M.K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law. Charles R. DiSalvo
for those who wanted to join; support of vegetarianism was enough. Gandhi decided to advocate for Allinson. He wrote out his speech but “had not the courage to speak.”12 Hills was gracious enough to find someone to read a speech attacking his own position.
On another occasion, Gandhi and Mazmudar attended a vegetarian conference in Ventnor. While there, Gandhi met the author of a famous vegetarian tract who offered Gandhi the opportunity to speak at the conference, an invitation he accepted without hesitation. Once again Gandhi wrote out his remarks, and once again he appeared to deliver them. In terms reminiscent of his description of his cross-examination effort in the Mamibai case, Gandhi states what happened next: “I stood up to read it, but could not. My vision became blurred and I trembled, though the speech hardly covered a sheet of foolscap.” Once again, Gandhi was forced to find someone to read for him. While the audience received the talk well, Gandhi “was ashamed of [him]self and sad at heart for [his] incapacity.”13
Demonstrating either his courage or his naïveté, Gandhi’s two earlier failures at public speech making did not deter him from a third attempt. The occasion this time was a farewell vegetarian dinner hosted by Gandhi for a group of friends on the eve of his departure from London. The scene was the Holborn, a conventional restaurant Gandhi had convinced to host a vegetarian banquet. Again Gandhi had prepared his remarks with care. When he stood, he found that he “could not proceed beyond the first sentence.”14 Gandhi had intended to begin with a bit of humor but, as he stalled after his first sentence, found that the only thing humorous was his attempt to speak in public. He gathered up just enough composure to blurt out his thanks to his guests for coming. He then sat down, defeated, once again, by himself.
Was Gandhi’s difficulty that he obsessed over his prepared remarks, to the point of paralysis? Perhaps, but he also confesses that he had no aptitude for ex tempore speaking either. He was inept at both. The inability to deliver prepared remarks and the inability to speak extemporaneously must be counted as significant disabilities for one who intended to earn his living by speaking. Yet, years later, when writing his autobiography, Gandhi claimed that several advantages flowed from what he called his “constitutional shyness.” While he was in England, he says, he found that his shyness made it easier for him to keep his pledge to his mother to abstain from commerce with women. In the rest of his life, he found that shyness brought him the benefits of speaking little, namely that a studied silence permitted him to avoid thoughtless chatter, exaggeration, and untruths.
VAKILS ON THE RISE
It is one thing to muse about being tongue-tied in one’s memoirs. It is something altogether different to be tongue-tied in fact while trying to make a living as a barrister in the highly competitive atmosphere of nineteenth-century Bombay. Gandhi’s inability to speak in public must be understood as a limitation that rendered it virtually impossible for him to overcome a number of background factors that made his practice of law in India a chancy proposition at best.
When Gandhi attempted to enter practice in India in 1891, he did so at a time when the Indian legal system was in the midst of a maelstrom of changes in terms of both the organization of the judiciary and the regulation of the practice of law. The High Court at Bombay had only recently been established, along with High Courts at the other two presidency towns of Madras and Calcutta, by the Indian High Courts Act of 1861.15 This act was part of a protracted process whereby the British government eventually took over virtually the entire judicial system in India.
At the same time the court system was evolving, the legal profession was undergoing change. The profession, which got its start when the East India Company first established itself in India, had a history of being poorly organized and regulated,16 with a wide and confusing range of different types of practitioners, all competing for business.17 Well before Gandhi’s time, however, one clear distinction emerged—that between barristers and native practitioners. On the one hand, barristers, at first almost exclusively English, commanded enormous prestige—and enormous fees.18 Their status and their earning power were the result of two factors: the monopoly on practice barristers held for a considerable period of time and the small number of barristers available for hire. For a good part of the nineteenth century barristers alone were allowed to appear in the highest courts, leaving native practitioners to scratch out their livings in inferior tribunals. For some time barristers capitalized on their legal monopoly by keeping their own numbers low. In Bombay, for example, there were only two barristers in 1807, with the number rising to only thirteen by 1861. As one historian has noted, “Even a new practitioner could begin earning large sums almost immediately.”19 It was with this image of the profession in mind that Gandhi’s family had pooled its resources to give young Mohan a barrister’s education.
In contrast, there existed a broadly defined class of practitioners trained in India, generally known as vakils, who were held in lower esteem, who commanded lesser fees, and whose practice was restricted to certain courts. These practitioners began with very limited roles in the legal system but transformed themselves over time into lawyers some of whose training was arguably better than that received by barristers in the Inn system. While the extent of his training and the precise nature of his practice are unknown, it is known that Gandhi’s brother, Lakshmidas, was such a practitioner.
It was Gandhi’s misfortune to enter practice at a time when the power of vakils was on the ascendancy, while that of barristers was on the decline. From the mid-1800s on, the vakils campaigned with good effect for the right to practice in all courts and for the abolition of the distinctions among and between barristers (known as “advocates”), solicitors (known as “attorneys”), and vakils. Indeed, even before Gandhi took up practice in Bombay, vakils had been permitted to appear before the High Court there, shattering the monopoly barristers once had and greatly influencing the economics of law practice. To make matters worse, it became well known by 1890 that the practice of law could be a most lucrative profession. Accordingly, the profession attracted great numbers to its ranks at just the time Gandhi arrived in Bombay—only to see so many enter the profession that the supply of lawyers exceeded the public’s demand for them. With the laws of economics in play, many a young novice went without work.20
NO CONNECTIONS, NO TOUTS, NO INCOME
Gandhi’s own background provided him with no assets with which to succeed at the practice of law in this changing environment. Much of the Indian economy in the 1890s was tied to the land.21 When Gandhi entered practice, Indian capitalism was just starting to develop alongside the traditional agrarian economy. As the nineteenth century was coming to a close, these two forces, previously in balance, would interact, threatening society and the law with a tumultuous transformation that the Raj was not prepared to accept.22 Thrust into this period of swirling change, Gandhi could have exploited it had he had ties to either the rising capitalist elements or to the traditional agrarian economy. Gandhi, however, had no ties to the landed elite that would help him obtain work representing landowning clients in litigation. With respect to business litigation, Gandhi was already at a disadvantage simply by virtue of being an Indian-born rather than a British-born barrister. Historian Samuel Schmitthener reports that from the time of the founding of the High Courts in 1862 through the end of the nineteenth century, Indian lawyers could not easily find financial success:
The first Indian barristers . . . were disappointed to find that they could not make a success of practicing [in courts], where the lucrative commercial cases were. Work [in such courts] could only come to a barrister through a solicitor. The solicitors’ firms were all British, and they did all the work for the Government departments and the . . . firms. They did not want to patronize an untried Indian barrister. Nor did the few Indian solicitors who were struggling to expand their practice wish to risk the blame that would come upon them if some inexperienced Indian barrister mishandled a case. . . . Not only British firms, but also Indians preferred to be represented by British . . . advocates—perhaps because it was believed they would have more influence with the English judges.23
Gandhi might have overcome the predisposition of potential clients to favor English barristers had he had some ties to the commercial, industrial, and mercantile