Pulitzer Prizewinning former New York Times correspondent and editor Lelyveld (Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop, 2005, etc. Muslim support, crucial in his rise to leadership, soon waned, and the oppressed untouchables - for whom Gandhi spoke to Hindus as a whole - produced their own leaders. A thorough sifting of the often contradictory life pursuit of Gandhi (18691948), from South African barrister to the Mahatma. India and its politicians were ready to place Gandhi on a pedestal as "Father of the Nation" but were less inclined to embrace his teachings.
Lelyveld leads us step-by-step through the last months of this leader's long campaign when his nonviolent efforts culminated in the partition of India, the creation of Pakistan, and a bloodbath of ethnic cleansing that ended only with his own assassination. The man himself emerges as one of history's most remarkable self-creations, a prosperous lawyer who became an ascetic in a loincloth wholly dedicated to political and social action.
Joseph Lelyveld shows how Gandhi's sense of mission, social values, and philosophy of nonviolent resistance were shaped on another subcontinent - during two decades in South Africa - and then tested by an India that quickly learned to revere him as a Mahatma, or "Great Soul," while following him only a small part of the way to the social transformation he envisioned. A book on Mahatma Gandhi that deepens our sense of his achievements and disappointments - his success in seizing India's imagination and shaping its independence struggle as a mass movement, his recognition late in life that few of his followers paid more than lip service to his ambitious goals of social justice for the country's minorities, outcasts, and rural poor.
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