M.K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law. Charles R. DiSalvo
from the business community.
To make matters worse, neither did Gandhi have any close relatives or friends in the legal profession in Bombay. This was a significant drawback because barristers in Gandhi’s day obtained clients not directly through contact with them but through referrals from other members of the profession. Indeed, it was often a family matter: many barristers derived their success from having family members in positions from which they could refer cases to their favorite member of the bar. With no one looking out for young Gandhi’s interests among the corps of Bombay attorneys, there was no one to send cases to this “briefless barrister.”24
Finally, there was the matter of professional ethics. At the time Gandhi was attempting to practice in Bombay, some in the profession relied upon touts—mercenaries who would hunt down litigation and bring it to a barrister for a fee. While this practice was considered unethical, it was nonetheless employed by some of the most successful members of the Bombay bar. Gandhi, however, refused to pay touts, even if the practice was winked at and even if it meant he would earn far less than he might otherwise. Indeed, when those advising him in Bombay pointed out that one highly successful criminal lawyer paid touts, Gandhi scoffed at the idea that financial success should rank higher than professional ethics. This was a watershed moment for Gandhi as a person and as an attorney. Faced with the choice of failing with honor or succeeding with dishonor, he chose the more difficult path. This is the first indication Gandhi gives as a lawyer that the world’s way was not his way. In the future he would stake out a definition of his professional life that rested upon the belief that one could find true happiness as an attorney without adhering to the profession’s definition of success. It is not a belief to which he would always be faithful, as we shall see, but it provides us with the first real glimmer of the attorney he was to become. Interestingly, he was hired in Mamibai’s case despite his refusal to pay the tout.
Gandhi would confound his critics from the beginning.
BACKWATERS: A RETURN TO RAJKOT
With all these factors against him, it is not surprising, then, that Gandhi’s Bombay practice collapsed shortly after the Mamibai incident. The most he could manage thereafter was a case in which he drafted a memorial for free for an impecunious client. While his colleagues approved of the quality of his work in the case, Gandhi realized that he could not support himself if his practice consisted of nothing but pro bono work.
At about this time Gandhi started thinking of seeking employment overseas, but because Lakshmidas opposed such a move, Gandhi deferred consideration of it. Moreover, there was a promise of some work in Bombay in the fall of 1892. This new work, however, never materialized.25
New measures were required. Gandhi applied for a part-time position teaching English at a well-known Bombay high school for 75 rupees a month. At the interview, when it became apparent that the high school sought a university graduate, the school lost interest. He pleaded that his passage of the London examination should qualify him to teach, but the school would not budge.
With this door closed, there was nothing more Gandhi could do to sustain himself in Bombay. He had failed. After six months in Bombay, Gandhi closed what he called his “little establishment” and retreated to his Rajkot home.26 There he would work with his brother, Lakshmidas, a petty pleader, in doing the low-level legal work of native attorneys that he had disdained earlier. Gandhi would be an overeducated paralegal in his older brother’s shop, drafting common applications and memorials.
A BREACH OF ETHICS
Given the experiences Gandhi had had before being called to the bar, it was predictable that he would have difficulty assuming the role of public person that the job of courtroom barrister required.27 From the time of his childhood Gandhi had been a timid person. His attempts at public speaking in high school and later in London regularly placed unmanageable amounts of stress on him—and these prior attempts at public speaking were almost always before receptive audiences of friends or colleagues. When Gandhi was forced into the courtroom, he found himself in a new setting in which all speech and all behavior are adversarial. Adversarial speech places enormous demands on the speaker to manage his emotions, his intellect, and even his body so that he can tell the most compelling story on opening statement, ask the most captivating questions on direct examination, wrestle the most hostile witnesses to the ground on cross-examination, and make the most persuasive case in closing argument, all at the same time he is parrying the thrusts of his opponent, responding to the inquiries of the judge, and following the rules of evidence and procedure. Even for those experienced in courtroom speaking, such speaking is challenging. For the young lawyer—even one trained throughout law school and apprenticeship—the prospect of such speaking is threatening. How much more challenging and threatening was it for Gandhi, wholly unprepared as he was by personality, training, and experience?
Gandhi’s new work would keep him far from the courtroom. He set up an office in Rajkot where he was able to earn enough on which to live (about 300 rupees a month) by drafting applications and petitions. This work, at the lower echelons of practice, was made possible through Lakshmidas, who at the time was a member of a two-man vakil firm. Lakshmidas’ partner (apparently the dominant of the two) gave Gandhi his overflow applications and petitions. The significant cases the partner kept; to Gandhi he gave the work of assisting his poorest clients. Even this work, however, proved problematic for Gandhi, for he was expected to pay commissions for these cases. He had rebelled at this practice in Bombay because it smelled of corruption.28 Now, however, he relented so as not to give offense to his brother’s partner, who apparently was gracious in agreeing to help Gandhi. Gandhi also undoubtedly wanted to help provide Lakshmidas with income inasmuch as Lakshmidas and Gandhi shared any income Gandhi generated through the partner’s referrals. In this instance, then, Gandhi’s feelings of loyalty to his brother and his appreciation for his brother’s partner worked together to create a lapse in Gandhi’s ethical standards. He was off the path.
So in 1893, Gandhi, a London-educated barrister, found himself stuck in the backwaters of Rajkot, performing low-level legal work and doing so in a fashion he considered morally repugnant. Indeed, he soon learned that petty politics, corruption, and backroom deals were the order of the day there and throughout the region. Gandhi’s introduction to the political facts of life in Kathiawad was made possible by Lakshmidas, an individual who appears to have been possessed of a conscience less demanding than that of his younger brother. Lakshmidas had been the secretary to, and the advisor of, a powerful figure in neighboring Porbandar. During the course of this employment, Lakshmidas ran afoul of the authorities. Gandhi, in his memoirs, is not precise in his description of this trouble, but he is quite clear on the point that Lakshmidas expected his brother to bail him out of it. The political agent in charge of the area at that time was an officer whose acquaintance Gandhi had made in London. It was Lakshmidas’ idea that Gandhi ought to go to him and, playing on the friendship, seek to put the matter to rest.29
Gandhi was opposed to this plan. It offended his sense of procedure and right order. But his reluctance was overcome by the importuning of his brother, who argued that decisions in Kathiawad were made only on the basis of influence and that Gandhi owed him a fraternal duty to intercede. Reluctantly, Gandhi agreed to see the agent, knowing in advance that he “was compromising [his] self-respect.”30
His worst fears materialized. On seeing the agent, Gandhi sensed immediately that the agent knew Gandhi was there to improperly influence him and that he was offended by this. Before Gandhi could even finish stating his case, the agent exploded: “Your brother is an intriguer. I want to hear nothing more from you. I have no time. If your brother has anything to say, let him apply through the proper channel.”31 With that, the agent had the protesting Gandhi physically removed from his office. Gandhi, who knew he was wrong to be there in the first instance, immediately, and perhaps unconsciously, converted his embarrassment at having done something improper into righteous indignation at a perceived personal insult. Perhaps this was Gandhi’s way of pulling a curtain over his embarrassment. Gandhi was so caught up in his anger at the way he was treated that he sent a note to the agent, threatening to