How a vegetarian meal in London made Mahatma Gandhi renounce meat ‘by choice’

When I read Gandhi’s autobiography, I want to talk to you about the London section, about what it was like to be an Indian and a vegetarian in the heart of a meaty empire.

In 1888, Gandhi travels from India to London to study law. He arrives carrying a promise to his mother that he will not touch meat (or wine or women) while in Europe. At the age of 19, Gandhi is both a reluctant vegetarian and a reluctant meat-eater. Many of his Indian peers take to meat-eating. As one friend explains to him, “We are a weak people because we do not eat meat. The English are able to rule over us, because they are meat-eaters. You know how hardy I am, and how great a runner too. It is because I am a meat-eater. Meat-eaters do not have boils or tumours, and even if they sometimes happen to have any, these heal quickly.”

Gandhi recalls this doggerel of the Gujarati poet Narmad that his classmates recite.

Have you heard this one too? Behold the mighty Englishman!

He rules the Indian small,
Because being a meat-eater
He is five cubits tall.

“It began to grow on me that meat-eating was good, that it would make me...

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