M.K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law. Charles R. DiSalvo
preparing for his examination in Roman law, which he took just three months earlier.
BAR EXAMINATIONS
Those in the business of advising law students at the time universally recommended that the Roman law examination be taken at the earliest possible moment, thus freeing up the maximum amount of time to study for the examination in English law that followed. Inns permitted their students to take the Roman law examination after four terms. Gandhi would have completed his first four terms with the end of the Trinity term in mid-June 1889, yet he did not take the Roman law examination until March 1890. Why the delay? The most likely explanation is that Gandhi divided his attention for a substantial period of time between his preparation for the Roman law and London examinations.23 Whatever the reason for the delay in taking the Roman law examination, Gandhi was not hurt by it. He finished sixth out of the forty-six who sat for it. Not a bad showing for one who was not a “University man.”24
With the Roman law and London examinations both behind him, Gandhi opened the summer of 1890 with but one more substantial hurdle: passage of the English law examination (known as the “bar finals”). This examination could not be taken before one had kept nine terms. For Gandhi, his ninth term would be completed with the conclusion of the 1890 Michaelmas term on November 25, 1890. For this examination, Gandhi was out of the gate with the crack of the starter’s gun, sitting for it at the first opportunity, from December 15 to December 20, 1890. While this set of dates falls just six months after his London examination, Gandhi actually spent more time than that to prepare, pouring himself into the common law for “nine months of fairly hard labor.”25 Even accounting for a month he spent in Brighton in the summer of 1890 and accounting for the study he undertook earlier in 1890 to pass the Roman law and London examinations, the amount of study Gandhi invested in preparation for the bar finals exceeded the four months of study recommended by Ball for a university-educated person. In his autobiography, Gandhi recounts that he managed to increase his burden of preparation by forgoing the use of notes on the law that were circulating among students, choosing instead to go directly to the recommended textbooks instead. Foreshadowing the scrupulousness that would characterize his entire life at the bar, he felt that to do otherwise would be a fraud. Accordingly, he purchased and read “all the text-books . . . , investing much money in them.”26 Among the treatises Gandhi read were Snell’s The Principles of Equity, Intended for the Use of Students and the Profession, which he found “full of interest, but a bit hard to understand” and which actually would aid him in his religious explorations later in life, and Williams’ Principles of the Law of Real Property, Intended as a First Book for the Use of Students in Conveyancing,27 surely the only law text in existence ever described as reading “like a novel.”28
Gandhi’s industriousness paid dividends. On January 12, 1891, he learned that he had passed his bar finals. Validating Napier and Stephenson’s observation that the test had recently become more difficult than most thought,29 32 of the 109 test takers failed. Of the 77 who passed, Gandhi placed in the top half, finishing 34th.
Gandhi placed fairly highly, too, in the esteem of his fellow “dinner barristers,” as they were then called, but not for very admirable reasons. Each table of four was allocated a set amount of wine for each meal. With the abstemious Gandhi at one’s table, the wine could be split not four ways, but three. As a result, Gandhi was very much in demand as a dinner companion.
AN APPRENTICESHIP FORGONE
And dinner was his last formal obligation, for with his passing the bar finals, Gandhi had now fulfilled all the academic requirements for the call to the bar. But for the necessity of keeping the Hilary, Easter, and Trinity terms, he had no obligations between the end of his test on December 20, 1890, and the date in early June 1891 when he could anticipate being called to the bar. While an apprenticeship was not a requirement for being called, students were nonetheless strongly advised to use the half-year between the bar finals and the call, as well as a period of one to two years after the call, to learn how to practice by serving as apprentices in the offices of practicing barristers. Without the experience of pupilage, it was adjudged that the “greatest amount of theoretical or book knowledge [was] comparatively worthless.”30
For reasons he does not explain, and apparently contrary to the general advice he later gave others, Gandhi never apprenticed.31 Why forgo the experience? Perhaps Gandhi deemed practice in India so different from that in England that apprenticing would have been a waste of his time—an unlikely supposition in light of the court system operated by the British Empire in India. Perhaps the fastidiously economical Gandhi did not believe he could afford to apprentice; after all, it was not free. A pupil was expected to pay his barrister fifty guineas for each six months of pupilage. Perhaps Gandhi could not find a barrister who would take him on for such a relatively short period of time with no prospect of Gandhi’s returning the investment with permanent employment. Perhaps Gandhi, lacking close connections to the British bar, could find no barrister at all. The most intriguing explanation, however, is that Gandhi was preoccupied with a realm of life entirely separate from the bar.
FASHIONABLE WESTERNIZATION: THEOSOPHY AND VEGETARIANISM
When he arrived in London, Gandhi was thrust into a world where he was a stranger looking to be accepted. The world of the Inns, with its dinners, costumes, formality, and long tradition of catering to the educated, wealthy, and noble, was an upper-class world to which this relatively uneducated boy from the colonial backwaters of India was unaccustomed, but which he was eager to explore. Gandhi’s understanding of the privileged status to which barristers were entitled may have led him to see his mission in England to learn and take on the customs of the elite. After all, he had been sent to England to attain the lofty status of barrister for one reason only: to come home and provide financial leadership for the family. Thus, it is likely that Gandhi believed that becoming a barrister required of him different tastes and manners. Accordingly, he experimented in 1890 with top hats, starched collars, silk shirts, striped trousers, gold watch chains, leather gloves, walking sticks, patent leather shoes, spats, and evening suits.32 The private lessons in dance, elocution, violin, and French that he took for a brief time can be similarly explained.33 With time, however, Gandhi came to his senses, realizing that a dandy was not who he was, nor who he needed to be, in order to be called to the bar and to practice in India. Here his pledge to his mother to avoid wine, meat, and women might have fortified him with the beginnings of the independence he needed to escape the full grasp of British upper-class mores. Yet the attraction of belonging to a privileged group gripped him still. It was in his study of theosophy and his embrace of the cause of vegetarianism that he discovered a way to bridge the distance between faithfulness to himself and things Indian, on the one hand, and, on the other, his attraction to the higher strata of British society where, at least at the edges, theosophy and vegetarianism were thriving.
Theosophy in Gandhi’s time was a religious philosophy with roots in the teachings of the Russian-born medium Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.34 She, along with an American, Henry Olcott, founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. Theosophy argued that all religious traditions “hold in common many religious, ethical, and philosophical ideas.” It purported to explain the commonality of all religious thought by resort to the notion that an ancient band of “great spiritual Teachers (themselves the outcome of past cycles of evolution) acted as the instructors and guides of the child humanity of our planet, interpreting to its races and nations the fundamental truths of religion in the form most adapted to the idiosyncrasies of the recipients.”35 The truth that they passed on to Blavatsky and her followers was divine wisdom, the Greek for which (theos and sophia) gave rise to the name of this body of thought.
The openness of theosophy to all the great religious traditions included an embrace of Hindu ideas, which in turn led theosophy to a pantheistic understanding of God, an emphasis on the oneness of all people, and a belief in human perfectibility. One could see how readily each of these notions might appeal to a young Hindu stranded in an alien culture far from home.36 Gandhi tells us he was introduced to theosophy by two friends who asked him for help in reading Sir Edwin Arnold’s The Song Celestial, a poetic translation of the Bhagavad Gita. The friends thereafter took him