to his Rajkot home.26 There he would work with his brother, Lakshmidas, a petty pleader, in doing the low-level legal work of native attorneys that he had disdained earlier. Gandhi would be an overeducated paralegal in his older brother’s shop, drafting common applications and memorials.
A BREACH OF ETHICS
Given the experiences Gandhi had had before being called to the bar, it was predictable that he would have difficulty assuming the role of public person that the job of courtroom barrister required.27 From the time of his childhood Gandhi had been a timid person. His attempts at public speaking in high school and later in London regularly placed unmanageable amounts of stress on him—and these prior attempts at public speaking were almost always before receptive audiences of friends or colleagues. When Gandhi was forced into the courtroom, he found himself in a new setting in which all speech and all behavior are adversarial. Adversarial speech places enormous demands on the speaker to manage his emotions, his intellect, and even his body so that he can tell the most compelling story on opening statement, ask the most captivating questions on direct examination, wrestle the most hostile witnesses to the ground on cross-examination, and make the most persuasive case in closing argument, all at the same time he is parrying the thrusts of his opponent, responding to the inquiries of the judge, and following the rules of evidence and procedure. Even for those experienced in courtroom speaking, such speaking is challenging. For the young lawyer—even one trained throughout law school and apprenticeship—the prospect of such speaking is threatening. How much more challenging and threatening was it for Gandhi, wholly unprepared as he was by personality, training, and experience?
Gandhi’s new work would keep him far from the courtroom. He set up an office in Rajkot where he was able to earn enough on which to live (about 300 rupees a month) by drafting applications and petitions. This work, at the lower echelons of practice, was made possible through Lakshmidas, who at the time was a member of a two-man vakil firm. Lakshmidas’ partner (apparently the dominant of the two) gave Gandhi his overflow applications and petitions. The significant cases the partner kept; to Gandhi he gave the work of assisting his poorest clients. Even this work, however, proved problematic for Gandhi, for he was expected to pay commissions for these cases. He had rebelled at this practice in Bombay because it smelled of corruption.28 Now, however, he relented so as not to give offense to his brother’s partner, who apparently was gracious in agreeing to help Gandhi. Gandhi also undoubtedly wanted to help provide Lakshmidas with income inasmuch as Lakshmidas and Gandhi shared any income Gandhi generated through the partner’s referrals. In this instance, then, Gandhi’s feelings of loyalty to his brother and his appreciation for his brother’s partner worked together to create a lapse in Gandhi’s ethical standards. He was off the path.
So in 1893, Gandhi, a London-educated barrister, found himself stuck in the backwaters of Rajkot, performing low-level legal work and doing so in a fashion he considered morally repugnant. Indeed, he soon learned that petty politics, corruption, and backroom deals were the order of the day there and throughout the region. Gandhi’s introduction to the political facts of life in Kathiawad was made possible by Lakshmidas, an individual who appears to have been possessed of a conscience less demanding than that of his younger brother. Lakshmidas had been the secretary to, and the advisor of, a powerful figure in neighboring Porbandar. During the course of this employment, Lakshmidas ran afoul of the authorities. Gandhi, in his memoirs, is not precise in his description of this trouble, but he is quite clear on the point that Lakshmidas expected his brother to bail him out of it. The political agent in charge of the area at that time was an officer whose acquaintance Gandhi had made in London. It was Lakshmidas’ idea that Gandhi ought to go to him and, playing on the friendship, seek to put the matter to rest.29
Gandhi was opposed to this plan. It offended his sense of procedure and right order. But his reluctance was overcome by the importuning of his brother, who argued that decisions in Kathiawad were made only on the basis of influence and that Gandhi owed him a fraternal duty to intercede. Reluctantly, Gandhi agreed to see the agent, knowing in advance that he “was compromising [his] self-respect.”30
His worst fears materialized. On seeing the agent, Gandhi sensed immediately that the agent knew Gandhi was there to improperly influence him and that he was offended by this. Before Gandhi could even finish stating his case, the agent exploded: “Your brother is an intriguer. I want to hear nothing more from you. I have no time. If your brother has anything to say, let him apply through the proper channel.”31 With that, the agent had the protesting Gandhi physically removed from his office. Gandhi, who knew he was wrong to be there in the first instance, immediately, and perhaps unconsciously, converted his embarrassment at having done something improper into righteous indignation at a perceived personal insult. Perhaps this was Gandhi’s way of pulling a curtain over his embarrassment. Gandhi was so caught up in his anger at the way he was treated that he sent a note to the agent, threatening to sue him for assault—the quintessential act of a juvenile barrister too big for his britches. The agent’s reply was wholly unapologetic, telling Gandhi to sue if he wished. Nonplussed, Gandhi sought the advice of Mehta, who happened to be in the area on a case. Mehta’s reply was just what one would expect from a wiser and older hand. Transmitting his advice to Gandhi through a third party, Mehta wrote: “Such things are the common experience of many vakils and barristers. He is still fresh from England, and hot-blooded. He does not know British officers. If he would earn something and have an easy time here, let him . . . pocket the insult. He will gain nothing by proceeding against the sahib, and on the contrary will very likely ruin himself. Tell him he has yet to know life.”32 Gandhi took Mehta’s advice, despite its being “bitter as poison” to him.33 “Never again shall I place myself in such a false position, never again shall I exploit friendship in this way,” Gandhi pledged to himself.34 It was a pledge he was to honor for a lifetime.
A SOUTH AFRICAN OFFER
Gandhi had no hope of reconciling with the agent. As a result, he believed this experience destroyed any chance of establishing a Rajkot practice, for it was in the agent’s court that Gandhi would have made the lion’s share of his appearances. Because Gandhi’s practice depended on fees, he and his brother recognized that Gandhi needed employment that did not rely for its success on being in a courtroom run by a hostile judge. Salaried employment as a government minister or as a judge, for example, would offer Gandhi an opportunity to escape the consequences of his disastrous encounter with the agent, but jobs such as these could not be had simply for the asking. Obtaining such positions required political intrigue, intrigue in which Gandhi now steadfastly refused to engage. His refusal exacted a price. Gandhi speaks in his memoirs of representing some clients in an effort to have their excessive land rent moderated. He failed at this and expresses dissatisfaction that the decision was based simply on the discretion of the authorities—the exercise of which he apparently was unwilling to influence in the usual Kathiawad way—and not upon a rule or regulation.
Gandhi’s practice in Rajkot was earning him a modest living. But this was not the life of the successful barrister he and his family had envisioned. Indeed, everything about this work was wrong. It was routine, he had to pay commissions to get it, it did not come to him by virtue of his own reputation, and it took place in a legal and political world overflowing with rank corruption.
Lakshmidas was not blind to his brother’s difficulties and to the ill effect they were having on his own fortunes. He apparently made it his task to contact his friends and business acquaintances in an effort to find a way out for Mohandas. Not knowing the momentous chain of events its offer would put in motion, a Porbandar business with ties to South Africa answered Lakshmidas’ call. Gandhi recalls Dada Abdulla and Company’s letter to his brother as stating:
We have business in South Africa. Ours is a big firm, and we have a big case there in the Court, our claim being £40,000. It has been going on for a long time. We have engaged the services of the best vakils
