Reception to Gandhi in Bombay at Jehangir Petit's house with Sir Pherozeshah Mehta in the chair, January 12,1915.
A hundred years ago on January 9, a small launch bearing some of Bombay’s more prominent industrialists, a senior doctor, a diamond merchant and a journalist set off from the newly built Gateway of India to greet the SS Arabia, a mail boat travelling from London.
This unusual delegation were greeting an unusual figure: Mohandas Gandhi, who was back in India with his wife Kasturba after 21 years in South Africa. Gandhi had been in London the previous year to treat a severe bout of pleurisy, a lung inflammation. His doctors advised him to return to India to escape the English winter. This time, India became his permanent home.
Gandhi and Kasturba on their return to India, January 1915.
Gandhi remained in Bombay for one week before leaving for Ahmedabad. In that week, everyone from Jehangir Petit of Bombay to the Gurjar Society of India held parties for him. He met Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and a platoon of relatives. Kasturba and he gave speeches, were given speeches at, and most strangely, were presented with a set of golden shackles, perhaps to commemorate his time in prison in South Africa.
“Mr. Gandhi, in acknowledging the gifts, described the silver casket and the fetters as somewhat unsuitable to a person who had neither a roof over his head nor locked doors to his house,” wrote the Bombay Chronicle, which seemed to have avidly followed him between January 9 and January 16. “Fetters, whether of gold or of iron, were the same to him.”
The first reception was on January 12 at at Petit’s Peddar Road mansion. Six hundred people attended the gathering presided over by Ferozeshah Mehta. Gandhi was left feeling like “a rustic” in his Kathiawari turban and clothes in the midst of Bombay’s high society. The lawyer KM Munshi later claimed that a lady at the party had said Gandhi looked like her tailor.
A later party organised by the Gurjar Society of India seems to have been a more sombre affair, with a long speech in English by Jinnah in praise of Gandhi and Kasturba and Gandhi’s equally long reply in Gujarati.
Already a hero
Gandhi was already well known in India for his 20 years of activism for better treatment of Indians in South Africa. Through this period, he corresponded regularly with his political mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale and the Indian National Congress.
But the South African human rights activist had not yet become the leader of the Indian freedom struggle. While he was interested in replicating his South African experiments with Satyagraha in India, Gokhale made him promise not to become politically active for at least one year after his return.
“For the present, as Mr. Gokhale has very properly pointed out, I, having been out of India for so long, have no business to form any definite conclusions about matters essentially Indian, and that I should pass some time here as an observer and a student,” he said just after he arrived in an interview to the Bombay Chronicle with the journalist BG Horniman, who was present on the welcome launch.
Though the British watched Gandhi, they did not think of him as particularly dangerous. This might be why Bombay felt free enough to give him a hero’s welcome.
Even so, Gandhi was never quite the social butterfly. In a letter to his cousin Maganlal Gandhi two days after he arrived, he wrote waspishly of his time in the city.
“I feel suffocated by all this public honouring,” he wrote. “I have not known a moment’s peace. There is an endless stream of visitors. Neither they nor I gain anything.”