ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about a spiritual, intellectual, even political anti-biography of the man Rabindranath Tagore called Mahatma, 'the great soul'. It attempts to approach the complex character of the apostle of non-violence without using psychoanalysis or the Christian point of view. 'Gandhi is the only freedom fighter of our time who took arms in the name of the human soul. Claude Markovits sees three separate existences in Gandhi's life: the first, which goes up to 1893, covers the period before he left for South Africa. The twenty years he spent in South Africa constitute the second and the third begins with his return to India in 1915. This division, created by the historian, is based on the intrinsic cohesion of each of the phases of Gandhi's life. The same could perhaps be said of Lenin's life, too.
