RAMACHANDRA GUHA
(ALLEN LANE, 1,152 PP, £40)
Tablet Bookshop price £36 • tel 020 7799 4064
This biography marks the completion of a mighty trilogy on the life and posthumous influence of Gandhi by one of the leading historians of modern India. Occupying him for more than 20 years, the project first produced India after Gandhi, then Gandhi before India, and finally the present book, dealing with the period when the Mahatma, having returned to the country of his birth, became one of the greatest figures of the twentieth century.
Why add to the huge corpus of works on Gandhi? In his preface, Ramachandra Guha writes that each generation of Indians – he was born in 1958 – needs to reassess the life of their most famous son. He has been able to go well beyond the 90-odd volumes of Gandhi’s Collected Works from his time in India to find what other people thought about the Mahatma, in particular through consulting the papers collected by his secretary after his murder.
The result is an absorbing and impressively detailed account of the devotion which Gandhi inspired and the forces with which he had to contend, whether they were British (Churchill and Lord Linlithgow, Viceroy from 1936-43, were especially hostile) or Muslim (under Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan). Then there were fellow Hindus who rejected his belief in ahimsa (non-violence) or B.R. Ambedkar, an untouchable who questioned his opposition to the caste system.