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Between Two Worlds: Gandhi's First Impressions of British Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

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The Gandhi the world knows was the Mahatma, the ‘great soul’ who led India's drive for independence from British domination, the prophet of non-violent revolution, and the practitioner of civil disobedience. The Gandhi the world does not know was the spindling lad from Kathiawad, so determined to see England that he defied his sub-caste's chief and cheerfully accepted outcasteing as the price of making the polluting voyage to an impure land. The Gandhi the world has forgotten was the shy young lawyer who sang ‘God save our gracious Queen’ as fervently as any other subject of Her Majesty Queen Victoria—even after suffering the bitterest insults and beatings in South Africa because of his brown skin and his loyalty to his Indian heritage. Mahatmas are made, not born, and the making of this Mahatma was a long and often painful process. We can add to our understanding of that process by piecing together hundreds of bits of information about the first eighteen years of Gandhi's life—information from his own writings and from the Indian environment which shaped his evolution from infancy to young manhood.

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Articles
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1969

References

1 For details of Karamchand Gandhi's career and Gandhi's childhood, see Devanesen's, Chandran D. S. forthcoming book, The Making of the Mahatma: An Interpretive Study of M. K. Gandhi's First Forty Years, Calcutta, etc.: Orient Longmans, 1969. I am grateful to Dr Devanesen for permitting me to consult his book in manuscript.Google Scholar

2 Gandhi, Prabhudas, My Childhood with Gandhiji, Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, 1957, p. 24.Google Scholar

3 Gandhi, M. K., An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, tr. Desai, Mahadev, 2nd ed., Navajivan Publishing House: Ahmedabad, 1940, p. 49.Google Scholar

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5 Report of the Irish Presbyterian Mission in Gujarat and Kattiawar for 1888. Printed at the Irish Presbyterian Mission Press: Surat, 1889, p. 13.Google Scholar

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