Empire in India. Perhaps the fastidiously economical Gandhi did not believe he could afford to apprentice; after all, it was not free. A pupil was expected to pay his barrister fifty guineas for each six months of pupilage. Perhaps Gandhi could not find a barrister who would take him on for such a relatively short period of time with no prospect of Gandhi’s returning the investment with permanent employment. Perhaps Gandhi, lacking close connections to the British bar, could find no barrister at all. The most intriguing explanation, however, is that Gandhi was preoccupied with a realm of life entirely separate from the bar.
FASHIONABLE WESTERNIZATION: THEOSOPHY AND VEGETARIANISM
When he arrived in London, Gandhi was thrust into a world where he was a stranger looking to be accepted. The world of the Inns, with its dinners, costumes, formality, and long tradition of catering to the educated, wealthy, and noble, was an upper-class world to which this relatively uneducated boy from the colonial backwaters of India was unaccustomed, but which he was eager to explore. Gandhi’s understanding of the privileged status to which barristers were entitled may have led him to see his mission in England to learn and take on the customs of the elite. After all, he had been sent to England to attain the lofty status of barrister for one reason only: to come home and provide financial leadership for the family. Thus, it is likely that Gandhi believed that becoming a barrister required of him different tastes and manners. Accordingly, he experimented in 1890 with top hats, starched collars, silk shirts, striped trousers, gold watch chains, leather gloves, walking sticks, patent leather shoes, spats, and evening suits.32 The private lessons in dance, elocution, violin, and French that he took for a brief time can be similarly explained.33 With time, however, Gandhi came to his senses, realizing that a dandy was not who he was, nor who he needed to be, in order to be called to the bar and to practice in India. Here his pledge to his mother to avoid wine, meat, and women might have fortified him with the beginnings of the independence he needed to escape the full grasp of British upper-class mores. Yet the attraction of belonging to a privileged group gripped him still. It was in his study of theosophy and his embrace of the cause of vegetarianism that he discovered a way to bridge the distance between faithfulness to himself and things Indian, on the one hand, and, on the other, his attraction to the higher strata of British society where, at least at the edges, theosophy and vegetarianism were thriving.
Theosophy in Gandhi’s time was a religious philosophy with roots in the teachings of the Russian-born medium Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.34 She, along with an American, Henry Olcott, founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. Theosophy argued that all religious traditions “hold in common many religious, ethical, and philosophical ideas.” It purported to explain the commonality of all religious thought by resort to the notion that an ancient band of “great spiritual Teachers (themselves the outcome of past cycles of evolution) acted as the instructors and guides of the child humanity of our planet, interpreting to its races and nations the fundamental truths of religion in the form most adapted to the idiosyncrasies of the recipients.”35 The truth that they passed on to Blavatsky and her followers was divine wisdom, the Greek for which (theos and sophia) gave rise to the name of this body of thought.
The openness of theosophy to all the great religious traditions included an embrace of Hindu ideas, which in turn led theosophy to a pantheistic understanding of God, an emphasis on the oneness of all people, and a belief in human perfectibility. One could see how readily each of these notions might appeal to a young Hindu stranded in an alien culture far from home.36 Gandhi tells us he was introduced to theosophy by two friends who asked him for help in reading Sir Edwin Arnold’s The Song Celestial, a poetic translation of the Bhagavad Gita. The friends thereafter took him to Theosophical Society meetings and eventually to a talk given by Annie Besant, a follower of Blavatsky and a leading theosophical theorist of her time, whose speeches emphasized brotherhood, tolerance, and the spiritual nature of people.37 The talk Besant delivered the night Gandhi was in the audience defended theosophy against its critics, causing Gandhi to later write: “The words she uttered . . . as she rose to answer the charge of inconsistency have never faded from my memory. She said as she wound up her great speech that she would be quite satisfied to have the epitaph written on her tomb that she had lived for truth and she died for truth.”38 Gandhi made it a point to read Blavatsky’s The Key to Theosophy. The effect of this reading was to stimulate in him “the desire to read books on Hinduism” and to disabuse him “of the notion fostered by the missionaries that Hinduism was rife with superstition.”39
Despite this interest, Gandhi felt that he did not have sufficient time to continue his religious explorations while examinations were looming. Thus, it appears that the period of Gandhi’s most intense involvement with theosophy came to an end sometime before December 15, 1890. And when his examinations concluded on the 20th of December 1890, it was not theosophy that reclaimed his attention, but vegetarianism.
Gandhi’s initial interest in vegetarianism resulted from a blend of pragmatism and principle. To secure her blessing for the trip, he had promised his mother he would not touch meat. Keeping this pledge caused him to endure a fairly lengthy trial, stretching from the time he boarded the SS Clyde in early September to late October 1888, during which time he ate meals that were meatless but nutritionally inadequate for this eighteen-year-old man-child. On the Clyde, an English fellow passenger importuned him to eat meat, claiming that it was “so cold in England that one cannot possibly live there without meat.”40 Gandhi politely turned away the advice, saying that if what the passenger was saying were true, he would simply pack up his bags and return to India before violating his vow. Gandhi’s fidelity to his pledge (as well as his fear of having to speak English) resulted for some days in his eating spartan meals in his cabin, meals consisting of nothing more than sweets and fruits brought from home, before other arrangements could be made. After finding his initial lodging in England at the Victoria Hotel, Gandhi apparently had little luck there, reporting that he paid the princely sum of £3 for his short stay and got very little to eat for it. He was forced to continue eating from his store of Indian sweets and fruits. Even after Gandhi left the hotel and secured private, less expensive rooms, he found that all the meatless dishes put in front of him were “tasteless and insipid.” This, plus a serious case of homesickness, left this young man lying in bed at night, wondering whether he had erred in leaving home, pining over the loss of his mother’s affections, and unable to check the rivers of tears flowing down his cheeks.
Gandhi had come to England with several letters of introduction, including one addressed to Dr. Pranjivan Mehta, a medical doctor as well as a barrister-in-training himself, who hailed from near Gandhi’s hometown. Mehta quickly recognized Gandhi’s need for some social context, for he convinced him to move and take on a roommate, all in preparation for eventually taking quarters with an English family. Mehta’s argument was that Gandhi, after all, had come to England not so much to get an education as to gain “experience in English life and customs,” something life with a family would provide. Gandhi soon thereafter moved in with Dalpatram Shukla, another law student from Gandhi’s region. It became Shukla’s job to train the young Gandhi in English ways—in the course of which he could not get Gandhi to eat meat. Despite his profound dislike for the landlady’s nonmeat dishes, Gandhi resisted sampling her meat dishes. Seeing Gandhi’s resistance, Shukla lost his temper and exploded: “Had you been my own brother, I would have sent you packing. What is the value of a vow made before an illiterate mother, and in ignorance of the conditions here?”41 Gandhi, however, remained steadfast—and hungry. After a month of training in English ways, save meat eating, Mehta and Shukla found a family in West Kensington willing to board Gandhi. Again, he found the meals insipid and complains in his autobiography that he continued to “practically . . . starve.”42 But eventually the day came when his landlady informed him that there were vegetarian restaurants in London. Gandhi seized on this information and found, to his great happiness, the Central Restaurant off London’s Farringdon Street. He related later that the very sight of the restaurant filled him with joy.
What Gandhi found for his soul, however, was to become even more
