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His First Acquaintance with Religions

Three factors combined to propel the shy, provincial young man Gandhi onto a sea voyage to the shores of England: first, the financial woes and worries of his family after his father’s death; second, his desire to fulfill his late father’s wish for his youngest son “Manu” (Gandhi’s childhood nickname) to bring pride to the family and add luster to his name; and third, his own personal ambition to become a London-trained barrister-at-law. The most dominant of these three reasons was of course his own irresistible desire to see London—“the city of his dreams”—and the motherland of all the English romantic poets he had admired from afar! It was this—his starry-eyed, youthful fascination for the “London-wonderland”—that impelled the eighteen-year-old Mohandas Gandhi to set sail from Bombay to London on September 4, 1888!