'Gandhi Before India,' by Ramachandra Guha

Gandhi Before India

By Ramachandra Guha

(Alfred A. Knopf; 673 pages; $35)

Mohandas Gandhi's latest biographer, Ramachandra Guha, often recounts what South Africans of Indian origin have told him: You gave us a barrister named Mr. Gandhi; we gave you a Mahatma (a Sanskrit word meaning a great soul). That is not an idle boast. Gandhi was born in India, South Africa made him, and he tried to remake India.

"Gandhi Before India" covers Gandhi's early years in India and the time he spends in England studying law and learning about vegetarianism and religion. The story then brings us to South Africa. Guha is a brilliant historian who combines the gift of a storyteller, the discipline of an academic and the critical ability of seeing Gandhi as a fascinating human being, by not placing him on a pedestal.

After qualifying as a barrister in London in the twilight of Victorian Britain, Gandhi returned to India, but work was hard to find. Dada Abdullah, a Gujarati Muslim trader living in South Africa, wanted a lawyer who could understand and represent him, and Gandhi, unable to establish a proper practice in Bombay, went to South Africa. He was 24. He spent 22 years there, only making occasional visits to India.

When he returned, he knew little about his motherland. As Guha shows, he moved England at 19 in 1888, and he hardly knew India beyond his birthplace, Porbandar. Indeed, Gandhi begins to understand India's diversity only after he comes face to face with the problems of Hindi- and Tamil-speaking Indians in South Africa, some of whom are indentured laborers, and from a different class altogether. Gandhi sets aside his ideas of privilege and caste and forges a common identity.

In the second part of the planned two-volume biography, Guha will write about his 33 years in India, until his assassination by a Hindu nationalist in 1948. The South Africans were right; they let in a barrister, but they gave the world an apostle of peace.

Guha is brave - Gandhi is a subject of many biographies, and he was himself a prodigious writer, leaving voluminous correspondence and collected works that took the Indian government decades to compile. But Guha has re-created the past by connecting scattered dots, such as little-known letters written to Gandhi or newspaper accounts, to weave a rich tapestry.

A less ambitious writer would find the project daunting. But Guha is the man for the task. He has written on environmentalism and cricket, and more pertinently, a landmark history of India from its independence in 1947. That book is called "India After Gandhi" (2007), and the title of this biography playfully alludes to that.

In South Africa, Gandhi saw how Indians could not travel outside the states in which they lived, how they had to carry certificates of identity and how they feared expulsion. In an incident made famous in Richard Attenborough's 1982 film, "Gandhi," his transformative moment was when he was thrown off the first-class compartment of a train in Pietermaritzburg even though he had a valid ticket, because he was not white.

While the film rightly dramatized that incident, as Guha shows, there were many incidents that were incrementally and cumulatively instrumental in transforming Gandhi. To remedy those injustices, he turned to inspiration from writers like Emerson, Thoreau, Ruskin and Tolstoy.

His universalism was far ahead of his time. Guha quotes Chhagan, a nephew of Gandhi stunned by the easy friendship Gandhi has with a Jewish man and his Christian wife (as well as close ties with Muslims), including eating together at the same table and living with them. He writes: "To his (the nephew's) conventional Bania eyes, the household was eccentric. To the conventional white Christian in Johannesburg, the household was positively heretical."

Gandhi did what he thought was morally right, and thus were born ideas like passive resistance, civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance. Gandhi began addressing the public, organizing protests and exhorting Indians not to take indignities meekly. He exposed racism and tried to shame his opponents.

The saintly halo around Gandhi is formidable. To darken it, lazy writers have focused on Gandhi's bizarre experiments and peculiar views about sex (he told his son Manilal that "a person who marries in order to satisfy his carnal desire is lower than even the beast"), and his insistence that his followers be vegetarians, celibate, fast regularly and live in communes like the farms Phoenix and Tolstoy that he had set up.

Guha does not spare him, showing how he alienated his wife and elder son, disregarding their human needs for a husband and a father. In these relationships, he was an autocrat. But Guha does not dwell too much on it; he sees those concerns as a Western obsession, but is balanced enough to write elsewhere: "Sometimes he behaved like an unworldly saint, at other times like a consummate politician."

With the wisdom of hindsight, some critics have lamented Gandhi's failure to champion black rights in South Africa. Gandhi took a dim view of Africans, and while leaving South Africa, he had nothing to say about them. Guha notes: "To them alone were Gandhi's connections too slight to merit a formal and public farewell."

But antiapartheid stalwarts of the African National Congress found inspiration in him. Guha overstates the case when he calls Gandhi apartheid's first opponent. Uncomfortable questions remain about Gandhi's circumscribed universalism because he did not make common cause with black people, a problem similar to the questions the Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi faces today over her failure to condemn the violence against Rohingya Muslims in Burma.

And yet, Gandhi's failure reinforces Guha's central thesis - that flaws apart, the good Gandhi did far outweighs his shortcomings.

Gandhi was complex, and not perfect. Guha's intent is not to deify Gandhi; rather, to show the struggles Gandhi underwent to discard his base instincts to become a purer, kinder, heroic person in a constant quest for perfection. Gandhi was not born Mahatma; he became one. This well-told story explains how that happened.

Salil Tripathi is contributing editor at Indian publications Mint and Caravan, and is writing a book on the Bangladesh war of independence in 1971. He lives in London. E-mail: books@sfchronicle.com