NEW DELHI: Two men who would find themselves implacably opposed to each other for close to half a century would have first glimpsed each other in the aftermath of a battle.

Gandhi and Churchill would have been yards apart on Spion Kop (Spy Hill) in Natal, South Africa , on January 24, 1900, a book suggests, even if either then knew the other or that the outcome of future decades would lead to the elevation of one to the Mahatma who would dissolve the empire the other lived and breathed.

Gandhi of the Indian Ambulance Corps was carrying a wounded general, Edward Woodgate, on a stretcher that passed by Churchill, then a young reporter during the Second Boer War who had been commissioned as a lieutenant in the South African Light Horse.

“In fact, he and Gandhi must have passed literally within yards of each other…” the historian Arthur Herman writes in “Gandhi and Churchill”. The yet-to-be British statesman would acknowledge this years later.

They would meet in person just once — when Gandhi called on Churchill who was then colonial undersecretary in the first decade of the 20th century — and well before Churchill would train epithet and invective at his immovable opponent.

While Gandhi received his real education reading law at University College London, where he was also drawn by the Theosophists, to studying the Bhagavad Gita, second lieutenant Churchill would begin in Bangalore the voracious reading that would later lead to a Nobel Prize in Literature.

The adversarial lives of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Winston Spencer-Churchill began in irony. For Churchill, it ended in one. He was buried in 1965 on the date his adversary was assassinated in 1948.

