Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948

by Ramachandra Guha

several times. He was never chosen, in part because of Norway’s extremely close relationship to Britain. That Gandhi was never awarded the prize remains a matter of deep embarrassment to the Nobel Committee in Oslo. They have since tried to make amends,

by awarding prizes to (among others) Albert Luthuli, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Aung San Suu Kyi, al...

He did not think science had all the answers to the mysteries of the universe. Faith answered to a deep human need. Yet Gandhi did not think that there was one privileged path to God either.

Gandhi’s faith resonates closely with spiritual (or intellectual) traditions that are other than ‘Hindu’. The stress on ethical conduct brings

him close to Buddhism, while the avowal of non-violence and non-possession is clearly drawn from Jainism. The exaltation of service is far more Christian than Hindu. The emphasis on the dignity of the individual echoes Enlightenment ideas of human rights.

The best tribute to Gandhi’s religious ecumenism that I have come across relates to a memorial meeting held after his death in the Tamil town of Tirupattur. Presiding over the meeting was the fou...

most moving speech,’ he reported later, ‘was that of the Secretary of the local Muslim League, who said: “Mahatma Gandhi was the twentieth centur...

Back in 1928, Gandhi had warned about the unsustainability, on the global scale,

of Western patterns of production and consumption. ‘God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West,’ he had said. ‘The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom [England] is today keeping the

world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip...

Gandhi had an intuitive understanding of the global limits to resource-intensive, energy-intensive industrialization. As

he put it in 1926, to ‘make India like England and America is to find some other races and places of the earth for exploitation’. Since the Western nations had already ‘divided all the known races outside Europe for exploitation and there are no new worlds to discover’, he

pointedly asked: ‘What can be the fate of India trying t...

Perhaps no political leader in modern times knew his land and his people as intimately as Gandhi. He travelled around India by train, car, bullock cart and on foot,

traversing thousands of miles of desert, mountain, valley, plain, plateau, delta and the coast, while spending the nights in towns and hamlets and sometimes in open fields as well.

As an English Quaker who interacted with him over a period of twenty years pointed out, ‘Gandhiji had no private life, as we Westerners understand the expression.’54 God knows what we would think of other celebrated

figures (whether in politics or business, sports, science or the arts) if we were so directly exposed to the intimacies of their lives and thoughts. Beyond satyagraha, interfaith harmony, environmental responsibility, the ending of the British Empire, and the delegitimizing of untouchability, the practice of, and the largely successful quest for, truth may in fact be Gandhi’s most remarkable achievement.