a dancing class, hired a French tutor and an elocution teacher.
The results of that poignant little charade were as disastrous as his earlier encounter with goat’s meat. The only sound he learned to coax from his violin was a dissonant wail. His feet refused to acknowledge three-quarter time, his tongue the French language, and no amount of elocution lessons were going to free the spirit struggling to escape from under his crippling shyness. Even a visit to a brothel was a failure. Gandhi couldn’t get past the parlour.
He gave up his efforts to become an Englishman and went back to being himself. When finally he was called to the bar, Gandhi rushed back to India with undisguised relief.
His homecoming was less than triumphant. For months, he hung around the Bombay courts looking for a case to plead. The young man whose voice would one day inspire 300 million Indians proved incapable of articulating the phrases necessary to impress a single Indian magistrate.
That failure led to the first great turning point in Gandhi’s life. His frustrated family sent him to South Africa to unravel the legal problems of a distant kinsman. His trip was to have lasted a few months; he stayed over twenty years. There, in that bleak and hostile land, Gandhi found the philosophical principles that transformed his life and Indian history.
Nothing about the young Gandhi walking down a gangplank in Durban harbour in May 1893, however, indicated a vocation for asceticism or saintliness. The future prophet of poverty made his formal entry on to the soil of South Africa in a high white collar and the fashionable frock coat of a London Inner Temple barrister, his brief-case crammed with documents on the rich Indian businessman whose interests he’d come to defend.
Gandhi’s real introduction to South Africa came a week after his arrival on an overnight train ride from Durban to Pretoria. Four decades later Gandhi would still remember that trip as the most formative experience of his life. Halfway to Pretoria a white man stalked into his first-class compartment and ordered him into the baggage car. Gandhi, who held a first-class ticket, refused. At the next stop the white called a policeman and Gandhi with his luggage was unceremoniously thrown off the train in the middle of the night.
All alone, shivering in the cold because he was too shy to ask the station master for the overcoat locked in his luggage, Gandhi passed the night huddled in the unlit railroad station, pondering his first brutal confrontation with racial prejudice. Like a medieval youth during the vigil of his knighthood, Gandhi sat praying to the God of the Gita for courage and guidance. When dawn finally broke on the little station of Maritzburg, the timid, withdrawn youth was a changed person. The little lawyer had reached the most important decision of his life. Mohandas Gandhi was going to say ‘no’.
A week later, Gandhi delivered his first public speech to Pretoria’s Indians. The advocate who’d been so painfully shy in the courtrooms of Bombay had begun to find his tongue. He urged the Indians to unite to defend their interests and, as a first step, to learn how to do it in their oppressors’ English tongue. The following evening, without realizing it, Gandhi began the work that would ultimately bring India freedom by teaching English grammar to a barber, a clerk and a shopkeeper. Soon he had also won the first of the successes which would be his over the next half-century. He wrung from the railway authorities the right for well-dressed Indians to travel first- or second-class on South Africa’s railways.
Gandhi decided to stay on in South Africa when the case which had sent him there had been resolved. He became both the champion of South Africa’s Indian community and a highly successful lawyer. Loyal to the British Empire despite its racial injustice, he even led an ambulance corps in the Boer War.
Ten years after his arrival in South Africa, another long train ride provoked the second great turning point in Gandhi’s life. As he boarded the Johannesburg-Durban train one evening in 1904, an English friend passed Gandhi a book to read on the long trip, John Ruskin’s Unto This Last.
All night Gandhi sat up reading as his train rolled through the South African veldt. It was his revelation on the road to Damascus. By the time his train reached Durban the following morning, Gandhi had made an epic vow: he was going to renounce all his material possessions and live his life according to Ruskin’s ideals.
Riches, Ruskin wrote, were just a tool to secure power over men. A labourer with a spade served society as truly as a lawyer with a brief, and the life of labour, of the tiller of the soil, is the life worth living.
Gandhi’s decision was all the more remarkable because he was, at that moment, a wealthy man earning over £5000 a year from his law practice, an enormous sum in the South Africa of the time.
For two years, however, doubts had been fermenting in Gandhi’s mind. He was haunted by the Bhagavad Gita’s doctrine of renunciation of desire and attachment to material possessions as the essential stepping-stone to a spiritual awakening. He had already made experiments of his own: he had started to cut his own hair, do his laundry, clean his own toilet. He had even delivered his last child. His doubts found their confirmation in Ruskin’s pages.
Barely a week later, Gandhi settled his family and a group of friends on a hundred-acre farm near Phoenix, fourteen miles from Durban. There, on a sad, scrubby site consisting of a ruined shack, a well, some orange, mulberry and mango trees, and a horde of snakes, Gandhi’s life took on the pattern that would rule it until his death: a renunciation of material possessions and a striving to satisfy human needs in the simplest manner, coupled with a communal existence in which all labour was equally valuable and all goods were shared.
One last, painful renunciation remained, however, to be made. It was the vow of Brahmacharya, the pledge of sexual continence and it had haunted Gandhi for years.
The scar left by his father’s death, a desire to have no more children, his rising religious consciousness all drove him towards his decision. One summer evening in 1906 Gandhi solemnly announced to his wife, Kasturbai, that he had taken the vow of Brahmacharya. Begun in a joyous frenzy at the age of thirteen, the sexual life of Mohandas Gandhi had reached its conclusion at the age of 37.
To Gandhi, however, Brahmacharya meant more than just the curbing of sexual desires. It was the control of all the senses. It meant restraint in emotion, diet, and speech, the suppression of anger, violence and hate, the attainment of a desireless state close to the Gita’s ideal of non-possession. It was his definitive engagement on the ascetic’s path, the ultimate act of self-transformation. None of the vows Gandhi took in his life would force upon him such intense internal struggle as his vow of chastity. It was a struggle which, in one form or another, would be with him for the rest of his life.
It was, however, in the racial struggle he’d undertaken during his first week in South Africa that Gandhi enunciated the two doctrines which would make him world-famous: nonviolence and civil disobedience.
It was a passage from the Bible which had first set Gandhi meditating on non-violence. He had been overwhelmed by Christ’s admonition to his followers to turn the other cheek to their aggressors. The little man had already applied the doctrine himself, stoically submitting to the beatings of numerous white aggressors. The philosophy of an eye for an eye led only to a world of the blind, he reasoned. You don’t change a man’s convictions by chopping off his head or infuse his heart with a new spirit by putting a bullet through it. Violence only brutalizes the violent and embitters its victims. Gandhi sought a doctrine that would force change by the example of the good, reconcile men with the strength of God instead of dividing them by the strength of man.
The South African government furnished him an opportunity to test his still half-formulated theories in the autumn of 1906. The occasion was a law which would have forced all Indians over the age of eight to register with the government, be fingerprinted and carry special identity cards. On 11 September, before a gathering of angry Indians in the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg, Gandhi took the stand to protest against the law.
To obey it, he said, would lead to the destruction of their community. ‘There is only one course open to me,’ he declared, ‘to die but not to submit to the law.’ For the first time in his life he led a public assembly in a solemn vow before God to resist an unjust law, whatever the consequences. Gandhi did not