GREAT SOUL

A highly original, stirring book on Mahatma Gandhi that deepensour sense of his achievements and disappointments—his success inseizing India’s imagination and shaping its independence struggleas a mass movement, his recognition late in life that few of hisfollowers paid more than lip service to his ambitious goals ofsocial justice for the country’s minorities, outcasts, and ruralpoor. Pulitzer Prize–winner Joseph Lelyveld shows invivid, unmatched detail how Gandhi’s sense of mission, socialvalues, and philosophy of nonviolent resistance were shaped onanother subcontinent—during two decades in South Africa—and thentested by an India that quickly learned to revere him as a Mahatma,or “Great Soul,” while following him only a small part of the wayto the social transformation he envisioned. The man himself emergesas one of history’s most remarkable self-creations, a prosperouslawyer who became an ascetic in a loincloth wholly dedicated topolitical and social action. Lelyveld leads us step-by-step throughthe heroic—and tragic—last months of this selfless leader’s longcampaign when his nonviolent efforts culminated in the partition ofIndia, the creation of Pakistan, and a bloodbath of ethniccleansing that ended only with his own assassination. India and its politicians were ready to placeGandhi on a pedestal as “Father of the Nation” but were lessinclined to embrace his teachings. Muslim support, crucial in hisrise to leadership, soon waned, and the oppressed untouchables—forwhom Gandhi spoke to Hindus as a whole—produced their ownleaders. Here is a vital, brilliant reconsideration ofGandhi’s extraordinary struggles on two continents, of his fiercebut, finally, unfulfilled hopes, and of his ever-evolving legacy,which more than six decades after his death still ensures his placeas India’s social conscience—and not just India’s.