Gandhi in London

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Mahatma Gandhi, educated in the new English-language schools of Kathiawar, came to believe wholeheartedly that Indians should become like Englishmen. At 18, he went to the heart of the Empire for his professional training, and thus began a lifelong relationship with London.

This book provides a fully documented study of each of Gandhi's visits to London, which extended from 1888 to 1931, a period of 43 years. Based on fresh research in the archives of London, Oxford, New Delhi, and Ahmedabad, it provides a totally new portrait of his activities and associates in the capital, from his student days to his final triumph as a delegate to the Round Table Conference in 1931. Full analyses are also made of three lesser- known visits in 1906, 1909 and 1914, which shed light on the progress of his work in South Africa.

The political and cultural milieu of Gandhi's London is fully described, yielding new perspective on his political and philosophical development. His initial fascination with England became articulated in a political strategy based on alliances with Imperialists. Later, stimulated in part by his close study of the moral critics of Western civilization, he renounced London and all she stood for in his famous manifesto, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule.

A revision of this now-standard study of Mahatma Gandhi's life and work in London on all five occasions from 1888 to 1931, updated to incorporate scholarly publications and the author's own research since 1976. More useful than ever as a detailed guide to his life and work in the capital of the Empire. An important contribution to Gandhi biography and the history of the Indian independence movement.

JAMES D. HUNT (1931-2011) was emeritus professor in humanities and philosophy at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S.A. He was author of several authoritative books on Gandhi, Satyagraha, civil rights and peace.

It was a happy idea to find out all that can be known about Gandhi during his five visits to London-where he stayed, whom he met, what he said, did, and thought, and how he felt. Gandhi had loved London at first sight. "I thought I could pass a lifetime in that room," he wrote of his room in the Victoria Hotel where he spent his first London night on September 29, 1888. A few months later, a fellow Indian who met him in Piccadilly Circus came away with this impression: "a nut, a masher, a blood-a student more interested in fashion and frivolities than in his studies."¹ Young Gandhi soon gave up these trivial interests, but the impact of British ways and ideas on his mind (which had started during his school days in Rajkot) continued to deepen until racist laws in South Africa and political rebuffs in London drove him to cry halt to the Anglicization of India. He himself gave up wearing Western dress and changed his way of life in other ways, but to his dying day retained many British traits among them his masterful use of the English language and his insistence on the individual's rights to civil liberties under laws not even legislators or judges could alter.

James Hunt has discovered and assembled with exemplary precision a multitude of facts concerning Gandhi's most intensive encounters with British culture and political power, the five times he visited London. A creative as well as meticulous scholar, Hunt has outlined in this evidence patterns not previously noticed. Condensing his treatment of Gandhi's student years in London (more fully covered in Chandran D.S. Devanesen's The Making of the Mahatma), Hunt brings sharply into focus the 1906 and 1909 visits, when political pressures from South Africa as well as India converted Gandhi into a determined opponent of modern city-centered civilization.

LONDON was the center of political authority for India throughout almost all the days of Mohandas K. Gandhi. He was born at the time when British power was being newly consolidated in his home province, and he saw the departure of the British Raj only half a year before his death. He was drawn to London on five occasions, first as a student (1888-1891), three times from South Africa (1906, 1909, 1914), and lastly as a delegate to the Round Table Conference in 1931. The experience of British life and the relation- ships he formed on these occasions had important effects on his outlook. At one time he sought to be very British; later he renounced all that and became very Indian. When he first returned to India from his student days, he brought an English lifestyle to his family, but when he made his last visit to London, for high-level diplomacy, he dressed as an Indian peasant even while having tea with the King. These phenomena were manifestations of a profound encounter with Western civilization and a deep understanding of the British people, gained largely in London.

The unceasing stream of biographies and memoirs, all of which add something to our understanding of Gandhi, nonetheless have failed to give close attention to his London experience. This study attempts to use that experience to shed light on the man and his career from a new quarter. I have examined each of the visits, seeking to discover the intention, the structure and the drama of each one, while observing how Gandhi's thought and methods were modified by the changing pattern of his objectives. The study attempts to delineate the context of British life in which Gandhi operated, including the political scene and the identity of his companions and protagonists. What emerges from the study is, I think, a more comprehensive view of his political and cultural development on these occasions, clarifying the manner in which his philosophy matured.