The second and concluding volume of the magisterial biography that began with the acclaimed, Gandhi Before India: the definitive portrait of the life and work of one of the most abidingly influential-and controversial-men in world history.
This volume opens with Mohandas Gandhi’s arrival in Bombay in January 1915 and takes us through his epic struggles over the next three decades: to deliver India from British rule, to forge harmonious relations between India’s Hindu and Muslim populations, to end the pernicious Hindu practice of untouchability, and to develop India’s economic and moral self-reliance. We see how in each of these campaigns, Gandhi adapted methods of nonviolence-strikes, marches, fasts-that successfully challenged British authority, religious orthodoxy, social customs, and would influence non-violent, revolutionary movements throughout the world. In reconstructing Gandhi’s life and work, Ramachandra Guha has drawn on sixty different archival collections, the most significant among them, a previously unavailable collection of papers belonging to Gandhi himself. Using this wealth of material, Guha creates a portrait of Gandhi and of those closest to him-family, friends, political and social leaders-that illuminates the complexity inside his thinking, his motives, his actions and their outcomes as he engaged with every important aspect of social and public life in the India of his time.
RAMACHANDRA GUHA has taught at Yale and Stanford universities, the University of Oslo, the Indian Institute of Science, and the London School of Economics. His books include the award-winning India After Gandhi, and the first volume of this biography, Gandhi Before India which was a 2014 New York Times Notable Book, and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. He writes regularly on social and political issues for The New York Times, and for the British and Indian presses, including The Telegraph and the Hindustan Times. He lives in Bangalore, India. Email: ramachandraguha@yahoo.in