Gandhi in London
1997 was a year of celebration and reflection for London’s Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani communities — as they looked back half a century to Indian independence.
For one man, 1947 was the culmination of a lifetime’s struggle against the dying days of empire. But his triumph was short lived. As the New Year of 1948 was ushered in, Gandhi had only days left to live.
The assassination of Mohandas Karamchand Ghandi on January 30, 1948, also brought to an end the long association of the Mahatma, which means Great Soul, with the East End.
In 1931, Gandhi visited London for the Round Table Conference, which looked at changing the constitution of British-governed India.
The British Government, after years of resistance and antagonism to his revolutionary ideas, was now talking to Mahatma, and offered him accommodation.
But he had a long friendship with Doris and Muriel Lester and happily took up their offer of accommodation at Kingsley Hall, off Bruce Road in Bromley-by-Bow.
He still had 16 years to wait before his dream of a free India would come to pass — but then Gandhi had already been waging peace on intolerance and injustice for almost 50 years.
Well-to-do family
Born near Bombay in 1869, Gandhi was a son of the Hindu merchant caste — his well-to-do father had been prime minister of several small states — and Mohandas was married when he was just 13 years old.
But convention couldn’t hold him for long. When he was 19 he came to London to study, reading Law at University College.
He got his first taste of prejudice as fellow students snubbed him because of the colour of his skin. The young Mohandas was forced to spend hours in his room, reading alone.
But it was here that the seeds of his philosophy of non-violence were sown. He absorbed the ideas of Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and returned to India, determined to put them into practice.
Unsuccessful in Bombay, Gandhi went to South Africa to work and became the first “coloured” lawyer to be admitted to the Supreme Court.
He swiftly took up the cause of fellow Indians who had come to South Africa as labourers, only to find they were treated as inferiors — it backed up his experience of England and the caste system back home.
In 1906, he put his peaceful revolution into effect, saying he would die before obeying an anti-Asian law. Thousands of fellow Indians joined him in civil disobedience and Gandhi was jailed twice.
But through all his tribulations, Gandhi remained loyal to Britain, organising an ambulance corps for British troops in the First World War.
Then, in 1914, the long final passage of his campaign began when he returned home to India. He was an inspiring figure and Indians followed him in their thousands as he campaigned for “swaraj” (home rule) and vowed to unite all classes and religions — especially the Hindus and Muslims.
He encouraged Indians to boycott British goods, courts and authority — his reward was a series of jail sentences during the 20s and 30s.
World War Two came and the politically astute Gandhi demanded independence as the price for India supporting Britain — again, in 1942, he was jailed.
But in 1947, the years of peaceful protest paid off when independence was won. To Gandhi’s horror, the splitting of the subcontinent into Pakistan and India brought Hindu-Muslim riots. He met violence with peace — fasting until the Delhi rioters swore themselves to non-violence.
It made his end all the more ironic. On January 30, 1948, on his way to pray, Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu infuriated by his success in bringing the two religions together.
It was a violent end to a life of harmony. But if you travel down to Kingsley Hall you will find a plaque to this day — commemorating a staging post on a lifetime’s quest for peace.