"My Life is My Message" "You may be sure I am living now just the way I wish to live.What I might have done at the beginning, had I more light, I am doing now in the evenning of my life, at the end of my career, building from the bottom up.study my way of living here, study my surroundings, if you wish to know what I am. Village improvement is the only foundation on which conditions in India can be permanently ameliorated." M. K. Gandhi
It is said that Mahatma Gandhi's impact on the people he met and spoke to was everlasting. He spoke not only to freedom fighters and politicians, writers and thinkers, but also to slum dwellers and villagers, farmers and labourers, the underprivileged and illiterate. And he moved masses into movements. Inside Mahatma's mind brings together his most famous speeches and thoughts which serve as a testimony to his oratorical skills and penetrative thoughts.
Here is the first volume of a magisterial biography of Mohandas Gandhi that gives us the most illuminating portrait we have had of the life, the work and the historical context of one of the most abidingly influential—and controversial—men in modern history. Ramachandra Guha—hailed by Time as “Indian democracy’s preeminent chronicler”—takes us from Gandhi’s birth in 1869 through his upbringing in Gujarat, his two years as a student in London and his two decades as a lawyer and community organizer in South Africa. Guha has uncovered myriad previously untapped documents, including private papers of Gandhi’s contemporaries and co-workers; contemporary newspapers and court documents; the writings of Gandhi’s children; and secret files kept by British Empire functionaries. Using this wealth of material in an exuberant, brilliantly nuanced and detailed narrative, Guha describes the social, political and personal worlds inside of which Gandhi began the journey that would earn him the honorific Mahatma: “Great Soul.” And, more clearly than ever before, he elucidates how Gandhi’s work in South Africa—far from being a mere prelude to his accomplishments in India—was profoundly influential in his evolution as a family man, political thinker, social reformer and, ultimately, beloved leader. In 1893, when Gandhi set sail for South Africa, he was a twenty-three-year-old lawyer who had failed to establish himself in India. In this remarkable biography, the author makes clear the fundamental ways in which Gandhi’s ideas were shaped before his return to India in 1915. It was during his years in England and South Africa, Guha shows us, that Gandhi came to understand the nature of imperialism and racism; and in South Africa that he forged the philosophy and techniques that would undermine and eventually overthrow the British Raj. Gandhi Before India gives us equally vivid portraits of the man and the world he lived in: a world of sharp contrasts among the coastal culture of his birthplace, High Victorian London, and colonial South Africa. It explores in abundant detail Gandhi’s experiments with dissident cults such as the Tolstoyans; his friendships with radical Jews, heterodox Christians and devout Muslims; his enmities and rivalries; and his often overlooked failures as a husband and father. It tells the dramatic, profoundly moving story of how Gandhi inspired the devotion of thousands of followers in South Africa as he mobilized a cross-class and inter-religious coalition, pledged to non-violence in their battle against a brutally racist regime. Researched with unequaled depth and breadth, and written with extraordinary grace and clarity, Gandhi Before India is, on every level, fully commensurate with its subject. It will radically alter our understanding and appreciation of twentieth-century India’s greatest man.
Throughout history, great speeches have produced great change. From inciting violence and asserting control to restoring peace and securing freedom, nothing has the raw emotional power of a speech delivered at the right moment, in the right place, with the right content, and the right delivery. 50 Speeches That Made The Modern World is a celebration of the most influential and thought-provoking speeches that have shaped the world we live in. With comprehensive, chronological coverage of speeches from the 20th and 21st centuries, taken from all corners of the globe, it covers Emmeline Pankhurst's patiently reasoned condemnation of men's failure to improve ordinary women's lives in 1908 through speeches by Vladimir Lenin, Mahatma Gandhi, David Ben-Gurion, Albert Einstein, Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Benazir Bhutto, Osama Bin Laden and Aung San Suu Kyi, right up to the most compelling oratory surrounding the 2016 US Presidential elections. Through the rallying propaganda speeches during World War II to the cautious rhetoric of the Cold War period, through challenging the status quo on issues of race, gender and politics to public addresses to the masses on the issues of AIDS and terrorism, through apologies, complaints, warmongering, scaremongering and passionate pleas, this book delivers the most important speeches of the modern era and why they still remain so significant. Each speech has an introduction explaining its setting, importance and impact as well as marginal notes filling in any background information.
The Great Speeches of Modern India tells the story of modern India through its speeches. Here are all the classics from Tilak, Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore, Ambedkar, L.K. Advani, Manmohan Singh, Indira Gandhi, and here are also some rare speeches—Satyajit Ray on cinema, Vikram Seth on his school days and Godse’s defence of his assassination of Gandhi. Stimulating, informative, and full of rare gems, The Great Speeches of Modern India is a must on every bookshelf.
A biography detailing Gandhi’s twenty-year stay in South Africa and his attitudes and behavior in the nation’s political context. In the pantheon of freedom fighters, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has pride of place. His fame and influence extend far beyond India and are nowhere more significant than in South Africa. “India gave us a Mohandas, we gave them a Mahatma,” goes a popular South African refrain. Contemporary South African leaders, including Mandela, have consistently lauded him as being part of the epic battle to defeat the racist white regime. The South African Gandhi focuses on Gandhi’s first leadership experiences and the complicated man they reveal—a man who actually supported the British Empire. Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed unveil a man who, throughout his stay on African soil, stayed true to Empire while showing a disdain for Africans. For Gandhi, whites and Indians were bonded by an Aryan bloodline that had no place for the African. Gandhi’s racism was matched by his class prejudice towards the Indian indentured. He persistently claimed that they were ignorant and needed his leadership, and he wrote their resistances and compromises in surviving a brutal labor regime out of history. The South African Gandhi writes the indentured and working class back into history. The authors show that Gandhi never missed an opportunity to show his loyalty to Empire, with a particular penchant for war as a means to do so. He served as an Empire stretcher-bearer in the Boer War while the British occupied South Africa, he demanded guns in the aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion, and he toured the villages of India during the First World War as recruiter for the Imperial army. This meticulously researched book punctures the dominant narrative of Gandhi and uncovers an ambiguous figure whose time on African soil was marked by a desire to seek the integration of Indians, minus many basic rights, into the white body politic while simultaneously excluding Africans from his moral compass and political ideals. Praise for The South African Gandhi “In this impressively researched study, two South African scholars of Indian background bravely challenge political myth-making on both sides of the Indian Ocean that has sought to canonize Gandhi as a founding father of the struggle for equality there. They show that the Mahatma-to-be carefully refrained from calling on his followers to throw in their lot with the black majority. The mass struggle he finally led remained an Indian struggle.” —Joseph Lelyveld, author of Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India “This is a wonderful demonstration of meticulously researched, evocative, clear-eyed and fearless history writing. It uncovers a story, some might even call it a scandal, that has remained hidden in plain sight for far too long. The South African Gandhi is a big book. It is a serious challenge to the way we have been taught to think about Gandhi.” —Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things
In this fascinating and meticulously researched book, bestselling historian Arthur Herman sheds new light on two of the most universally recognizable icons of the twentieth century, and reveals how their forty-year rivalry sealed the fate of India and the British Empire. They were born worlds apart: Winston Churchill to Britain’s most glamorous aristocratic family, Mohandas Gandhi to a pious middle-class household in a provincial town in India. Yet Arthur Herman reveals how their lives and careers became intertwined as the twentieth century unfolded. Both men would go on to lead their nations through harrowing trials and two world wars—and become locked in a fierce contest of wills that would decide the fate of countries, continents, and ultimately an empire. Gandhi & Churchill reveals how both men were more alike than different, and yet became bitter enemies over the future of India, a land of 250 million people with 147 languages and dialects and 15 distinct religions—the jewel in the crown of Britain’s overseas empire for 200 years. Over the course of a long career, Churchill would do whatever was necessary to ensure that India remain British—including a fateful redrawing of the entire map of the Middle East and even risking his alliance with the United States during World War Two. Mohandas Gandhi, by contrast, would dedicate his life to India’s liberation, defy death and imprisonment, and create an entirely new kind of political movement: satyagraha, or civil disobedience. His campaigns of nonviolence in defiance of Churchill and the British, including his famous Salt March, would become the blueprint not only for the independence of India but for the civil rights movement in the U.S. and struggles for freedom across the world. Now master storyteller Arthur Herman cuts through the legends and myths about these two powerful, charismatic figures and reveals their flaws as well as their strengths. The result is a sweeping epic of empire and insurrection, war and political intrigue, with a fascinating supporting cast, including General Kitchener, Rabindranath Tagore, Franklin Roosevelt, Lord Mountbatten, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. It is also a brilliant narrative parable of two men whose great successes were always haunted by personal failure, and whose final moments of triumph were overshadowed by the loss of what they held most dear.