![]() Not Gandhi’s struggle for India, but with it: as if this vast and antique land was somehow too refractory and ungrateful ( recalcitrant is a word to which Lelyveld recurs) to be fully deserving of Gandhi’s sacrificial endeavors on its behalf.īut with perhaps equivalent subtlety-because he generally refrains from imposing any one interpretation upon the reader-Lelyveld furnishes us with the very material out of which one might constitute a refutation of this common opinion. In a different way, the subtitle reinforces the same idea. ![]() The repetition, unlikely to be accidental in the case of a writer as scrupulous as Lelyveld, seems to amount to an endorsement. Eliot, who nurture themselves on the supposedly holy character of the subcontinent. The word Mahatma (often employed in ordinary journalistic usage without any definite article, as if it were Mohandas Gandhi’s first name) is actually the Sanskrit word for “Great Soul.” It is a religio-spiritual honorific, to be assumed or awarded only by acclaim, and it achieved most of its currency in the West by association with Madame Blavatsky’s somewhat risible “Theosophy” movement, forerunner of many American and European tendencies to be found in writers, as discrepant as Annie Besant and T. Joseph Lelyveld subtly tips his hand in his title. ![]()
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