History & realpolitik, from the mouth of the Mahatma

When an extraordinary man like Mahatma Gandhi claims to be an “ordinary man”, one is tempted to ask: “Is he fooling himself or is he fooling you”? But in the run up to, and in the aftermath of, this momentous movement of civil disobedience that shook the Empire as never before, Gandhi’s principal concerns were his diet ; his deteriorating relationship with his wayward eldest son, Harilal; his concern over his other son, Manilal, falling in love with a Muslim girl, Fatima Gool; fussing over another son, Ramdas, wanting to marry; doting over his youngest, Devdas, who come closest to his ideal; the health of his life companion, Ba; the death of his cousin, Maganlal and, even more poignantly, his nephew Rasiklal at a tender age; the shock of Deshbandhu’s sudden passing a few days after Gandhi had stayed with him in Darjeeling; the petty problems of running the Sabarmati Ashram, combined with “shock” at discovering unspecified “immoral” activities going on at the Ashram; and his horror at finding himself having an erection in his waking hours after he has mortified himself over his occasional night emissions. Reading voraciously and writing copiously from prison, where he reveled in the “solitude”, his eclectic study included Gibbons and even “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” and extends more seriously to numerous books on comparative religion covering Hinduism, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Zoroastrianism. Most intensively, he reads all he can on Islam, a full range from the Koran itself and commentaries thereon to Mirza Ghulam Ahmed’s “Ethics of Islam”, Husain Sayani’s “Saints of Islam”, Syed Ameer Ali’s “Spirit of Islam”, R.A. Nicholson’s “Mystics of Islam”, ASA Wadia’s “The Message of the Prophet”, Maulana Shibli’s Life of the Prophet, and “Usva-e-Sahaba”, the reminiscences of the Prophet’s closest companions in several volumes.