Gandhi

by Jad Adams

Overview

“Provocative. Adams strips away Gandhi’s saintly aura and explores the duality of India’s most famous leader.” —Financial Times

Jad Adams traces the course of Gandhi’s multi-faceted life and the development of his religious, political, and social thinking over seven tumultuous decades: from his comfortable upbringing in a princely state in Gujarat; his early civil rights campaigns; his leadership through civil disobedience in the 1920s and 1930s that made him a world icon; and finally to his assassination by a Hindu extremist in 1948, only months after the birth of an independent India.

An elegant and masterly account of one of the seminal figures of twentieth-century history, Adams presents for the first time the true story behind the man whose life may truly be said to have changed the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681770109
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	05/01/2012
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jad Adams is a historian and television producer. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and is currently a visiting research fellow of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London.

Table of Contents

Maps

The Partition of India, 1947 x

South Africa, 1893 xi

Introduction: Naked Ambition 1

1 Childhood and Marriage 7

2 London Lessons 26

3 Adventures in Natal 39

4 Challenge and Chastity 74

5 The Army of the Poor 94

6 Village Activist 125

7 Arousing India 156

8 The Salt March 176

9 World Icon 196

10 Quit India 220

11 Partition and Death 240

12 Legacy 272

Notes 285

Bibliography 305

Glossary 311

Index 313

Editorial Reviews

Adding fresh insight to a life so well documented is no mean feat, but Adams's biography of Gandhi eschews hagiography and offers critical insights about the revered political and spiritual leader. Scholars of Indian politics are no strangers to the notion that "Gandhi was a great leader but a poor politician," and Adams (Hideous Absinthe) attends to this naïveté. But the author pulls the veil back much more dramatically on Gandhi's personal life, notably his obsession with chastity and his practice of testing it by sleeping next to teenage girls—in some cases, his young relatives—and receiving daily nude massages from his female devotees. And while Gandhi was an astute campaigner, he was also willful, fixated on his own personal dietary and sexual beliefs, and a bit of a brute to his family. Adams observes that he behaved "not always well toward his friends and supporters, but wonderfully towards people he did not know, and with an outflowing of spontaneous benevolence towards those toiling masses that he would never know in person." The author veers on occasion into overly psychoanalytic dissection of Gandhi's motives, attributing his poor treatment of his offspring to "the carnality of their creation, as if he saw in his own sons nothing but the embodiment of the copulatory urge that had to be tamed." But Adams provides a balanced view of the complex figure whose personal, spiritual and historical legacy are no less great for being flawed. (July)

Publishers Weekly

There have been enough hagiographies of this great figure,
and after his death there was a concerted effort to erase some embarrassing truths from the Gandhi legend. This is a vividly human book.

The Daily Mail [London]

For anyone trying to find a way through the myriad political byways of modern India and Pakistan, Adams’s biography is the perfect starting point.

The Glasgow Herald

Adams focuses not on the idealized apostle of peace, but
Gandhi the man.

Times of India (Mumbai)

Adams focuses not on the idealized apostle of peace, but Gandhi the man.

The Times of India (Mumbai)

Historian Adams (visiting research fellow, Sch. of Advanced Study, Univ. of London; Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle) bases this biography (published in the UK with the subtitle "Naked Ambition") on primary sources, including Gandhi's own writings and those of his associates, as is evident in the book's extensive notes and bibliography. In addition to the solid research, Adams casts a penetrating and critical eye on Gandhi's complex personality, although at times Adams evidently fails to understand the mores of the period. Additionally, he ascribes motives to Gandhi that may or may not be true. At other times, the author's assertions are undeniably on the mark. If Joseph Lelyveld's recent Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India focuses on Gandhi the reformer and his struggle to unite Hindus and Muslims, this book is an astringent and hard-hitting look at Gandhi's life, especially his personal eccentricities and inconsistencies. In this regard, Adams's book is closer to George Orwell's 1949 essay, "Reflections on Gandhi." VERDICT Libraries that already have Great Soul may well wish to purchase this title to round out their collection.—Ravi Shenoy, Naperville P.L., IL

Library Journal

A concise, critical look at the Indian leader, emphasizing his striving for spiritual perfection.

Unlike Joseph Lelyveld's recent exhaustive study of Gandhi and the evolution of his ideas,Great Soul (2011), this work by British historian Adams (Hideous Absinthe, 2003, etc.) goes right to the essential thought of the Mahatma, despite his confounding, albeit engaging inconsistencies. The author sticks to primary sources, such as accounts by Gandhi'ssecretaries, while remaining somewhat leery of Gandhi's own autobiography, because of his elusive relationship to truth ("I have grown from truth to truth"). In discrete, tidy chapters, Adams embarks on the main tenets of Gandhi's life: his pampered upbringing by a very devout Hindu mother; his marriage at age 13 to Kasturbai, also his age, which would arouse his later disgust for Hindu marriage rituals; his lifelong striving for chastity and the shaping of his brahmacharya vow; his obsession with his diet, a system of trial-and-error that would often leave him weak and ill; his early law education in England, a great sacrifice for his family, though later he would essentially sever ties to his relatives, refuse to educate his sons and support his family financially; his use of fasting as a political tool; and his gradual political engagement, from his time as a young barrister in South Africa to his return to India as a national leader for the rights of the indentured servants, miners, poor and untouchables. He sought emancipation by doing—living in self-sufficient simplicity within his ashrams, where he imposed the strictest discipline on himself and others, immersing himself in sacred texts of all religions. The concluding chapter on Gandhi's "Legacy" considers his assassin's criticism of Gandhi's sense of his own infallibility, as well as the terrible repercussions from the partition of Pakistan and Gandhi's invaluable catalyst to global movements of human rights.

A tight synthesis and good introduction to Gandhi's life and work.

Kirkus Reviews