I have many books on Mahatma Gandhi in my library.
More than Mao Tse Tung, Zhao En Lai, or Deng Xiao Ping, the giants of Chinese history.
This slim 150-page biography was commissioned by the Gandhi Centenary Committee of Victoria and was published in 1969 to mark the centenary of Gandhi’s birth.
Nelson Rosenthal gives us a concise account of the life of The Great Soul.
The foreword by Baron Casey, Governor of Bengal, who crossed swords with Gandhi numerous times, revealed the fairness of the man.
Casey said, ” Each of us… recognised that the other was objective and fair and wanted to do the right thing. ”
” .. never making any harsh or critical comment on other individuals, even on those who have said hard things about him. ”
Baron Casey may have missed some cryptic remarks by Gandhi on him.
‘A good man,’ observed Gandhi to Nehru after his first meeting with Casey. ‘ He reminds me of Smuts.’
To know Gandhi’s views on the Smuts of South Africa, we have the relatively recent and excellent 2- 2-volume biography by Ramachandra Guha.
For an equally impressive one-volume biography, the best is Rediscovering Gandhi by Yogesh Chadha, published in 1997, which I chanced upon back in November 2004 somewhere on the road from Delhi to Agra on my way to a legal conference at the exquisite Oberoi Amarvilas, Agra resort. To this day, after reading many biographies on The Mahatma, I still find this the best.
Lwh
Chinese New Year 2nd day,
30 Jan 25