The Un-Gandhian Gandhi: The Life and Afterlife of the Mahatma

Although there have been many biographical accounts of Mahatma Gandhi, much of the literature on him is hagiographic. Keeping clear of hagiography and hyper-criticism, this book throws new light on Gandhi by looking simultaneously at his legend and career. The Gandhian legend is analysed through texts and images which spread it-through India and in the West. Markovits suggests that the legend of the saint as politician has obscured the facts of Gandhi’s career. Gandhi’s professional role in the public sphere, says Markovits, was marked by this maturation in South Africa, a phase often glossed in laudatory accounts as a ‘preparation’ for his famous work in India. But this later Indian career, markovits argues, was really the consequence of Gandhi having to radically reinvent himself. The attempts made here is thus to revaluate some crucial points within Gandhi’s career and sometimes ambivalent ideological positions. Markovits argues that the disjunctions between the early and later Gandhi need to be squarely examined. Rather than seeing Gandhi as an upholder of traditional Indian values, Markovits stresses the paradoxical modernity of Gandhi’s antimodernism. What comes out strongly. In the end, is Gandhi as a polysemic figure, open to different, even contradictory, interpretations, whose susceptibility to varying appropriations makes him enduring and contemporary.