What would Gandhi think of India now?

Christopher Harding on a labour of love that chronicles Gandhi’s life – and how he became a political weapon

‘AGANDHI: THE YEARS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, 1914-48

seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East… [a] malignant subversive fanatic…”

This classic of colonial invective appears in not one but two massive and important recent biographies, delving afresh into two of the 20th century’s most heavily chronicled lives. The man who delivered the line is brought to life in Andrew Roberts’s Churchill: Walking with Destiny. Its target, one Mohandas K Gandhi, is the subject of a lengthy and loving two-part portrait by Ramachandra Guha.

This second and final instalment, The Years that Changed the World, takes us from Gandhi’s farewell to his law practice and civil rights activism in South Africa, through his revolutionary leadership of the Indian nationalist movement to independence in 1947, and his assassination the following year.

In an era of quick and quicktempered politics, replete with reductive black-and-whitery about the world, it is a relief to find the art of the doorstop biography still alive: celebrations of human complexity and colour, built on serious archival graft and fashioned through topclass storytelling into a detailed narrative, with a point to make. At this, Ramachandra Guha excels – though he might have been a little less reticent in stating his case.

In his preface, Guha offers up three answers to the inevitable “why another Gandhi book?” question: long fascination with his subject; the need for each generation to reappraise its major national figures (as the British do with Churchill, Guha points out, and the Americans with Franklin D Roosevelt); and finally a desire to exploit new source material.

It is not until the epilogue – “Gandhi in Our Time” – that we encounter what feels like the most important reason for Guha putting pen to such a considerable quantity of paper. Whereas Gandhi’s life and thought ought to be a well from which India draws whenever the need arises, he has of late been turned into a political weapon, piously wielded by illiberal forces on the Left and Right of Indian politics. Guha finds the behaviour of Hindu nationalists especially distasteful: praising the Mahatma as “Father of the Nation” and making grand plans for the 150th anniversary of his birth this year, while reopening divisions between religious groups that Gandhi had seen it as his mission in life to heal.

It is to India’s “flawed and fault-ridden democracy” that

Guha offers his Gandhi: a man whose religious outlook was defined by pluralism, dialogue and deep seriousness, expressed in a life of activism that stretched from social work on behalf of all-but-forgotten corners of his country right up to meeting his British adversaries with one of the most penetrating critiques of colonialism ever offered – that it was a form of moral and spiritual violence which colonisers

Hindu nationalists praise the Mahatma while reopening rifts between the religions

ultimately inflict on themselves as much as on the colonised.

Guha allows all this to emerge gradually, revelling in the minutiae of Gandhi’s travels and