every Hindu ought to wear them.”
Now there is a history as to how I came to dispense with both. When I was an urchin often, I envied the Brahmin lads sporting bunches of keys tied to their sacred threads, and I wished I could do likewise. The practice of wearing the sacred thread was not then common among the Vaishya families in Kathiawad. But a movement had just been started for making it obligatory for the first three varnas . As a result several members of the Gandhi clan adopted the sacred thread. The Brahmin who was teaching two or three of us boys Rama Raksha invested us with the thread, and although I had no occasion to possess a bunch of keys, I got one and began to sport it. Later, when the thread gave way, I do not remember whether I missed it very much. But I know that I did not go in for a fresh one.
As I grew up several well-meaning attempts were made both in India and South Africa to re-invest me with the sacred thread, but with little success. If the Shudras may not wear it, I argued, what right have the other varnas to do so? And I saw no adequate reason for adopting what was to me an unnecessary custom. I had no objection to the thread as such, but the reasons for wearing it were lacking.
As a Vaishnava I had naturally worn round my neck the kanthi , and the shikha was considered obligatory by elders. On the eve of my going to England, however, I got rid of the shikha , lest when I was bareheaded it should expose me to ridicule and make me look, as I then thought, a barbarian in the eyes of the Englishmen. In fact this cowardly feeling carried me so far that in South Africa I got my cousin Chhaganlal Gandhi, who was religiously wearing the shikha , to do away with it. I feared that it might come in the way of his public work and so, even at the risk of paining him, I made him get rid of it.
I therefore made a clean breast of the whole matter to the Swami and said: