Gandhi's Quit India Movement of 1942 was the climax of a nationalist revolutionary movement which sought independence on India's own terms. Indian independence was attained through revolution, not through a benevolent grant from the British imperial regime. "The British left India because Indians had made it impossible for them to stay." The bases for Francis Hutchins' thesis are new facts from hitherto unused sources: interviews with surviving participants in the movement, private papers from the Gandhi Memorial Museum and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, documents in the National Archives of India. In particular, he has studied the secret records of the British government, recently made available, which reveal for the first time the extent of the revolutionary movement and Britain's plans for dealing with it. Of the British records Hutchins says, "No other regime has left such careful documentation of its strategies or compiled such extensive records revealing the way in which it was overthrown." Even though England had always proclaimed its hope that India would one day become independent, the tacit assumption was that this was a remote eventuality. Only after Gandhi's Quit India Movement did Britain's political parties resign themselves to the necessity to leave quickly, whether or not they believed India was "ready." Obscured by censorship in India and by preoccupation with World War II, the significance of Gandhi's revolutionary technique was not appreciated at the time. Hutchins' impressive analysis uses the Indian case to develop a general theory of the revolutionary nature of colonial nationalism.

Why did Mohandas Gandhi campaign so strongly for Indian independence from the British Empire, at a time when Japan was threatening the country's borders during World War II? What choices did he have, what support and advice did he receive, and how did his decisions affect history and his legacy? This book looks at a controversial event from modern history, showing why one of the world's most famous leaders chose a particular course of action.

Mahatma Gandhi's fundamental work - a key to understanding both his life and thought, and South Asian politics in the twentieth century.

"My Life is My Message" "You may be sure I am living now just the way I wish to live.What I might have done at the beginning, had I more light, I am doing now in the evenning of my life, at the end of my career, building from the bottom up.study my way of living here, study my surroundings, if you wish to know what I am. Village improvement is the only foundation on which conditions in India can be permanently ameliorated." M. K. Gandhi

“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

In this fascinating and meticulously researched book, bestselling historian Arthur Herman sheds new light on two of the most universally recognizable icons of the twentieth century, and reveals how their forty-year rivalry sealed the fate of India and the British Empire. They were born worlds apart: Winston Churchill to Britain’s most glamorous aristocratic family, Mohandas Gandhi to a pious middle-class household in a provincial town in India. Yet Arthur Herman reveals how their lives and careers became intertwined as the twentieth century unfolded. Both men would go on to lead their nations through harrowing trials and two world wars—and become locked in a fierce contest of wills that would decide the fate of countries, continents, and ultimately an empire. Gandhi & Churchill reveals how both men were more alike than different, and yet became bitter enemies over the future of India, a land of 250 million people with 147 languages and dialects and 15 distinct religions—the jewel in the crown of Britain’s overseas empire for 200 years. Over the course of a long career, Churchill would do whatever was necessary to ensure that India remain British—including a fateful redrawing of the entire map of the Middle East and even risking his alliance with the United States during World War Two. Mohandas Gandhi, by contrast, would dedicate his life to India’s liberation, defy death and imprisonment, and create an entirely new kind of political movement: satyagraha, or civil disobedience. His campaigns of nonviolence in defiance of Churchill and the British, including his famous Salt March, would become the blueprint not only for the independence of India but for the civil rights movement in the U.S. and struggles for freedom across the world. Now master storyteller Arthur Herman cuts through the legends and myths about these two powerful, charismatic figures and reveals their flaws as well as their strengths. The result is a sweeping epic of empire and insurrection, war and political intrigue, with a fascinating supporting cast, including General Kitchener, Rabindranath Tagore, Franklin Roosevelt, Lord Mountbatten, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. It is also a brilliant narrative parable of two men whose great successes were always haunted by personal failure, and whose final moments of triumph were overshadowed by the loss of what they held most dear.