Gandhi's Passion

Gandhi's Passion: The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi
By Stanley Wolpert
Oxford University Press, 336 pp.

All of us know Gandhi's name. We know that he lived a life of great rectitude and that he preached a doctrine of nonviolence that propelled India to independence. But he

	Read an excerpt from the book Gandhi and Jesus by Harris Wofford Quoting the Mahatma Members discuss Hinduism and Christianity

has also achieved what might be called the anonymity of fame: We all know who he is, and therefore few of us bother to delve deeply into his life. Having seen the magisterial hagiographic film "Gandhi," and having read bits and pieces about his teachings, many might think they have some sense of Gandhi. In fact, we have a sense of his image. The actual flesh-and-blood person remains a mystery.

That becomes abundantly clear on reading Stanley Wolpert's magnificent new biography. Wolpert has been writing about India for half a century, and his expertise permeates every page of the book. Wolpert provides us with a Gandhi who is neither the undistilled saint of popular imagination, nor a man much like other men. Gandhi emerges as a strange, complicated individual, obsessed with his body and what he took to be its impurities, and driven to help his world progress without violence. "To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of the Truth face to face," Gandhi wrote, "one must be able to love the meanest of creatures as oneself. And a man who aspires after that cannot afford to keep out of any field of life. That is why my devotion to truth has drawn me into the field of politics.... Those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means." For most of his adult life, Gandhi lived this creed with unyielding integrity.