Gandhi

Throughout his long and turbulent career as a political leader, first in South Africa and then in India, Gandhi sought to fulfil his religious aspirations through politics and to reconcile politics with personal religious conviction. But Gandhi’s religion was wildly divergent from anything to have taken root in his native India. Foremost among his private tenets was the belief that he was a world saviour, long prophesied and potentially divine.

Penetrating and provocative, Kathryn Tidrick’s book draws on neglected material to explore the paradoxes within Gandhi’s life and personality. She reveals a man whose spiritual ideas originated not in India, but in the drawing rooms of late-Victorian England, and which included some very eccentric and damaging notions about sex. The resulting portrait is complex, convincing and, to anyone interested in the legacy of colonialism, more enlightening than any previously published. 

The Gandhi revealed here is not the secular saint of popular renown, but a difficult and self-obsessed man driven by a messianic sense of personal destiny. A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR

"A fine and engaging biography ... His ideas remain very relevant in understanding the problems that plague the contemporary world."—Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize winner

"Brilliant."—William Dalrymple, Sunday Times

"Fair and balanced."—Atul Chaturvedi, Indian Express

"Exhaustively researched ... Gandhi emerges from Tidrick’s detailed and balanced biography as a man with his full share of flaws, contradictions and oddities, but with more than a streak of genuine holiness."—Tablet

"An extraordinarily careful, calm and courageous work. Any serious student of this historical figure would have more to learn about his outlook from her work than from any other extant study of him."—Perry AndersonKathryn Tidrick is the author of the highly regarded Heart Beguiling Araby: The English Romance with Arabia and Empire and the English Character.