THE REAL GANDHI

...the troubles over the entrance of a family of untouchables into the newly formed ashram in India which seemed to touch off the fuse leading to Gandhi's resolution that Hinduism must yield on this issue if India was to become a truly free nation...

...his decision, at the farewell party given him the night before he.was to return to India, to change his plans and throw in his lot with the South African Indians' cause which, all unknown to him then, was to mean a twenty-year vigil there and the forging of his tool of non-resistance to injustice for later use in India...

...This led Agatha Harrison to say of these days, "When you meet absolute honesty and directness of purpose in a tangled world, you are in the presence of something that silences criticism...

...his experience of being put off the train and then brutally beaten on a stage coach in the course of traveling in the first fortnight of his visit to South Africa which involved him physically and personally in the Indian-white situation there...

...This book will do much to make the real Gandhi felt again on the pulses of Western readers...

...Gandhi's role in the 1939-45 war is carefully described: His consistent and often repeated refusal to defect to the Axis...

...The final days of India's liberation with their anguish of sadness on Gandhi's part at partition and riots and human displacement in which over a half a million Hindus and Muslims lost their lives are all movingly depicted here together with the martyrdom and its effects upon India and the world...

...The materials are here however not only for such conjectures but also for the shade and light of his portrait: the anti-machine comments, the vegetarian and dietary notes, his views on sex, on cow protection, on ashram life as well as the magnificent triple exchange with Tagore, the tender words of friendship with C. F. Andrews, Nehru, Madeline Slade, and the rest...

...his "Himalayan mistake," as he called it, in thinking that the Civil Disobedience campaign which he and the Congress Party had initiated could be carried out peacefully...

...Asked about the King's reception and whether he felt undressed in his loin cloth, he replied, "Oh no, the King wore enough for both of us...

...his preparations to resist non-violently an expected Japanese invasion, and his insistence that nothing short of unconditional independence was the Indian requirement...

...He said, "God did not ask the permission of the Christian Church when he poured his message of reconciliation for this and future generations into the life of this frail Hindu lawyer...

...Or would he have beaten out a course of equal significance in response to widely different life incidents...

...Reviewed by Douglas V. Steere ISTILL remember the remark of a Swede who turned to me in Sig-tuna after hearing of Gandhi's death over the Stockholm radio in 1948...

...then the Amritsar Massacre incident in the course of which British troops killed 379 persons and wounded over a thousand in ten minutes of firing which transformed Gandhi from a conciliatory reformer into a nonviolent but implacable opponent of British rule pledged once and for all to the thesis that "The British must go...

...I wear minus-fours...

...If a portrait is wanted, one in which an artist has painted what he intuitively feels to be the basic equation of the man, Louis Fischer's biography, which is frequently drawn upon in the Reader, is still, for my' taste, unsurpassed...

...There are frequent glimpses to be found, too, of 'that fierce transparent honesty that cut through the three months of boring verbiage of the Round Table Conference and asked of the British, "Why not make a clean breast and announce your policy and let us make our choice...

...Eight years later, a Christian minister, Homer Jack, has given us in The Gandhi Reader perhaps the best public vehicle for entering into the life and impact of this frail Hindu lawyer that has yet appeared in the West...

...One hungers for an epilogue of some estimate of Gandhi's residue at work in India and the world today but perhaps that must wait a decade or two of interval before even reliable soundings can be made...

...In England, at the time of the Round Table Conference, when twitted about his garb, he remarked, "You English wear plus-fours...

...Each of these apparently critical incidents was of the kind that makes a student of character ask, "Could Gandhi have been the Gandhi we knew, if any of these decisive situations had not been there...

...The wry humor too is included...

...It is possible to find here, for instance, so many of the key incidents that would seem to have been decisive in Gandhi's unfolding—if a character can ever be said to be influenced by responding to his setting: his abject failure as a beginning lawyer in Bombay which left him open to the modest and trivially paid invitation to go for a short trip to South Africa in the legal service of an Indian merchant...

...the temporary success with General Smuts in 1914 that made Gandhi feel now he could honorably leave South Africa...

...But if a reader would like a hundred candid shots from which he may fashion his own portrait, short of long private research, this is his book...

...Short of reading a shelf of books, some published in South Africa, in India, and in Britain, as well as in this country, and many of them long since out of print and available only in the most extensively stocked academic libraries, this finely assembled collection of passages from a wide variety of writers as well as from Gandhi's own books and articles, bound together by the editor's penetrating clear transitions, is the best possible way to learn the gripping story of Gandhi's life, of his philosophy, and of his mission to our time...

...the first fast, "an appeal to the Highest Tribunal," and its moving results that confirmed the validity of this principal weapon of self-suffering in his non-violent arsenal...