M.K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law. Charles R. DiSalvo
and the senior barristers of his Inn while awaiting his call to the bar. Dinners were highly stylized affairs, emphasizing hierarchy, formality, and tradition.
At earlier points in their history, the Inns provided the students with lengthy and careful lectures, known as readings, by distinguished members of the bar. The reader prepared an elaborate discussion of an act or statute that, after being delivered, was followed by a series of arguments by barristers about the incorrectness of the reader’s opinion, followed itself by the reader’s rebuttal. In addition to these readings, the students were provided with the opportunity to observe mock exercises called bolts and moots.
KEEPING TERMS: DINNER AS EDUCATION
By the time of Gandhi’s arrival these practices had disappeared, and the Inns, while retaining their control over admission, had, with respect to their pedagogical function, descended to institutions akin to educationally undemanding social fraternities. The practice of “keeping terms,” as the dinner requirement was known, remained, but in an eviscerated form. Four terms a year were held. A student was required to keep twelve terms in all, meaning that one could complete his preparation for the bar in just under three years. During these terms, students with university educations were required to dine at least three times during each term in a dining hall run by the Inn while nonuniversity students, like Gandhi, were required to eat dinner there at least six times a term. Students and barristers would be seated at tables of four, while the “benchers” would be seated separately.8 Although all were required to appear for dinner attired in their formal gowns, there was no requirement that any part of the dinner conversation center on the law. Indeed there was not even any conversation between the students and the benchers. There were no readings, lectures, or speeches. There were no moot exercises, the custom of conducting mock trials having been discarded long before Gandhi arrived. The only requirement was that the student, to get credit for attending, appear before grace was said and remain present throughout the dinner until a concluding after-dinner grace was said. By 1888, it appeared that keeping terms had lost any function it may once have had to impart a formal legal education to the students and was reduced to nothing more than a ceremony to inculcate in the student the manners of his profession.9
Apart from dinners there was no setting in which students were required to come in contact with either lecturers or practitioners.10 The students’ days were their own. A diligent student would occupy himself, perhaps in one of the Inns’ comfortable libraries, with the reading entailed in meeting the only academic requirements of this process: the passage of two written examinations, one in Roman law and one in English law. The Student’s Guide to the Bar, by William Ball of the Inner Temple, published in 1879, states that the knowledge required to pass the Roman law examination was slight, and advises that for the person with a university education, “six weeks’ work of . . . six hours a day would be sufficient.”11 In the period before Gandhi arrived in England, the English law examination had developed a reputation for being not much more challenging than that in Roman law, with Ball estimating that “four months’ work of . . . six hours a day ought to be amply sufficient for a University man of average abilities and education.”12 The picture changed just before Gandhi started his studies. Writing on the eve of Gandhi’s arrival in London, T. B. Napier and R. M. Stephenson, authors of A Practical Guide to the Bar (1888), claimed that “until quite recently the difficulty of the Bar examinations was greatly underrated” and that the “percentage of men who are ploughed for the Bar examinations is tolerably large.”13 It is not surprising, then, that they advised more study than Ball, namely two to three months of steady work for the Roman law examination and more than just “a few months’ reading” for the English law examination.14
The final condition for being called to the bar was simply that the applicant be at least twenty-one.
These were the requirements to be called to the Bar in Gandhi’s day, a set of criteria so minimal that it was universally agreed that one’s legal education at the Inns had to be supplemented by an apprenticeship if one was to have any chance of success as a barrister. By associating himself with a practitioner, the pupil could familiarize himself with practice not only by observing the work of his barrister but by helping in the work itself, such as by drafting conveyances and pleadings under the barrister’s supervision. Opinions as to how long a pupil should read in chambers, as it was called, ranged from one to three years.15
THE INNER TEMPLE
Like every barrister-to-be, Gandhi had his choice of inns. Of the four—Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, the Middle Temple, and the Inner Temple—the Inner Temple was the most expensive.16 Gandhi chose the Inner Temple. Given the difficulty he had in India raising the funds to support himself in England, and given his lifelong habit of squeezing every ounce out of every rupee, a habit already well developed when he arrived in England, this is something of a surprise. Because there is no record indicating why Gandhi chose the Inner Temple, we can only speculate. Perhaps he chose it because it was the most prestigious; the Inner Temple numbers Lord Coke, for example, among its graduates. Perhaps he chose it because it had the largest membership and because he thought he could therefore expect to find there the company of a fair number of countrymen.17 The most plausible explanation, however, is that he chose it because it focused on the common law, the study of which would aid him later in his practice in India.18
Whatever Gandhi’s reason for choosing the Inner Temple, it was not unlike the other Inns with respect to the abysmal level of training it offered aspiring barristers. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Inns had fallen to a very low point. Only the most minimal intellectual standards were maintained. It was not until the decade before Gandhi’s arrival, in 1872, that the Inns agreed to require students to take a bar examination, and it was not until the very year Gandhi arrived in England that all the Inns required that nonmatriculates take and pass a special entrance examination. Since Gandhi had already passed the Bombay matriculation examination, he was excused from the preliminary examination to which nonmatriculates were subject. Gandhi’s agenda, therefore, was clear and simple: to be called to the bar, he had only to keep terms and pass examinations in Roman and English law.
But Gandhi was still a student without a university degree, while the great majority of his fellow students were university graduates.19 To make matters worse, Gandhi didn’t even have full command of the English language. When he was unceremoniously invited to leave a swank restaurant because of what were perceived to be his bad manners, he assuaged his pain by resolving to take on Western ways and master “the task of becoming an English gentleman.” As part of his plan to become more sophisticated, Gandhi began searching for a suitable program of study. The reputation of the special admission examination for nonmatriculates was that it was a pushover, requiring only minimal knowledge of Latin, English, and English history. Gandhi needed something quite different to distinguish himself. In the University of London matriculation examination he found a suitably difficult challenge.20 In addition to the subjects tested on the bar’s special examination, this examination required that the student know other subjects, including science and a modern language. Gandhi chose to be tested in French, a language with which he had some familiarity. Joining a private matriculation class and keeping meticulous fidelity to a self-imposed schedule, Gandhi undertook a five-month course of fairly arduous private study that culminated in his taking the examination in January 1890, nearly a year and a half after landing on England’s shores. The results were not good. Gandhi, to use his phrase, got “ploughed in Latin.”21 Latin and French together, he later admitted, were too much for him.
Gandhi was unbowed. He renewed his studies, substituting “heat and light” for the more difficult subject of chemistry, and reattacking Latin, for which, he says, he acquired a taste. At the same time, Gandhi apparently was suffering from pangs of guilt, thinking that he was spending his family’s fortune only to meet failure. Accordingly, he secured a smaller apartment and began eating more of his meals at home. The change, he says, “harmonized my inner and outer life. It was also more in keeping with the means of my family. My life was certainly more truthful and my soul knew no bounds of joy.”22 Gandhi took the examination in June 1890 and, this time, passed it. Making his accomplishment all the more noteworthy is the fact that for much of the