MAHATMA’S LONDON DAYS
In 1888, a young MK Gandhi went to London to study law. From joining the London Vegetarian Society to imbibing the value of the law, the city nurtured him, even though in later years, he confused and angered the British Empire
IIndia’s love-hate relationship with England is best symbolised by the life and times of MK Gandhi, whose engagement with London first as a student of law, then as an activist from South Africa and a freedom fighter from India has been chronicled in some detail. It is a measure of the distance that India and Britain have travelled since de-colonisation in the mid-20th century that today, Indian ministers pay tributes to Britain’s liberalism and Britons honour the man who UK’s wartime Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill derisively called a “half-naked fakir”.
Gandhi’s stay in London as a student had a big influence on him. Historians have noted his struggle with securing vegetarian food, joining the Vegetarian Society; and imbibing the value for the rule of law that laid the foundation for his later battles against segregation and discrimination.
While unveiling his statue in Parliament Square in 2015 former Prime Minister David Cameron noted, “That inspirational man worked out who he was and what he stood for right here in Britain. It was in London as a young man that Gandhi first learnt to petition, to draft letters and make speeches… in putting Gandhi in this famous square we are giving him an eternal home in our country.”
Such was London’s influence that Gandhi was to say in 1909 that “next to India, I would rather live in London than any other place in the world”.
PUBLIC HONOURS
Richard Attenborough’s film, Gandhi (1982) enhanced popular awareness, but the first British public honour came soon after Gandhi’s assassination in 1948. Gandhi’s stay in a community centre in Tower Hamlets during his last visit to London in 1931 for the Second Round Table Conference was commemorated with a blue plaque in 1954 — the first to honour an Indian. Founded in 1866, London’s blue plaques scheme, run by the charity English Heritage, celebrates the links between notable figures of the past and the buildings in which they lived and worked.
In 1986, another blue plaque was put up on a house in Hammersmith, where he lived as a law student in the 1880s.
In recognition of “one of the greatest men of his time” — as cited by English Heritage
— the London City Council decided to waive the rule to honour only those who had been dead at least 20 years.
What’s more, neither plaque bore a descriptor, as it was felt that any attempt to describe Gandhi’s achievements in the usual short phrase would be superfluous.
Several Gandhi statues have also been installed in London and elsewhere, including at Tavistock Square. A new one will be installed in Medieval Quarter, Manchester, on November 25.
COMING INTO HIS OWN
Bhikhu Parekh, member of the House of Lords and a prominent academic who was closely involved in installing Gandhi’s statue in Hull’s Museum Quarter, said, “Gandhi is relevant in today’s Britain for three reasons. First, he would prefer an open and outward looking Britain, not one that thinks only of itself. Second, he would be worried about the quality of public discourse in Britain and strongly plead for a language of inclusion and reconciliation. Third, he would expect Britain to reorganise itself from the bottom upwards and dispense with its highly centralised system. He would, of course, also say quite a bit about the importance of climate change.”
Parekh added, “Gandhi was a very young man when he came to London. Even his English was inadequate. It is striking, therefore, that he became active so 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.”