Gandhi: The Man Behind the Mahatma
About this ebook
Gandhi: The Man Behind the Mahatma follows his life in order, from his birth in the small coastal town of Porbandar in 1869 to his assassination in a Delhi garden in 1948. It follows the timid, unremarkable boy to London and the bar; the failed young lawyer to South Africa, and to the night on a railway platform that changed everything; and the mature leader through the great Indian campaigns, Champaran, Non-Cooperation, the Salt March to Dandi, Quit India, to independence, to the catastrophe of Partition, and to the final, heroic, solitary fasts for peace.
Above all, this is an honest book. It is neither a work of devotion nor a work of demolition, and the world has had a good deal of both. It explains the philosophy, satyagraha, ahimsa, the inseparability of means and ends, in plain language, and it shows why that philosophy went on to shape Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and nonviolent movements across the world. But it also faces, squarely and without flinching, the difficult Gandhi: his troubling early attitudes to black Africans in South Africa, his letters to Hitler, his collision with Ambedkar over caste, the partition he could not prevent, and the disturbing experiments of his last years. It separates, carefully and in the open, the man who can be known from the legend that was built around him.
Written in clear, jargon-free prose for curious general readers, with no prior knowledge of Indian history, philosophy, or politics assumed, this is a vivid and trustworthy introduction to one of the most influential, and one of the least simple, human beings of the modern age.
What you will find in this book
• A clear, ordered account of Gandhi's life, from his birth in Porbandar in 1869 to his assassination in Delhi in 1948.
• The making of a leader in South Africa: the train at Pietermaritzburg, the Natal years, and the invention and naming of satyagraha.
• The great Indian campaigns explained step by step: Champaran, Non-Cooperation, the Salt March to Dandi, and Quit India.
• The Gandhian philosophy in plain language: truth, non-violence, the doctrine of means and ends, and the critique of modern civilization in Hind Swaraj.
• The tragedy of Partition, the barefoot peace pilgrimage through Noakhali, and the final fasts for communal peace.
• The private man: Kasturba and a marriage of sixty-two years, the four sons, the life of the ashrams, and the famous, deliberate simplicity.
• An honest reckoning with the controversies: the early words on black Africans, the letters to the dictators, the question of caste, and the experiments of his last years.
• The clash of Gandhi with the other great figures of his age: Jinnah, Ambedkar, Churchill, and Tagore.
• The global legacy of Gandhism: how the method shaped the American civil rights movement, the fall of apartheid, and nonviolent struggle worldwide.
• A detailed chronology of his life, a guide to the key figures, a glossary of terms, and a note on the sources for readers who wish to go further.
Who this book is for
This book is written for readers of general culture who are curious about Gandhi, about India, about the twentieth century, and about the idea of non-violence, but who are not specialists in any of those fields. It assumes no prior knowledge and explains every term it uses. It will appeal to anyone who has met the famous image of Gandhi and wondered what kind of man, and what kind of life, actually stood behind it.
