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Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India
Knopf
April 2011
On Sale: March 29, 2011
448 pages
ISBN: 0307269582
EAN: 9780307269584
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
A highly original, stirring book on Mahatma Gandhi that
deepens our sense of his achievements and
disappointments—his success in seizing India’s imagination
and shaping its independence struggle as a mass movement,
his recognition late in life that few of his followers paid
more than lip service to his ambitious goals of social
justice for the country’s minorities, outcasts, and rural poor. Pulitzer Prize–winner Joseph Lelyveld shows in vivid,
unmatched detail how Gandhi’s sense of mission, social
values, and philosophy of nonviolent resistance were shaped
on another subcontinent—during two decades in South
Africa—and then tested by an India that quickly learned to
revere him as a Mahatma, or “Great Soul,” while following
him only a small part of the way to the social
transformation he envisioned. The man himself emerges as one
of history’s most remarkable self-creations, a prosperous
lawyer who became an ascetic in a loincloth wholly dedicated
to political and social action. Lelyveld leads us
step-by-step through the heroic—and tragic—last months of
this selfless leader’s long campaign when his nonviolent
efforts culminated in the partition of India, the creation
of Pakistan, and a bloodbath of ethnic cleansing that ended
only with his own assassination. India and its politicians were ready to place Gandhi on a
pedestal as “Father of the Nation” but were less inclined to
embrace his teachings. Muslim support, crucial in his rise
to leadership, soon waned, and the oppressed
untouchables—for whom Gandhi spoke to Hindus as a
whole—produced their own leaders. Here is a vital, brilliant reconsideration of Gandhi’s
extraordinary struggles on two continents, of his fierce
but, finally, unfulfilled hopes, and of his ever-evolving
legacy, which more than six decades after his death still
ensures his place as India’s social conscience—and not just
India’s.
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