A Letter for His Son
c. 1906–11 · Gandhi, whose eldest son Harilal wants to study law in London, as his father once did
His eldest son wants what he had. A place at the bar in London, the training, the qualification, the exact road the father took at nineteen and the reason the father is anyone at all.
There is a scholarship in the community's gift, and the community would give it to this boy in an afternoon if the father asked. The father does not have to lie or pull anything. He only has to not object.
He objects. He says a Western legal education is the wrong thing for an Indian to want, that character is built by service and not by qualifications, and that a man who uses his standing to advance his own son has taken from the movement to give to his household, which is precisely what he has spent a decade telling everyone else not to do.
The boy has heard the argument. What the boy hears inside the argument is that other people's sons are being sent, and he is the one who has to be the example.
He is nineteen. He is waiting for an answer.
Refuse
Let him have the placeOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
Gandhi refused, and sent another young man instead. Harilal never forgave him. He broke with his father completely, drifted through failed businesses and debt, converted to Islam and then back again (both times, his father believed, mainly to wound him), and drank heavily for the rest of his life. He turned up at his mother Kasturba's funeral in 1944 drunk and had to be led away. He was at his father's funeral in 1948 without being recognized in the crowd, and died five months later in a Bombay hospital, of tuberculosis, registered under a name nobody connected to anyone. Gandhi wrote late in life that he had been a good deal harder on his own family than on anyone else's, and did not conclude from that that he had been wrong.
The philosophers weigh in
Refuse"The question is not whether he loved the boy. It is whether a rule that bends for the people we love is a rule at all, and it is not. He answered it correctly and it cost what correct answers cost."
Let him go"He made a stranger of his son to keep faith with people he had never met. Ask what kind of order he expects those strangers to build, when the first relationship he had was the one he spent."