, and took great pains not to injure living beings, covering their mouth with a handkerchief lest an insect popped in. There were Jain hospitals for injured birds. Renunciation could take ostentatious forms; as when a wealthy merchant gave away his property in front of an admiring crowd of community members.

Raychand, however, dismissed orthodox Jainism as the ‘religion of
the mouth-covering (
muh patti
) rather than the soul’. The obsession with formal vows distressed him. He argued that even a householder could practise renunciation, providing for his wife and children while himself cultivating an inner detachment from worldly pleasures.
⁴

Raychand was the son-in-law of Pranjivan Mehta’s brother. He was a jeweller by profession, combining running a shop with the reading of scriptures and the writing of poetry. Although but a year older than Mohandas Gandhi, he inspired admiration and awe. He was introduced to Gandhi as a
shatavadhani
, one who could remember a hundred things. There was a time when he would demonstrate this skill in public. Lately, however, he had devoted himself to religious pursuits. He knew the Jain and Hindu scriptures intimately, and had also read many texts in Gujarati on Islam and Christianity.
⁵

For his first few days in Bombay, Gandhi stayed indoors with Raychand. To amuse him and distract him from his bereavement, Raychand put on a private exhibition of his prowess. The visitor from London was asked to write down paragraphs in several languages and read them out. Raychand reproduced the paragraphs and sentences in exactly the same order. Gandhi was greatly impressed. More than thirty years later, he recalled the impact the Jain scholar made on him:

His gait was slow, and the observer could mark that even while walking, he was engrossed in thinking. There was a magic in his eyes. They were very sharp; there was no confusion in them. Concentration was engraved in them. His face was round, lips thin, nose neither sharp nor flat, constitution lean, stature medium, complexion not quite fair. His appearance was that of a calm and quiet person. His voice was so sweet that no one would get tired of listening to him. He was always smiling and gay. Inner joy was pictured on his face. He had such a thorough command over language that I do not remember he had ever to search for words while expressing his opinion.

Speaking with (and listening to) Raychand made Gandhi ‘realise that school is not the only place where memory can be cultivated, that knowledge also could be had outside schools if one has a desire, an intense desire, to gain it …’
⁶

After a week spent with Raychand, Mohandas proceeded with his brother to the town of Nasik. His fellow Modh Banias had still
not forgiven him for travelling to London. To placate them he took a purificatory swim in the river Godavari and then proceeded to Rajkot, where he hosted a dinner for the leading Banias of the town. It was also in Rajkot that he was reunited with his wife and son, whom he had not seen for three years.

Photographs of Mohandas Gandhi as a young man are scarce; and photographs of his wife as a young lady are practically non-existent. Later pictures, taken when she was in her thirties and forties, show a round-faced woman of undistinguished appearance. One biographer, however, comes up with the enjoyable fantasy that when Mohandas met Kasturba after his return from London he ‘was captivated by his wife’s beauty’. Apparently, she was

enchanting … to behold. Her smooth skin, her large eyes framed by thick lashes, her tiny figure, shapely and supple as ever under the soft folds of her bright-coloured sari! How beguiling it was to watch her comb her long, gleaming, black hair; to study the simple grace of her movements; to hear, at every step, the musical tinkle of the tiny silver bells that encircled her slender bare ankles.
⁷

This is an inspired piece of mind-reading, for which no source is or could be given. Gandhi’s account in his autobiography is altogether more prosaic. He writes of their reunion that ‘my relations with my wife were still not as I desired. Even my stay in England had not cured me of jealousy. I continued my squeamishness and suspiciousness in respect of every little thing …’ Other evidence (the fact that Kasturba was soon pregnant) suggests that they did at least resume sexual relations. Meanwhile, encouraged by his experiences in England, Gandhi introduced changes in the household’s cuisine, introducing cocoa and oatmeal into the daily diet.
⁸

A month after Gandhi’s return, his brother Laxmidas was drawn into a controversy in their home town, Porbandar. Laxmidas had attached himself to the heir to the throne, Kumar Bhavsinghji. The Kumar was the son of the prince who, in the year of Gandhi’s birth (1869), had ‘expired in extreme agony’, causing Rana Vikmatji to have the prince’s adviser murdered and consequently have his own status reduced to that of a Third Class ruler, and then sent into exile. The Rana’s powers had not
been fully restored by 1891. He had been allowed back into Porbandar, but he ruled under the supervision of an Administrator appointed by the British. The Rana’s grandson, Bhavsinghji, was being groomed for the throne. A British tutor taught him English, History and other subjects; a British engineer took him for excursions into the countryside, identifying sites for bridges to be built; the Administrator had him in his office two or three times a week, so that he could learn to settle disputes amongst his subjects and lay down state policy himself.

Gandhi writes in his autobiography that ‘my brother [Laxmidas] had been secretary and adviser to the late Ranasaheb of Porbandar before he was installed on his
gaddi
[throne] and hanging over his head at this time was the charge of having given wrong advice in that office.’
⁹
Behind that sentence lies a rather complicated story, which had lost its significance in the 1920s – when Gandhi wrote his memoirs – but which may in fact have had a determining impact on his life and career.

Fortunately, a large file of correspondence in the archives allows us to flesh out the tale. We know therefore that in August 1891 Laxmidas was on the staff of the Thakor of Shapur, a
zamindar
in Kathiawar. However, he was often in Porbandar, where (as the Administrator of the State remarked) he ‘has been hanging about in some unknown and undefined capacity with Bhavsinghji for the last nine or ten months’.
¹⁰
By hanging about the young prince, Laxmidas Gandhi may have hoped that when Bhavsinghji became the Rana of Porbandar, he would get a suitable position in his administration. Or perhaps he hoped to exercise influence indirectly, through his brother Mohandas, who, as a London-trained lawyer, was extremely well qualified to be diwan of Porbandar at a time when the British were modernizing indigenous systems of law and authority. In his memoirs, Gandhi writes that ‘my elder brother had built high hopes on me. The desire for wealth and name and fame was great in him.’
¹¹
This description allows for either possibility – that Laxmidas hoped he would become diwan of Porbandar, or (which seems more likely) that his better-qualified younger brother would get the job instead.

Laxmidas Gandhi’s patron, young Kumar Bhavsinghji, enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh more than the obligations of kingship. Although married he maintained a harem. At the time of Gandhi’s return from England, the Kumar had just acquired a new mistress. To indulge her he employed new servants, to add to a household staff already in excess of
fifty persons. The expenses mounted, and so also the debts. The Administrator wrote despairingly that ‘the young Kumar has surrounded himself by some of the worst characters in the state.’
¹²

The Kumar and his grandfather had a contentious relationship, the young man choosing to stay in a house away from the palace. On the night of 7/8 August 1891, Bhavsinghji broke into a room on the third floor of the palace. A blacksmith from the town had, at his command, opened the lock to the door as well as the locks to several boxes of jewels that the room contained.

From these boxes, Bhavsinghji helped himself to earrings, nose-rings and bracelets made of gold, rubies and other precious jewels. He also took some expensive dinner services back to his house. However, the blacksmith was stopped and questioned by the palace guards. When he explained why, and under whose instructions, he had intruded into the palace, the Rana alerted the Administrator of the State.

Porbandar’s Administrator, a man named S. P. Pundit, now called in Bhavsinghji, who insisted that the jewels belonged to his late parents. Worried that his grandfather would illegally dispose of them, he was pre-emptively claiming his birthright. Rana Vikmatji denied this – he told the Administrator that the jewels were the patrimony of the State, accumulated by several generations of rulers. So long as he was Rana he was in charge of them; when Bhavsinghji ascended the throne, but only then, would the responsibility pass on to him.
¹³

That night at the palace, Bhavsinghji and the blacksmith had two other companions. One was the son of a Rajkot merchant to whom the Kumar owed money. The other was Gandhi’s ambitious brother Laxmidas. In his testimony to the Administrator, Laxmidas denied he was present at the break-in, claiming he was called in after the blacksmith was detained by the guards. Bhavsinghji, he said, was ‘very much perplexed’ at being called in to explain the theft. He asked Laxmidas whether he should call in a lawyer from Rajkot to help him. Laxmidas answered that since these were his jewels, that would be an admission of guilt. The prince said, ‘All right,’ whereupon Gandhi’s brother left. Seeking to distance himself from the controversy, Laxmidas told the administrator that he was in the palace ‘for five minutes only’ before returning home.
¹⁴

The British Political Agent in Rajkot was called in to settle the dispute. The jewels were returned to the treasury, and Kumar Bhavsinghji
warned that unless his conduct dramatically improved, he would not be allowed to become Rana when his grandfather passed on. Laxmidas Gandhi was told he could not visit Porbandar without the express permission of the Political Agent in Rajkot.
¹⁵

Barred from his home town, and in disgrace with the authorities, Laxmidas turned to his brother Mohandas for help. Gandhi had briefly met the Political Agent in London. Could he not talk to the man and restore Laxmidas to favour?

Gandhi was hesitant, as he saw it, to ‘try to take advantage of a trifling acquaintance in England’. His brother persisted. ‘You do not know Kathiawar,’ he said, ‘and you have yet to know the world. Only influence counts here. It is not proper for you, a brother, to shirk your duty, when you can clearly put in a good word about me to an officer you know.’

Laxmidas was an elder brother; besides, he had come to Mohandas’s rescue when he needed money to study law in London. Against his better judgement, Gandhi went to meet the Political Agent. But racial boundaries were far more sharply drawn in British India: in the colony, a casual friendship between an Englishman and an Indian in the metropolis counted for nothing. When Mohandas went to plead his brother’s case, the Agent had him thrown out of the office.
¹⁶

By his actions, Laxmidas Gandhi had ruined any chance Mohandas had of early preferment in Porbandar. After the fiasco in the palace the chances of a judgeship or diwanship had receded, if not altogether disappeared.
¹⁷
The best option now was for Mohandas to work as a lawyer in British India. In early November 1891 he returned to Bombay, with a view to enrolling in the High Court. He was granted a licence on the basis of a certificate from the Inner Temple and a letter of recommendation from a British barrister.
¹⁸

Bombay in the 1890s had a population of just under 1 million. A British resident called it ‘All India in Miniature’: anyone walking through its streets could hear forty languages being spoken, while their nostrils were assailed with the ‘blending of incenses and spices and garlic, and sugar and goats and dung’.
¹⁹
Once a cluster of fishing villages, by the late nineteenth century Bombay was a thriving industrial and commercial centre. There were some fifty cotton mills, employing more than 50,000 people. There was a buzz of economic activity: land
reclaimed from the sea, new railway lines laid to link the suburbs to the city, new docks constructed to cope with the increase in shipping. Schools and colleges were being opened all the time. The city was home to all the religions of India (and the world). It was also very diverse in class terms, with a large proletariat, a substantial business community, and a small but growing class of English-speaking lawyers, doctors, clerks and teachers.
²⁰
As the city expanded, wrote one historian, ‘all tribes in Western India seemed to have flocked to Bombay, like the Adriatic tribes who took refuge in the city of the Lagoons.’
²¹
Gandhi’s fellow Gujaratis were a key part of this migration, moving down the coast to take advantage of the new opportunities in trade and the professions.