Gandhi's Passion
The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
More than half a century after his death, Mahatma Gandhi continues to inspire millions throughout the world. Yet modern India, most strikingly in its decision to join the nuclear arms race, seems to have abandoned much of his nonviolent vision. Inspired by recent events in India, Stanley Wolpert offers this subtle and profound biography of India's "Great Soul."
Wolpert compellingly chronicles the life of Mahatma Gandhi from his early days as a child of privilege to his humble rise to power and his assassination at the hands of a man of his own faith. This trajectory, like that of Christ, was the result of Gandhi's passion: his conscious courting of suffering as the means to reach divine truth. From his early campaigns to stop discrimination in South Africa to his leadership of a people's revolution to end the British imperial domination of India, Gandhi emerges as a man of inner conflicts obscured by his political genius and moral vision. Influenced early on by nonviolent teachings in Hinduism, Jainism, Christianity, and Buddhism, he came to insist on the primacy of love for one's adversary in any conflict as the invincible power for change. His unyielding opposition to intolerance and oppression would inspire India like no leader since the Buddha--creating a legacy that would encourage Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and other global leaders to demand a better world through peaceful civil disobedience.
By boldly considering Gandhi the man, rather than the living god depicted by his disciples, Wolpert provides an unprecedented representation of Gandhi's personality and the profound complexities that compelled his actions and brought freedom to India.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wolpert, a professor emeritus in South Asian history at UCLA, is well versed in the politics of India and has written numerous books on that country and its neighbor Pakistan. His new work is not so much a book on how Gandhi came to be the Mahatma, or India's "Great Soul," but a chronicle of India's independence movement after WWI and the communal violence that led to the 1947 partition along religious lines. The most absorbing part of the book shows how Gandhi's legal training at Inner Temple in London and his work to protect the rights of Indians in South Africa at the turn of the century led to his agitation for Home Rule in India. Wolpert skillfully uses Gandhi's own writings there are 90 volumes of his collected works and descriptions of meetings and travels to organize mass passive resistance, including boycotts and marches, to explain how Gandhi's nonviolent resistance, or Satyagraha, essentially forced the British to grant dominion status to 300 million Indians. However, Wolpert does not convincingly illustrate how Gandhi came to believe in nonviolence and how he transformed himself from a rich Anglophile and lawyer into a near-godlike figure who valued equality, self-control, celibacy and the relinquishing of wealth and desires. Wolpert touches on the fact that Gandhi's transformation alienated his children and wife (whom he married at age 11) even while he expressed an "intensely personal passion" for various Western missionaries and forced some ashram devotees to sleep by him naked. By supplying more detail than useful analysis, Wolpert's effort is ultimately disappointing, and, in the end, Gandhi remains a recognizable but cryptic figure.
