Mahatma Gandhi-London Life Experience.

Gandhiji.    Part.2.

While in London,

Gandhiji took his studies seriously and tried to brush up on his English and Latin by taking the London University matriculation examination. But, during the three years he spent in England, his main preoccupation was with personal and moral issues rather than with academic ambitions.

 The transition from the half-rural atmosphere of Rajkot to the cosmopolitan life of London was not easy for him. As he struggled painfully to adapt himself to Western food, dress, and etiquette, he felt awkward.

His vegetarianism became a continual source of embarrassment to him; his friends warned him that it would wreck his studies as well as his health. Fortunately for him he came across a vegetarian restaurant as well as a book providing a reasoned defense of vegetarianism, which henceforth became a matter of conviction for him.

The missionary zeal he developed for vegetarianism helped to draw the pitifully shy youth out of his shell and gave him a new poise. He became a member of the executive committee of the London Vegetarian Society, attending its conferences and contributing articles to its journal.

In the vegetarian restaurants and boarding houses of England, Gandhiji  met not only food faddists but some earnest men and women to whom he owed his introduction to the Bible and the Bhagavadgita, the most popular expression in the form of a philosophical poem, which he read for the first time in its English translation by Sir Edwin Arnold.

The English vegetarians were a motley crowd. They included socialists and humanitarians like Edward Carpenter, "the British Thoreau"; Fabians like George Bernard Shaw; and Theosophists like Annie Besant.

Most of them were idealists, quite a few were rebels who rejected the prevailing values of the late Victorian Establishment, denounced the evils of the capitalist and industrial society, preached the cult of the simple life, and stressed the superiority of moral over material values and of cooperation over conflict.

These ideas were to contribute substantially to the shaping of Gandhiji's personality and, eventually, to his politics.

Painful surprises were in store for Gandhiji when he returned to India in July 1891. His mother had died in his absence, and he discovered to his dismay that the barrister's degree was not a guarantee of a lucrative career.

The legal profession was already beginning to be overcrowded, and Gandhiji was much too diffident to elbow his way into it. In the very first brief he argued in a Bombay court, he cut a sorry figure. Turned down even for the part-time job of a teacher in a Bombay high school, he returned to Rajkot to make a modest living by drafting petitions for litigants. Even this employment was closed to him when he incurred the displeasure of a local British officer. It was, therefore, with some relief that he accepted the none-too-attractive offer of a year's contract from Nanji Kalidas firm in Natal, South Africa.