Arguments with Gandhi

'Warm, insightful, far-ranging, and eloquent' ADAM HOCHSCHILD

'An essential book' GARY J. BASS

'Deeply erudite' AMITAV GHOSH

From the foremost biographer of Mahatma Gandhi comes a landmark work of moral and political history – a sweeping account of Gandhi's ideas, their contested legacy, and their urgent relevance to our fractured world.

Ramachandra Guha has spent decades immersed in Gandhi's life and thought. Arguments with Gandhi is the fruit of this lifetime of scholarship and uses the legacy of Gandhi to present a moral and political history of the modern world.

Structured around four great themes – violence, justice, faith and progress – the Gandhi of this book is a compelling as well as controversial figure, whose ideas on non-violence, social justice, religious harmony and economic policy have elicited a wide range of responses, affirmative as well as critical. As Guha demonstrates, Gandhi’s debates with his contemporaries, and the arguments of later generations with him, foreground some of the vital questions of human existence that we still confront: How do we best resist political tyranny? How do we mitigate discrimination on the basis of caste, gender and race? And how do we achieve freedom from poverty and deprivation without destroying the planet?

Gandhi never held formal office and yet he developed the most powerful weapon for peaceful political change in history – satyagraha, or nonviolent resistance – and deployed it to bring down the British Empire in India. That same weapon was taken up by Martin Luther King Jr. in America, by anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, and by democracy movements across the globe. Yet Gandhi was also a fierce challenger of his own society. He campaigned against the caste system and untouchability at enormous personal risk. He insisted that Hindus and Muslims were equally Indian, a conviction that ultimately cost him his life. He advocated for women's rights and against racial prejudice. And he warned, decades before the rest of the world caught up, that the Western model of industrial development was environmentally unsustainable – a position mocked by Western intellectuals from Bertrand Russell to Arthur Koestler, and now recognised as prophetic.

Rigorously researched, elegantly written and alive with moral intelligence, the portrait of Gandhi that emerges is of a man who changed...read more...