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Remembering Mahatma Gandhi: The Autobiography That Still Challenges Power and Pretense

Edited by IndianRepublic.in - Location: India

✍️ Written by Saket Suman

Mahatma Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth is not the story of a perfect man as political heavyweights present themselves to be -- and that is perhaps precisely why it endures still today. It is a book filled with self-doubt, failures, confessions, and contradictions. But it remains one of the most powerful examples of a life devoted to truth, however painful, however incomplete that pursuit may be.

Gandhi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a few days before he was assassinated.
There’s something profoundly disarming about the way Gandhi presents himself. He does not hide behind legacy, myth, or moral superiority. He does not edit out the parts of himself that might be mocked or misunderstood. Instead, he offers his life as a series of experiments -- some noble, some naive, but all of them are deeply personal. The tone is intimate, often vulnerable. 

You feel, as a reader, that you are being let in.

Gandhi wrote the book as a seeker still unsure of what lay ahead. Even in the later chapters, he expresses doubt about whether he has succeeded in expressing the truth he has glimpsed. 

“I do not know whether I have been able to do justice to them,” he admits, referring to his experiments. “I can only say that I have spared no pains to give a truthful narrative.”

And it is a truthful narrative in spirit. Gandhi doesn't pretend to be the man his followers later made him out to be. He doesn’t proclaim enlightenment. Instead, he tells us how difficult it is to even begin walking the path of truth and non-violence. The honesty is raw, even awkward at times. He is just as ready to admit confusion over a moral choice as he is to critique his own pride.

He confesses to moments of temptation, to emotional blindness, to episodes that caused pain to those he loved. It’s all there, deliberately. Because, to him, truth could not be pursued selectively. “The exercise has given me ineffable mental peace,” he wrote. “Because it has been my fond hope that it might bring faith in Truth and Ahimsa to waverers.” The writing is as much for the reader as it is for himself.

There’s also something extremely liberating about a leader admitting that he is still learning, still faltering. It’s an almost impossible standard in our time -- when public figures present polished perfection, and admit nothing unless forced. Gandhi, in contrast, puts everything on the table. He admits to ego. He admits to failure. 

He writes, “I know that I have still before me a difficult path to traverse. I must reduce myself to zero.” That line lingers. To reduce oneself to zero out of humility -- is a rare act of inner courage.

Gandhi was no passive idealist. He entered politics precisely because he believed that truth and ahimsa were not abstract ideals. They were meant to be tested in the most brutal, complex spaces of human interaction -- including power, violence, and injustice. For him, the personal and the political were not separate domains. 

“Those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means,” he wrote. But here, religion didn’t mean dogma. It meant the inner discipline required to serve others without ego.

It’s not hard to see why this book is still so difficult for some to accept. It offers no easy conclusions, no neat binaries of good and evil, no perfected hero to imitate. But it holds up a mirror that few autobiographies ever do. Gandhi asks readers to begin asking of themselves what he asked of himself.

In a world that celebrates certainty, Gandhi's doubt is his strength. In a world of outrage, his restraint is radical. In a time of endless shouting, his quiet persistence in seeking truth feels almost revolutionary.

And this is what makes the book more urgent than ever. Today, his legacy is often evoked by those who hardly embody it -- politicians who wear khadi but practice cruelty, who praise Gandhi while silencing dissent, who speak of peace while stoking division. But Gandhi’s own words -- printed plainly and sold for pennies in small Indian shops -- remain a quiet rebuke to all of it.

You don’t need to agree with Gandhi to learn from him. His flaws are real. His worldview was shaped by a very different era. But his willingness to dissect himself -- to write with humility rather than hindsight -- is something rare, and perhaps unmatched.

To read The Story of My Experiments with Truth is to understand what it means to live the questions. Gandhi left us something much more difficult, and more valuable than mere answers: a method. And perhaps a mirror too.

(Saket Suman is a journalist and author of The Psychology of a Patriot. He has written extensively on literature, politics, and cultural freedom.)

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