Gandhi & Churchill (13 page)

Justifiably, these men saw themselves as India’s future leaders, but they remained a tiny minority. During Randolph Churchill’s tenure less than one percent of Indians could read or write English. Those who could, and who had the chance to travel or even study in England or Europe, were fired with Western liberal ideas. But the institutions of the Raj would not allow them near the levers of powers. In addition, most found themselves educated beyond their means or India’s needs, leaving them “in an economic strait jacket, caught between rising prices and badly paid employment or unemployment.”
⁴²

But their anger and discontent also had another, deeper source. After 1857 the British classification of “martial races” and “non-fighting races” had covered India’s best and brightest with a cloak of shame.
⁴³
Put bluntly, in British eyes a Hindu, especially one from Bengal or southern India, was not a true man. An educated Hindu was even worse. As a result, young men of Gandhi’s generation found themselves caught in a British cultural vise that stigmatized them as unmanly poltroons on one side, but as untrustworthy and “too clever by half” on the other. Gandhi and many others would spend their lives struggling to break free from that vise and the psychological scars it left. In a profound sense Gandhi’s entire theory of satyagraha or civil disobedience as manly “soul force,” requiring soldierly virtues like courage and self-sacrifice, sprang from the urgent need to fill the hole that Western education had left in his countrymen’s souls.

Nonetheless, most Indians saw no alternative to Western education as the path to the future. This was true even in provincial Gujarat. In January 1879 Gandhi’s father would send his son to the English school in Rajkot, in order to prepare him to enter that elite rank. It was Karamchand’s way of recognizing that a new era had dawned, and that the traditional ways, around which he had built his life, were no longer enough.

And so, even as Queen Victoria settled into her new role as Empress of India, young Mohandas Gandhi was about to embark on a decade-and-a-half odyssey, across cultures but also across lands. It would take him thousands of miles from home—and then unexpectedly and paradoxically, it would also bring him back to his roots.

Chapter Four

AWAKENING:

Gandhi in London and South Africa, 1888–1895

You would have me sit at your feet; I will not do so.

MOHANDAS K. GANDHI
, 1893

T
HE
G
ANDHIS MOVED TO
R
AJKOT WHEN
Mohandas was six. In 1874 Karamchand had become diwan for another Gujarati prince, the rani of Rajkot. He regularly made the two-hundred-mile, five-day journey from Porbandar by oxcart until his family was ready to join him. Small and dust-bitten, set on a flat featureless plain, Rajkot had no decent roads, no telegraph, and no post office. But here the Gandhis had their first encounter with the India the British had made.

Rajkot was the headquarters of the British resident in Kathiawar. A court of appeal sat in judgment of natives and Europeans alike. Under the Raj Rajkot had become in effect two towns. There was a British quarter, with neat white houses and streets running in straight right angles, and an Indian one, with dark winding alleyways and fifteen thousand people crammed into 137 acres of living space.
¹
As diwan, Karamchand had to attend official durbars when the governor of Bombay came to call. Gandhi would remember the upheaval it caused in his household when his father put on European-style garb for the visit. “If I was a painter,” he recalled, “I would paint my father’s disgust and torture on his face as he was putting his legs into his stockings and feet into ill-fitting and uncomfortable boots.” At home or at work Karamchand never wore anything but soft leather slippers. The ordeal of wearing boots was the price he had to pay for becoming a cog in the wheels of British power.
²

Gandhi himself was getting his first dose of Western-style education in the local Rajkot school. A shy, timid student, he dutifully made his way through English grammar, arithmetic, penmanship, Sanskrit, and geography (his weakest subject). In 1881 he tested into the Kathiawar High School, where mostly Parsi teachers led their pupils through twenty-nine hours of lessons a week, including ten hours of training in English.

“I had not any high regard for my ability,” Gandhi remembered of his school days, and he was amazed whenever he won a prize or award. “Everything had to be learned through English,” he recalled fifty years later. “The tyranny of English was so great that even Sanskrit or Persian had to be learned through English, not through the mother tongue,” that is, Gujarati. Since neither his father nor his mother spoke the language of the Raj, “I was fast becoming a stranger in my home,” Gandhi remembered.
³

Then one day he returned from school to learn he was going to be married. He was thirteen—certainly not too young for the prearranged marital match that was considered essential to a Hindu household. His bride Kasturbai Makanji, also thirteen, was the daughter of a merchant who lived only a few doors down from the Gandhis’ old house in Porbandar. The ceremony took place in Porbandar. To save expense, it was celebrated together with the marriages of his older brother Karsandas and of a cousin.

Amid the music, incense, and banks of food and fragrant flowers, Mohandas exchanged vows and the traditional sweet wheat cake with his child bride. Kasturbai was small, shy, and plain. She had not learned how to read or write and never would. Yet Gandhi would write in his autobiography, “I was passionately fond of her.” Although child brides customarily spent more than half their time in their father’s, rather than their husband’s, home, “separation was unbearable” to Mohandas. “I used to keep her awake til late at night with my idle talk.” She was also the delightful, if passive, outlet for his adolescent sexual energies.
⁴

Marriage marked the first crucial life change for Gandhi. The death of his father was the second. While traveling from Rajkot to Porbandar, Karamchand suffered from a road accident and never recovered. He spent the last three years of his life as an invalid. Almost every night Mohandas would go to his father’s room and massage his withering limbs, “but while my hands were busy massaging my father’s legs, my mind was hovering above the bed-room,” with lustful thoughts about his bride Kasturbai. As soon as the massage was done, Mohandas would go straight into her bed, even though she was now pregnant with their first child.

One night he finished his father’s massage late, around ten-thirty or eleven o’clock. He had to wake up Kasturbai in order to have sex; after a few minutes a frantic knock came at the door. “Get up!” one of the servants was shouting. “Father is very ill!” By the time Mohandas had opened the door and raced down the hall, he learned the stunning truth. Karamchand Gandhi, the family patriarch, was dead. He had been only fifty-six.

As he watched his mother and uncle and brothers dissolve into tears and heard the servants wailing, Mohandas was swept by a wave of intense shame. The thought that he had been having sex at the very moment his father died—that his “animal passion,” as he called it, might even have somehow contributed to his father’s death—would haunt Gandhi for the rest of his life. “It is a blot I have never been able to efface or forget,” Gandhi confessed years later. To cap it all, the child that Kasturbai had been carrying that night died shortly after it was born.
⁵

Sexual relations with his wife would never be the same. Although Mohandas and Kasturbai would have four more children (all sons), Gandhi’s decision at age thirty-seven to take a vow of chastity or
brahmacharya
was more than just an act of self-denial.
⁶
It was also a way of trying to close a horrifying chapter in his life, one that marked and marred his relations with women until his death.

Karamchand’s dying thoughts had been about his son. “Manu here will keep up my reputation,” he said. “He will increase the fame of our lineage.” Since 1879 there had been talk about sending Gandhi to England to study law. A friend of the family, a Brahmin, had told Karamchand that it was relatively easy to become a barrister. The course of study at one of London’s Inns of Court was short and informal, and a law degree would not only earn Mohandas a good living but open the doors for him to become a diwan like his father. Even the proud Karamchand realized that an English education and a knowledge of British law were the new path to success in his profession.
⁷

Somehow the family scraped together the money needed to send him to London. Mohandas even sold some of Kasturbai’s gold necklaces to pay for the steamship ticket.
⁸
In that dry hot summer of 1888, as his brother announced that he would accompany him as far as Bombay (which Mohandas had never visited) and his fellow high school students stared at him with admiration, a trip to the moon must have seemed less of an undertaking. By any measure, going to England meant making a momentous break with his culture, his past life, his family, and even his marriage, because Kasturbai would remain in India while he was studying in London.

Then, even as Mohandas was poised on the brink of his new life, the values of old India asserted themselves. When he and his brother arrived in Bombay, they learned that other members of their Modh Bania caste were in an uproar. No Modh Bania had ever traveled to England; none should now. In fact, devout Hindus commonly feared “crossing the black water,” as the ocean was called, meant pollution and breaking one’s caste. The danger that one might have to eat and drink with Europeans or other nonbelievers, and perhaps eat what they did, was considered too great a risk. So Mohandas was summoned to a meeting of the caste council, where the
seth
or headman told him point-blank that he could not go to England.

Gandhi was nervous but angry. He explained that a learned Brahmin had approved the trip; so had his brother and mother.

“But will you disregard the orders of the caste?” the seth demanded.

Gandhi shrugged. “I am really helpless,” he said. “I think the caste should not interfere in the matter.” The seth and the council were furious. They declared him an outcaste and forbade anyone to give him money or to see him off at the dock, on pain of a fine of one rupee four annas. It was a humiliating sentence, but “I sat unmoved,” Gandhi later remembered.
⁹
It was also a turning point. Going to England meant breaking with the ancient bonds that had held together India for centuries and that now, in the wake of the modern age, seemed to hold it back. But Gandhi had resolved that those bonds did not apply to him unless
he
decided they should. It was more than just an act of courage and will; it was a declaration of personal independence.

Besides, he could tell himself, he had broken with his caste but not his family. Before he left Rajkot, his mother had made him take a vow that he would not touch three things during his stay in England: wine, women, or animal flesh. It was that vow that he told himself he would uphold as his religious obligation, instead of the arbitrary and impersonal rules of his caste. And so on September 4, 1888, after frantic days of final packing and restless nights of anxious nightmares, he set sail from Bombay, leaving behind everything he knew to “see England, the land of philosophers and poets, the very centre of civilization.”
¹⁰

Certainly London was the largest city on the planet, with more than five and a half million inhabitants in 1888.
¹¹
It was the nerve center of the world’s financial system, the capital of the world’s most admired government, and the summit of the world’s mightiest empire. Someone once asked Gandhi what had led him to London. He answered with one word: “Ambition.”
¹²
If true, then he had certainly come to the right place.

Ambitious foreigners had been flocking to London for years, making it Europe’s premier cosmopolitan capital. The American novelist Henry James had settled there in 1876 and soon became a favorite of London’s West End social elite and a close friend of Churchill’s mother. Another American, the painter James McNeill Whistler, had left London for Paris, but John Singer Sargent had exhibited at the Royal Academy the previous year and was poised to become the high-paid portraitist of Britain’s rich and powerful. Latin Americans, Jews from Eastern Europe, and Italians, as well as Indians, Arabs, and subjects from other parts of the British Empire were becoming a common sight in the streets of central London and the East End. At the same time new shops and department stores attracted hordes of shoppers to Oxford Street and Piccadilly in the West End.