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A CRITICAL LOOK AT A NATIONAL HERO Gandhi: Behind the Mask of Divinity, by G.B. Singh (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2004, ISBN 157392-9980) 355 pp. Cloth $32.00.
Albert Einstein said this about Mohandas Gandhi: "Generations to come will scarcely believe that such a one as this walked the earth in flesh and blood."
This new critical investigation by G.B. Singh is an attempt at bringing the Mahatma-or "Great Soul," as Gandhi came to be known-down to earth. Mr. Singh presents the personal side of Gandhi that is vastly underrepresented in Gandhian literature.
Mr. Singh, who migrated from India and now lives in the United States, researched Gandhi's role in South Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century. Five out of the seven chapters in Mr. Singh's book are devoted to the years between 1884 and 1914, when Gandhi began practicing what would later become famous as satyagraha, his peaceful, nonviolent revolution.
Gandhi studied law in London and returned to India in 1891 to practice as a lawyer. Two years later, in 1893, he accepted a one-year contract to do legal work in South Africa. At the time, South Africa was controlled by the British. When he attempted to claim his rights as a British subject, he was abused and soon realized that all Indians in South Africa suffered similar treatment. Gandhi would stay on in South Africa for twenty-one years, working to secure rights for Indian people there.
Mr. Singh's book attempts to expose the racial prejudices of Gandhi and his followers in South Africa and the sometimes violent nature of his satyagraha movement there and asserts that facts from that period were concealed as biographers, in years to come, relied primarily on Mr. Gandhi's own writings rather than independent research.
The author provides a lifeline for Gandhi and a select bibliography as appendices. The book also comes with three unusual...