Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth [Paperback]

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Author), Mahatma Gandhi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1983

Personal account of the life of the man who freed India from colonization through the Satyagraha — nonviolent protest — movement. His early boyhood life, legal studies, purification, and ultimate salvation of his homeland is carefully recounted in this inspiring and critical work of insurmountable importance.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Gandhi's nonviolent struggles in South Africa and India had already brought him to such a level of notoriety, adulation, and controversy that when asked to write an autobiography midway through his career, he took it as an opportunity to explain himself. Although accepting of his status as a great innovator in the struggle against racism, violence, and, just then, colonialism, Gandhi feared that enthusiasm for his ideas tended to exceed a deeper understanding. He says that he was after truth rooted in devotion to God and attributed the turning points, successes, and challenges in his life to the will of God. His attempts to get closer to this divine power led him to seek purity through simple living, dietary practices (he called himself a fruitarian), celibacy, and ahimsa, a life without violence. It is in this sense that he calls his book The Story of My Experiments with Truth, offering it also as a reference for those who would follow in his footsteps. A reader expecting a complete accounting of his actions, however, will be sorely disappointed.

Although Gandhi presents his episodes chronologically, he happily leaves wide gaps, such as the entire satyagraha struggle in South Africa, for which he refers the reader to another of his books. And writing for his contemporaries, he takes it for granted that the reader is familiar with the major events of his life and of the political milieu of early 20th-century India. For the objective story, try Yogesh Chadha's Gandhi: A Life. For the inner world of a man held as a criminal by the British, a hero by Muslims, and a holy man by Hindus, look no further than these experiments. --Brian Bruya --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Dover Publications; Dover ed edition (June 1, 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0486245934
• ISBN-13: 978-0486245935
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (99 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #69,080 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #2 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Hinduism > Gandhi
  • #5 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( G ) > Gandhi, Mahatma
  • #37 in Books > History > Asia > India

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 70 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My all-time favorite book, October 30, 2000

By 

"r-k-k" (Wisconsin) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gandhi An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (Paperback)

I first read this book in the spring of 1998 when I was home with a cold and fever, and I can say that it is one of the best things that ever happened to me. The events described in the book are a hundred years old, but Gandhi has a way of describing their essence which is timeless, and will grip you in a way that makes them entirely relevant to today's world. It made me wonder how the world might have been if people today only followed his ideas. But this is no boring lecture on politics or nonviolence. In fact quite the opposite - it is the sparkling story of a very special man told in his own words. We learn about truth and non-violence in the best way possible, by observing Gandhi's actions as he goes about matters small and big. It brought Gandhi to life in a very special way. I always admired his principles, but now feel closer to Gandhi the man. This is a first-hand account that cannot be ignored. My only regret was that the book ended much too soon (mid 1920's) and there was nothing to cover the rest of his life. I can think of no person of any age who would not be greatly enriched by this book. For the interested, I found the companion book "Satyagraha in South Africa" (also by Gandhi) to be just as good.

48 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Portrait of a man as explorer., January 8, 2007

By 

frumiousb "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Gandhi An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (Paperback)

There is a lot of discussion as to whether this book is actually an autobiography or not. I am not sure whether it is really a question relevant to the work, but it is probably relevant for people who want to decide whether or not to buy the book. So. It is a recounting by Gandhi of his life as it related to his search for truth. It is not a general autobiography, although you will find autobiographical details. It is also not a series of essays about truth-- Gandhi writes very personally about his search for truth, not necessarily about what he found there. I would say that an autobiography about this specific aspect of his life is a fair enough description.

The book is divided into many small chapters. It is clearly intended for a large audience and the chapters are largely able to stand on their own and simply written. Gandhi addresses issues such as food habits, comparative religion, political involvement, justice and the law, and chastity.

I found it quick and easy to read. I liked his voice as a writer very much. I had the feeling that he was not hiding or leading. He left the reader free to either agree or disagree with his actions and conclusions. Most writers in this space have neither the clarity nor the confidence exhibited in The Story of My Experiments With Truth. More, I enjoyed the book. The tone is often wry and sprightly, and as a whole it is very engaging to read. I might have wished that Gandhi had spent more time on some of the subjects, but that was not the purpose of the work.

Recommended for people with an interest in Gandhi, Indian/South African history, or spiritual exploration. The simple accessible style should make it available to a wide range of readers across virtually all age groups.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Imprint of the Divine on the Material World, August 28, 2001

By 

Carl E. Gunther (West Hollywood, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Gandhi An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (Paperback)

From this book we can see that Gandhi took everything in his life, from the smallest details of his diet to the grandest political decisions, very, very seriously. He believed that only a blade of the purest metal could cut through illusion to reveal the underlying truth of a society and of a world. The key to this purity for Gandhi was integrity and consistency in every word and deed. If he made a promise to abstain from milk, or to support a particular political position, he would keep that vow even at the risk of his life.

This concept of integrity started from Gandhi's personal life and extended outward to each community and each nation that he touched with his message and with his political campaigns. When he worked to elevate the status of the Indian community in South Africa, he worked simultaneously to improve the sanitary habits and internal justice of that community, thereby ensuring that there was integrity not only in the nation of South Africa, but also in the Indian community itself. The same pattern can be seen in his work with the Champaran peasants ("ryots") to remove the crushing feudal tribute of indigo required of them by their landlord masters. As he led that campaign, he simultaneously established schools in the region and once again taught the rudiments of sanitation to the oppressed farmers. And of course his tireless campaign against untouchability, and his work to heal the rifts between Muslims and Hindus were both attempts to ensure the integrity of Indian society itself, which he considered a necessary part of attaining Indian independence from Britain, thereby helping to heal the inconsistency of colonialism at the global level, which in turn brought greater integrity to international relations.

Likewise, his promotion of the use of Hindi and Gujarati (this book was written by Gandhi in Gujarati) rather than English in Indian public life, his promotion of homespun Indian cloth and revival of a cottage industry to create it, his civil disobedience in the making of Indian salt from seawater, were all attempts to ensure that the Indian nation and people could define themselves as a more self-sufficient entity having a distinct identity, rather than describing themselves as they related to an external entity, i.e., the British government.

At every level, then, he desired and sought to create one thing: integrity. His ethics seemed to be: every person, every family, every community, every nation, that is founded upon an organic set of relationships, has a right to exist, to strengthen its own identity and to shine forth with its own kind of light. The process of integrating smaller such entities into larger ones must be a dialectical, interactive one that respects differences, rather than one of control or subsumption. In this way, the material world comes to reflect the infinite diversity, and the inviolable integrity, of the All, and the Divine thus creates an expression of itself in that material substrate, however transient and imperfect that expression may be.

Part of his genius as a political organizer lay in his understanding that control hierarchies such as the British colonial administration depended upon the organic processes of Indian society to create the value that they wished to extract and exploit. A policy of peaceful non-cooperation, when carried out in a determined and disciplined fashion, could rob the imperial power of the very wealth upon which it is based, thereby forcing it to release its hold. This exposes the fundamental paradox of imperialism: that it can only rule by breaking down and compromising the very social fabric that generates the wealth upon which it depends. Therefore, there are limits to the measures that it can take to coerce obedience from an organized and disciplined population.

As imperialism breaks down the internal relations of a society, it simultaneously presents that breakdown as a justification for its continued dominance, since otherwise (it claims) the disparate parts of the organic system would surely attack and consume each other in internecine conflicts. Thus, Gandhi's implicit answer to Hobbes' notorious quote that without the state life would be "nasty, brutish and short" was evidently to re-build the fraternal relationships of the sundered parts of the organic social and political animal (e.g., Hindus and Muslims), thereby rendering the state-based control structure a superfluous and unnecessary "remedy."

Although there are many aspects of this book that could be improved for the naive reader (of which I count myself as one) by creating an annotated edition, the narrative retains its hold because of the sense of discovery and self-revelation that emerges from every page.

As we each grapple with the finiteness of our own lives and the question of how meaning can be derived from something so transient as this life and this world, Gandhi's integration of the material with the spiritual in his own life provides a rare and helpful example. As he writes at the end of the book, "I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means." In a world that is increasingly run by totalitarian corporations that impose their control over people, governments and the environment with results that are utterly destructive to the integrity of each, Gandhi's struggle for a spiritual politics and a political spirituality shines in a way that can still give us hope today, if only we will take our lives as seriously as he took his own.