top hats and French-language lessons, he used his free time to play the wealthy barrister. He hired one Ravishankar to cook for him at his residence. Gandhi quickly learned that Ravishankar knew little about cooking, and so, with the initiative that hallmarked so much of his life, he threw himself into running the kitchen along with his pupil, teaching Ravishankar something about vegetarianism along the way.
A FAILURE OF NERVE
With his days passing in such desultory fashion, it is no wonder that Gandhi leapt at the chance to represent an actual paying client in court when a defendant in a civil case, an individual by the name of Mamibai, asked Gandhi to represent her. Little did Gandhi realize how terribly unprepared he was by nature or experience to advocate a client’s cause in open court.
To be an advocate for a client in court requires a fair amount of confidence in one’s ability to engage without hesitation in the rambunctious and fractious give-and-take of the courtroom. It requires a lawyer to be a public person, one who is not afraid to stand before a judge and argue, one who is not afraid to take on opposing lawyers and parties, one who is not afraid to vigorously defend one’s position or to attack an opponent’s position—all in public. In sum, the lawyer as a public person is one who has no lack of nerve.
In the year 1891 twenty-two-year-old Mohandas K. Gandhi, barrister at law, lacked nerve. As a result, his representation of Mamibai ended in failure and embarrassment. Mamibai’s case was being processed at the lowest level of the judicial system, the equivalent of what is called small claims court in some jurisdictions.8 Because Mamibai was the defendant, the first task of Gandhi’s courtroom career was to cross-examine the witnesses for the plaintiff. As Gandhi stood up to conduct his first cross-examination as a barrister, he was gripped with fear. He became dizzy from stage fright and his head began to reel. His heart sank. Even his eyesight failed him. He could not get control of his panic. He was unable to ask a single question. He staggered to his seat and told the client’s agent that he could not go on. Then, unnerved, he stumbled out of the courtroom in disgrace.
A HISTORY OF FEAR
Gandhi’s extreme discomfort in his role as a courtroom advocate was the predictable end point for a person who only rarely was able to find his voice in public. From the time Gandhi was a high school student (and probably before), public speaking had almost always reduced him to a nervous, quivering bowl of mush. Just before Gandhi set sail for London in 1888, his high school classmates in Rajkot held a farewell celebration in his honor. In his autobiography Gandhi recalls that he had difficulty reading his prepared notes, that he was dizzy from nervousness, that he stammered and that “his whole frame shook.”9 Such a reaction should have been expected from Gandhi, inasmuch as he was an extremely shy and timid youth, avoiding not only the rigors of childhood sports but even the casual company of other children.
When Gandhi boarded the steamer SS Clyde for London, he found it impossible to speak with other passengers. His shipmate and fellow Indian the lawyer Tryambakrai Mazmudar urged him to deal with his unfamiliarity with English by conversing in English with their fellow travelers. Interestingly, Mazmudar even pointed out to Gandhi that such practice would do him good because “lawyers should have a long tongue.”10 Mazmudar put Gandhi on notice that he was entering a profession in which speech was considered a tool of the trade. Nothing, however, moved Gandhi; he abstained from social commerce.
Little changed on his arrival in England. When Gandhi secured a room with a family in West Kensington, he found that the portions of food his landlady served him were too small. But the same mouth that craved to eat could not convince itself to speak. Gandhi found himself “as shy as ever and dared not ask for more than was put before [him].”11
Gandhi’s involvement in the vegetarian movement brought him face-to-face with several opportunities for public speaking. He seems to have failed miserably at almost all of them. Indeed, Gandhi set a pattern: he would write out his remarks, practice them, arrive at the meeting, lose his nerve, and ask someone else to read his speech. For example, in a dispute within the leadership of the LVS, on whose Executive Committee he served, Gandhi was forced to take sides between its president, Arnold F. Hills, and Dr. Thomas R. Allinson, another member of the Executive Committee. Allinson had taken up the cause of birth control, leading to a motion by Hills to strip Allinson of membership in the society. Gandhi was opposed to birth control, but believed there should be no morals test for those who wanted to join; support of vegetarianism was enough. Gandhi decided to advocate for Allinson. He wrote out his speech but “had not the courage to speak.”12 Hills was gracious enough to find someone to read a speech attacking his own position.
On another occasion, Gandhi and Mazmudar attended a vegetarian conference in Ventnor. While there, Gandhi met the author of a famous vegetarian tract who offered Gandhi the opportunity to speak at the conference, an invitation he accepted without hesitation. Once again Gandhi wrote out his remarks, and once again he appeared to deliver them. In terms reminiscent of his description of his cross-examination effort in the Mamibai case, Gandhi states what happened next: “I stood up to read it, but could not. My vision became blurred and I trembled, though the speech hardly covered a sheet of foolscap.” Once again, Gandhi was forced to find someone to read for him. While the audience received the talk well, Gandhi “was ashamed of [him]self and sad at heart for [his] incapacity.”13
Demonstrating either his courage or his naïveté, Gandhi’s two earlier failures at public speech making did not deter him from a third attempt. The occasion this time was a farewell vegetarian dinner hosted by Gandhi for a group of friends on the eve of his departure from London. The scene was the Holborn, a conventional restaurant Gandhi had convinced to host a vegetarian banquet. Again Gandhi had prepared his remarks with care. When he stood, he found that he “could not proceed beyond the first sentence.”14 Gandhi had intended to begin with a bit of humor but, as he stalled after his first sentence, found that the only thing humorous was his attempt to speak in public. He gathered up just enough composure to blurt out his thanks to his guests for coming. He then sat down, defeated, once again, by himself.
Was Gandhi’s difficulty that he obsessed over his prepared remarks, to the point of paralysis? Perhaps, but he also confesses that he had no aptitude for ex tempore speaking either. He was inept at both. The inability to deliver prepared remarks and the inability to speak extemporaneously must be counted as significant disabilities for one who intended to earn his living by speaking. Yet, years later, when writing his autobiography, Gandhi claimed that several advantages flowed from what he called his “constitutional shyness.” While he was in England, he says, he found that his shyness made it easier for him to keep his pledge to his mother to abstain from commerce with women. In the rest of his life, he found that shyness brought him the benefits of speaking little, namely that a studied silence permitted him to avoid thoughtless chatter, exaggeration, and untruths.
VAKILS ON THE RISE
It is one thing to muse about being tongue-tied in one’s memoirs. It is something altogether different to be tongue-tied in fact while trying to make a living as a barrister in the highly competitive atmosphere of nineteenth-century Bombay. Gandhi’s inability to speak in public must be understood as a limitation that rendered it virtually impossible for him to overcome a number of background factors that made his practice of law in India a chancy proposition at best.
When Gandhi attempted to enter practice in India in 1891, he did so at a time when the Indian legal system was in the midst of a maelstrom of changes in terms of both the organization of the judiciary and the regulation of the practice of law. The High Court at Bombay had only recently been established, along with High Courts at the other two presidency towns of Madras and Calcutta, by the Indian High Courts Act of 1861.15 This act was part of a protracted process whereby the British government eventually took over virtually the entire judicial system in India.
At
