The shy, London-trained lawyer who found his method in South Africa and brought it home: non-violent mass disobedience, marching to the sea for salt, spinning cloth, filling the jails, that made British rule look like what it was.
The fork
A night in 1893 at Pietermaritzburg station, when he is thrown off a first-class carriage for being Indian. The twenty years in South Africa that follow are where satyagraha, 'truth-force', is invented and tested.
What they wanted
Independence, and a different India with it: villages, self-reliance, Hindu–Muslim unity, an end to untouchability, all won without hatred. Many of his allies want only the first.
What it cost
His critics name it: early contempt for Black Africans in South Africa, a paternalism toward the 'untouchable' castes that their leader Ambedkar fought, and a movement he could not hold together as partition came. A Hindu nationalist murders him in 1948.
The fight
Saint, politician, or both? Ramachandra Guha takes all of it seriously: the method, the contradictions, and the critics who still argue with him.