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