I know that I do not set down in this story all that I remember. Because it consistently reduces its author’s individuality, the text can even be described as anti-biographical, and Gandhi himself impugns its biographical veracity: Gandhi repeatedly emphasizes the generic quality of his experiments by arguing that they could be understood and even undertaken by a child, seeing as they were the efforts of a man as weak and fallible as any other. This means that the text was conceived not as the account of some uniquely individual life, but as an instruction to others in the form of a warning as well as model. More interestingly, they suggested it may mislead readers not by any mistake in the Mahatma’s telling, but because he might change his views in future. Suhrud notes that the Autobiography is haunted by an authorial anxiety about its self-aggrandizing genre, one that some of Gandhi’s friends told him was peculiar to the West. Suhrud’s carefully annotated version of Gandhi’s Autobiography, which inquires into the circumstances of its writing, its key terms and ideas, and the differences between its Gujarati and English texts, constitutes one such act of generosity, demonstrating that he is indeed the true successor of Desai and Pyarelal. His editorial work constitutes an act of intellectual generosity, offering the Mahatma’s life and words to the interpretation of others.

Like the Mahatma’s secretaries Mahadev Desai and Pyarelal Nayyar, who served as his archivists, diarists, and biographers, Suhrud, too, has annotated and translated in addition to analyzing Gandhi’s writing, and, in doing so, he has made it available for further research. Tridip Suhrud’s work has been part of this new interest in Gandhi, and has made much of it possible. This includes issues like environmental degradation, unequal social relations, and individual moral agency, all of which are informed by Gandhi’s ideas about the limitation of needs and desires, the everyday character of moral action, and the importance of willful sacrifice as a claim to sovereignty outside the state.

He is now a properly global rather than national figure, whose work allows us to think about the implications of modern life in a more general sense. Instead, it is because imperialism has ceased to be a burning issue, and the post-colonial state seen as having betrayed its promise, that another aspect of Gandhi’s legacy has come to the fore. But this time it has not been the Mahatma’s nonviolent struggle for his country’s freedom that has commanded attention. OVER THE PAST DECADE, interest in Gandhi has grown among scholars as well as activists.

Mahatma gandhi autobiography in english