A promise to Mother, 1888
Death… or meat and wine? What a choice!
It’s the 4th of September 1888 at about 5pm, and a young man – a month shy of his 19th birthday – steps aboard the P&O steamer SS Clyde, docked in Bombay (now Mumbai), off on the biggest adventure of his life so far.
Being allowed to take this trip, and raise the money necessary, has been hard won. And not surprisingly: he already had a wife, aged 19, who had given birth to their first child, a boy, just 12 days beforehand.
The young man – let’s call him M – has already finished high school, then dropped out of college… twice. His health isn’t great: “I suffered from constant headaches and nose-bleeding, and this was supposed to be due to the hot climate,” he wrote in 1891. A family friend suggests he should go and study law in the cold climate of England: the big step he was now taking, driven by “the fire that was burning within me”, which he admits is ambition. M’s mother is not impressed, and eventually only agrees to let him go if he promises not to eat meat – a crucial part of their Hindu faith – or to drink alcohol.
He would later write of his departure:
When I had the money and the requisite permission, I said to myself, “How am I to persuade myself to separate from all that is dear and near to me?” In India we fight shy of separation. Even when I had to go for a few days my mother would weep. How, then, was I to witness, without being affected, the heart-rending scene?… As the day of leave-taking drew near I nearly broke down. But I was wise enough not to say this, even to my closest friends. I knew that my health was failing. Sleeping, waking, drinking, eating, walking, running, reading, I was dreaming and thinking of England and what I would do on that momentous day. At last the day came. On the one hand, my mother was hiding her eyes, full of tears, in her hands, but the sobbing was clearly heard. On the other, I was placed among a circle of some fifty friends. “If I wept they would think me too weak; perhaps they would not allow me to go to England,” soliloquized I; therefore I did not weep, even though my heart was breaking.
He describes an emotional departure from his wife, too – she “had begun sobbing long before. I went to her and stood like a dumb statue for a moment. I kissed her, and she said, ‘Don’t go’.”
Others were against the journey too. In an 1891 magazine interview, he recalls a meeting with the furious elders of his caste, the Modh Bania:
[The head says:] “We were your father’s friends, and therefore we feel for you; as heads of the caste you know our power. We are positively informed that you will have to eat flesh and drink wine in England; moreover, you have to cross the waters; all this you must know is against our caste rules. Therefore we command you to reconsider your decision, or else the heaviest punishment will be meted out to you. What have you to say to this?”
I replied in the following words: “I thank you for your warnings. I am sorry that I cannot alter my decision. What I have heard about England is quite different from what you say; one need not take meat and wine there. As for crossing the waters, if our brethren can go as far as Aden, why could not I go to England? I am deeply convinced that malice is at the root of all these objections.”
And despite the banishment he is threatened with, he remains resolute. It has taken five months to win his family round and raise the money, “a time of terrible anxiety and torture”.
In that same interview, he discusses the dietary question in particular:
I was overwhelmed with gratuitous advice. Well-meaning yet ignorant friends thrust their opinions into unwilling ears. The majority of them said I could not do without meat in the cold climate. I would catch consumption. Mr. Z went to England and caught it on account of his foolhardiness. Others said I might do without flesh but without wine I could not move. I would be numbed with cold. One went so far as to advise me to take eight bottles of whisky, for I should want them after leaving Aden. Another wanted me to smoke, for his friend was obliged to smoke in England. Even medical men, those who had been to England, told the same tale. But as I wanted to come at any price, I replied that I would try my best to avoid all these things, but if they were found to be absolutely necessary I did not know what I should do. I may here mention that my aversion to meat was not so strong then as it is now. I was even betrayed into taking meat about six or seven times at the period when I allowed my friends to think for me. But in the steamer my ideas began to change. I thought I should not take meat on any account. My mother before consenting to my departure exacted a promise from me not to take meat. So I was bound not to take it, if only for the sake of the promise. The fellowpassengers in the steamer began to advise us (the friend who was with me and myself) to try it.
They said I would require it after leaving Aden. When this turned out untrue, I was to require it after crossing the Red Sea. And on this proving false, a fellow-passenger said, “The weather has not been severe, but in the Bay of Biscay you will have to choose between death, and meat and wine.” That crisis too passed away safely. In London, too, I had to hear such remonstrances. For months I did not come across any vegetarian. I passed many anxious days arguing with a friend about the sufficiency of the vegetable diet… At last I sealed his tongue by telling him I would sooner die than break the promise to my mother…
Some 30 years later, he looked back on this time while writing an autobiography, and again recalled his promise to his mother and the challenges of a meat-free diet (and English culture in general) at the time:
I would continually think of my home and country. My mother’s love always haunted me. At night the tears would stream down my cheeks, and home memories of all sorts made sleep out of the question. It was impossible to share my misery with anyone. And even if I could have done so, where was the use? I knew of nothing that would soothe me. Everything was strange—the people, their ways, and even their dwellings. I was a complete novice in the matter of English etiquette and continually had to be on my guard. There was the additional inconvenience of the vegetarian vow. Even the dishes that I could eat were tasteless and insipid.1 I thus found myself between Scylla and Charybdis. England I could not bear, but to return to India was not to be thought of. Now that I had come, I must finish the three years, said the inner voice.
He goes on…
My food… became a serious question. I could not relish boiled vegetables cooked without salt or condiments. The landlady was at a loss to know what to prepare for me. We had oatmeal porridge for breakfast, which was fairly filling, but I always starved at lunch and dinner. The friend continually reasoned with me to eat meat, but I always pleaded my vow and then remained silent. Both for luncheon and dinner we had spinach and bread and jam too. I was a good eater and had a capacious stomach; but I was ashamed to ask for more than two or three slices of bread, as it did not seem correct to do so… The friend once got disgusted with this state of things, and said: “…What is the value of a vow made before an illiterate mother, and in ignorance of conditions here? … And I tell you this persistence will not help you to gain anything here. You confess to having eaten and relished meat. You took it where it was absolutely unnecessary, and will not where it is quite essential. What a pity!”
But I was adamant.
And eventually, he decides he must take action:
I launched out in search of a vegetarian restaurant. The landlady had told me that there were such places in the city. I would trot ten or twelve miles each day, go into a cheap restaurant and eat my fill of bread, but would never be satisfied. During these wanderings I once hit on a vegetarian restaurant in Farringdon Street. The sight of it filled me with the same joy that a child feels on getting a thing after its own heart. Before I entered I noticed books for sale exhibited under a glass window near the door. I saw among them Salt’s Plea for Vegetarianism. This I purchased for a shilling and went straight to the dining room. This was my first hearty meal since my arrival in England. God had come to my aid.
In the end, it was the London Vegetarian Society that came to his aid too – for in fact this was a time when this diet had a growing following in Victorian Britain, particularly in Manchester and London, where there were around 30 veggie restaurants in the 1890s. Like any such group, the LVS was eager for, er, fresh meat, and young M was soon co-opted onto its committee. In his spare time while pursuing his law degree, he wrote numerous articles for The Vegetarian magazine (where the interview quoted above was printed). The book that helped him on this path, by Henry Stephens Salt, had been published in 1885, and Salt (born in India himself) was a vociferous campaigner, often regarded as the father of animal rights.
At the end of that magazine interview, M noted:
I am bound to say that, during my nearly three years’ stay in England, I have left many things undone, and have done many things which perhaps I might better have left undone, yet I carry one great consolation with me that I shall go back without having taken meat or wine.2
It was in this period that M, who arrived in London a shy and awkward young man, showed his inner steel, as well as concern for ethical issues (not just over food, but in supporting a dockers’ strike for better pay and conditions, for example). He qualified as a barrister, and in June 1891, he returned home. Two years later, he was off again, this time to South Africa, now firmly on the life journey that made him one of the most famous civil rights activists and pacifists in the world, and the man who led India to independence. For M, of course, was Mohandas Gandhi, later known as Mahātmā. Perhaps that dogged insistence on keeping a promise changed the world.
British readers will no doubt think of the classic Goodness Gracious Me sketch here, ‘Going for an English’. “What’s the blandest thing on the menu?”
Sources consulted for this article include his various writings for The Vegetarian and his early fragments of a London diary (both online here) and his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth.