Ved Mehta's brilliant Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles provides an unparalleled portrait of the man who lead India out of its colonial past and into its modern form. Travelling all over India and the rest of the world, Mehta gives a nuanced and complex, yet vividly alive, portrait of Gandhi and of those men and women who were inspired by his actions.

Here is the first volume of a magisterial biography of Mohandas Gandhi that gives us the most illuminating portrait we have had of the life, the work and the historical context of one of the most abidingly influential—and controversial—men in modern history. Ramachandra Guha—hailed by Time as “Indian democracy’s preeminent chronicler”—takes us from Gandhi’s birth in 1869 through his upbringing in Gujarat, his two years as a student in London and his two decades as a lawyer and community organizer in South Africa. Guha has uncovered myriad previously untapped documents, including private papers of Gandhi’s contemporaries and co-workers; contemporary newspapers and court documents; the writings of Gandhi’s children; and secret files kept by British Empire functionaries. Using this wealth of material in an exuberant, brilliantly nuanced and detailed narrative, Guha describes the social, political and personal worlds inside of which Gandhi began the journey that would earn him the honorific Mahatma: “Great Soul.” And, more clearly than ever before, he elucidates how Gandhi’s work in South Africa—far from being a mere prelude to his accomplishments in India—was profoundly influential in his evolution as a family man, political thinker, social reformer and, ultimately, beloved leader. In 1893, when Gandhi set sail for South Africa, he was a twenty-three-year-old lawyer who had failed to establish himself in India. In this remarkable biography, the author makes clear the fundamental ways in which Gandhi’s ideas were shaped before his return to India in 1915. It was during his years in England and South Africa, Guha shows us, that Gandhi came to understand the nature of imperialism and racism; and in South Africa that he forged the philosophy and techniques that would undermine and eventually overthrow the British Raj. Gandhi Before India gives us equally vivid portraits of the man and the world he lived in: a world of sharp contrasts among the coastal culture of his birthplace, High Victorian London, and colonial South Africa. It explores in abundant detail Gandhi’s experiments with dissident cults such as the Tolstoyans; his friendships with radical Jews, heterodox Christians and devout Muslims; his enmities and rivalries; and his often overlooked failures as a husband and father. It tells the dramatic, profoundly moving story of how Gandhi inspired the devotion of thousands of followers in South Africa as he mobilized a cross-class and inter-religious coalition, pledged to non-violence in their battle against a brutally racist regime. Researched with unequaled depth and breadth, and written with extraordinary grace and clarity, Gandhi Before India is, on every level, fully commensurate with its subject. It will radically alter our understanding and appreciation of twentieth-century India’s greatest man.

The author, the grandson of Mohandas Gandhi, describes the life of the Indian leader as well as the history of India during Gandhi's time.

“Louis Fischer, famous international reporter, was permitted a week in the guest house near Gandhi’s headquarters, and daily interviews with the great Indian leader. He kept virtually a stenographic report of his conversations, livened with personal comments, swift pen pictures of Gandhi and his followers, as he encountered them that week last June. One follows the workings of Gandhi’s mind, which -- as Fischer says -- is the reason for misapprehension only too often, for Gandhi thinks and speaks simultaneously, and sometimes subsequent statements seem to contradict previous ones, while actually he has simply shared his process of reasoning to a point with his hearers. The most striking evidence of this during Fischer’s stay was his expansion of his basic position to indicate that he had, reluctantly, reached a point of accepting the inevitability of India continuing to be a military base for United Nations. He supplemented other much quoted statements, too; for instance, that dealing with him negotiations with Japan, once India was free -- which he said he would like to think possible but realised would not be possible. He and Nehru agree in feeling that religious differences will be merged, once freedom is granted, that Pakistan is only a bargaining card with England, and so on. Exciting reading, as yet another facet of this tragic, complex problem. Fits into pattern with Mitchell and Raman.”-Kirkus Reviews

Presents Essential Writings Of Mahatma Gandhi Under 8 Different Sections-Autobiographical Writings-The Search For God-Pursuit Of Truths Stead Fast Resistance And Epilogue.