Portrait of a hero as a young man

Gandhi Before India. By Ramachandra Guha. Allen Lane; 672 pages; £30. To be published in America in April 2014 by Knopf; $35. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

MOHANDAS GANDHI was a prolific writer, swapping his pen between hands as they tired. His collected works of speeches, articles, letters, books and essays in English alone run to 100 volumes. These, and a similar number of Hindi and Gujarati works, have just been made publicly available as part of an official digital archive in India. Padding this trove are other people’s studies of the man; one Indian library reportedly holds 45,000 books on Gandhi or the Indian national movement.

What can a new biographer add? “Gandhi Before India” by Ramachandra Guha, India’s leading historian, offers plenty. The first of two volumes, it deals with Gandhi’s life up to 1914, particularly the two decades he spent in white-run South Africa campaigning for civil and political rights for Indians.

Gandhi’s biographers usually pass over this period in a rush to get to the main show in India. But Mr Guha argues his “African Gandhi” is every bit as worthy of attention as the later man. A fluent writer, Mr Guha is alert to Gandhi’s many apparent inconsistencies. He was an “unworldly saint” and a “consummate politician”, a man of public integrity who could be terribly harsh to his wife and children. His interest in diet, celibacy and herbal medicine was a reflection of his self-discipline, even if his obsessions verged on quackery.

Rather than lingering on Gandhi’s own well-studied words, Mr Guha has unearthed a wealth of previously overlooked school reports, diaries, letters and articles by collaborators and opponents of Gandhi. The result is a striking depiction of his transformation into mid-adulthood. The timid Gujarati who sailed from India in 1893 with no public-speaking skills and a halting legal career returned on the eve of the first world war, having survived two murder attempts, various spells in jail and much vilification. He was famous in India; in private correspondence he had already been dubbed the “Mahatma” (“venerable”). So self-assured had he become that he declared his limited achievements in South Africa—fending off a discriminatory tax on Indians, for example—as the “greatest struggle of modern time”.

Mr Guha makes two strong points. First, an assortment of progressive outsiders influenced Gandhi’s ideas and methods. He drew much from the feminists and activist vegetarians he met in Britain; in Johannesburg he learned from Hermann Kallenbach, a German Jew, and Leung Quinn, a Chinese activist; and he exchanged letters with Leo Tolstoy. All encouraged Gandhi’s unusual broad-mindedness, his belief in peaceful, incremental change and his readiness for self-sacrifice.

That seems paradoxical. South Africa for most people was a place of deep inequality. Gandhi’s encounters with black Africans, the majority in South Africa, may have been minimal, but still he found strength in their struggle against white power. He enjoyed “a crucible of human togetherness” among many who were opposed to discrimination. And he shared homes, prison cells and long walks with like-minded, though mostly foreign, friends. That would have been impossible had he remained in India.

Second, and just as important, it was in South Africa that Gandhi developed his methods of peaceful agitation. He liked to use the word “Satyagraha”, loosely translated as “insistence on truth”, to mean civil disobedience. His South African campaigns led thousands of people to court harsh prison sentences, which surprised the authorities, who had dismissed Indian migrants as timid. Even Gandhi’s wife, Kasturba, ended up behind bars at a time when the national movement back in India involved almost no women.

The Gandhi who returned to India was skilled at public argument, fund-raising and self promotion, an experienced public negotiator and a compelling speaker. In India politicians and the press quickly recognised him as a figure of note. As Mr Guha ably shows, for all that Gandhi influenced events in South Africa, it was he who experienced the greater change.