He chopped and changed the list, shifting priorities, learning from his experience and making new discoveries - having, as Lelyveld remarks somewhat acidly, a moment of epiphany every two years or so. Gandhi’s list of complaints about the ills that plagued Indian society did not come to him ready-made. The subtitle reveals Lelyveld’s key idea: Alongside his well-known political struggle for India against British colonial rule, Gandhi carried out an even more determined struggle with the country of his birth, or at least with all of those things he believed were wrong with it. The result, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, is a hard-edged, grainy, but cogently persuasive biography of one of the most illustrious figures of the 20th century. Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph Lelyveld ’60JRN, former executive editor of the New York Times, puts the record of Gandhi’s life to Gandhi’s test. (Bettmann / Corbis)Ī few months before his death in 1948, Mahatma Gandhi remarked that men like him must be measured “not by the rare moments of greatness in their lives, but by the amount of dust they collect in the course of life’s journey.” Few of the hundreds of Gandhi’s biographers have followed this dictum, choosing instead the safe comfort of hagiography. Mahatma Gandhi in 1947 with his grandnieces Abha and Manu at Birla House in New Delhi, where he would be assassinated the following January.
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