The Matriculation of 1887 was, in purely intellectual terms, the sternest test of Mohandas’s life. Some of the question papers he confronted have survived. For his English paper he had to ‘write an essay of about 40 lines on the advantage of a cheerful disposition’. Among the terms he had to define were ‘pleonasm’ and ‘apposition’. For the Arithmetic exam, he had to calculate some very complicated equations, running into tens of decimal points. The Natural Science paper obliged him to provide the chemical formulae of, among other substances, lime and sulphuric acid. The History and Geography
...more
