Henry Salt’s Plea for Vegetarianism. He devoured not only a hearty meal but Salt’s book, which, he later states, turned his life around:
From the date of reading this book, I may claim to have become a vegetarian by choice. . . . I had all along abstained from meat in the interest of truth and of the vow I had taken, but had wished at the same time that every Indian should be a meat-eater, and had looked forward to being one myself someday, and to enlisting others in the cause. The choice was now made in favour of vegetarianism, the spread of which henceforward became my mission.43
His “appetite for dietetic studies” whetted by Salt, Gandhi “went in for all books available on vegetarianism.”44 Eventually Gandhi found new rooms (he was constantly moving during his London student days) in order that he might economize by cooking for himself. By mid-1890 Gandhi was able to report that he “enjoyed the best of health and had to work very hard if not the hardest as there were only five months left for the final examination.”45 During this pre-exam period Gandhi was invited by Josiah Oldfield, a leading vegetarian whose acquaintance Gandhi had made earlier, to a vegetarian conference to be held in September 1890. As a result of his participation in this conference, Gandhi was almost immediately invited to become a member of the Executive Committee of the London Vegetarian Society (LVS), an invitation he accepted. With exams looming, however, Gandhi appears not to have taken much of a role on the committee.46
After the completion of his final examinations, by contrast, Gandhi was a beehive of vegetarian activity. Giving a preview of the prodigious output of writing for which he would later become known, Gandhi produced a series of articles for The Vegetarian, the weekly journal of the LVS. First he wrote a series of six essays on the practice of vegetarianism in India. This series was followed by a series of three articles on the festivals of India. Gandhi then delivered a speech titled “The Foods of India” before the LVS and had it printed thereafter in the Vegetarian Messenger, the society’s Manchester voice. Gandhi also gave a two-part interview to The Vegetarian. In addition, he found time to get embroiled in the inner politics of the LVS, to start up a local vegetarian club with his friend and eventual roommate Josiah Oldfield, and to make appearances in a number of forums on behalf of vegetarianism.
This intense round of activity closed out Gandhi’s time as a student in London. In the months since his bar finals, while his fellow students were learning to draft conveyances and pleadings in chambers, Gandhi’s involvement with the vegetarian movement was schooling him in ways of “organizing and conducting institutions.”47
He also was learning something about himself with no little import for a young barrister’s future, a lesson with ominous implications for the career that his family had chosen for him.
He was terrified, sometimes to the point of paralysis, of speaking in public.
TWO
The Barrister Who Couldn’t Speak
No client would be fool enough to engage me.
GANDHI
FOR SOMEONE WHO CLAIMED TO be in love with London, Gandhi’s behavior might easily be counted as strange. He received his call to the bar on June 10, was sworn in before the High Court on June 11, and on June 12 he was on a boat for India. Perhaps this was Gandhi the responsible son, one who knew that every extra day in London was an added burden on the family finances. Indeed, this might have been a Gandhi who knew that such expenses were doubly problematic: not only was he exhausting his family’s capital, but he had no prospects of replenishing the family coffers any time soon.
UNPREPARED TO PRACTICE
Gandhi’s family had sent its most promising son to England to obtain the elevated status of barrister and the lifestyle that accompanied it. Those who had sacrificed to put Gandhi through his legal training in England expected to be rewarded for their sacrifices upon Gandhi’s return to India.1 His faithful brother, Lakshmidas, in anticipation of Gandhi’s arrival home as the wealthy barrister, embarked upon a course of upgrading his family’s living style even before Gandhi’s return,2 a pretense Gandhi himself endorsed and furthered when he introduced European clothing and food to his family in Rajkot upon his arrival there. Surely, under these circumstances, Lakshmidas cannot be blamed for thinking that Gandhi would establish for himself and his family the comfortable life of a prestigious barrister. Gandhi, however, came back after three long and expensive years in England wholly unprepared to make a return to his family. He carried with him the title of barrister—and precious little else.
To begin with, he had no knowledge of Indian law. Despite a prolonged British effort at codification, the operation of a significant part of the legal system continued to be governed by a body of traditional Hindu and Muslim law that applied to succession, inheritance, marriage, adoption, guardianship, family relations, wills, gifts, and partition. Many practitioners would consider these basic aspects of practice, yet Gandhi had no knowledge of them.
Not only was he unacquainted with important aspects of the doctrinal side of the law, but Gandhi also had equally little knowledge of its practical side, having forgone the opportunity to apprentice. One cannot overstate the paucity of his practical knowledge. One example might suffice. The most basic written instrument in the practice of law is the complaint, the document a plaintiff files against a defendant to begin an ordinary civil suit. While Gandhi’s family expected him to start up a “swinging practice” forthwith, the fact was, as he confessed to himself, “he had not even learnt how to draft a plaint.”3
SETTING UP SHOP IN BOMBAY
Gandhi was brutally honest about his position in 1891 when he later wrote in his autobiography: “To start practice in Rajkot would have meant sure ridicule. I had hardly the knowledge of a qualified vakil4 and yet I expected to be paid ten times his fee! No client would be fool enough to engage me. And even if such a one was to be found, should I add arrogance and fraud to my ignorance, and increase the burden of debt I owed to the world?”5 Faced with these rather serious disabilities, and seeing nothing for an inexperienced barrister in Rajkot, Gandhi decided to shift operations to Bombay, where he hoped to accomplish three goals: to remedy his deficiency in Indian law, to obtain some knowledge of the workings of the Bombay High Court, and to pick up a few cases.
Gandhi’s study of Indian law proved to be the easiest of these tasks. He set about studying Mayne’s Indian Law, which he read with “deep interest.”6 He had no similar luck plowing through the Civil Procedure Code, a failure readily forgiven by anyone who has attempted to study civil procedure—the driest of subjects—as an abstract matter, as opposed to learning it in the context of simulated or actual cases. The Evidence Act, by contrast, held more of Gandhi’s interest, perhaps because he knew that one of the giants of the Indian bar, Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, had memorized the act by heart.
Gandhi’s experience observing arguments before the High Court was neither productive nor uplifting. With nothing at stake for himself or for a client in the proceedings, there was little to hold his interest. Moreover, Gandhi had insufficient knowledge of the law in general or the argued cases in particular to be able to follow, much less learn from, the line of the arguments. For any neutral party observing appellate arguments, one wit has observed, the experience is about as stimulating as being a lighthouse attendant. Thus, it is not surprising that Gandhi’s main occupation while at the High Court was to sleep, a habit shared by so many other “observers” that Gandhi actually came to think it was “fashionable to doze in the High Court.”7
Neither Gandhi’s attempt to learn Indian law nor his study of the High Court’s workings was a demanding enough activity to occupy
