Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha

Gandhi Before India
Ramachandra Guha
Allen Lane 672pp £30

Mohandas Gandhi has always generated partisan feelings. Gandhi was barely 37 years old when a follower christened him Mahatma, the great souled one. The term is now so universal that in India those who do not use it are seen as anti-Gandhi and anti-Indian. However, many have never bought into this saint-like picture. During the war, after Gandhi called the British to quit India, the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, told Winston Churchill that he had always considered Gandhi a ‘humbug’. As for Churchill, such was his obsession to prove that his Indian nemesis was a cheat that in his memoirs published in 1951, four years after India was free and three years after Gandhi’s assassination, Churchill claimed that during his 1943 fast, while in a British jail, Gandhi mixed glucose with water. Only vehement denials from Gandhi’s doctors forced Churchill to withdraw the allegation from future editions. Even George Orwell, no friend of empires, wondered if Gandhi was a modern-day Rasputin. More than a generation later the passions have not cooled. So while Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi burnished the image of the Mahatma, there are many keen to prove that the saint had clay feet. Indeed in 2011, following lurid comments in a book suggesting Gandhi might have had a homosexual relationship with his Jewish friend Hermann Kallenbach, the Indian government considered banning its publication.