Ramachandra Guha - Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948

When Mohandas K. Gandhi landed in Bombay in January 1915, he was already forty-five, and had been away a long time from his homeland. Gandhi grew up in two small chiefdoms in Gujarat, insulated from the social and political changes taking place in British India. He studied law in London, and then, after failing to establish himself at the Bar in Bombay and Rajkot, moved to South Africa, where he developed a flourishing legal practice before turning to activism and social work.

The two decades that Gandhi spent in the diaspora were crucial to his intellectual and moral development. Living outside India, he came to appreciate the enormous linguistic and religious diversity of his homeland. It was in South Africa that he forged a regimen of extreme personal austerity, experimenting with different foods and methods of healing. It was here that he first thought of, and applied, the technique of non-violent resistance known as satyagraha.

Gandhis years in South Africa were important to him, personally, yet his years in India were of far greater historic import. In South Africa, he sought to represent the Indian diaspora, roughly 150,000 people in all. In his homeland, he strove to become the leader of its 300 million people. In South Africa, he worked only in towns and districts where Indians were present; in India, he made his ideas known in every corner of the subcontinent. In one place, he led a relatively small community of migrants; in the other, he became the central figure in the largest colony of the worlds greatest Empire.

The India that Gandhi returned to in 1915 was by no means politically quiescent. The Indian National Congress, set up in 1885, had a Moderate faction, which politely and respectfully petitioned the British to grant Indians greater rights; and an Extremist faction, which resorted to street protest and the burning of British cloth to demand political and economic independence for India. Whereas the Congress professed to represent all Indians regardless of caste or creed, the Muslim League was established in 1906 specifically to protect the interests of the subcontinents largest religious minority. There were also some revolutionary groups, small but very active, who sought through bombings and assassinations to scare the British out of India.

These political groups and tendencies were resolutely urban as well as middle class. They had no roots in the villages. After his return to India in 1915, Gandhi took this city-based and elite-dominated opposition to British rule and made it into a mass movement, reaching deep into the countryside, bringing in millions of peasants, workers, artisans and women. The techniques Gandhi used, the travels he undertook, and the friendships he forged to accomplish this transformation, form a major part of the narrative. This biography of Indias most famous patriot is inevitably also a history of the most important political party of the time, the Indian National Congress, and of the freedom movement itself.

To deliver India from British rule was by no means Gandhis only preoccupation. The forging of harmonious relations between Indias often disputatious religious communities was a second. The desire to end the pernicious practice of untouchability in his own Hindu faith was a third. And the impulse to develop economic self-reliance for India and moral self-reliance for Indians was a fourth.

These campaigns were conducted by Gandhi in parallel. All were to him of equal importance. In 1933, he wrote to a close friend that my life is one indivisible whole.I cant devote myself entirely to untouchability and say: Neglect HinduMuslim unity or swaraj. All these things run into one another and are inter-dependent. You will find at one time in my life an emphasis on one thing, at another time on another. But that is just like a pianist, now emphasizing one note and now another. But they are all related to [one] another.