Gandhi: A Life

By Yogesh Chadha

The Internationally Acclaimed Biography of One of History’s Monumental Figures Gandhi: A Life The first biography of this important figure in over twenty years, Gandhi: A Life rescues the man from the myth, revealing the transformation of an ordinary, timid young man into a leader whose stand against a mighty empire brought millions together. "Until another Gandhi scholar comes along who digs deeper and can write more movingly, Gandhi scholarship will be well served by Chadha’s effort." — The Washington Post Book World "It is well-balanced, even-handed, and, like its subject, inspiring." —Kirkus Reviews "An engaging work worthy of a wide audience." —Library Journal "A sober, sensible, and notably fair account of this most quicksilver of personalities … far from uncritical … But on the whole he is approving, even reverential. Usually he convinces one that this is justified." — Daily Telegraph (London) "The first major biography to appear for twenty years … [with] a depth and authority which others have lacked." —The Independent (London)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Apr 21, 2008
• ISBN: 9780470306918

Book preview

ONE

The Mahatma: Background and Boyhood

When Mahatma Gandhi was in London in 1931 to plead for India’s independence, a small girl started to ask him for his autograph. Then she drew back shyly before this strange little dhoti-clad man with a roughly mended coarse shawl over his shoulders, wearing cheap wire-framed spectacles. She looked up at her mother and asked: ‘Mummy, is he really great?’

Gandhi’s greatness – nay, uniqueness – lies in his role as an innovator in politics. Far from being a mere political theoretician or analyst, he loved humanity with surpassing compassion and, to use his own phrase, ‘approached the poor with the mind of the poor’. In fact, he endeavoured to found a new human order. He was the first in human history to extend the principle of nonviolence from the individual to the social and the political plane. He was always optimistic, for he could see with ‘the eye of faith’. This expression reminds one of the lines of George Santayana, the American philosopher of Spanish descent:

Columbus found a world, and had no chart,

Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;

To trust the soul’s invincible surmise

Was all his science and his only art.

Paying tribute to Gandhi on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, Professor Einstein wrote: ‘Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.’

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 at Porbandar, the capital of a small princely state of that name on the peninsula of Kathiawar that juts into the Arabian Sea. In the 1872 census, Porbandar state (area: 642 sq. miles) had a population of 72,000, and the town of Porbandar a population of 15,000.

The Gandhis belonged to the Modh Bania subdivision of the Vaisya caste, representing the trader class in the traditional Hindu caste system, and were, it seems, originally grocers. But for a considerable period of time the family had been of some consequence in Kathiawar. Gandhi’s grandfather, and his father and uncle were each in turn dewan, or prime minister, to the ruler of Porbandar; and his father was later prime minister of two other similar tiny states. None of these states was subject to direct British rule, and consequently old Indian customs and traditions were much more in evidence there than in most parts of British India.

Direct British sovereignty was established in India after the Mutiny of 1857. There were two Indias: British India was ruled by the Viceroy from Delhi and with British governors in all its provinces; the other India consisted of over 550 princely states which were mere royal instruments without possession of any political power. This tactic of divide and rule enabled the British to have tight control over the Indian subcontinent. Professor Rushbrook Williams, in an article in the London Evening Standard of 28 May 1930, puts its significance quite succinctly:

The situations of these feudatory states, checkerboarding all India as they do, are a great safeguard. It is like establishing a vast network of friendly fortresses in debatable territory. It would be difficult for a general rebellion against the British to sweep India because of this network of powerful, loyal, native states.

The princely states covered a third of the subcontinent, and contained a quarter of India’s total population. They varied greatly in size and wealth. Some princes were debauched grandees who spent a good deal of their time in the playgrounds of Europe’s rich, while there were rajahs who lived on less than £80 a year. There were a few rulers who allocated funds from the state’s exchequer for the improvement of the lot of their subjects, but the majority of them considered the maintenance of their living style to be the sole purpose of their rule.

The British deprived the princes of armed force, but allowed them ample liberty within their own domains under the eye of a British resident or agent, whose prime function was to ensure that they behaved themselves inasmuch as they did not endanger British security. The princes were independent of Delhi and of any laws passed by the Government of India – they owed their allegiance to the British Crown, whose foreign policy they agreed to accept and follow. The British retained the right to intervene in the affairs of the princely states, but they scarcely had the occasion to do so. These princely puppets rarely gave a resident or agent any anxious moments.

Uttamchand Gandhi, Mohandas’s grandfather, worked his way up to become the dewan of Porbandar. But political intrigues in the princely states were the order of the day. Their rulers behaved like petty autocrats toward their subjects, while displaying utter sycophancy before the British. Once, Uttamchand Gandhi fell out with the queen regent, Rupali Ba, by taking an opposite stand in a domestic dispute involving her maids. Things came to such a pass that Rupali Ba had Uttamchand’s house – the house his father, Harijivan, had bought – surrounded by palace guards, who fired at it from a cannon. Uttamchand was forced out of prime ministership of Porbandar into exile in the nearby state of Junagarh. When he went to pay his respects to the nawab, he saluted the prince with his left hand. Asked for an explanation, he said: ‘The right hand is already pledged to Porbandar.’ Mohandas was proud of such loyalty. ‘My grandfather’, he wrote, ‘must have been a man of principle.’

In 1841 Rupali Ba died and her eighteen-year-old son, Vikmatji, succeeded to the throne of Porbandar. He invited Uttamchand to return and take over as dewan. Uttamchand returned to Porbandar, but recommended the fifth, and most gifted, of his sons, Karamchand (Gandhi’s father), for the post. In 1847, at the age of twenty-five, Karamchand became dewan of Porbandar, an office he held for twenty-eight years.

Karamchand first married when he was fourteen, and for the second time when he was twenty-five. He had a daughter from each marriage, but both wives died without bearing any sons and nothing is known about either of the daughters. The third marriage proved childless and it is believed that this wife was stricken with an incurable ailment which had incapacitated her for life. Karamchand obtained his third wife’s permission – a matter of courtesy – to marry again when he was still married to her.

The small, stocky, broad-shouldered, forty-ish Karamchand married Putlibai, just in her teens. She bore him four children. The first child was Raliatbehn, a daughter, who was born in 1862 and died nearly a hundred years later. Laxmidas, the eldest son, was born the following year. Karsandas, the second son, in 1866 and Mohandas Karamchand, the last child, in 1869.

Karamchand, Putlibai and their children lived in the old family house, which had over the years been expanded to a three-storey structure. It is not known when the house was built, but the deed of sale and transfer shows that it was bought in 1777 by Harijivan Gandhi, the great-grandfather of the Mahatma. It was wedged between two temples and looked more like a small fortress than an ordinary dwelling-house. The interior contained a honeycomb of cramped, dark, dingy rooms built around a small courtyard. Only rooms built on the top storey permitted sunlight to penetrate them and were quite airy. Karamchand and his family occupied two ground-floor rooms opening on to a veranda, and the rest of the house was given over to Karamchand’s four brothers and their wives and children. Of his father, Gandhi wrote in his autobiography:

My father was a lover of his clan, truthful, brave and generous, but short-tempered. To a certain extent he might have been even given to carnal pleasures, for he married for the fourth time when he was over forty. But he was incorruptible and had earned a name for strict impartiality in his family as well as outside. His loyalty to the state was well-known . . . My father never had any ambition to accumulate riches and left us very little property . . . He had no education, save that of experience. At best he might be said to have read up to the fifth standard. Of history and geography he was innocent, but his rich experience of practical affairs of the state stood him in good stead in the solution of the most intricate questions and in managing hundreds of men.

Karamchand’s long tenure as prime minister of Porbandar was followed by similar positions, though of shorter duration, in the princely states of Rajkot and Wankaner. Once, the British political agent spoke insultingly about the native ruler of Rajkot, Thakore Saheb. Karamchand vehemently defended his chief. The agent strongly objected to the prime minister’s attitude and asked him to apologize. Karamchand stoutly refused. The agent ordered him to be detained under a tree till he apologized. Some hours later, seeing that Karamchand was adamant, the agent ordered him to be released.

Karamchand was a moderately religious man, his obeisance confined to frequent visits to temples and listening to religious discourses. However, in his last days, at the instance of a Brahmin friend, he would recite aloud some verses from the Bhagavad Gita every day at the time of worship.

But religion was the very breath of Putlibai. She was unlettered but knowledgeable, deeply religious and addicted to prayer and fasting. For her, every day was a holy day. Although she attended to her duties as wife and mother with single-minded zeal, her heart and mind were elsewhere. It was as if she lived mainly to prepare for the journey to the other world. She was a natural ascetic who loved discipline almost for its own sake. In the annual Chaturmas (literally: a period of four months), a kind of Lent lasting through the rainy season, she lived on a single meal a day. Not content with that, one year she observed, in addition, a complete fast on alternate days. The following Chaturmas she vowed to abstain from food until the sun came out, even though she had grown thin and haggard. Her children, observing her condition, often watched for some rift in the clouds, and when the sun showed through they at once raised a cry for their mother. But Putlibai’s vow demanded that she should see the sun herself, and more often than not, as she rushed outdoors, the fugitive sun was hidden again, thus depriving her of her meal. ‘That does not matter,’ she would cheerfully reassure her children. ‘God does not want me to eat today.’ The wife of the prime minister would return to her household duties with a smile. ‘The outstanding impression my mother has left on my memory’, Gandhi wrote, ‘is that of saintliness.’

Gandhi inherited his father’s stubbornness, incorruptibility and practical sense and his mother’s life of religion, devotion and asceticism. His life was influenced by both Vaishnavism and Jainism, the two religious cults which regard all forms of life as God’s creation and hence sacred. He grew up in the midst of a population which would not kill even wild animals that daily destroyed their crops. Saints and sages of all sects visited his house. ‘Jain monks’, Gandhi wrote, ‘would also pay frequent visits to my father and would even go out of their way to accept food from us – non-Jains. They would have talks with my father on subjects religious and mundane.’ Karamchand had, besides, Muslim and Parsi friends who would talk to him about their own faiths, and he would listen to them with respect. As his father’s nurse, the schoolboy Mohandas had ample opportunities to hear these discussions and have ‘glimpses’ of religion. ‘These many things combined to inculcate in me a toleration for all faiths.’

This was also the time when a great devotee of Lord Rama, Ladha Maharaj, recited before Karamchand couplets and quatrains from the Ramayana, an ancient Hindu epic centring round the life of Rama, the apostle of dharma (duty). Ladha Maharaj would not only sing the couplets and quatrains, but also explain them with such devotion that the thirteen-year-old Mohandas was enraptured. ‘That laid the foundation of my deep devotion to the Ramayana,’ Gandhi wrote. ‘Today I regard the Ramayana of Tulsidas as the greatest book in all devotional literature.’ Nevertheless, he gave credit to his old nurse, Rambha, for making him aware of the significance of Ramanama (the repetition of God’s name), which she had suggested as a means of dispelling his fears of ghosts and spirits. The repetition of Ramanama at a tender age was his introduction to self-realization. ‘I think it is due to the seed sown by that good woman Rambha that today Ramanama is an infallible remedy for me.’

Humility, tenderness and affection for all living things were the watch-words of the Vaishnavas, or followers of Vishnu, one of the three supreme gods of the Hindu pantheon. The medieval Gujarati saint-poet, Narasaya, had glorified Vishnu and the Vaishnavas in a song which Gandhi heard in his childhood and repeated throughout his life. This song was destined to ‘paint so fully the whole cast of Gandhi’s mind and the deepest longings of his spirit’. It reads:

He is the true Vaishnava who knows and feels another’s woes as his own. Ever ready to serve, he never boasts.

He bows to everyone and despises no one, keeping his thought, word and deed pure. Blessed is the mother of such a one.

He looks upon all with an equal eye. He has rid himself of lust, and reveres every woman as his mother. His tongue would fail him if he attempted to utter an untruth. He covets not another’s wealth.

The bonds of earthly attachment hold him not. His mind is deeply rooted in renunciation. Every moment he is intent on reciting the name of God. All the holy places are ever present in his body.

He has conquered greed, hypocrisy, passion and anger.

Young Mohandas’s exposure to these teachings does not mean that he had developed a deep faith in religion or in ahimsa (nonviolence) at an early age. ‘But one thing took deep root in me – the conviction that morality is the basis of things, and that truth is the substance of all morality.’ He learned then the guiding principle: ‘Return good for evil.’ And he began to make everything he did an experiment with truth.

Moniya, as the family affectionately called Mohandas, had an enchanting childhood. He received the special treatment often accorded a youngest child, and he inevitably became the spoiled darling of the family. One of the family members in charge of him was his sister Raliat. Years later she vividly remembered his early childhood days:

Moniya could be said to have grown up on my lap. I used to carry him in my arms when I went out for a walk or for recreation. Mother used to be worried lest I should drop him or lose sight of him. Moniya was restless as mercury, could not sit still even for a little while. He must be either playing or roaming about. I used to take him out with me to show him the familiar sights in the street – cows, buffaloes and horses, cats and dogs. He was full of curiosity. At the first opportunity, he would go up to the animals and try to make friends with them. One of his favourite pastimes was twisting dogs’ ears.

The mercurial little Moniya gave his family many an anxious moment. Once, during a carnival of dancing and singing, he slipped out of the house and followed a group of young girls dressed up in ceremonial costumes, with flowers in their hair, to a secluded temple on the outskirts of the town, where he spent the day with them. A frantic search was made for him, without success. At dusk one of the girls brought him home. He could not eat and complained of a burning throat. It was discovered that he had eaten nothing all day except some flowers that fell from the girls’ hair. A vaidya was summoned. He administered an antidote and also applied a throat paint, and soon young Moniya was relieved of the pain. But he could no more be trusted to be left unaccompanied at any time, and a nurse was engaged to look after him. This was Rambha, whom the Mahatma immortalized in his autobiography.

The nurse had difficulty in coping with her young charge. One afternoon he eluded her vigilance and stole into a temple with some of his cousins while the priest was taking a siesta. The boys wanted real gods and goddesses to play with, as a change from the mud versions they usually had. They stealthily removed some bronze statues from the sanctuary, and were about to run off with the booty when a couple of statues banged together, causing a sudden loud clanging noise around the priest, who gave chase. The boys dropped the statues and managed to get home without being caught.

By this time Karamchand was no longer the dewan of Porbandar and had taken up a similar new position of chief karbhari (adviser) in the principality of Rajkot, 120 miles to the north-east of Porbandar, so could not be called upon to give his verdict on the temple episode. The priest, who had recognized the boys as all belonging to the large Gandhi clan, reported the matter to one of Karamchand’s brothers, a strict disciplinarian. The boys were rounded up and cross-examined. All except one denied that they had had anything to do with the deed. The exception was Mohandas, then about six years old, who not only fearlessly confessed his hand in it but also pointed out the cousin who had put them up to it. Mohandas was, of course, one of the jubilant plotters and thoroughly enjoyed committing the mischief.

Mohandas started school in Porbandar, where he probably attended the local Dhoolishala, or Dust School, where the schoolteacher taught the children how to write letters of the Gujarati alphabet in the dust on the floor. He had no difficulty in composing, along with other children, Gujarati rhymed couplets ridiculing the lame teacher, but encountered some problem in mastering the multiplication table. ‘My intellect must have been sluggish, and my memory raw,’ the adult Mahatma charges the child of six.

He was about five when his father was appointed dewan to the Rana of Rajkot, but the dewan’s family stayed behind in Porbandar for about two years before moving to Rajkot. In Rajkot Mohandas and his brothers attended first a local primary school and then Alfred High School. He was again a ‘mediocre student’, but punctual and complained if breakfast was late ‘because it will prevent me from going on with my studies’. He was shy, self-conscious about his frail constitution, and avoided all company. ‘My books and lessons were my sole companions.’ At the end of the school day he ran back home because he could not bear to talk to anybody. ‘I was even afraid lest anyone should poke fun at me.’ At school he was required to do gymnastics and play cricket, but he had no aptitude for either. He preferred long solitary walks or playing a simple Indian street game called gilli danda, which consists of striking a short, sharpened wooden peg with a stick.

Alfred High School, Rajkot, the secondary school in the area, prepared students for college. English was taught in the very first year at this school, and in the upper high school all subjects (arithmetic, geometry, algebra, chemistry, astronomy, history, geography, etc.) were taught in English. ‘The tyranny of English’, as Gandhi puts it, was great and this difficulty was increased by reason of the fact that ‘the teacher’s own English was by no means without blemish’.

During Mohandas’s first year at the Alfred High School, when he was about eleven, a British educational inspector named Mr Giles attended an examination and set the pupils five words as a spelling exercise. No one made a mistake except Mohandas, who misspelled ‘kettle’. The regular teacher noticed the mistake and motioned him to copy from the slate of the boy sitting next to him. Mohandas would not do it. The teacher later chided him for this ‘stupidity’ which spoiled the record of the class, but Mohandas felt sure he had done the right thing. Years later he wrote in his autobiography: ‘I had thought the teacher was there to supervise against copying . . . Yet the incident did not in the least diminish my respect for my teacher. I was by nature blind to the faults of elders.’

Soon Mohandas, in the company of a cousin, began to smoke, eagerly collecting the cigarette butts of an uncle. They also tried smoking cheap cigarettes they bought with coppers stolen from the servants. Sometimes both were penniless, so they made cigarettes from the porous stalks of a wild plant, but found it hard to keep them lighted. As the days passed, and more and more money was stolen, both boys were gripped by a sense of guilt. They found it unbearable that they should be unable to do anything without the permission of the elders. They despaired of ever becoming grown-ups, and decided that death was preferable to remaining children. To honour their suicide pact, they first went into the jungle in search of poisonous dhatura (thorn-apple) seeds and thence proceeded, appropriately, to the nearby temple of God to lay down their lives. Mohandas and his cousin made their obeisances and sought out a lonely corner for the final act, but their courage failed them. The ‘suicide’ bid thus brought their habit of smoking, and of stealing coppers for the purpose, to an abrupt end. ‘I realized it was not as easy to commit suicide as to contemplate it,’ Gandhi wrote. ‘And since then, whenever I have heard of someone threatening to commit suicide, it has had little or no effect on me.’

At this stage, the schoolboy Mohandas had a distaste for reading beyond his school books. Doing the daily homework was an important part of his schedule, ‘because I disliked being taken to task by my teacher as much as I disliked deceiving him.’ But he noticed a book bought by his father Shravana Pitribhagti Nataka, a play about the undying devotion of a poor young boy, named Shravana, toward his old and blind parents, and read it with intense interest. Of all the holy pictures publicly displayed by itinerant showmen, it was the one of ‘Shravana carrying, by means of slings fitted for his shoulders, his blind parents on a pilgrimage’ which left ‘an indelible impression’ on his mind. The showmen performed the play with slides in a stereopticon, synchronizing it with the playing of musical instruments. Mohandas was overpowered by the agonized lament of the blind parents over the death of dutiful Shravana who, while bringing water for his thirsty parents from a stream, was hit by an arrow inadvertently shot at him by King Dasharath. The parents refused the water offered by the king and dehydrated their bodies to death. ‘The melting tune moved me deeply,’ he wrote, ‘and I played it on a concertina which my father had purchased for me.’

At about that time, Mohandas had obtained his father’s permission to see a play performed by a certain dramatic company. This play, Harishchandra, essentially centres round a king of immense goodness and unflinching devotion to truth. As the story goes, the gods decide to test him. They send a Brahmin to him, who at first asks for alms. Then he asks for more and more and the king, true to his dharma, does not hesitate to give. He ends up depriving himself of all he has, including his kingdom, and becomes a slave. His wife leaves him, taking their son, who soon dies. Harishchandra is posted at the local cremation grounds, where his wife comes with the body of their son for cremation. Harishchandra, true to his new dharma, insists on the customary fee, which his wife cannot pay. ‘But he is your son,’ she pleads. Finally the gods intervene and restore to Harishchandra his kingship and his family.

Gandhi reports in his autobiography:

I could never be tired of seeing Harishchandra. But how often should I be permitted to go? It haunted me, and I must have acted Harishchandra to myself times without number. ‘Why should not all be truthful like Harishchandra?’ was the question I asked myself day and night. To follow truth and to go through all the ordeals Harishchandra went through was the one ideal it inspired in me. I literally believed in the story of Harishchandra. The thought of it all often made me weep. My commonsense tells me today that Harishchandra could not have been a historical character. Still both Harishchandra and Shravana are living realities for me, and I am sure I should be moved as before if I were to read those plays again today.

Mohandas was now beginning to think about morality and codes of conduct, including the accepted codes of the Hindu caste system. Hindu society had been divided into four castes by Manu, the ancient Hindu sage, philosopher and strategist. These were, in order of hierarchy: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas and Shudras. Although the caste system was based on the birth of a person into a particular section, each section was attributed specific avocations. While Brahmins engaged themselves in learning holy scriptures and dissemination of knowledge, the Kshatriyas wore the mantle of protectors of society and they included kings and warriors. The Vaisyas represented the business class, and the Banias among them (to which Gandhi belonged) were predominantly engaged in trading. The Shudras, the lowest in the social hierarchy, did menial jobs and were particularly forbidden from learning scriptures and transgressing in any way into the domains of the other sections. On the lowest rung were the ‘Untouchables’ who were casteless.

A scavenger named Uka, who belonged to this lowest group, was employed in the Gandhi house to clean out the latrines. If anyone of a superior caste accidentally touched a scavenger, then it became incumbent upon him to ‘purify’ himself by performing his ablutions. Young Mohandas told his mother that he did not consider Uka inferior to anyone else, and added that untouchability was not sanctioned by religion; even Rama was taken across the Ganges by an ‘Untouchable’. His mother reminded him that it was not necessary for him to perform ablutions after touching a scavenger; the shortest cut to purification was to cancel the contact by touching any passing Muslim who would, no doubt, be free of the taboos of the Hindu religion.

Presently his attention was drawn to more compelling matters. When Mohandas was about thirteen, he married a girl who had been chosen for him. His bride, Kasturbai Makanji, was the daughter of Gokuldas Makanji, a merchant dealing in cloth, grain and cotton, who lived only a few doors away from the Gandhi house at Porbandar. She was almost the same age as Mohandas.

A wedding is a costly feature of Hindu life. The chief item of expenditure is the dowry, which is paid by the parents of the bride, but a certain amount of the expense must be met by the parents of the bridegroom. The prime minister of Rajkot, true to his Bania trait of a shrewd business mind, was not a man to incur debts or to waste money on three wedding feasts when one was sufficient. He therefore arranged that the wedding of Mohandas should synchronize with those of his elder brother, Karsandas, and a cousin.

The wedding, which took place at Porbandar, was celebrated with great pomp. While the preparations were taking place, Karamchand, on the ruler’s advice, remained at Rajkot, attending to matters of state. On the eve of the marriage, instead of making a leisurely journey to Porbandar by bullock cart, he travelled on a stagecoach especially ordered by the ruler. The coach speeded up when it was nearing Porbandar, resulting in an accident. The dewan was thrown clear as the coach overturned, but sustained serious injuries in his fall. However, there could be no postponement of the triple wedding, and he attended it wrapped in bandages.

Young Mohandas’s notion of marriage was nothing more than ‘the prospect of good clothes to wear, drum-beating, marriage processions, rich dinners, and a strange girl to play with . . . I forgot my grief over my father’s injuries in the childish amusement of the wedding.’

At the culmination of the festivities, Mohandas rode to Kasturbai’s house on horseback in a marriage procession. There he and Kasturbai sat on a dais and prayed. The priests intoned hymns, and the very young couple rose and took the traditional seven steps around a sacred fire, reciting the Hindu marriage vows pledging devotion to each other through all the ensuing years:

‘Take one step, that we may have strength of will,’ said Mohandas.

‘In every worthy wish of yours, I shall be your helpmate,’ responded Kasturbai.

‘Take the second step, that we may be filled with vigour.’

‘In every worthy wish of yours, I shall be your helpmate.’

‘Take the third step, that we may live in ever-increasing prosperity.’

‘Your joys and sorrows I will share.’

‘Take the fourth step, that we may be ever full of joy.’

‘I will ever live devoted to you, speaking words of love and praying for your happiness.’

‘Take the fifth step, that we may serve the people.’

‘I will follow close behind you always and help you to keep your vow of serving the people.’

‘Take the sixth step, that we may follow our religious vows in life.’

‘I will follow you in observing our religious vows and duties.’

‘Take the seventh step, that we may ever live as friends.’

‘It is the fruit of my good deeds that I have you as my husband. You are my best friend, my highest guru and my sovereign lord.’

Mohandas and Kasturbai then offered one another kansar, sweetened wheat-cakes, symbolizing their joy. It was the year 1882.

‘And oh! that first night,’ Gandhi wrote forty years later, ‘two innocent children all unwittingly hurled together into the ocean of life. My brother’s wife had thoroughly coached me about my behaviour on the first night. I do not know who had coached my wife.’ Both were too nervous to face each other and the ‘coaching could not carry me far’. ‘But no coaching is really necessary in such matters,’ he adds rather ambiguously. ‘The impressions of the former birth are potent enough to make all coaching superfluous.’

They gradually began to know each other, but the thirteen-year-old Mohandas took no time ‘in assuming the authority of a husband’. This authority appears to have been stretched rather far, as he began to consider it his right to exact faithfulness from his wife, even though he had no reason to suspect her loyalty. His self-inflicted jealousy ensured that he kept a strict vigilance over her movements. She could not go to the temple or visit friends without his permission. ‘But Kasturbai was not the girl to brook any such thing,’ Gandhi reports. ‘She made it a point to go out whenever and wherever she liked.’ The little husband got ‘more and more cross and refusal to speak to one another thus became the order of the day with us, married children’. Nevertheless he loved her. His ‘passion was entirely on one woman’, and he wanted it reciprocated. But Kasturbai was just a child. Sitting in his school classroom, he would daydream about her, and ‘the thought of nightfall and our subsequent meeting was ever haunting me. Separation was unbearable. I used to keep her awake till late in the night with my idle talk.’

Kasturbai remained virtually illiterate all her life. Her husband was anxious to teach her, but when he ‘awoke from the sleep of lust’ there was no spare time, for he had already launched forth into public life. Kasturbai was not impatient about her lack of education, and later efforts to instruct her through private tutors also proved futile. ‘I am sure,’ Gandhi wrote, ‘had my love for her been absolutely untainted with lust, she would be a learned lady today, for I could then have conquered her dislike for studies.’

In later years Gandhi would castigate the ‘cruel custom of child marriage’, saying that it was the prime cause of India’s weakness and degeneracy, filling children’s minds with lustful thoughts and sapping their strength, retarding their progress in their schoolwork and permitting them to live a debilitating life of senses. ‘It is my painful duty to have to record here my marriage at the age of thirteen,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘As I see the youngsters of the same age under my care, I think of my own marriage. I am inclined to pity myself and to congratulate them on having escaped my lot. I can see no moral argument in support of such a preposterously early marriage.’

In 1882, the year of his marriage, his schoolwork suffered. He failed to appear at the annual examination, but on his promise to make up for the loss he was allowed to enter a higher grade. He did exceptionally well the following year. In contrast, Karsandas, his elder brother, could not cope with the temporary uprooting. He bade farewell to school.

Mohandas had had certain fears and hang-ups since childhood and they still remained. He had always been afraid of darkness, and even after his marriage he could not sleep without a lamp burning at his bedside. To sleep in a room alone was an act of bravery for him. ‘I was a coward,’ he wrote. ‘Darkness was a terror to me. It was almost impossible for me to sleep in the dark, as I would imagine ghosts coming from one direction, thieves from another, and serpents from a third . . . How could I disclose my fears to my wife, no child, but already at the threshold of youth, sleeping by my side? I knew that she had more courage than I, and I felt ashamed of myself.’

He envied the bigger, stronger boys, particularly a Muslim named Sheikh Mehtab, who had originally been a friend of Karsandas. The bold, atheletic Mehtab led the timid Mohandas to believe that meat-eaters were always braver and stronger than others, and he ascribed his strength and fearlessness to meat-eating. He would tell Mohandas that he could hold in his hands live serpents, could defy thieves and did not believe in ghosts. And all this was, of course, the result of eating meat. Boys at school used to recite a doggerel of the Gujarati poet Narmadashankar:

Behold the mighty Englishman,

He rules the Indian small,

Because being a meat-eater

He is five cubits tall.

It began to dawn on Mohandas that he would grow taller, stronger and more daring if he ate meat. ‘If the whole country took to meat-eating, the English could be overcome.’

The experiment had to be conducted in secret lest his parents, strictly vegetarians by religious conviction, should be ‘shocked to death’. The opposition to and abhorrence of meat-eating among Jains and Vaishnavas was total. Mohandas, in the company of his brother Karsandas and friend Mehtab, went in search of a lonely spot by the river and there he undertook the experiment, the feast consisting of goat meat and baker’s bread. He relished neither. He found the goat meat ‘as thick as leather’ and had to leave off eating. He spent a nightmarish night. ‘Every time I dropped off to sleep it would seem as though a live goat were bleating inside me, and I would jump up full of remorse.’

Sheikh Mehtab was not one to give up easily, and for about a year, at regular intervals, Mohandas joined his friend in surreptitious meat-feasts in the Rajkot State House. He increased neither in strength nor in beauty; however, he came to the conclusion that though there was a duty to eat meat and take up ‘food reforms’ in the country, deceiving and lying to one’s parents was worse than not eating meat. He would not eat meat during the lifetime of his parents and when they were no more and ‘I have found my freedom, I will eat meat openly, but until such time I will abstain from it’.

Mohandas appears to have had an aversion to telling lies. Yet to have told the truth was quite impossible. It would have been ‘far easier for George Washington to confess to the destruction of an entire forest of cherry-trees than for Mohandas to confess to a Vaishnava family that he had tasted meat’. Sheikh Mehtab had a knack of arranging things, and on one occasion he succeeded in leading Mohandas to a brothel. Payment had been made in advance. Mohandas sat near the woman on the bed, tongue-tied and scared out of his wits. The woman had no time for him and promptly showed him the door, hurling some choice abuse at the future Mahatma. ‘I then felt as though my manhood had been injured and wished to sink into the ground of shame,’ Gandhi reports. ‘But I have ever since given thanks to God for having saved me.’

Karsandas continued to partake of meat at Mehtab’s feasts and, as a result, ran up a twenty-five-rupee debt. Sheikh Mehtab and Karsandas persuaded Mohandas to carve out a small piece of Karsandas’s thick, solid gold armlet and sell it. Mohandas accomplished the task with ease, but soon pangs of guilt hit him. He made up his mind to confess to his father, yet would not dare do it, not because he was afraid of his father giving him a thrashing – he had never done so – but because he was ‘afraid of the pain that I should cause him’. However, there could not be a cleansing without a confession. Finally he wrote out his confession and, trembling, handed it to his father. In it he asked for punishment, and knowing his father well he pleaded that Karamchand would not take the guilt upon himself. He also pledged himself never to steal in future.

The dewan had not fully recovered from the accident, and in addition he was suffering from a fistula. He sat up in his sickbed to read the note. Suddenly his cheeks were wet and tears were falling on the page. For a few moments he closed his eyes in thought, and then tore up the note. Mohandas also cried. ‘I could see my father’s agony,’ he wrote. ‘If I were a painter I could draw the picture of the whole scene today. It is still so vivid in my mind . . . This was, for me, an object lesson in ahimsa. Then I could read in it nothing more than a father’s love, but today I know that it was pure ahimsa . . . I know that my confession made my father feel absolutely safe about me, and increased his affection for me beyond measure.’

The spell of Mehtab even made inroads into Mohandas’s home life. His wife, his mother and even his brother Karsandas advised him that the Muslim wastrel was not a good influence on him. But Mohandas was determined to reform him. At one time Mehtab, whose veracity he could never doubt, managed to kindle Mohandas’s suspicion about his wife’s fidelity. ‘I broke her bangles, refused to have anything to do with her and sent her away to her parents for a whole year,’ Gandhi wrote fifty years after the event. ‘But Kasturbai showed courage. In the end, after four or more years, my suspicion was dispelled.’ His friendship with Mehtab appears quite strange. Years later, Mehtab ended up in South Africa as a member of the Gandhi household. At some point he was found in the house in the company of a prostitute and was finally abandoned.

Meanwhile Karamchand’s illness was causing anxiety. Hindu vaidyas, Muslim hakims and even the local quacks were descending on the house to offer their services. There was also a lengthy discussion with an English surgeon in Bombay about an operation on the fistula, but the dewan’s personal physician later disapproved of it, saying it could not possibly succeed because of the patient’s advanced age.

Mohandas, for his part, spared no effort in his role of nurse. In the evening he compounded the drugs for his ailing father, dressed the wound, massaged his legs, and when Karamchand was feeling somewhat better would go out for a long walk. This was the time when his mind was also occupied with the approaching birth of his first child, for the sixteen-year-old would soon become a father.

Karamchand was getting weaker and weaker and despaired of living any longer. The end came in November 1885. Mohandas was seized with the guilt which over the years never quite left him. He had spent the evening massaging his father’s legs, and late at night one of his uncles offered to take over. Mohandas was glad to be relieved of his duty, and returned to his own room. He describes the situation in what, perhaps, is the most celebrated passage in his autobiography:

The dreadful night came . . . It was between 10:30 and 11:00 p.m . . . my wife . . . was fast asleep . . . But how could she sleep when I was there? I woke her up. In five or six minutes, however, the servant knocked at the door. ‘Get up,’ he said, ‘father is very ill’ . . . I guessed what ‘very ill’ meant at that moment . . .

I felt deeply ashamed and miserable. I ran to my father’s room. I saw that if animal passion had not blinded me, I should have been spared the torture of separation from my father during his last moments. I should have been massaging him, and he would have died in my arms. But . . . it was my uncle who had the privilege.

This shame of carnal desire . . . at the critical hour of my father’s death . . . is a blot I have never been able to efface or forget . . . the poor mite that was born to my wife scarcely breathed for more than three or four days . . .

TWO

Growing Pains

With Karamchand’s death, the family began to experience financial difficulties. He had been receiving a small pension from the ruler of Rajkot, but this ceased with his death. By nature he was no hoarder of wealth, spending all he earned on the education and marriages of his children or on charity. The eldest of the three sons was now the head of the household. Mohandas therefore had to appeal to Laxmidas whenever he needed money. During these years, in fact, they were on close and friendly terms. But later the two brothers were to have a strong difference of opinion over money matters.

Late in 1887, when Mohandas was eighteen, he went to Ahmedabad, the capital of the province to sit for his matriculation at Bombay University. He barely succeeded in passing the examination. His total of 247 marks out of an aggregate of 625 (39 per cent) was by no means a creditable performance (pass marks for individual subjects being 33 per cent). But he managed to enter the small, inexpensive Samaldas College at Bhavnagar, in the princely state of Bhavnagar. For the first time he was living away from home without his wife. He did badly in his studies and felt homesick. He began having headaches and frequent nosebleeds and went back to Rajkot. While he was at college his wife had given birth to a son, who was named Harilal. Mohandas never returned to Samaldas College.

He confided his problems to Laxmidas, and the two brothers went to see an old family adviser, a Brahmin named Mavji Dave. Mohandas told Dave frankly about his total lack of interest in studies, adding that he was not hopeful of succeeding even in the first-year college examination. The priest was critical of the current plans for his education. ‘Times have changed,’ he told Laxmidas. ‘And none of you can expect to succeed to your father’s position as dewan without proper education.’ He advised that since Mohandas was still pursuing his studies, the family should look to him to keep the dewanship. If he spent four or five years getting his BA degree, it would at best qualify him for a sixty-rupee post, not a dewanship. He counselled Mohandas to go to England and become a barrister-at-law – a title reserved for those who studied law in England. The priest’s son, Kevalram, a lawyer, had informed him that it was far easier and took much less time to become a barrister-at-law than to qualify as a lawyer in India. The total expense would be about five thousand rupees, and on completion of his studies in England he would get the dewanship for the asking. ‘Try to get some scholarship,’ he added. ‘Apply to Junagarh and Porbandar states. See my son, Kevalram, and if you fail in getting pecuniary help and if you have no money, sell your furniture. You must go to England.’

Mohandas was also interested in medicine, but his suggestion that he go to England to study medicine instead of law was promptly dismissed by Laxmidas: ‘Father never liked it. He had you in mind when he said that we Vaishnavas should have nothing to do with dissection of dead bodies. Father intended you for the bar.’ Mavji did not take the same dismal view of the medical profession, but stressed that a doctor would have scant chance of becoming a dewan. He cautioned them to keep the matter a secret, because there would be objections to the plan on religious grounds. But Laxmidas had no talent for keeping secrets, and before long many of the Gandhi cousins had heard about it. One of them even promised to advance the five thousand rupees, but nothing came of it.

Mohandas was delighted at the prospect of going to England, but a meeting with the priest’s son had a sobering effect. ‘You will have to spend there at least ten thousand rupees,’ he was told. ‘You will have to set aside your religious prejudices, if any. You will have to eat meat. You must drink. You cannot live without that. The more you spend, the cleverer you will be. It is a very important thing. I speak to you frankly. Don’t be offended, but look here, you are still very young. There are many temptations in London. You are apt to be entrapped by them.’

Young Mohandas’s morale suddenly registered a new low. The journey to London had not only become prohibitively expensive, but would also demand that he should drink alcohol, eat meat and submit to the temptations of life in a great metropolis. Timidly, Mohandas asked Kevalram Dave to use his influence to get him a scholarship. The interview came to an abrupt end when the request was refused.

Mohandas was determined to eliminate the several obstacles confronting him. There were religious taboos against anyone of his caste travelling overseas; other members of the family must be in agreement on the subject; there was also his wife to be considered; and then, of course, there was the question of raising the money.

The thought of going to England, however, had emboldened Mohandas to make the four-day journey by bullock cart and camel to Porbandar to obtain, in accordance with his mother’s wishes, the consent of his uncle, now head of the Gandhi clan. The uncle pondered over the matter. He was not sure if it was possible to stay in England without prejudice to one’s religion. He had met many Indian barristers who were thoroughly Anglicized. ‘They know no scruples regarding food,’ he said. ‘Cigars are never out of their mouths. They dress as shamelessly as Englishmen. All this would not be in keeping with our family tradition.’ He was about to go on a pilgrimage, and how could he ‘at the threshold of death’, give Mohandas permission to cross the seas? This stern sermon was followed by a few reassuring words. ‘But I will not stand in your way,’ he said. ‘It is your mother’s permission which really matters. If she permits you, then godspeed. You will go with my blessings.’

In an effort to obtain some financial assistance for his law studies in London, Mohandas made an appointment with Mr Lely, the British agent in Porbandar, who managed the state during the minority of the young prince. Mr Lely rebuffed him without even letting him present his case. ‘Pass your BA first and then see me,’ he told the nervous and disappointed Mohandas. ‘I had made elaborate preparations to meet him,’ wrote Gandhi. ‘I had carefully learnt up a few sentences, and had bowed low and saluted him with both hands. But all to no purpose!’

Colonel Watson, the British agent at Rajkot, was also approached. He gave Mohandas a ‘trivial’ note of introduction to someone in England, which, he said, was ‘worth a hundred thousand rupees’. The ruler of Rajkot indicated some hope of assistance, but gave him just a signed photograph of himself. Mohandas returned to Bhavnagar and sold off his furniture, thus providing himself with a paltry sum toward his expenses.

Although Kevalram’s estimate of living expense amounted to ten thousand rupees, Mohandas was convinced he could manage it more cheaply. However, several weeks of manoeuvres had failed and no money was forthcoming from uncles and cousins who had earlier shown interest in his education plans and promised financial assistance. Laxmidas promised to find the required money somehow. Mavji Dave’s estimate of the expense of sending Mohandas to London proved grossly inaccurate. Instead of five thousand rupees, the total expense was in the vicinity of thirteen thousand rupees. If they had known this at the beginning, his chances of going to England would have been remote.

Mohandas’s mother had her reservations about his going overseas. She had begun making patient enquiries and was informed that young Indians in London sometimes associated with strange women, consumed liquor and ate meat. ‘How about all this?’ she asked him. Mohandas reassured her: ‘I shall not lie to you. I swear that I shall not touch any of those things.’ He reminded her that old Mavji Dave would never have suggested the journey to London if there was any danger of his succumbing to these sins. Another family adviser, a Jain monk named Becharji Swami, was able to allay her anxieties. ‘I shall get the boy solemnly to take the three vows and then he can be allowed to go.’ So Mohandas solemnly vowed not to touch wine, women or meat. She trusted her son to keep these vows, and gave her blessing to his departure.

On 4 July 1888, his fellow students at the Alfred High School in Rajkot gave him a farewell party. Mohandas rose to make his maiden speech. ‘I had written a few words of thanks,’ he reports. ‘But I could scarcely stammer them out. I remember how my head reeled and my whole frame shook as I stood up to read them.’ The substance of his speech was published in the Kathiawar Times, a local newspaper: ‘I hope that some of you will follow in my footsteps and after your return from England you will work wholeheartedly for big reforms in India.’

This was by no means a political speech. When Gandhi spoke at the school farewell meeting, he had social reforms in mind, though he had no clear concept in this regard. In his brief speech he was only stating the conventional things that were expected of a youth having the rare opportunity of going to England to become a lawyer.

The farewell party was rather premature, for a period of about one month elapsed before he was able to leave Rajkot. ‘Sleeping, waking, drinking, eating, walking, running, reading, I was dreaming and thinking of England and what I would do on that momentous day.’ At last, on 10 August, the day of departure to Bombay dawned. Gandhi describes the scene of his leaving home:

My mother was hiding her tearful eyes with her hands, but the sobbing was clearly heard. There were some fifty friends present, and if I wept they would consider me too weak . . . I did not cry even though my heart was breaking . . . then came the leave-taking with my wife . . . I had to see her in a separate room. She, of course, had begun sobbing long before. I went to her and stood like a dumb statue for a moment. I kissed her, and she said, ‘Don’t go.’ What followed I need not describe.

Mohandas, accompanied by Laxmidas, Sheikh Mehtab and two others, left for Bombay. Some friends got into the carriage en route, travelled with him a few stations, and then returned. A ship was scheduled to leave on 21 August, and he planned to spend a few days in Bombay, buying proper clothes for the journey, but there were to be more difficulties in store for him.

In Bombay he was told that the Indian Ocean was rough, and since it was his first voyage he should postpone his departure till November when the sea would be calmer. It was also reported that a steamer had just sunk in a gale. Laxmidas was frightened, and he refused to allow Mohandas to sail till the roughness of the Indian Ocean had subsided. He returned to Rajkot, leaving Mohandas in the care of brother-in-law Khushalbhai Makanji, who had been entrusted with the money, and also left word with some friends to afford him whatever help he might need. But there were also enemies around.

Word had passed from one Modh Bania to another that a member of their caste, with plans to go to England, was on the verge of polluting the sanctity of the caste. Nothing was done until Mohandas had actually left Rajkot, but soon after he reached Bombay, he savoured the first taste of Bania orthodoxy. On one occasion, not far from the Town Hall, he was accosted and hooted by a group of caste fellows, while Laxmidas looked helplessly on. Mohandas was determined to tackle this new hurdle that now threatened his departure. He was pestered by many deputations from his caste people; however, they failed to make an impression on him. The boy’s full-grown obstinacy came to his rescue, but not before he was virtually dragged out of the house to present himself at a court of elders. The meeting of the caste was well attended as the elders had announced that absentees should be liable to a fine of five annas.

‘In the opinion of the caste, your proposal to go to England is not proper,’ said the Sheth – the headman of the community – who was a distant relative of Mohandas and had been on very good terms with Karamchand Gandhi. ‘We are positively informed that you will have to eat flesh and drink wine in England; moreover, you have to cross the waters; and all this you must know is against our caste rules. Therefore we command you to reconsider your decision, or else the heaviest punishment shall be meted out to you.’

‘I thank you for your warnings,’ Mohandas said calmly. ‘I am sorry I cannot alter my decision. What I have heard about England is quite different from what you say; one need not take meat or wine there. Concerning crossing the waters, if our brothers can go as far as Aden, why could I not go to England? I am deeply convinced that malice is at the root of all these objections.’

‘Very well, then,’ replied the headman in anger. ‘You are not the son of your father.’ Then, turning to the audience, he proclaimed: ‘This boy shall be treated as an outcast from today. Whoever helps him or goes to see him off at the dock shall be punishable with a fine of one rupee four annas.’

The incident made Mohandas more anxious to sail, lest they should succeed in pressurizing his brother. As he was worrying over his predicament, he heard from friends that a middle-aged Junagarh lawyer, Tryambakrai Mazumdar, had reserved a passage on the SS Clyde, and they suggested that he should take the same ship and even share a cabin with the lawyer. Mohandas approached his brother-in-law for the money, but Khushalbhai referred to the order of the headman and said he could not afford to lose caste. Mohandas then sought the help of a friend of the family to advance him money to cover travelling expenses and sundries. The friend obliged, and it was arranged that he could recover the amount from the brother-in-law. Mohandas finally sailed from Bombay on 4 September 1888.

Tryambakrai Mazumdar was a kindly man. He advised the shy, provincial Mohandas to come out of his self-imposed loneliness and mix with other passengers aboard. But Mohandas hid himself in the cabin, speaking to no one except his new-found friend, living for two days on the sweets and fruits he had brought with him. On board he wore a black suit. He was innocent of the use of knives and forks, and could not pluck up enough courage to enquire what dishes on the menu were free of meat. Finally Mr Mazumdar arranged for Indian vegetarian food to be served, and Mohandas would dine in the company of his lawyer friend and a first-class passenger named Abdul Majid. He was, however, not too pleased with the food and found it somewhat unappetizing.

Mohandas was unaccustomed to conversing in English. Except for him and Mr Mazumdar, all the passengers in the second-class saloon were English. Some of them would come up to speak to him, but he could hardly make out what they were saying. Even when he did understand them, he could not reply. ‘I had to frame every sentence in my mind, before I could bring it out.’ He took refuge from the loneliness of the cabin by watching the sea from the deck. One night the scene around him completely baffled him, and he recorded this in his journal:

One dark night when the sky was clear the stars were reflected in the water. The scene around us was very beautiful at that time. I could not at first imagine what that was. They appeared like so many diamonds. But I know that a diamond could not float. Then I thought they must be some insects which can only be seen at night. Amidst these reflections I looked up in the sky and at once found that it was nothing but stars reflected in waters. I laughed at my folly.

When the ship anchored at Aden, he saw young boys rowing out to dive into the clear blue water for the pennies the Europeans flung into the sea. He envied their strength and skill at diving, till a boatman informed him that the boys sometimes lost their limbs to the hungry sharks. He enjoyed driving around Aden with Mr Mazumdar in a carriage which cost him one rupee, and he regretfully noted this expense in his journal.

He was fascinated by the journey through the Suez Canal. The sheer heat would drive him out of the cabin to the deck where it would be somewhat more bearable. He marvelled at the construction of the canal. ‘I cannot think of the genius of the man who invented it,’ he wrote in his journal.

Reviews for Gandhi

[mfassold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the Gandhi biography I most recommend. Complete. Writing is interesting enough to hold my attention