Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life

by Kathryn Tidrick

Throughout his long and turbulent career as a political leader, first in South Africa and then in India, Gandhi sought to fulfil his religious aspirations through politics and to reconcile politics with personal religious conviction. But Gandhi’s religion was wildly divergent from anything to have taken root in his native India. Foremost among his private tenets was the belief that he was a world saviour, long prophesied and potentially divine.

Penetrating and provocative, Kathryn Tidrick’s book draws on neglected material to explore the paradoxes within Gandhi’s life and personality. She reveals a man whose spiritual ideas originated not in India, but in the drawing rooms of late-Victorian England, and which included some very eccentric and damaging notions about sex. The resulting portrait is complex, convincing and, to anyone interested in the legacy of colonialism, more enlightening than any previously published. 

The Gandhi revealed here is not the secular saint of popular renown, but a difficult and self-obsessed man driven by a messianic sense of personal destiny. 


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, India, Biography

402 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 22, 2006

Reviews

[Gabriel Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exhaustively close reading of Gandhi's political activism considered primarily in terms of the evolution of his spiritual and religious beliefs. It's far too nuanced and objective a work to be called "iconoclastic" but it raises many broader questions about the by turns inspirational and damaging way religious fervour and politics can mix. Also fascinating on the lasting impact 19th century Theosophy and Esoteric Christianity had on the younger Gandhi.

[Bastiaan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard to find a general storyline. It felt like reading shattered anecdotes, not like reading a big story.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gandhi was a very complex man. He was personally filled with many contradictions. This book about him presents them but often without sympathy or the ability to enlighten us. There are many books about Gandhi. I hope to find a better one then this is.

[Sambasivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tries to analyse Gandhi microscopically and enlarge the weaknesses and downplay his good qualities. Seems a biased book. But well researched.