What must it really have been like for Gandhi, coming to London in the Victorian era?
Here's some of what I've found out:
Gandhi (front right) with members of the London Vegetarian Society in 1891
In London, the young Gandhi-a slender Indian with protruding ears and terrible shyness-felt desperately isolated. His command of English, despite a high-school education that emphasized the language, was weak and his command of European custom weaker, and on the boat to Southampton he ate in his cabin to avoid embarrassment. In England, fortunately, family friends took him under their wing and enabled him to get settled in a boarding-house without incident. But problems persisted-notably the difficulty of diet. Vegetarian food was hard to come by in Victorian London, and many Indians simply abandoned the Hindu strictures on eating meat. But Gandhi had promised his mother to keep his religious customs, and he was a man who kept promises, so he subsisted on oatmeal porridge and other dishes until he found a suitable restaurant-and in it, a work entitled A Plea for Vegetarianism that converted him from being a vegetarian by birth to a vegetarian by conviction, a position he was to maintain for his entire life.
In other respects, however, Gandhi made a conscious attempt to westernize himself, taking lessons in French, dancing, elocution and the violin. Although he soon abandoned these, it was during this period that he also began dressing in the English fashion, a habit that he was to keep up for many years.
At the same time, his philosophical and religious education began in earnest, as he became friends with a number of Christians, reading the Bible for the first time. While he never accepted the Christian idea of sin and redemption, and tended toward a universalist idea of religion rather than Christian particularism, Gandhi was deeply influenced by the New Testament, particularly Christ's Sermon on the Mount, with its celebration of humility and "the poor in spirit."
It was in England as well, ironically enough, that Gandhi first seriously read the Bhagavad-Gita, one of the great sacred works of his own Hindu tradition. He discovered the work through some friends involved in theosophy, a faddish mélange of superstition and Eastern then fashionable in Victorian society, and he was soon enthralled by its poetry and message. Written between the fifth and second centuries B.C., the Bhagavad-Gita consists of a dialogue between Arjuna, a legendary Indian general, and the hero Krishna, whom Hindus worship as a god. There have been many interpretations of the work over the centuries, but Gandhi found in it the idea of suppressing appetite, attachments, and desire itself in the pursuit of a larger good-an idea that was to guide his later career.
Gandhi studied hard to pass the bar-harder, a number of biographers have argued, than most English students of the time-and was enrolled as a barrister (an English word for lawyer) on June 11 of 1891, after less than three years in England.
http://www.sparknotes.com/biography/gandhi/section2.rhtml
http://www.ivu.org/congress/2006/fifteenth.html
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace