Not yet twenty-five, a Gujarati educated in London who had been but a year in South Africa, Gandhi had now become the leader of the Natal Indians. ‘The responsibility undertaken is quite out of proportion to my ability,’ he wrote to Naoroji. He was ‘inexperienced and young and therefore, quite liable to make mistakes’. He asked the Parsi stalwart for guidance, saying any advice would ‘be received as from a father to his child’.56
