Page:Rolland - Mahatma Gandhi, tr. by Catherine D. Groth, 1924.pdf/24

 which, as he says, he “wasted a lot of time and money trying to become an Englishman,” he buckled down to hard work and led a strictly regulated life. Some friends gave him a copy of the Bible, but the time to understand it had not yet come. But it was during his stay in London that he realized for the first time the beauty of the Bhagavad Gitâ. He was carried away by it. It was the light the exiled Hindu had been seeking, and it gave him back his faith. He realized that for him salvation could lie only in Hinduism.

He returned to India in 1891, a rather sad homecoming, for his mother had just died, and the news of her death had been withheld from him. Soon afterward he began practising law at the Supreme Court of Bombay. He abandoned this career a few years later, having come to look upon it as immoral.