Charles Allen
A Great Soul
Gandhi: The Man, His People and the Empire
By Rajmohan Gandhi
Haus Books 700pp £25 order from our bookshop
I remember quite clearly the moment when I heard that Bapu had been shot, and I remember being comforted by one of my parents’ servants, who assured me that he was now seated beside Vishnu on a lotus in heaven. Nothing better illustrates M K Gandhi’s unique hold over the popular imagination in India in January 1948 than the fact that even a little white boy not yet in school should have been so distressed.
Biographies of saints should always be approached with caution – and when a saint’s biography is written by his grandson, who in his earlier days was a politician, the reader has every right to be doubly, if not trebly, suspicious. But then ‘saint’ might not quite be the right word
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