Mahatma Gandhi

With a new introduction by Makarand R. Paranjape

The life of Mahatma Gandhi is the story of a legend. In Mahatma Gandhi: The Great Indian Way, Raja Rao upends the genre of the literary biography with inventive non-linear chronology, through dialogue and anecdote, situating the physical within the metaphysical, and with a text that is both retrospective and contemporary at the same time. By mapping genealogies and distilling them, Rao focuses on Gandhi's years in South Africa, the birth of non-violent resistance, and then moves into the epic freedom struggle in India, which brought Gandhi to worldwide renown in his own lifetime.

With an emphasis on the idea of dharma as a framework for Gandhism, both in South Africa and India, this is the story of the man as much as the Mahatma.

Raja Rao, a path-breaker of Indian writing in English, was born in Hassan, Mysore. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.