Gandhi’s Transformative Years in England: From Student to Leader

In September 1888, a shy nineteen-year-old from the coastal town of Porbandar boarded a ship bound for England. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi could barely speak fluent English, had never lived away from his family, and carried with him a solemn vow made to his mother. Three years later, he would return as a qualified barrister, but the more important change was internal. The young man who came back was not the same nervous student who had left. The experiences he gathered in London, from struggling with food to discovering the religious texts of his own land, quietly built the foundation of the leader the world would later know as the Mahatma.

Why Gandhi went to England 🔗

Gandhi’s father had served as a senior official in Porbandar, and the family hoped Mohandas would continue this tradition of public service. After his father’s death in 1888, a family friend suggested that the quickest path to a respectable career was to qualify as a barrister in England. A law degree from London carried enormous prestige in colonial India and promised both social standing and a good income.

The decision was not simple. Gandhi belonged to a Vaishnava Hindu family, and crossing the seas was considered a violation of caste rules. Some community elders even declared him an outcaste. To win his mother Putlibai’s permission, Gandhi made three promises: he would not touch wine, women, or meat during his stay abroad. These vows seemed minor at the time, but keeping them would test his character almost from the moment he set sail.

First days in a foreign world 🔗

London in the late nineteenth century was the capital of the largest empire in history. For a young man from a quiet Gujarati town, the foggy streets, unfamiliar manners, and constant cold were overwhelming. Gandhi felt deeply homesick and out of place. He struggled with the climate, the language, and above all, with food.

His vow to avoid meat became a daily ordeal. English hosts and friends repeatedly told him that no one could survive the cold without eating meat. Gandhi nearly starved in his early weeks, surviving on bread and a few vegetables, often going hungry rather than breaking his promise. The relief came when he discovered a vegetarian restaurant on Farringdon Street, not far from St Paul’s Cathedral. According to the records of the Inner Temple, where Gandhi enrolled to study law, he learned to live extremely frugally, cooking his own simple breakfast and walking long distances to save money and stay healthy.

Enrolling at the Inner Temple 🔗

Gandhi joined the Inner Temple, one of the four Inns of Court in London that train and qualify barristers. Indian students of his background often preferred it for its social standing. He also studied at University College London, although his autobiography barely mentions it. As the historian Vinay Lal notes in an account of Gandhi’s London years, the legal education itself left less of an impression on him than the friendships he formed with vegetarians, reformers, and spiritual seekers.

The experiment in becoming an English gentleman 🔗

For a brief period, Gandhi tried hard to fit into English society. He believed that to be accepted, he had to look and behave like a proper English gentleman. This phase, which he later described with gentle humour in his autobiography, is one of the most revealing episodes of his time abroad.

He spent a large sum on a new evening suit tailored in Bond Street and bought an expensive top hat. He took lessons in dancing, French, and elocution, and even attempted to learn the violin so he could understand Western music. He spent ten minutes every day in front of a mirror, carefully arranging his tie and parting his hair.

The experiment did not last. Gandhi soon realised that he could not master the rhythm of dancing, and more importantly, that this entire effort was a false ideal. He recognised that he was a student who had come to England for a serious purpose, and that imitating others would never make him truly belong. He stopped the lessons, recovered his savings where he could, and turned his full attention to his studies. This early decision to abandon pretence and live according to his own values became a defining feature of his later life.

The turn towards simplicity 🔗

Once he gave up trying to appear fashionable, Gandhi embraced a deliberately simple and economical way of living. He moved into cheaper lodgings, cooked his own meals, and tracked every penny he spent. This was not merely about saving money. He discovered a genuine satisfaction in self-reliance and restraint. The habits of discipline, careful accounting, and plain living that he developed as a poor student in London stayed with him for the rest of his life and later shaped his philosophy of voluntary simplicity.

Vegetarianism becomes a conviction 🔗

The vow Gandhi made to his mother had been a matter of obedience. In England, vegetarianism became a matter of personal conviction. The turning point was his reading of Henry Salt’s book A Plea for Vegetarianism, which he picked up at that small Farringdon Street restaurant. Until then, Gandhi had avoided meat out of duty. Salt’s arguments gave him a reasoned, ethical basis for his choice.

He read widely on the subject, including Howard Williams’ The Ethics of Diet and the writings of other dietary reformers, as he records in his autobiography. He joined the London Vegetarian Society and, in time, was appointed to its executive committee. According to the International Vegetarian Union, he even served as the society’s delegate to a vegetarian conference in Portsmouth in 1891.

This involvement gave Gandhi something far more valuable than a settled diet. Organising meetings, writing articles for the society’s journal, and speaking in public taught him the basic skills of running an organisation and persuading an audience. He was, in effect, getting his first practical training in leadership and communication, skills he would use to great effect in South Africa and India.

Discovering the religions of the world 🔗

One of the great ironies of Gandhi’s time in England is that he encountered the sacred text of his own tradition through English friends. In 1889, two theosophist brothers who were studying the Bhagavad Gita asked Gandhi to help them with the Sanskrit. He had to confess, with some embarrassment, that he had never read the Gita in Sanskrit or in Gujarati.

The brothers introduced him to The Song Celestial, Sir Edwin Arnold’s English verse translation of the Bhagavad Gita. As accounts of this episode describe, this was Gandhi’s first real reading of the text that would become his lifelong companion and moral compass. He later called it “the book par excellence for the knowledge of Truth” and said it gave him invaluable help in moments of despair.

A growing respect for all faiths 🔗

Gandhi’s spiritual reading did not stop at the Gita. He read Arnold’s The Light of Asia, a poem on the life and teachings of the Buddha, which moved him deeply. As records of his student reading note, this was among the first religious books he studied in London. A Christian friend also gave him a copy of the Bible. He found the Old Testament hard going, but the New Testament, especially the Sermon on the Mount, struck him powerfully. The ideas of turning the other cheek and returning good for evil resonated with the teachings of his own tradition.

This exposure to many faiths at an impressionable age planted a seed that would grow throughout his life: a deep respect for all religions and a belief that they shared a common core of truth. The conviction that no single faith held a monopoly on goodness became central to his thinking and to his vision of a society where people of different beliefs could live together.

Passing the bar and returning home 🔗

Despite the distractions of his early months and his many other interests, Gandhi did not lose sight of why he had come to England. He studied diligently, kept his terms at the Inner Temple, and prepared for his examinations. He was called to the Bar on 10 June 1891, officially becoming a barrister. The very next day he enrolled in the High Court, and shortly afterwards he sailed back to India.

The young man who returned was visibly transformed. The nervous, homesick teenager had become a composed adult with firm principles and a clear sense of who he was. He had learned to stand by his commitments under pressure, to live simply, to organise and speak in public, and to think seriously about ethics and religion.

Lessons that outlasted the law degree 🔗

Interestingly, Gandhi’s actual career as a lawyer began with failure. He was so shy that he could not speak up properly during his first case in an Indian court and had to hand it over to another lawyer. The legal qualification opened doors, but it was the personal qualities forged in England, his discipline, his honesty, his self-reliance, and his commitment to truth, that would prove far more important.

The experience of being an outsider in a foreign land also taught him something he would never forget. He had felt what it meant to be different, to be judged, and to struggle to belong. Years later in South Africa, when he faced open racial discrimination, this earlier sensitivity helped him understand injustice not as an abstract idea but as a lived experience. The seeds of his lifelong fight for dignity and social justice can be traced back to these formative years.

What do you think? If Gandhi had simply succeeded in becoming the polished English gentleman he first tried to be, would he ever have developed the inner strength that made him a leader? And how much do you think being an outsider in a foreign country shapes a person’s understanding of justice and fairness?

References

1. https://www.innertemple.org.uk/who-we-are/history/historical-articles/gandhi-jayanti/
2. https://southasia.ucla.edu/history-politics/gandhi/gandhi-law-student
3. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/gandhi-s-autobiography-self-promotion-down-to-a-fine-art-1.3179478
4. https://www.mkgandhi.org/autobio/chap15.php
5. https://ivu.org/marly-winckler/2170-gandhi-and-vegan-diet.html
6. https://www.mkgandhi.org/articles/Mahatma-Gandhi-and-the-Bhagavad-Gita.php
7. https://theosophy.wiki/en/The_Light_of_Asia_(book)