Gandhi has been in such vogue for quite a few years that it would have surprised him. After all, in his life time, he was not always so popular. Today, he is an inspiration for peace even in the most violent places, and people whose ideology is radically different from Gandhi’s pay tributes to him. The new century has seen a surfeit of biographies, fresh research works and films on Gandhi.

And yet, beyond platitudes of a Bollywood film, Gandhi remains little understood. This, when everybody seems to agree that we need to engage with him more, look at today’s problems with his approach. Here is a list of things that can help us discover Gandhi.

Gandhi in his own words

There are umpteen books that name Gandhi as author. Almost all are compilations on various themes. The ones that Gandhi conceived as books, even if published first in serial form in his journals, are: Hind Swaraj, Satyagraha in South Africa, Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments with Truth, From Yervada Mandir, Ashram Observances in Action, Gospel of Selfless Action or Gita According to Gandhi, Constructive Programme: Its Meaning and Place, and Key to Health. Needless to say, the autobiography and Hind Swaraj are crucial readings.

For a first-time reader, the autobiography poses a peculiar problem: the events and incidents seem so well known, through school textbooks and popular culture, that there are no surprises to propel further reading.

Yet, a careful reading reveals a surprising portrait of an ungandhian Gandhi. As for Hind Swaraj, those who have not read it are in for a rare treasure of shock and surprise, a true mixture of politics and spirituality.

In a recent survey of books that define India by Governance Now magazine, Ashis Nandy had this to say about it: “This manifesto on India’s self-definition, once looked upon as an insanely retrogressive tract, has been rediscovered as the starting point of all alternative visions of India’s future.”

For the reader, his suggestion is: “It should be read along with Rabindranath Tagore’s novel Gora and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. Readers will find that unwittingly the three are debating the same issue and coming close to each other on the meaning of India.”

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s suggestion is to pick up the Cambridge University press edition by Anthony Parel. “This work shows Gandhi at his most controversial and challenging. His inquisition of modern materialism should be pondered today more than ever,” she writes.

There is no better way to remember Gandhi on his Jayanti than to read this barely 70-page book that can be read in a few hours, or during a flight (it was written during a voyage, after all), and costs next to nothing.

To explore Hind Swaraj, you need to be aware of the subtle nuances of language that shift from Gujarati to English – though this was the only work Gandhi translated himself. ‘MK Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj: A Critical Edition’ (edited by Suresh Sharma and Tridip Suhrud) fills the gaps and provides a most enlightening introduction to the great text.

Yervada Mandir and Ashram Observances are even smaller books – actually booklets, and are similar: in both, Gandhi explains to his associates the importance of the Ekadash Vrat, the eleven vows (truth, non-violence, brahmacharya, swadeshi and so on) that ashramites were expected to follow. Largely ignored in Gandhian discourse, these 11 values are what made him a Mahatma.

If, on the other hand, you have time and inclination for much more than 100 pages, then there are 100 volumes too. The good news is that the monumental Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG) is now available online, as well as in electronic edition. If you don’t intend to write a PhD thesis on Gandhi and yet want a dip into the CWMG, a one-volume version has been compiled by Gopalkrishna Gandhi (The Oxford India Gandhi: The Essential Writings).

Gandhi biographies
When he wrote the first biography of Gandhi, Rev Joseph Docke might not have known that he was inaugurating a full-fledged genre. There have been about 200 first-rate biographies of Gandhi, not counting little tracts, according to experts’ estimates. Based on discussions with several scholars, here is a partial list:

Louis Fischer’s Life of Mahatma Gandhi is an old and reliable classic. Among the recent works, Rajmohan Gandhi’s Mohandas (Penguin) is a masterpiece for its critical interpretation. Ramachandra Guha’s two-part biography (the first of which, Gandhi Before India, has been published by Penguin) is unputdownable.

But for digging deeper into the life and work of the Mahatma, the inimitable Narayan Desai’s four-volume My Life is My Message (translated from Gujarati by Tridip Suhrud, Orient BlackSwan) is indispensable.

This work manages to present the apparently disparate facets of Gandhi – politics, spirituality, social service – in a seamless whole. Among multi-volume works, two classics with a treasure trove of details are: Mahatma by DG Tendulkar (8 volumes, Publications Division), and Last Phase, Early Phase and Middle Phase Pyarelal and Sushila Nayar (Navajivan). For those with a literary bent, the great novelist Raja Rao’s The Great India Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi (Orient Paperbacks) will appeal more than any other biography.

Gandhi as they saw him

Gandhi’s life was more multi-faceted than most, and hence diaries and memoirs of several of Gandhi’s associates – or their biographies – that present variegated reflections of this life are necessary to come to terms with the man. His secretary Mahadev Desai’s Diaries run into several volumes. After CWMG, the diaries are the most vital source on Gandhi. Unfortunately, not all are translated into English or Hindi, some yet to be published even in Gujarati.

Gandhi had many associates and followers, and a large number of them chose to pen down their recollections, making it difficult to list out even a selection. From Gandhi’s correspondence with Mirabehn (Beloved Bapu, Orient BlackSwan) to NK Bose’s needlessly controversial My Days with Gandhi (Orient BlackSwan), the list is long.

But a special mention must be made of books looking back on childhood days spent with Gandhi: consider Narayan Desai’s Gandhi Through a Child’s Eyes, and the perennial classic in Gujarati, Prabhudas Gandhi’s Jeevan-nu Parodh (abridged English translation by James Hunt, My Childhood With Gandhiji, Navajivan).

Biographies of the associates, too, form a rich sub-genre of Gandhiana. For no particular reason, two worth mention are of Mahadev Desai by his son Narayan Desai (Agnikund-man Ugelu Gulab, English translation by Chitra Desai: The Fire and The Rose, Navajivan) of Gandhi’s lesser-known but greatest friend Pranjivan Mehta by SR Mehrotra (The Mahatma and the Doctor, Vakils, Feffer and Simons Pvt. Ltd).

Since Gandhi was a human being with human failures, it is more instructive to learn about his failures and blind spots than to deify him. If you agree with that statement, it is necessary to come to terms with Ambedkar’s challenge to him, and the best albeit partial introduction to it could be through Arundhati Roy’s introduction to a new edition of Annihilation of Caste (Navayana).

And follow it up with the novelist’s dialogue with Rajmohan Gandhi in the pages of the Economic and Political Weekly. It is the debate of our time

Interpreting Gandhi

The best one-point introduction to the man, his life and his thought might just be the slim volume by Bhikhu Parekh, now called Gandhi: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford). Accessible to the whole range of readers, it introduces all major themes for further engagement with the Mahatma.

Beyond that, it is difficult to even begin listing important critical studies. Still, one can recommend Cambridge Companion to Gandhi, edited by Judith M Brown and Anthony Parel (Cambridge University Press) as the starting point for an overview of current research and proceed from its bibliography.

Gandhi in literature

Some of us are bent towards fiction, but Gandhi has not been sufficiently captured in creative literature. Yet, there are some gems here. RK Narayan was among the first to see literary possibilities in Gandhi’s life, with his Waiting for the Mahatma.

In the concluding episodes of his classic TV serial, Bharat Ek Khoj, based on Jawahalal Nehru’s classic Discovery of India, Shyam Benegal chose to depict the Mahatma only through a dramatization of a small but powerful novel, Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (Penguin). Giriraj Kishore’s Hindi novel, Pahla Girmitiya (Rajpal Publishing, translated into English by Prajapati Sah as The Girmitiya Saga, Niyogi Books) is a milestone.

Sudhir Kakar’s Mira and the Mahatma (Penguin), a fictionalized account of their troubled yet uplifting relationship, etches out a rare, humane portrait of Gandhi.
Gandhi in the digital age

The Gandhi Heritage Portal, hosted from the Sabarmati Ashram and supported by the government of India, is a unique archive that anybody from anywhere can access for authentic material. The portal has not only the CWMG, in three languages, and facsimiles of all the journals Gandhi edited, but also crucial memoirs and other works by Gandhi’s associates and interpreters. Moreover, it is adding audio and visual material.

Visiting Gandhi heritage

Notwithstanding the selfie-seeking touristy crowds, people have reported finding a deep silence inside when visiting Rajghat or the Sabarmati Ashram. Ahmedabad and Delhi of course are abundant in Gandhian sites, but there are many, many more, some forgotten, some neglected, spaces associated with Gandhi.

(Happily, all of them will have better maintenance along with a memorial plaque under the Gandhi Heritage project of the Government of India, and the work is on at the Sabarmati Ashram). For those who worship Gandhi, Champaran and Noakhali would be nothing less than pilgrimage spots. Yerawada jail in Pune, Mani Bhavan in Mumbai, Sevagram Ashram in Vardha are landmarks in Gandhi’s journey.

Studying Gandhi

Those of us who have randomly read a few works by or on Gandhi are prone to soon feel disoriented – by the range of themes, by contradictions, by one’s lack of historic or religious perspective, or theoretical tools.

It would be nice, we would think, if there would be a short workshop-like thing wherein experts would come and walk us through various aspects and also guide us to what is essentially one, seamless, holistic core of the phenomenon called Gandhi.

Surprisingly, something like that has been happening for six years now, at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study at Shimla. (Much of the above stuff in this article derives from my participation in it in 2010.)

The next one, Seventh Winter School on Life and Thought of Gandhi, will be under way during 1-15 December at the historic place that hosts IIAS – what was once the Viceroy Lodge (now Rashtrapati Niwas). Please check the website for information on how to participate

Gandhi in Multiplex

Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi is a monument that one cannot afford to ignore, even if its powerful pull needs to be tempered with some criticism (notably, Salman Rushdie’s review of it). Of late, Bollywood has discovered Gandhi, and made him a simplified simpleton palatable to masses.

One exception is Feroze Abbas Khan’s Gandhi My Father, based on a biography of the troubled son, Harilal Gandhi. (If Gandhi is the father of the nation, maybe, we all have turned out to be a bit of Harilal ourselves.)

Discovering Gandhi DIY way

Actually, the best way to understand Gandhi is by ‘doing Gandhi’. Picking up a neighbourhood cause – preferably involving no personal gains – will tell you much more about him than reading multiple biographies. More to the point, cleaning your toilet yourself once in a while will reveal a lot more about the way Gandhi’s mind worked than any critical study will do.

Saying no to at least one craving of whichever sort once in a day will show what obstacles Gandhi overcame in his quest for swaraj.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author’s own.