Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division by Patrick French Flamingo £9.99, 467 pages FT bookshop price: £7.99

Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life by Kathryn Tidrick I.B. Tauris £19.50, 400 pages FT bookshop price: £15.60

Gandhi: The Man, His People and the Empire by Rajmohan Gandhi Haus Publishing £25, 738 pages FT bookshop price: £20



Sixty years after the end of the Raj, nothing seems odder about the whole strange story of British rule in India than the leaving of it- except, perhaps, for the personality of the man who did more than anything else to drive the British out, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Considering how deeply rooted the British were in India after 350 years - they had, after all, been there since the time of Shakespeare, the East India Company being founded in 1599, the year of As You Like It- it is extraordinary that they were able to leave as peacefully as they did. Partition may have brought on a sectarian Armageddon that left 14.5m uprooted and more than half a million dead in inter-religious massacres between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims ; but as far as the British were concerned, whatever the fate of their former subjects, they themselves were able to march out of the Gateway of India without a shot being fired. Indeed by the end the two sides had become so close that Lady Mountbatten, the wife of Britain's last viceroy, was having an affair with the first Prime Minister of Independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru: the two lovers were even photographed openly holding hands as they visited refugee camps together.

The achievement of Gandhi appears today all the more remarkable. To have won India freedom at all was an extraordinary feat. To have won it without violence, and to end the Raj with British-Indian relations intact was astonishing. In the process Gandhi developed a template for non-violent resistance applicable the world over. Figures as diverse as Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi have all looked to him for inspiration.

Gandhi was an exceptionable figure in other ways too: uncorrupt and uncorruptable, he refused office and financial rewards, choosing instead to lead by moral authority alone. He worked hard to bring peace between Muslims and Hindus, and fought for the rights of untouchables. For many he remains a saintly figure, an icon of tolerance and selfless idealism. He could also be strikingly witty. Attending a reception given by George V at Buckingham Palace, he was asked by reporters if his shawl and khadi dhoti were really appropriate for such an event. He replied that His Majesty had been wearing enough for both of them.

Gandhi is one of the most written about individuals in modern history- there are currently more than 5000 works of Gandhiana including nearly a thousand books published in Britian alone; many of these, particularly those eminating from India, amount to fully-fledged hagiographies. But recently his status has been somewhat eroded: In India his political legacy has been eclipsed by the rise of the sectarian Hindu right and the BJP, while his emphasis on village life and holiness has been lost in the extreme materialism that has come with industrialisation. In contrast, his reputation abroad has been questioned less on political grounds, but on the basis of his sheer personal oddness: two recent British studies, by Patrick French and Kathryn Tidrick have both emphasised his extreme eccentricities.

Both books argue in different ways that the scale of the man's achievement in effectively bringing the colonial period to an end has masked, to a certain extent, the extreme weirdness of his ideas. A decade ago Patrick French wrote a book called Liberty or Death which for the first time highlighted some of Gandhi's more unusual practices. "If Gandhi is your hero," he wrote, "it can be a deflating experience to read what he actually did and said... The authorized version of the Mahatma is very different from the real one. Far from being a wise and balanced saint, Gandhi was an emotionally troubled social activist and a ruthlessly sharp political negotiator."

Among the odder practices which French highlighted were Gandhi's many dietary fads, his enthusiasm for personally giving his friends and acquaintances saline enemas, and particularly his habit of sleeping with nubile young women, including his great-niece, in order to test his vows of celibacy. He was also "a great believer in the increment of human excrement," writes French, "and had elaborate theories about its use in the cultivation of crops, a passion that must have been aided by his having no sense of smell. "

French's fine book got excellent reviews, but when it was serialised in the Indian magazine Outlook his irreverence to the Father of the Nation generated a tidal wave of patriotic outrage which filled the letter column for weeks. It is a good job that Kathryn Tidrick's new biography, Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual life has not been serialised in India, as its findings are much more damaging. Tidrick is the author of two witty studies of British Orientalism. In this latest book, which is both highly original and remarkably convincing, she locates the roots of Gandhi's thought in the lunatic spiritualist fringe of late Victorian England, among the occultists, high fibreists and mediums who flourished in late 19th-century London. "Mohandas Gandhi entered politics, not to liberate his country in the sense understood by other Indian leaders," she writes, but to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The principal feature of this belief system was that he, Gandhi, was the pre-ordained and potentially divine world saviour whose coming was implicit in the 'Eastern' religious writings to which so many of his English acquaintances had turned.. [He came to believe that] it was his destiny to lead a troubled world along the path of salvation."

This strange man "who announced his wet dreams to the world and kept millions informed of the state of his digestive apparatus" aimed not just at liberating India, but "the universal transcendence of the body and the absorption of all souls into the divine essence." There is something almost too good to be true in the idea of the huge, pompous Curzonian edifice of the Raj being undermined by ideas emanating from such wonderfully dotty sources. Yet in the process of tracing the development of Gandhi's thought, Tidrick makes her case very persuasively.

When Gandhi arrived in London to study law in 1888 following an unremarkable childhood in Gujarat, he had little formal knowledge of Hinduism beyond the rituals taught to him as a child. With great originality, Tidrick shows how he re-encountered it in London through the writings of Victorian enthusiasts of Eastern religions and was drawn into the company of a network of passionately unorthodox cranks and idealists who saw vegetarianism as a way to connect with the natural world and nourish both body and spirit.

Before long he was visiting meetings of the Theosophists and reading the works of Annie Besant and Madam Blavatsky. The latter claimed to have received instruction ("spiritual precipitations") in occult knowledge from certain 'Himalayan Masters, 'radiant astral figures' or 'Mahatmas' - "immortal beings who, though principally resident in Tibet, materialized here and there and were the authors of Madam Blavatsky's books." They also helpfully translated for her The Book of Dzyan "an ancient book in the unknown language of Senzar."

From the Theosophists, Gandhi drew his sacralised idea of politics which combined social and political reform with a belief in reincarnation and personal spiritual growth, along with his ideals of aligning himself with the "great laws that govern the universe." The Theosophists example also taught him to form a theological cocktail, part Christian and part Hindu, which drew equal inspiration from the Sermon on the Mount and the Gita, mixing Hindu ideas of dharma, or duty, with Christian ideals of self-sacrifice.

Gandhi kept in touch with the Theosophists when he moved to South Africa, keeping a picture of Annie Besant in his office, but here he was drawn into the world of the Esoteric Christian Union, whose South African agent he became. The sect was founded by Edward Maitland and his collaborator Anna Kingsford whose table-tilting had revealed to them that they were reincarnations respectively of St Mary Magdalen and St John the Evangelist.


These two "comically vainglorious spiritualists" as Tidrick describes them, had "a rich fantasy life fuelled by mutual obsession," that included inter-cosmic battles taking place with "astrals" and a belief that the twelve apostles had been reincarnated in the United States where "one is a railroad manager, another a college president." Their books had, according to Gandhi's faithful secretary Pyarelal, a profound "specific and lasting" influence on Gandhi's thought, and Tidrick demonstrates that Gandhi's writings are "saturated in the ideology of Esoteric Christianity."

A final influence were the no less bizarre beliefs of the German Louis Kuhne who developed the idea of the "Nature Cure" as an alternative to conventional medicine. This aimed at the elimination of "morbid matter" by bringing oneself into harmony with natural forces through a regime of sun bathing and 'sitz friction baths' which involved sitting in water and rubbing the genitals with a cold wet cloth. As Tidrick explains it, "Kuhne believed that the body's nervous system converged on the genitals, and their non-lustful stimulation produced general health, in addition to curing diseases from whooping cough to epilepsy."

In another newly published biography- Gandhi: The Man, His People and the Empire- this time written by its subject's grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, Nature Cures are shown to have remained a Gandhian enthusiasm until the very end. As late as 1946, as atom bombs were falling on Japan and a Labour government was deciding how to go about giving India its Independence, the Mahatma was in a village south of Poona prescribing mud-poultices and nude sunbathing 'in a solitary place' to poor villagers. Rajmohan reproduces a note his grandfather made about one sick boy: "Can he see at the moment? If he takes a diet free from chillies, takes fruit and a friction bath, he is likely to be alright. Does he pass stools? He needs an enema, which can be done only here."

Rajmohan Gandhi's weighty, authoritative and comprehensive biography is a great achievement. While not shying away from showing either his grandfather's peculiarities or the contradictions in his life and thought, Rajmohan still manages to convey how such a man was charismatic enough to win a national following, dominate the Congress Party, outwit the British, and not only lead his nation to freedom, but to begin the entire process of post-war decolonisation. Rajmohan's book may not be as witty or original as that of Tidrick, but it makes up for it in warmth and intimacy, and in the roundness of its portrayal of Gandhi as a fallible human being, whose extreme eccentricity did not stop him from being both a shrewd tactician and a major moral force.

Particularly moving is Rajmohan's account of Gandhi's later years, much of which were spent behind bars until his final release after his wife's death (and cremation) in jail in 1944, aware of his fading influence and haunted by the possibility of failure. By the end, it is difficult not to be moved by the account of Gandhi's assassination, and the elegy that the weeping Nehru read that night over the radio: "The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere. Our beloved leader, Bapu, the Father of the Nation, is no more."

It was Gandhi's other great acolyte, Sardar Patel, who first realised that Gandhi would remain as influential in death as he was in life. In the recriminations that followed the assassination, the Hindu fundamentalist RSS was banned and many of its members arrested. Nehru's position in Congress was strengthened, as was that party's commitment to protect the minorities. Gandhi's ideal of an India of village republics remained the enthusiasm of a minority, along with his spinning wheels, friction baths and saline enemas; but thanks to the way he died, India remained the pluralistic democracy he had always fought for, and the Hindu extremists he so disapproved of were marginalised for the next forty years.