The all-too-familiar Mahatma

Any serious student of Indian political history would not be unaware of My Experiments with Truth, the Mahatma's true autobiography.

“The life of [Mahatma] Gandhi… is …one of the most widely studied and written about… . The man himself left an ocean of words, and generations of scholars can delve into them, de-constructing old theories and forming new ones,” I had observed in my review of Ramachandra Guha’s magisterial Gandhi before India in 2013. So why should this addition to Gandhiana be of interest to this reviewer? First, it claims to be a (reconstructed) autobiography of the early years of a man now dead for close to three-quarters of a century. The second is the pedigree and the credentials of