http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
the years that changed the world, 1914-1948
xix, 1083 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm.
The second and concluding volume of Ramachandra Guha's magisterial biography that offers the definitive portrait of the life and work of one of the most abidingly influential and controversial men in world history. This book opens in July 1914, as Mohandas Gandhi leaves South Africa to return to India. Over the next three decades, Gandhi's daily life would be given over to the epic struggle to deliver India from British rule, to forge harmonious relations between India's Hindus and Muslims, to end the pernicious practice of untouchability, and to nurture India's economic and moral self-reliance. Guha's illuminating narrative follows Gandhi as he works his way into the hierarchy of the nationalist movement, emerging as early as 1919 as its leader as he organizes local and issue-specific campaigns that would lead to the spectacular movement of non-cooperation that spread across the country between 1920 and 1922 (only to be called off by Gandhi himself when a group of his followers burned a police station to the ground), as he spearheads the "Independence Pledge" among his colleagues in the Congress and as he makes the extraordinary three-week-long Salt March, which would force the British, finally, to meet face-to-face with the "half-naked fakir," as Churchill (in)famously called him. In each of these campaigns, Gandhi develops novel methods of nonviolence, strikes, marches and fasts, to successfully challenge not only British authority but the religious orthodoxy and social customs that had afflicted his country for centuries. In reconstructing Gandhi's life and work, Guha has drawn on sixty different archival collections, the most significant a previously unavailable collection of papers belonging to Gandhi himself. He creates a luminous portrait not only of the Mahatma but of those closest to him, among them the political leaders Vallabhbhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahadev Desai, his indispensable secretary and confidant, Charles E Andrews, the Christian priest who acted as intermediary between Gandhi and officials of the Raj, Gandhi's great rivals, the Muslim leader M.A. Jinnah and the brilliant Columbia-educated leader of the "Untouchables," B.R. Ambedkar, Gandhi's wife, Kasturba and their son Devadas. Guha reconstructs the attitudes of the successive British viceroys of India in their dealings with Gandhi, shows how the Second World War provided impetus for the Quit India movement, which the author argues was Gandhi's last desperate effort to see the end before he died and examines how Gandhi's opposition to the partition would be the catalyst for sectarian violence when the British granted independence on 15 August 1947. We see his extraordinary walk through riot-torn villages in that year, his fast that succeeded in stopping religious violence in Calcutta and the worldwide outpouring of grief after his assassination in January 1948. This biography is a revelation of the complexity of Gandhi's thinking, his motives, his actions and their outcomes as he engaged with every important aspect of social and public life in the India of his time, and as his influence, and the challenge and controversy of his legacy, continue unabated.
Part I. Claiming a nation (1915-1922). The returning hero ; Coming out in Banaras ; Three experiments in Satyagraha ; Going national ; The personal and the political ; Capturing the congress ; The rise and fall of non-cooperation ; The Mahatma from above and below -- Part II. Reaching out to the world (1922-1931). Prisoner number 827 ; Picking up the pieces ; Spinning in Sabarmati ; The moralist ; The memoirist ; Once more into the fray ; Father, son, holy spirit ; The march to the sea ; The prison and the world ; Parleys with proconsuls ; At home in London -- Part III. Reform and renewal (1931-1937). Arguments with Ambedkar ; Shaming the Hindus ; A second sabbatical ; From rebels to rulers -- Part IV. War and rebellion (1937-1944). The world within, and without ; (Re)capturing the congress ; One nation, or two? ; Pilgrimages to Gandhi ; Somewhere between conflict and cooperation ; Towards 'Quit India' ; A bereavement and a fast ; The death of Kasturba -- Part V. The last years (1944-1948). Picking up the pieces (again) ; Prelude to partition ; Marching for peace ; The strangest experiment ; Independence and division ; The greatest fasts ; Martyrdom -- Epilogue: Gandhi in our time.
Includes bibliographical references and index.