The Asian Age reports on Gandhis’ London Walk
The Asian Age has published story July 17, 2007 (click here to open the link)
Sarju Kaul, London correspondent for The Asian Age has reported on the walk.
Text of the story is pasted below:
A journey through the steps of Bapu in London
Sarju Kaul
London: Mahatma Gandhi, who is once again part of popular imagination in India thanks to antics of Munnabhai, is slowly making a comeback in London too.
To celebrate Bapu’s links with London, businessman Ajay Goyal has started Gandhi’s London, a monthly walk.
The walk, which celebrates Mahatma Gandhi’s links to London, covers the Father of the Nation’s five visits to London — starting from the first one in 1888 when he arrived as an eighteen-year-old to train as a barrister at University College of London and his subsequent visits in 1895 and 1914 and as the leader of Indian freedom struggle in 1931.
The walk aims to help re-introduce people, Britons and Indian alike, to London’s Indian connections. “There is a strong Indian soul in London, which was colonial India’s capital city for decades. Every single of our leaders from Rabindranath Tagore to Raja Rammohan Roy, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru found their true spirit and calling in London,” said Mr Goyal, who was born and brought up in Kurukshetra.
Describing himself as a true Londoner, Mr Goyal started researching links of Indian freedom fighters to London after enjoying the touristy walking tours tracing links of Jack the Ripper, fictional Sherlock Holmes and innumerable British writers to the city.
“Most of them (Indian freedom fighters) were educated here, but there is really nothing to show for their long stays in the city. The Gandhi walk doesn’t really just embody and architectural circuit, it is basically the story of what Gandhi as 19-year-old student would have seen, experienced and coveted in London.
He saw exactly the same things that we see now — the shops, restaurants, parks, houses. But despite his initial desire to become a gentleman, he turned inwards to search his real self and found it and become an icon for all,” he said.
The walk explores Mahatma’s London in less than three hours through his first port of call, his link to Inner Temple, to the Vegetarian Society and late 19th and early 20th century restaurants that provided vegetarian food for the young student, to his links with Theosophists led by Annie Besant, and his numerous lodgings.
Although an appreciable number of buildings and sites linked to Mahatma Gandhi were destroyed in the Blitz during World War II, or were demolished, a lot many links and traces remain.
As a student, Bapu roamed Westminster, lived in Kensington, made friends at the vegetarian restaurants of the city but never crossed into Whitechapel and the East End, which became notorious for murders by serial killer Jack the Ripper.
London, a walker’s paradise, seems to have developed Mahatma Gandhi’s fondness for walking which he incorporated with great success in the Indian freedom struggle in form of salt Satyagraha or the Dandi March, said Mr Goyal, who invested up to £10,000 in the project through his foundation to research, conceive and implement the walk as a regular tour.
After extensive research, Mr Goyal took the help of London Walks Company and its highly qualified Blue Badge tour guides to develop the tour.
Introduced in May this year, the Gandhi Walk is organised on a Saturday afternoon of each month and this month it is scheduled for July 21.
The £6-per-person walk is free for students and older people.
Mr Goyal, a wealthy investor in European media and Hollywood who left India about 20 years ago, is keen to create a number of India-linked tours, including a bus tour, in London.
He aims to create a day-long tour on the soul of India in London — it will include haunts of Tagore, Nehru and Roy and include predominantly Indian areas like Southall, with Indian food and purely Indian experiences thrown in.
He said he wants to ensure that these walks are on the itinerary of every Indian visiting London and develop them into permanent fixtures on the London tourist map.
However, the biggest project that he envisages is setting up of a Gandhi museum in central London.
He told this newspaper that he is looking for a building to buy in an area, which has some link to Mahatma Gandhi, to turn it into a museum.
“It will be a modern museum — with wax figures, multi-media exhibitions on glimpses of freedom struggle, the personality of Mahatma Gandhi and how London helped him develop into the leader he became,” Mr Goyal said.
The Gandhi Walk has got an official stamp of approval in London — it is part of India Now, a London-wide festival promoted by London mayor Ken Livingstone that lasts from July 15 to September 30.
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