Gandhi & Churchill (14 page)

But London also had another, darker side when Gandhi arrived there. Even as he was settling into the Victoria Hotel on October 1, 1888, all England was talking about the series of grisly murders in the slums of Whitechapel. The victims were all women and all prostitutes. The first had occurred on August 31; the second on September 8; and the third and fourth on September 30, just the day after Gandhi arrived.
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That same afternoon the police received a note from the killer, signed “Jack the Ripper.”

The Ripper murders would terrorize the city until mid-November. They also exposed to the British public the violence and squalor of an underclass London that was located only a few short minutes from wealthy homes like that of the Churchills in Grosvenor Square. In 1883 George Sims had published the first study of London slum housing, entitled
How the Poor Live
. Two years later W. T. Stead wrote his sensational exposé of child prostitution in London, “The Maiden Tribute of Babylon.” A new era of social consciousness was under way. The Ripper murders (in November they ceased as mysteriously as they had begun and were never solved) would highlight the ugly reality lurking behind the confident facade of Western-style progress, “a dark continent that is within easy walking distance of the General Post Office.”
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Gandhi’s diary never mentions the murders, nor any of the famous sights of London that impressed every other visitor, like Big Ben and the British Museum. In fact, from the day of his arrival he seems to have virtually barricaded himself first in his hotel room, then in a boardinghouse in Baron’s Court Road in West Kensington owned by an Anglo-Indian lady. He read the newspapers every day, including the
Daily Telegraph
and the
Pall Mall Gazette
. He met with several people from his home province living in London, including other Indians studying with him at the Inns of Court. (By 1907 Indians at the Inns of Court numbered more than three hundred.)
¹⁵

But Gandhi found himself a fish out of water in London, isolated and homesick. “I would think continually of my home and country,” he recalled forty years later. “At night the tears would stream down my cheeks.” Speaking English was a constant battle: he bought a copy of
The Standard Elocutionist
by renowned speech therapist Alexander Melville Bell to help him practice but without much success.
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He also had his struggles with Western dress. The ties, stiff collars, hard shoes, top hats, and thick wool suits (in a moment of extravagance Gandhi even bought an evening suit from a shop in Bond Street) that he needed to appear respectable, and to protect himself against the unfamiliar cold and damp of a London autumn, all grated on his nerves, not to mention on his pocketbook.
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Above all, he struggled with the issue of food. Life as an Inner Temple student required attending six dinners “in Hall” every term. Somewhat surprisingly for a boy who never enjoyed books, Gandhi threw himself into his legal studies with gusto. He made his diligent way through a shelf of textbooks on common and Roman law, civil and criminal procedure, and even read William Douglas Edwards’s daunting 508-page
The Law of Property in Land
“with interest.”

But the term dinners were a torment to him. Remembering his vow to his mother, Gandhi stuck to a meatless diet, but the only vegetables English cooks prepared were, then as now, “tasteless and insipid.”
¹⁷
The special vegetarian meals he asked for tasted like cardboard, while the beef or mutton on other people’s plates, and the decanters of claret and port on the table, reminded him that others were enjoying themselves even as he tried to keep his vow.

This was the temptation that the other members of his caste, and his mother, had feared. For what was at stake was not just a personal vow or even religious law. At stake was a fundamental part of Gandhi’s identity as a Hindu.

“Meat is indeed the best kind of food,” the
Vedas
had said.
¹⁸
In early India meat had been the food of the gods, literally so in the Vedic ritual sacrifices; meat was naturally also the food of kings and the ruling class. The Vedic social pecking order was resolutely and proudly carnivorous. “The mongoose eats mice,” runs a passage in the
Mahabharata,
“just as the cat eats the mongoose; the dog devours the cat, O king, and wild beasts eat the dog. Man eats them all,” the passage adds, “see
dharma
for what it is! Everything that moves and is still is food for life.”
¹⁹

The Brahminic cultural order of later Hinduism reversed every Vedic value. Glory, worldly wealth, power attained at the pain of others, all became “bad” or at least spiritually empty, and self-renunciation became “good.” Likewise, meat became “bad,” fit only for the lower castes and untouchables, while a purely vegetarian diet symbolized spiritual purity, just like other acts of renunciation and self-denial. For an Indian like Gandhi, vegetarianism was more than just a matter of diet. It upheld spiritual values that had ingrained themselves in Hindu culture and its social order. The rituals of vegetarianism had permeated his father’s household and Gandhi’s own sense of self-worth.

To yield on this issue, Gandhi had come to feel, would be to yield on everything. There would be nothing left, either of his culture or himself. “Daily I would pray for God’s protection,” he remembered later, “and get it.”
²⁰
He steered clear of the Englishman’s diet. Once again Gandhi’s willpower had prevailed.

Still, the problem remained: how to stay on a meatless regimen without dying of boredom. It was his kindly landlady who solved his difficulty. Three weeks after he moved in, she told him about a vegetarian restaurant she knew on High Holborn Street. On the way there Gandhi passed another vegetarian café, called the Central, off Farrington Street and not far from the Inner Temple. “The sight filled me with joy,” Gandhi would write in his autobiography, and it would change his life.

In the front window was a stack of pamphlets, entitled
A Plea for Vegetarianism,
by Dr. Henry Salt. Gandhi bought a copy for a shilling and read it with his meal. For the first time he realized there was a “modern” Western philosophical case for not eating flesh of any kind, as well as the traditional Hindu one. Later, Gandhi saw Dr. Salt at high tea at the Central. “My name is Gandhi,” he said, extending his hand to the tall, bearded middle-aged author. “You have of course never heard of it.” The two remained friends until Salt’s death in 1939.

Henry Salt was unlike any Englishman Gandhi had ever met. He had been born in India, the son of an army colonel who returned to England five years before the Great Mutiny when Henry was an infant. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, Salt fit the conventional mold of Victorian middle-class life in everything except his growing disgust with meat. By 1884 he moved to Surrey to cultivate an enormous vegetable garden and author a growing pile of pamphlets and books and poems, many of them centering on an issue that would come to be called animal rights.

“All practices which inflict unnecessary pain on sentient beings,” Salt wrote, “are…incompatible with the higher instincts of humanity,” including killing animals for food or sport or scientific research. (Salt was also a founder of the anti–fox-hunting Humanitarian League and very active in the Anti-Vivisection Society.)
²¹
In short, the basis of Salt’s vegetarianism was not religious but secular and liberal. It was part of the new social consciousness in Britain and carried over from animal rights to opposition to the death penalty, corporal punishment, and industrialization’s despoiling of the countryside—Salt’s favorite book was Henry David Thoreau’s
Walden
.
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Salt’s wide circle of friends also included such unconventional figures as George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the sexologist Havelock Ellis, and the Catholic journalist G. K. Chesterton—the latter a figure whose work would have a decisive impact on Gandhi later on.

“From the date of reading”
A Plea for Vegetarianism,
Gandhi tells us, “I may claim to have become a vegetarian by choice.” It also marked his first acquaintance with Late Victorian London’s emerging counterculture. These counterculture gurus wore frock coats and top hats, not beads and sandals, while the ladies wore crinoline dresses. They read Shelley and John Ruskin, not Kerouac and Marcuse. But they were no less challenging to the official culture around them.

The official London of aristocrats like the Churchills and their friends, Henry James and John Singer Sargent, was resolutely cosmopolitan, materialistic, and self-consciously modern. It endorsed all forms of progress as long as they had firm foundations in historical tradition. That sentiment was made visible by the new Houses of Parliament, which had been designed in a neo-Gothic style in order to underline modern self-government’s continuity with its medieval past.

Therefore the official culture’s opponents decided they would be esoteric, spiritual, and resolutely antimodern. Although their politics tilted sharply to the left, in their minds the transformation of politics was less important than the transformation of the inner self. They saw themselves as standard-bearers of a new dawn of spiritual and moral values for Western man and a new beginning for society. Their utopian vision of the future was summed up by the title of one of their magazines:
The New Age.

Gandhi became friends with many of these New Age figures through Salt’s Vegetarian Society. They included Josiah Oldfield, leader of the Esoteric Christian Union, who taught Gandhi the unity of all religions from Jesus and Buddha to Muhammad, and explained that the true realm of religion is the mind and heart of the individual.
²³

He met T. R. Allinson, a keen advocate of birth control as well as vegetarianism, whose writings on health and hygiene had a profound impact on Gandhi. He met Edward Carpenter, author of
Civilization: Its Cause and Cure,
a devastating moral critique of the modern industrial West. He met J. B. Paton, whose views on modern society were summed up in his
Back to the Land
. And finally he met Annie Besant, the estranged wife of an Anglican clergyman and a key figure in the Anti-Vivisection Society as well as the Social Democratic Federation.

Besant’s life and Gandhi’s would become strongly intertwined over the years, both in England and in India. She was in many ways a powerful role model (although later a bitter rival) for Gandhi. In fact, a year earlier in 1887 she had organized what could be called the first great display of the power of mass civil disobedience: a huge demonstration in Trafalgar Square against British rule in Ireland. It took fifteen hundred policemen and two hundred Life Guards to disperse a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands. Three people were killed and hundreds more thrown into prison, including Besant herself. Some protesters even chained themselves to iron railings before being dragged away to jail. Both Henry Salt and Edward Carpenter had been there that day, later remembered as “Bloody Sunday.” Another supporter had been Randolph Churchill’s old nemesis, Charles Bradlaugh, who was a political mentor to many of Gandhi’s New Age friends.

A young man from Kathiawar who found official London so strange and cold was exhilarated to be part of this marginal but active and intellectually alert elite. Gandhi enthusiastically joined the Vegetarian Society of London, and he read and eventually wrote articles for its house organ,
The Vegetarian.
He went to several meetings of the Esoteric Christian Union; later in South Africa he would list himself as a member of the Union and sell its pamphlets door to door. He attended Bradlaugh’s funeral at Woking cemetery, “as I believe every Indian in London did.”
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Gandhi’s introduction to London’s New Age counterculture was only just starting. At the end of 1889 two young Englishmen stopped at his table at the Central Café. They were reading the
Bhagavad Gita,
they explained, and had some questions about it. Since Gandhi was Indian, they were hoping he would discuss it with them.

“I felt ashamed,” Gandhi remembered in his autobiography, “as I had read the divine poem neither in Sanskrit or in Gujarati,” even though it had been his father’s favorite book before he died. So he agreed to join their little reading group and learned that they were members of another New Age group called the Theosophical Society. (Annie Besant had recently also become a member.) They brought him to one of their meetings, where Gandhi met the woman who, more than any other single person, changed his view of India and its place in the world’s future.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had been born in the Ukraine, the daughter of an army officer of German descent and wife of a Russian civil servant. Her passion, however, was for all forms of religious experience and the occult. That passion led her to travel extensively through Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and India. In 1856 she had even tried to enter the forbidden Buddhist kingdom of Tibet to meet the Dalai Lama. Madame Blavatsky, as she was known, became a believer in reincarnation and the supernatural: she even claimed it was a guardian spirit who warned her to leave India just before the Mutiny.
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In 1875 she founded the Theosophical Society in New York City to proclaim the essential unity of all the world’s religions, then moved to Madras in 1882 and to London five years later. Short and squat, a chain smoker with bulging penetrating eyes and dramatic gestures, Madame Blavatsky drew large crowds to her lectures and occult séances. Official London found her absurd, even a charlatan. One London wit called her “the low clown of the world to come.” But London’s New Age counterculture was drawn to her idea that humanity was on the brink of a great spiritual breakthrough.