Gandhi Before India (4 page)

The request granted, Kaba Gandhi chose a woman twenty-two years younger as his fourth wife. Named Putlibai, she came from a village in Junagadh State. They were married in 1857, and in quick succession she
bore him three children. A son, Laxmidas, was born in or around the year 1860. A daughter named Raliat was born two years later, followed, in about 1867, by a second son named Karsandas.
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In the spring of 1869 Putlibai was pregnant once more. As she awaited the birth of her fourth child, the state of Porbandar was mired in controversy, caused by the actions of Kaba Gandhi’s ruler and pay-master, Rana Vikmatji. In April, a slave named Luckman as well as an Arab soldier were killed on the orders of the king. The former in particular met with a gruesome end. His ears and nose were slit and then he was thrown off the town walls to his death.

Told of the killings, the British agent asked Rana Vikmatji for an explanation. The Rana replied that the slave Luckman was an attendant to his eldest son, whom he had made a ‘habitual drunkard’. When the Rana and his wife were out of town, Luckman promoted his prince’s ‘indulgence in ardent spirits’, as a result of which he ‘expired in extreme agony’. The Rana had to punish the ‘murderer of our son’; he admitted to having ordered the cutting of nose and ears, but claimed the deadly fall was an accident.

As for the Arab soldier, Rana Vikmatji said he had entered the
zenana
, the women’s quarters of the palace, where he ‘took hold of our late son’s widow’ and attempted to molest her. The soldier too had to be put to death, for violating ‘the fidelity he owed to his master, and like a robber secretly and at night invad[ing] the sanctity of the zenana so jealously guarded by Hindoos, especially Rajputs’.

The British were unpersuaded by the Rana’s explanations. In view of these ‘serious instances of abuse of power’, his status was downgraded – previously a prince of the First Class, he would now be put in the Third Class. He was deprived of the power of capital punishment over his subjects. As a mark of good behaviour he had to establish criminal courts run on modern principles of justice.
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The archival record of these incidents in Porbandar does not contain any hint of the feelings of the Rana’s Diwan. In a small state with a small court, one suspects that Kaba Gandhi knew of the close relationship between the prince and his slave. What advice did the Diwan give his ruler? Did he counsel against the mutilation of the slave or the execution of the soldier? Did he help in drafting Vikmatji’s letter of explanation? To such questions we have no answer. But of the fact that
Kaba Gandhi felt his ruler’s demotion most keenly there can be no doubt. News of the king’s troubles would have reached the servants, and Kaba’s pregnant wife Putlibai too.

It was on 10 September 1869 that the Bombay Government formally downgraded Rana Vikmatji by making him a Ruler of the Third Class. Three weeks later, amidst this background of violence and humiliation, the wife of the Rana’s longserving Diwan gave birth to her fourth child. He was a boy, who was named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Since the year 1777, the Gandhi family had lived in a three-storey house close to one of the old city gates of Porbandar. The rooms – twelve in all – were large but with little light. On the second floor there was a large balcony; this was where the family repaired in the evenings, to refresh themselves with the sea breeze. Below the house was a tank to store water. Since the aquifer under Porbandar was brackish, it was necessary to harvest and husband rainwater. Before the monsoon, the roof of the Gandhi home was cleaned. Then as the rain ran down it was purified by some lime, attached to the mouth of a pipe which linked the roof to the water tank below.
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Putlibai’s youngest son, Mohandas, was born in a room on the ground floor. A later visitor wrote, ‘the room is dark. The corner is darker still. No window opens out [to] the verandah. A small door opens out in another room just behind this one at [the] opposite corner.’
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As was customary in Indian households, the baby Mohandas was looked after by the women around him. Apart from his mother and his aunts, his girl cousins and especially his elder sister Raliat took turns holding and playing with him. The sister recalled that, as a little boy, Mohandas was ‘restless as mercury’. He could not ‘sit still even for a little while. He must be either playing or roaming about. I used to take him out with me to show him the familiar sights in the street – cows, buffaloes and horses, cats and dogs … One of his favourite pastimes was twisting dogs’ ears’.
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Gandhi’s mother, Putlibai, was born in a village named Dantrana, set amidst hills and on the banks of a river thirty miles inland from Porbandar. Her father was a shopkeeper. The American scholar Stephen Hay points out that Mohandas’s mother ‘would have had to develop a good deal of patience and forbearance as a young bride, for her
husband’s other wife, whom she had in a sense displaced, was both ill and barren, and the two lived under the same roof for some years’.
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The household that Putlibai ran in Rajkot was vegetarian. Like other members of their caste, the Gandhis never cooked meat or eggs.
Hobson-Jobson
, that compendium of customs and manners prevalent in nineteenth-century India, notes of the Banias of Gujarat that they ‘profess[ed] an extravagant respect for animal life’.
²³
Their fastidiousness had made the Banias an object of derision. The meat-eating castes disparaged them as ‘
dhili dal
’, soft like lentils. In turn, the merchant castes looked down on ‘what they saw as the dirty and degrading eating habits of most non-Baniyas’.
²⁴

Some Bania households refused to eat vegetables grown ‘under the ground’, such as onion and garlic. Bania women watched vigilantly over their cooking fires, lest a passing insect enter the pot and pollute the food. Somewhat unusually, Kaba Gandhi would help his wife cut and clean the vegetables in preparation for the evening meal.

The Rajputs of Kathiawar (the ranas of Porbandar included) liked hunting, smoking and drinking. The peasants of the peninsula enjoyed the same pleasures, albeit at less regular intervals. Banias like the Gandhis rigorously eschewed meat, tobacco and alcohol. Yet their vegetarian cuisine was subtle and wide-ranging. The main cereals were millet and rice. There were also many varieties of lentils. With these staples went an assortment of special snacks, many distinctive chutneys and pickles, several very fine desserts, but also a unique mixing within the meal of spicy and sweet dishes.
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Another feature of the Gandhi household was piety. Putlibai was a woman of self-sacrificing discipline and a stoic religiosity, who (as her son remembered) would

not think of taking her meals without her daily prayers. Going to
Haveli
 – the Vaishnava temple – was one of her daily duties … She would take the hardest vows and keep them without flinching. Illness was no excuse for relaxing them … To keep two or three consecutive fasts was nothing to her. Living on one meal a day during
Chaturmas
was a habit with her. Not content with that she fasted every alternate day during one
Chaturmas
. During another
Chaturmas
she vowed not to have food without seeing the sun. We children on those [rainy] days would stand, staring at the sky, waiting to announce the appearance of the sun to our mother.
²⁶

The sub-caste the Gandhis belonged to was known as Modh Bania, the prefix apparently referring to the town of Modhera, in southern Gujarat. Their
kul devata
, or family deity, was Ram. There was a Ram temple in Porbandar. (One of the temple’s founders was a Gandhi.) The region was steeped in the traditions of Vaishnavism, the worship of Vishnu and especially his avatars Ram and Krishna. Up the coast from Gandhi’s place of birth lay the town of Dwarka, where Krishna is believed to have lived in adulthood, and which since the ninth century ad (at least) has been one of the great pilgrim centres of the Hindu tradition.
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Mohandas’s mother introduced him to the mysteries – and beauties – of faith. Putlibai was devout, but not dogmatic. Born and raised a Vaishnavite, she became attracted to a sect called the Pranamis, who incorporated elements of Islam into their worship. The sect’s founder was a Kshatriya named Pran Nath who lived in Kathiawar in the eighteenth century. He was widely travelled, and may even have visited Mecca. The Pranami temple in Porbandar that Putlibai patronized had no icons, no images; only writing on the wall, deriving from the Hindu scriptures and from the Koran. Putlibai’s ecumenism extended even further, for among the regular visitors to her home were Jain monks.
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In 1874, when Mohandas was five, his father moved from Porbandar to Rajkot, on being appointed an adviser to the Thakore, or king, of that state. Two years later he was promoted to the office of Diwan. Kaba Gandhi now had to supervise the state’s finances, the registration of all properties, the working conditions of public officials, and Rajkot’s trade with other states. As Diwan of Rajkot, Karamchand also served on the Rajasthanik Court, a body of elders set up to mediate disputes between different chiefdoms in Kathiawar.
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We do not know why Kaba Gandhi made the move to Rajkot. Perhaps he left Porbandar because his ruler had been demoted to Third Class status. Or perhaps he calculated the new assignment had more prestige. The Agent to the Kathiawar States lived in Rajkot. Since he had the British Crown and the British Army behind him, the Agent was the most powerful man in the peninsula. Moving to Rajkot enhanced Kaba Gandhi’s connection to the paramount power. Notably, the Gandhis retained their links with Porbandar. Shortly after Kaba shifted to Rajkot, his younger brother Tulsidas was appointed by Rana Vikmatji as his Diwan.

As the centre of the British presence in Kathiawar, Rajkot had a stud farm, a mission run by Irish Presbyterians, an Anglican Church and a British garrison. It was an important railway junction, with lines linking it to other towns in the peninsula. Rajkot was also home to the Rajkumar College, modelled on a British public school, where the sons of the Kathiawari chiefs were sent to acquire the elements of an English education. Established in 1870, four years before Kaba Gandhi moved to the town, the College had a ‘fine building in the Venetian Gothic style’, as well as a gymnasium, racquet courts, a rifle range and a cricket pavilion.
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As an important man in the town – and region – Kaba Gandhi may occasionally have entered the portals of Rajkumar College in Rajkot. But the school itself was barred to his children. It was restricted to those of authentically Rajput lineage, who might take over as Ranas or Maharajas of their principalities. Some Muslim boys were allowed in – these being the sons or nephews of Nawabs. However, there was no question of a Bania student being admitted into the College.

Kaba Gandhi moved to Rajkot in 1874; his family joined him two years later, on his confirmation as Diwan. The boy Mohandas may (or may not) have attended a primary school in Porbandar. But of his schooling in Rajkot we have some very firm and reliable evidence. This is contained in two books written in the 1960s by a retired headmaster who, in a spring-cleaning operation, stumbled upon the records of Mohandas’s years in school.
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On 21 January 1879, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was admitted into the Taluk School, a short walk from his home in the district of Darbargadh. The subjects taught to Mohandas were Arithmetic, Gujarati, History and Geography. He was expected to learn ‘easy mental arithmetic’, read and memorize snatches of poetry, take accurate dictation, and acquaint himself with the main rivers and towns of western India.

To begin with the boy’s attendance was spotty: in the calendar year 1879 he went to school for only 110 days out of 238. This showed in the results of the final examination, where Mohandas was placed in the lower half of the class. In one set of tests he scored 41.25 per cent (the highest ranked student got 76.5 per cent, the lowest 37.6 per cent). In a second set of exams he did slightly better – at 53 per cent his performance was twelve percentage points above the dullard of the class, but also twelve points below the class leader.

In October 1880, Mohandas appeared for an examination to gain
admission to Kattywar High School.
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Established in 1853, it was the oldest high school in the Peninsula. Mohandas did well in the entrance test – scoring 64 per cent – and was enrolled in the general register of the school. Now, for the first time, he would learn English along with the other subjects.

Kattywar High School was housed in a handsome two-storey structure built with a grant from the Nawab of Junagadh. Classes ran from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays (with an hour’s recess for lunch). On Saturdays, the school closed half-an-hour early. English teaching was given the maximum time – ten hours a week, devoted to reading, spelling and copying; that is to say, to the nurturing of skills essential to employment in the bureaucracy.

In 1881 the Gandhis moved from rented premises to their own home. Kaba Gandhi had bought a large house built in the Kathiawari style, an arched entrance leading into a courtyard around which the rooms were built. It was less than a mile from the High School, so Mohandas walked to his classes, wearing traditional Kathiawari dress – long, loose pyjamas, a buttoned-up tunic and a close-fitting cap.

The chronicler of Gandhi’s schooldays tells us that his performance in his new school was ‘discouraging’. In his first year, he passed in Arithmetic and Gujarati, but was ‘one of the three pupils who secured no marks at all in Geography’. In the end-of-year examination, he ranked 32nd out of 34 students in his division. The next year, 1882, Mohandas hardly attended school, apparently because his father had fallen ill. He could not appear for the annual examination. However, in 1883 he became more diligent. His attendance was regular, and in tests held at the end of the year he averaged a creditable 68 per cent in four subjects, these being Arithmetic, Gujarati, History and Geography, and English. In the terminal examination held in April 1884, he slipped slightly, ending with an average of 58 per cent.