By Ramachandra Guha

Pages: 1152 pages

First Published: 23 November 2020

Published By: Penguin

About the book

Beginning in July 1914, as Mohandas Gandhi leaves South Africa to return to India, Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948 traces the Mahatma’s life over the three decades preceding his assassination. Drawing on new archival materials, acclaimed historian Ramachandra Guha follows Gandhi’s struggle to deliver India from British rule, to forge harmonious relations between India’s Hindus and Muslims, to end the pernicious practice of untouchability and to nurture India’s economic and moral self-reliance. Guha shows how, in each of these campaigns, Gandhi adapted methods of non-violence that successfully challenged British authority and influenced revolutionary movements throughout the world. A revelatory look at the complexity of Gandhi’s thinking and motives, the book is a luminous portrait of the man himself, as well as his family, friends, colleagues, rivals and adversaries.

Book Reviews

A brilliant and scholarly work by Ram Guha. We have heard or read about Gandhi over the years and was always fascinated or sometimes provided us with intrigue.

What I liked about the book is no where has the author opined his views. Everything was linked to primary sources. The reader should be able to form his or her own views after reading a book and this book enables you to do that. I never had any idea about Ambedkar and Jinnah who were major opponents to Gandhi’s philosophy but this book gave me all the insights to form an opinion about them. A remarkable book. But don’t read it in a hurry. Savour it as I did over many days. – Subramanian Seshadri

About the Author

Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bengaluru. His books include a pioneering environmental history, The Unquiet Woods (University of California Press, 1989), and an award-winning social history of cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field (Picador, 2002), which was chosen by The Guardian as one of the ten best books on cricket ever written. India after Gandhi (Macmillan/Ecco Press, 2007; revised edition, 2017) was chosen as a book of the year by the Economist, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and as a book of the decade in the Times of London and The Hindu.