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and a leading theosophical theorist of her time, whose speeches emphasized brotherhood, tolerance, and the spiritual nature of people.³⁷ The talk Besant delivered the night Gandhi was in the audience defended theosophy against its critics, causing Gandhi to later write: “The words she uttered . . . as she rose to answer the charge of inconsistency have never faded from my memory. She said as she wound up her great speech that she would be quite satisfied to have the epitaph written on her tomb that she had lived for truth and she died for truth.”³⁸ Gandhi made it a point to read Blavatsky’s The Key to Theosophy. The effect of this reading was to stimulate in him “the desire to read books on Hinduism” and to disabuse him “of the notion fostered by the missionaries that Hinduism was rife with superstition.”³⁹

      Despite this interest, Gandhi felt that he did not have sufficient time to continue his religious explorations while examinations were looming. Thus, it appears that the period of Gandhi’s most intense involvement with theosophy came to an end sometime before December 15, 1890. And when his examinations concluded on the 20th of December 1890, it was not theosophy that reclaimed his attention, but vegetarianism.

      Gandhi’s initial interest in vegetarianism resulted from a blend of pragmatism and principle. To secure her blessing for the trip, he had promised his mother he would not touch meat. Keeping this pledge caused him to endure a fairly lengthy trial, stretching from the time he boarded the SS Clyde in early September to late October 1888, during which time he ate meals that were meatless but nutritionally inadequate for this eighteen-year-old man-child. On the Clyde, an English fellow passenger importuned him to eat meat, claiming that it was “so cold in England that one cannot possibly live there without meat.”⁴⁰ Gandhi politely turned away the advice, saying that if what the passenger was saying were true, he would simply pack up his bags and return to India before violating his vow. Gandhi’s fidelity to his pledge (as well as his fear of having to speak English) resulted for some days in his eating spartan meals in his cabin, meals consisting of nothing more than sweets and fruits brought from home, before other arrangements could be made. After finding his initial lodging in England at the Victoria Hotel, Gandhi apparently had little luck there, reporting that he paid the princely sum of £3 for his short stay and got very little to eat for it. He was forced to continue eating from his store of Indian sweets and fruits. Even after Gandhi left the hotel and secured private, less expensive rooms, he found that all the meatless dishes put in front of him were “tasteless and insipid.” This, plus a serious case of homesickness, left this young man lying in bed at night, wondering whether he had erred in leaving home, pining over the loss of his mother’s affections, and unable to check the rivers of tears flowing down his cheeks.

      Gandhi had come to England with several letters of introduction, including one addressed to Dr. Pranjivan Mehta, a medical doctor as well as a barrister-in-training himself, who hailed from near Gandhi’s hometown. Mehta quickly recognized Gandhi’s need for some social context, for he convinced him to move and take on a roommate, all in preparation for eventually taking quarters with an English family. Mehta’s argument was that Gandhi, after all, had come to England not so much to get an education as to gain “experience in English life and customs,” something life with a family would provide. Gandhi soon thereafter moved in with Dalpatram Shukla, another law student from Gandhi’s region. It became Shukla’s job to train the young Gandhi in English ways—in the course of which he could not get Gandhi to eat meat. Despite his profound dislike for the landlady’s nonmeat dishes, Gandhi resisted sampling her meat dishes. Seeing Gandhi’s resistance, Shukla lost his temper and exploded: “Had you been my own brother, I would have sent you packing. What is the value of a vow made before an illiterate mother, and in ignorance of the conditions here?”⁴¹ Gandhi, however, remained steadfast—and hungry. After a month of training in English ways, save meat eating, Mehta and Shukla found a family in West Kensington willing to board Gandhi. Again, he found the meals insipid and complains in his autobiography that he continued to “practically . . . starve.”⁴² But eventually the day came when his landlady informed him that there were vegetarian restaurants in London. Gandhi seized on this information and found, to his great happiness, the Central Restaurant off London’s Farringdon Street. He related later that the very sight of the restaurant filled him with joy.

      What Gandhi found for his soul, however, was to become even more important than that evening’s meal. On his way in to the Central he noticed a window display featuring Henry Salt’s Plea for Vegetarianism. He devoured not only a hearty meal but Salt’s book, which, he later states, turned his life around:

      From the date of reading this book, I may claim to have become a vegetarian by choice. . . . I had all along abstained from meat in the interest of truth and of the vow I had taken, but had wished at the same time that every Indian should be a meat-eater, and had looked forward to being one myself someday, and to enlisting others in the cause. The choice was now made in favour of vegetarianism, the spread of which henceforward became my mission.⁴³

      His “appetite for dietetic studies” whetted by Salt, Gandhi “went in for all books available on vegetarianism.”⁴⁴ Eventually Gandhi found new rooms (he was constantly moving during his London student days) in order that he might economize by cooking for himself. By mid-1890 Gandhi was able to report that he “enjoyed the best of health and had to work very hard if not the hardest as there were only five months left for the final examination.”⁴⁵ During this pre-exam period Gandhi was invited by Josiah Oldfield, a leading vegetarian whose acquaintance Gandhi had made earlier, to a vegetarian conference to be held in September 1890. As a result of his participation in this conference, Gandhi was almost immediately invited to become a member of the Executive Committee of the London Vegetarian Society (LVS), an invitation he accepted. With exams looming, however, Gandhi appears not to have taken much of a role on the committee.⁴⁶

      After the completion of his final examinations, by contrast, Gandhi was a beehive of vegetarian activity. Giving a preview of the prodigious output of writing for which he would later become known, Gandhi produced a series of articles for The Vegetarian, the weekly journal of the LVS. First he wrote a series of six essays on the practice of vegetarianism in India. This series was followed by a series of three articles on the festivals of India. Gandhi then delivered a speech titled “The Foods of India” before the LVS and had it printed thereafter in the Vegetarian Messenger, the society’s Manchester voice. Gandhi also gave a two-part interview to The Vegetarian. In addition, he found time to get embroiled in the inner politics of the LVS, to start up a local vegetarian club with his friend and eventual roommate Josiah Oldfield, and to make appearances in a number of forums on behalf of vegetarianism.

      This intense round of activity closed out Gandhi’s time as a student in London. In the months since his bar finals, while his fellow students were learning to draft conveyances and pleadings in chambers, Gandhi’s involvement with the vegetarian movement was schooling him in ways of “organizing and conducting institutions.”⁴⁷

      He also was learning something about himself with no little import for a young barrister’s future, a lesson with ominous implications for the career that his family had chosen for him.

      He was terrified, sometimes to the point of paralysis, of speaking in public.

      TWO

      The Barrister Who Couldn’t Speak

      No client would be fool enough to engage me.

      GANDHI

      FOR SOMEONE WHO CLAIMED TO be in love with London, Gandhi’s behavior might easily be counted as strange. He received his call to the bar on June 10, was sworn in before the High Court on June 11, and on June 12 he was on a boat for India. Perhaps this was Gandhi the responsible son, one who knew that every extra day in London was an added burden on the family finances. Indeed, this might have been a Gandhi who knew that such expenses were doubly problematic: not only was he exhausting his family’s capital, but he had no prospects of replenishing the family coffers any time soon.

      UNPREPARED TO PRACTICE

      Gandhi’s family had sent its most promising son to England to obtain the elevated status of barrister and the lifestyle that accompanied it. Those who had sacrificed to put Gandhi through his legal training in

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