Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World, 1914-1948
by Ramachandra Guha (Allen Lane, £40)
Five years after the first volume, Ramachandra Guha has produced the second part of his impressive biography of Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi Before India (2013) dealt with the less familiar stage of Gandhi’s life from 1869 to 1914. It covered his childhood and early years in Gujarat, west India, his time as a law student in London and his life in South Africa, where he started to develop his political ideas and methods about non-violent passive resistance— or satyagraha—in order to defend the rights of the Indian minority. In this second volume Gandhi appears in his mid-forties, back in India for the first time in decades and fully formed by his experiences abroad.