ABSTRACT
The chapter understands the Gandhi phenomenon through the intellectual, philosophical and scholastic discourses built around Gandhi and his associates/interlocutors. Although Gandhi’s life is self-explanatory with the affirmation “my life is my message”, the continuing engagements with Gandhi’s life and numerous reflections and afterthoughts about him after seven decades of his death raise some crucial questions: Why is the proliferation of writings/biographies on Gandhi? In what ways do the biographies/correspondences alter the perceptions of reading Gandhi today? What roles do these documents play in constructing and deconstructing the myth called Gandhi? The life-writing in Gandhi’s case is copious – the scholars from India and the West have engaged themselves with the life of mahatma and his philosophy, have written about his life in elaborate detail from his practice of diet, sex, hygiene to his death, with equal commendation and condemnation further leaving enormous potential for the discourse of his life to continue in the future. From the biographers’ varied accounts it appears that it is the one and many Gandhis that are at work in the biographies. Similarly, the numerous exchanges, correspondences among his close associates and interlocutors like Mahadev Desai, J C Kumarrapa, Mirabehn, J Nehru, C F Andrews, Verrier Elwin and Lanza Del Vasto offer a new image of Gandhi which can enrich our nuanced understanding of Gandhi – the man and his philosophy. The present work will critically scrutinise Gandhi’s interface with his interlocutors which can initiate a discourse on its own. The perspective to understand Gandhi – his ideologies, agreements and disagreements among his interlocutors may criss-cross at many levels but what remains is the one yet many-dimensional figure of Gandhi, which equally continues to allure and elude us.
