Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life »

Kathryn Tidrick was born and grew up in Britain. She has lived in the United States, Jamaica, Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa and India, and now makes Scotland her home. She is the author of Heart-Beguiling Araby: The English Romance with Arabia and Empire and the English Character.

'My struggle is not merely political. It is religious and therefore quite pure.'
This major new interpretation of the life of Gandhi adds a new dimension to our understanding of this extraordinary figure of twentieth-century history. Drawing on material neglected by earlier biographers, Kathryn Tidrick provides a highly original account of Gandhi's beliefs, their origins, and their expression in his political views and personal behaviour. She revealingly examines Gandhi's ideas about the relationship between sexual temptation and spiritual power, and the bizarre and scandalous behaviour that resulted. The fresh light that Tidrick throws on her subject reveals not the secular saint of popular myth but a difficult and self-obsessed man driven to pursue the world-changing destiny that he believed was marked out for him.

Gandhi's conception of his personal destiny grew out of the religious influences to which he was exposed as a student in London and developed in the context of the Indian independence struggle. Throughout a long and turbulent career, he strove to balance the demands of the spiritual discipline he imposed on himself with the necessity (as he saw it) of his personal leadership of the independence movement and the claims of practical politics. Penetrating and provocative, "Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life" shows how he maintained an unswerving belief that his success or failure was of crucial significance not only for India but or the world. It makes a tremendous contribution to our understanding of the man behind the myth.

List of Illustrations     vii
Acknowledgements     viii
Prologue     xi
Kathiawar and London     1
South Africa: Beginnings     23
South Africa: Satyagraha     53
Return to India     104
The Battle Joined     135
In the Wings     183
Salt     216
The Solitary Path     247
Gotterdammerung     285
Glossary     325
A Note on Sources     328
Notes     331
Index     368