A city that nurtured a young Mahatma
quickly and started organising the Vegetarian Society and meeting important public figures such as Charles Bradlaugh [a British politician]. He even got himself elected as a secretary to the Vegetarian Society and was able to correspond with the eminent public figures of his time.”
It was Gandhi’s engagement with the Vegetarian Society that opened the doors to British society to which few Indian students had access. “There were anarchists, socialists and of course, devout Christians among them. They took Mohandas into their fold. He learned to conduct business of meetings, take notes, draft petitions. He dreaded public speaking but they were patient with him. His ideas of health were developed here. Vegetarians also gave him confidence in his own religious beliefs. The promise he had made his mother of not eating meat or drinking alcohol was very much in tune with his British friends,” said House of Lords member Meghnad Desai.
Gandhi and his thoughts were often invoked by British politicians of an earlier generation. Among them was the iconic Labour politician Tony Benn (1925-2014), who shook hands with Gandhi as a boy during his 1931 visit (Benn’s father was the secretary of state for India). Benn remarked on Jawaharlal Nehru’s death in 1964: “It is sometimes said that Britain liberated India. In fact the reverse is the truth. Gandhi and Nehru liberated us. By winning their freedom, they freed us from the ignorance and prejudice that lay behind the myth of Britain’s imperial destiny.”
But in recent years, there are allegations that Gandhi is used for political purposes in the UK. When Cameron unveiled the statue in 2015 in the company of the late Arun Jaitley and Amitabh Bachchan, some saw it as a way to woo the increasingly important 1.5 million-strong Indian community’s vote ahead of that year’s general election.
RECALL VALUE
Gandhi is widely known as a global figure in the UK, but not much is known beyond the basics. Farrukh Dhondy, writer and playwright, said: “The notional average Briton, the proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus, thinks of the Mahatma as an icon. He occupies the space in his or her consciousness that is occupied by Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, possibly the Dalai Lama, and even Abraham Lincoln. Most of the bottom deck of the said omnibus would probably not be able to tell whether Gandhi came before or after Revd. King or the others, but they all stand out as models of how to achieve political ends beneficial to humankind or to their particular constituencies and messiahs of ethical leadership. Very few, if any, even on the top deck of our omnibus, will have read My Experiments With Truth and won’t in any way associate Mohandas with the struggle within himself — the path to his convictions and the confessions of his journey”.
Dhondy makes the important point that many in British universities study Gandhi’s life, political manoeuvres, global achievements, self-confessed failures, and of his time in London, but such historical analyses, ironically, are used as a template for the influence of British thought on the dissolution of the British Empire.
Sunder Katwala, director of the think tank, British Future, agrees that little is known about Gandhi in the country. “No other figure of India’s march to nationhood, including Nehru, would have the recognition of Gandhi. Nor would any other figure from any other independence cause. Yet little is known of Gandhi. His iconic image is claimed for many causes. An image of integrity, to contrast with the politicians of our time; an image of simplicity, perhaps now to be seized by environmentalists; an image of activism. The history of the Empire, India and de-colonisation remains too rare in our schools.”