GANDHI REMAINED A COMMITTED VEGETARIAN – BY CHOICE – ALL HIS LIFE
This was the foundation on which everything else was built. Gandhi came from a vegetarian Gujarati family and never ate meat in his life, except for a brief period as a schoolboy, when he did so at the urging of his elder brother’s friend who convinced him that the English were able to rule over Indians because they were meat-eaters. Gandhi records in his autobiography that he must have had half a dozen secret “meat-fests” over a period of one year.
But the fact that he was lying to his parents gnawed at his heart. “In their [his parents’] lifetime, therefore, meateating must be out of the question. When they are no more and I have found my freedom, I will eat meat openly, but until that moment arrives I will abstain.” But he never ate meat again. Before leaving for England to study law in 1888, he vowed to his mother that he would not touch meat or liquor. He kept his word, though vegetarian food was hard to come by and he was always hungry.
He eventually found a vegetarian restaurant on Farringdon Street (“the sight of it filled me with the same joy that a child feels on getting a thing after its own heart”), which also stocked a book that influenced him deeply: English writer Henry Stephens Salt’s Plea for Vegetarianism. Gandhi ate his first hearty meal since his arrival in England there, and followed it up by reading Salt’s book from cover to cover. After that, says Gandhi, he became a vegetarian by choice (as opposed to being vegetarian because of family tradition).
He joined the Vegetarian Society and made English friends who were part of the Society. For a while he had a London roommate, Josaiah Oldfield, a barrister, who was an active member of the Society. Later, when he was in South Africa, he met Henry Polak, a British-born Jew, at the Alexandra Tea Room, the only vegetarian restaurant in Johannesburg. Polak ended up becoming one of his closest friends. But he also lost friends – an English family in South Africa asked him to stop visiting them, because their son was beginning to refuse eating meat.
Gandhi firmly believed that a meat diet was not good for health, because meat brought with it the “defects of the animals from which it is derived.” But more importantly, his vegetarianism had deep spiritual and philosophical underpinnings. It was part of his commitment to ahimsa, the cornerstone of his politics. Eating meat meant doing violence to animals, who, he believed, had spirits and souls. Vegetarianism was also a crucial part of brahmacharya (see box), which meant exercising selfrestraint, in order to control the senses.