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Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age

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Writing a dual biography of two political giants is not an easy task.One is reminded about the outstanding joint biography written many years ago by Lord Bullock on Hitler and Stalin.
In this book,two themes run concurrently:the British Empire's fin-de-siecle and the rise of India as an independent nation.Although of different backgrounds,both political giants-Churchill and Gandhi- seem to have been much alike.On the one hand, this book gives plenty of evidence about Churchill's effort to keep the Jewel of the British Empire no matter what the cost, while on the other hand, Gandhi- as shown here-has done almost anything to undermine Churchill's aspirations.In a very long but fascinating book, Arthur Herman has depicted the two rivals by showing their strong and weak points.Many other personalities make their appearance on this political stage,such as :General Kitchener,Rabindranath Tagore,Franklin Roosevelt,Jawarhalal Nehru,Clement Attlee and others.As Mr Herman points out,both men enjoyed moments of glory but were also flawed.He tells a wonderful tale about one of the most fascinating yet violent periods of contemporary history.This book shows that there were many dark sides in the course of the British history and the Amritsar act of butchering helpless Indians is just one example.The final result of this showdown between Churchill and Gandhi was the rise of India and the demise of the British Empire with grave consequences for both sides.While at some point Churchill was out of touch with the historical reality,Gandhi has not hesitated to sacrifice millions of his fellowmen in pursuit of his dream and in some ways he was extremely naive when interpreting some political events.
This books has been carefully researched and documented, the language is simple yet extremely rich, and the reader-I am confident- will enjoy one of the best-ever written history books that has come along in recent years. Arthur Herman is a master storyteller-a characteristic that many professional historians lack.The result: a very interesting,quick-moving,rich and stimulating narrative.

This is one of those books that takes two familiar lives--those of Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill--and tells them in parallel. The idea is that the two men influenced each other's goals and lives much more than has been acknowledged in the past. The two only met once: in 1906 when Churchill was Colonial Undersecretary, and Gandhi was lobbying on behalf of Indian independence. Author Herman makes this the center of the book in some ways, which is strange given that it happens very quickly in the book (on about page 130 of what's a 600-page tome) but it works, because the two men seem to have built impressions of one another resting in part on this meeting.

Herman has a number of things to say about both men. He spends about equal time with each, discussing the central issues of their lives and how the other person fit into each stage of the history of the 20th Century. For instance, when he's talking about Churchill, Herman recounts his attitude towards Indian independence and towards Gandhi personally. The book also works as a history of the latter part of the British Raj in India, from approximately the turn of the century to independence. There's a lot of interesting stuff in here, including the fact that Churchill's time "in the wilderness" during the run-up to World War II may have been due to his attitude towards India (he opposed independence resolutely) as much as his opposition to Hitler and appeasement. Gandhi comes across as a naïve idealist who thought he could create a country where everyone worked a spinning wheel and there were no factories, who made speeches that set off riots, but always seemed to think he was only encouraging non-violence.

I enjoyed this book a great deal. It's long, and there's a lot of material here, but it's very informative and has a different take on things. I would recommend it highly.

Most people will read "Gandhi and Churchill" for the author's detailed study of how the two men compared and contrasted with each other. Remember the exam papers that asked you to compare and contrast two historical periods or two--whatever? Arthur Herman uses the compare and contrast framework to anchor his view that under the skin, Gandhi and Churchill were more alike than you would expect if you put the skinny, bare-chested man and his rotund, English-dressed adversary side by side. Both men were products of the Victorian Age. Both highly esteemed the "manly" virtues. Both were ruthless on occasion. And both, more often than we like to think, could be wrong, even disastrously wrong. To add to the mix, both men's lives had a series of successes and failures.

For many decades Gandhi and Churchill (but they were not the only players, as the author makes clear in great detail) struggled over what India was and what India would become. In the end, according to Herman, neither man's vision prevailed.

This is a very critical dual portrait, not easy on either man, and if both emerge, from time to time, as large sized, it is not because the author intends to spare them. On occasionI found myself wrestling with the author's judgments, not completely satisfied with the interpretations, not sure that there isn't more to be said on one side or the other. Interpretive histories can be more or less persuasive, and I found this one very useful, with lots of new information, but--well, we are allowed to reserve judgment. The author seems to suggest that each man, in his own way, scuttled the possibility of a united India containing Hindus and Moslems together, an India emerging without the birth pangs of massacre and attrocity. He almost seems to be saying that absent these men the bloodbaths would have or could have been avoided. Maybe.

However, the book is interesting for another quite unexpected reason: its portrait of what happened in and around India during the Second World War. My guess is most Americans think of WWll in terms of the blitzkreig in Europe, men and machinery trudging in the snow in endless areas of Russia, naval battles in the Pacific, with some fierce island-hopping fighting going on as you got closer to Japan. Sure there was something called "over the hump" and of course Singapore fell, and something should be said about Burma, but that part is hazy. For those not aware how deeply and intimately India and Indian soldiers were involved in the war, this book is something of a revelation. For that reason alone some readers might well want to pick up the book quite aside from the book's two-peas-in-a-pod argument.

Arthur Herman took up a challenging task to write the comparative histories of two men who influenced the lives of millions of people living around the world, each in a different way. He did not quite succeed in his task. Let me explain.

I believe that one cannot write a revealing history of India without being touched by its soul. Most books on Indian history, written by people from West, are good at documenting the chronology of events, battles, treaties and the like but they are not capable of giving a living portrait of the participants or the driving forces behind the events since the writers have not opened their eyes or intellect to recognize India's soul. The author is no different. He shows his ignorance by referring to Gita as a scripture that preaches violence.

Churchill and Gandhi are not comparable people. The former was a bigoted megalomaniac who got stuck with the nineteenth century racial outlook and could neither recognize nor accept the changing world. He had no hesitation to continue to subject an alien people to the rule of his own government for the material benefits that it would derive, he would neither agree to its end even when the rest of the world was moving into a new era. Where as, Gandhi was a spiritual humanist, believed in reaching out to his friends and enemies alike through peaceful negotiations and viewed at all human beings deserving of justice and humanity. Gandhi wanted love and justice for the entire human race and he saw shedding blood as inhuman and anti-divine while Churchill's vision was that the justice and rights were to be limited to a privileged few even if it is to be enforced through violence.

Gandhi was a Westerner in thoughts and beliefs in his early years, during his stay in South Africa and until around the early twenties. Therefore the author is able to understand Gandhi and successfully presents a clear portrayal of his spiritual journey during this period. At this time Gandhi himself was under delusion that British respected the ideal of human rights and justice for of everyone which was indeed true in England. Truth was different in India. The colonial bureaucrats who ran India were ruthless despots who violently enforced their will on a helpless Indian population.

The evolution of Gandhi from a loyal British subject towards some one who would demand total cut off from British connection began upon his arrival in India in 1915, accelerated by the Jallianwallahbag massacre by Dyer and was complete by the Second Round Table Conference. From that time onwards Gandhi becomes a stranger to the author. Like other Westerners the author fails in his comprehension of Gandhi during this period until his death in 1948. The narrative after the Second Round Table Conference looses objectivity and it becomes a tirade of Western incomprehension of Gandhi, the freedom movement and the other participants especially during the war period.

Scripps mission to discuss self government in India was initiated by Churchill to get Roosevelt off his back. Roosevelt was asking Churchill dissolve the empire and let Indians rule themselves in view of Universal human rights. Churchill put a poison pill in the Scripps offer in the name of "opt-out clause" by which Muslims, Sikhs, Princes, Anglo-Indians and whoever wanted could have their own "home land". This was anathema to Gandhi who saw India as one entity and he vetoed it. Scripps being naïve of the situation was upset with Gandhi while Churchill got what he wanted - kill any further talk of Indian independence and get Roosevelt off his back. Reaction of Viceroy Linlithgow towards Gandhi's Quit India movement in 1942 was to imprison the entire Congress leadership through the duration of the war and cultivate Jinnah and Pakistan as a potential British military outpost in the event that they were forced to vacate India. By the end of the war Labor won the elections in '45 but Churchill, Linlithgow and Wavell had done enough damage that partition of India had become inevitable. Author did not recognize the responsibility of these three men for the millions of deaths, refugee movements, legacy of hostilities in the subcontinent which haunts us till today and the evolution of Pakistan as a source of global terrorism today. In the discussion on Kashmir the author provides misleading statements. The tribal mercenaries under the guidance of Pakistan army attacking Kashmir and looting is well documented, I do not understand where the author got the idea that it was a concoction by Nehru. If author is indeed right, Mozaffirabad and Gigit would be under Indian rule today. By openly showing his dislike of Mountbatten the author shows his biases and fails in his task as an objective historian.

Author's narrative on Churchill was revealing in the sense that we are able to understand the psyche of a man who would refuse to acknowledge the human rights of four hundred million people, continue to live in the nineteenth century outlook, would cause the division of a country on religious basis, create millions of refugees, deaths and human suffering and a legacy of unending hostilities between the divided people.

I am puzzled by the inclusion in the reference list the discredited book, James Mill's "History of British India", an abusive and slanderous write up on Indian people, written under contract with East India Company long ago. It is a book that no contemporary Indic scholar would use as a reference. All I can hope is that the author's understanding of India and Indians did not come from that book.

Arthur Herman has written twin biographies here, of Gandhi and Churchill and how their work and their lives intertwined in the great saga of Indian Independence. The book appears to be well-researched, with extensive footnotes and references. It covers the entire lives of both Gandhi and Churchill and the environments in which they operated. So far, OK.

Multiple generations of Indians have grown up hearing, reading and learning of India's Independence. It is an inspiring story, something that makes Indians very proud. This book spoils that narrative (and there is nothing wrong with that, per se). It claims to provide a revisionist view of Indian Independence. Clearly, many of Herman's assertions are true and accurate and they help in providing some balance to our understanding of that period in history. But many others are just shocking and challenge fundamental beliefs that have been held for a long time. In Herman's view, the India under British rule was probably not such a bad place. It was a highly developed manufacturing center. If the British came down on the local population, it was often because of some provocation. Famines etc during the British rule are discussed briefly, and even there the blame is equally given to the British rulers and the Indian administrative officers. There are other surprises too. Apparently, Nehru and many others were just power-hungry folks with very little else on their minds. In fact Nehru was a Hindu sympathizer, who put his Hindu leaning above everything else. This is despite fairly public assertions made by several folks that he was "Muslim by culture, English by education and Hindu by accident".

Now, history is to a large extent, a narration of an individual's account of certain events. So it is difficult to say that one historian's view is right and another's is not. But thus far, we have relied at least to some extent, on Nehru's account of this period of Indian history. Much of the subsequent popular work such as Lapierre/Collins' Freedom at Midnight and Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy derives heavily from Nehru. Herman largely ignores Nehru, and almost never references any of his works. Now it is possible that Nehru's view is a biased one, given his own interests in the situation. But to completely ignore such a critical body of work seems wrong. Why Herman ignored Nehru's work is beyond logic or comprehension. He appears to get a lot of his perspectives around that time period from Pramit Pal Chaudhuri. He has relied on one person to get most of his views about the Indian Independence struggle.

Also, as a biographer, his approach seems to be to take the greatness of Gandhi & Churchill as a given, and then to start debunking the myths that glorify them. So he over-compensates for the deification of these individuals and instead presents an overly critical view of them. The attitude seems to be, "we all know that these two were great men, now let me tell you how they were not all that great". Well, that's OK, except that he brushes past their achievements and their greatness and focuses disproportionally on what he considers to be their failings. To be fair, he applies this imbalanced view to both Gandhi and to Churchill. The trouble with this approach is that someone who has no background on either of these two subjects may end up getting a distorted view of them.

As an author, Herman does a reasonably good job of providing a fast-paced and lucid style to his writing. However, it does appear as if he sometimes tries to force-fit all the research that he has laid his hands on, regardless of its relevance or importance. For example, he gives us details of what Churchill had for breakfast at one point in his life. That piece of detail adds no insight to the man or those times, but it is still there. Some other details seem to be erroneous. His discussion of famines in India appears to be just plain inadequate and wrong. Some other accounts that I have read point to a very different perspective. Furthermore, he ends every chapter with a annoying flourish acceptable only to thriller novels. All of this points to a bit of immaturity as a writer, although overall I wouldn't rate that as the book's greatest problem.

Also, while the book is well-researched, it seems to miss the essence of this story. Perhaps that's why Nehru's version appears so superior. Even if it is biased, you feel the pain and the emotion behind the story. Anyone who has read The Discovery of India will understand the difference.

Readers with some context of Indian and English history may find the book illuminating, although quite frustrating in some aspects. It may expand a reader's perspective. For a reader who is totally unfamiliar with this subject, this book needs to be read with caution.

Arthur Herman's book is a great example of how one can get most of the facts right, and yet miss the mark. I bought this book online for $ 4.99 and instantly felt a tinge of sadness at how a potentially scholarly work sells for so less. After completing the book, I feel convinced that the online market has unwittingly priced the book close to its value.

For those of you intimidating by reading History, I would encourage you to give it a chance. Yeah, history books are long, hundreds of pages; it at first appears that it can be dry. This is not the case when well written, and when reading History patience does have its rewards. Oh, now there might be a lot of names, places, dates and it might be tough to follow. Again if well written and presented, then it should be easy to follow, stay with it. From History you not only learn about the past, the past also teaches us about the present situation and what could potentially happen in the future. For me those little nuggets of historical trivia also excite me. Growing up I had learned a lot about India's fight for independence and Gandhi. When I read the cover of this book about Gandhi and Churchill, I was immediately drawn in, and I had to read the book.

This brings me to the topic of this review, Gandhi and Churchill, The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, written by Arthur Herman, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for 2008. Herman is a former professor of history from Georgetown University, Catholic University, George Mason University, and Smithsonian's Campus. His interest in Indian History spawned as a youth from his father, who himself has written about Hinduism, Buddhism, and Gandhi. As the author writes "I was in High School when I helped my father to correct proofs of his translation of the Bhagavad Gita".

Arthur Herman provides a revealing accounting of the politics of the British Empire in India. While as the title indicates the major players in this author's account of the colonial history are Gandhi and Churchill, the book also nicely pieces together the relationships between all the key political figures in India, England, and also world events like a puzzle. One of the most interesting parts of the book was the author's fascinating recounting of World War II and also specifically Japan's invasion of Asia and the impact of these events on the cause for India's Independence. The author's account of Japan's invasion of Asia during World War II reads like a fast pace action novel, while also providing interesting historical facts. The following is a sample of the action from the book:

"After a year's preparation, the Japanese attacked India. One thrust ran southward toward Imphal, less than fifty kilometers west of the Burmese border. The other stretched to Korma, as thousands of Japanese infantry poured through the thick jungle hoping to encircle the massive British base being built at Dimapur."

The author paints Gandhi and Churchill as complex characters. Both men were characterized by discipline, determination for a cause, and strong principles. One way these characteristics were highlighted was through the author's use of referencing primary sources of information throughout the book. The author described the seemingly parallel lives, yet integrally linked, of Churchill and Gandhi using fluid prose and nice transitions. It is fascinating how two great men, rivals, shaped the course of destiny for not only India, also the future of the World.

One feature of the book that I enjoyed was the footnotes that the author made along the way. The author at times would have relevant sidebar discussions on the footer, and I found that this provided a lot of interesting nuggets of historical facts. Overall the book provided a wealth of information on Indian History during the British Raj through Independence and also provided a view into the workings of the British Empire of the early 20th century.
I would highly recommend this book to all history aficionados. More specifically to those interested in India's rise to Independence or the workings of the British Empire in India. This writing presents an objective and balanced view of Churchill and Gandhi. Also, as I commented at the start, if you are not sure about reading History, give it a chance; it can be fun and informative.

This is a fascinating account of the relationship between India and Britain for the first half of the twentieth century through the lives of these two countries greatest men. However, it failed to hit the mark in terms of truly explaining Gandhi's role in India's independence and on Indian psyche and also Churchill's imperialist legacy in our modern world.

The author has certainly done a good job in reconstructing the trials and tribulations of both men. He has proved without doubt that these men were built of extraordinary stuff. I think this is the best part of the book. Now, where the book falls short is in its attempt to analyze the repercussions of their lives.

It is definitely true that all of Gandhi's satyagraha movements eventually fizzled out without any apparent gain, or resulted in uncontrolled mob violence. But one can't really infer from these that Gandhi's message of ahimsa (non-violence) was lost on the Indian public, and that it was the threat of violence rather than non-violence which forced the British to leave India.

What the author failed to understand, even though he presented all the necessary evidence, was that Gandhi united a wide segment of India's society behind the Independence movement which earlier had been the monopoly of the elites in India's society. It was this mass mobilization which got stronger over time even after every failed satyagraha that eventually forced the British to leave.

Also, it is incorrect to state that the message of non-violence didn't leave its mark on the Indian public. It is definitely true that India erupted into mass communal violence in 1947, and even to the present day similar violence is quite common. However, at the same time there is a very strong under-current of non-violent civil disobedience in modern Indian politics. For example, when Indira Gandhi and her son attempted to grab power unlawfully, they were forced out of power by large-scale non-violent protests. More recently, similar public action has become common-place in deciding various political issues.

The British didn't leave India simply because they were afraid of violence in 1946. After all they had weathered a lot more violence in the prior century. What was different in 1946 was that the British belief of racial superiority had vanished and with it any justification for ruling India. Now, the author does talk about this change in British beliefs, but he doesn't go into its reasons. It was surprising that even though the author presented a lot of evidence of Gandhi's strong image in the west, almost fairy-tale like, he failed to draw a connection between this and the changed racial perceptions in Britain.

Finally, on the matter of Churchill, the author conveniently sweeps under the rug his misadventures in Iran. As has been written in other prominent historical works, Churchill tried unsuccessfully to force a coup in Iran, and then instigated Eisenhower to have the CIA do the dirty job. This was America's first real taste of imperialism and it was really taken up by Kissinger in his many coups and guerrilla wars in the Latin American countries. Churchill essentially handed the torch of imperialism to the Americans. Of course, we can all feel the repercussions of this legacy in the form of Islamic terrorism and Hugo Chavez.

Still, despite its shortcomings in understanding the significance of its subject, I have given the book 4 stars because its very readable history.

Popular historian Arthur Herman in this book scripts parallel biographies of MK Gandhi and Winston Churchill, two titans of the last century, whose influence is indicated by their places as the runner-up to Person of the Century (1900 - 2000) and the Person of the Half Century (1900 - 1950) respectively by Time.

The book has several remarkable merits. It is well-paced, gripping and at most points a page-turner. Its penchant for digging up unusual details and startling facts calls to mind that masterpiece of historical storytelling, Freedom at Midnight. The narrative and structure, from the point of view of timeline and two parallel storylines, is extremely commendable; one never loses track of time or of events, or sight of the big picture.

While the book looks to be solid on facts, its interpretations seem questionable, even simplistic, especially regarding Gandhi. To summarize the impressions one would glean from the book - both the characters, conventionally and in the public imagination considered unequivocal heroes, come off badly.

Churchill (admittedly about whom this is my first and perhaps last book) comes off as a person gifted with uncommon courage, great oratorical skill, and a generous dose of luck, but not possessed of an inclination toward out-of-the-box or even objective thought. Because his set of core beliefs - colonialism, democracy, capitalism with certain welfare systems, anti -communism and -totalitarianism - does not appear to be founded on rational thought, and his intellectual capacities seem ordinary, one is inclined to ascribe his unyielding adherence to these beliefs even in the face of extraordinary challenge more to an innate stubbornness and fundamentalism rather than an enlightened steadfastness. His megalomania and racism become apparent through understated facts and comments throughout the narrative; the shocking extent of his racism is brought out best by his comments about and reaction to the Bengal famine.

Gandhi comes off more as a shrewd strategist than a well-intentioned saint-politician. Herman's approach strikes one as uncharitable toward Gandhi, and sometimes needlessly sensational; too much is made of middle-aged Gandhi's racism against blacks and lower-class Indians (which is not all that startling given his historical and cultural context as the author would have us believe), his emphasis on manliness, and particularly his faddish experiments with diet. These experiments as well as his sexual experiments (upon which Herman should have elaborated) are, again, not incongruous with the spirit of the puritanical ascetic tradition of India. It is standard fare in Hindu thought that a complete subjugation of the passions is a prerequisite of, or coincident with, salvation. While Herman justifiably dismisses Gandhi's ideas on industry, nonviolent protest (being an effective weapon in all cases - even extreme ones like Hitler), and society as impracticable or even downright silly, he misses or deemphasizes Gandhi's essential nobleness: his peacebringing trip to remote Noakhali whilst in the thick of political turmoil, his ceaseless battle against untouchability, religious intolerance and indignity of labor, and his singular contribution toward making the struggle for independence a countrywide event and therefore promoting national identity, perhaps his greatest accomplishment. Herman's account of the impact of Gandhi's campaigns, though closer to the truth than several others that simplistically conclude that Gandhi brought independence to India, seems to err in the other direction: he judges the campaigns' performances harshly since he compares their actual consequences against their promised consequences (independence in one year, and so on). A more measured account would conclude that the campaigns were, in fact, effective in the sense that successive campaigns swelled the numbers of protesters, intensified the drive for independence, mobilized world opinion, and tired the British. And through all this, they contributed hugely to India achieving its independence.

The overdone dramatic subtitle of the book - "The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age" - presages the style of narration. Throughout the book, one gets the niggling feeling that marketing wisdom was a partial reason for juxtaposing these very different lives with each other. Though some of the parallels he draws in Gandhi's and Churchill's lives, as well as the impact they had on each others' situations, are enlightening, the constant exercise of establishing interconnections between the two giants quickly gets trying for the reader. The "ta-da" closings of several chapters don't help.

For the reader who expected to be inspired by great lives, one common quality between the protagonists hits home: Gandhi and Churchill both faced crushing failures during their lives, the kind that would induce most men to exhaust and give up. But they didn't, and their continuous resilience accounted largely for their places in history. The ultimate conclusion of the book is inexorable: Gandhi's and Churchill's ideas captivated their people for a time, but pragmatism, as always, won out, and history evaded them.

This is an interesting book, to say the least. Arthur Herman had an excellent idea, trace the careers of two of the giants of the 20th century from the angle of how their lives intersected with each other (even though the two only met once, when they were both quite young). So, the focus of the book, as the subtitle indicates, is on India. The use of the word "destroyed" in reference to the Empire gives some indication of where Herman's sympathies lie. Though he is an American, he seems to have much regret that the British empire fell by the wayside.

For a massive, scholarly volume by a professional historian, this book reads remarkably well. Herman has a fascinating story to tell--and tell it well he indeed does. The book follows a pretty straight chronology, and even a person pretty familiar with the outline of the events will still find new information and provocative interpretive moves throughout.

Just as Herman himself clearly has a distinctive perspective that shapes how he presents this material, so readers will bring their perspectives that shape how they will respond to this book. From my perspective as one decidedly unfriendly to empires and their champions (such as Churchill), and friendly to Gandhi's pioneering work in the philosophy and practice of nonviolence, Herman comes across as a pretty unreliable witness in the Gandhi half of this double biography. Yet, even though Herman likes Churchill much better than I do, his treatment of the man is much more objective and believable than his corresponding account of Gandhi's career.

That is, I felt I learned enough about Churchill to be able to form my own judgment. Herman is thorough and clear in providing ample bases for seeing Churchill as a deeply problematic influence on the world of the 20th century--even as Herman himself generally views this influence as more positive. Churchill drank deeply of imperial grandiosity (along with other more mundane spirits) and, at the cost of untold lives, exerted every ounce of his considerable power and influence to keep the British Empire intact long after even the British people themselves believed it was time to let go. Churchill was an unrepentant racist, also with deadly consequences for India and other part of the Empire. And he was apparently the person most responsible for several terrible military disasters (most notably the infamous fiasco at Gallipoli during World War I).

To Herman's credit, we get Churchill warts and all. In fact, I am not quite sure why Herman respects Churchill so much. He certainly does not provide a persuasive case for why we should see Churchill as a great man--that seems to be Herman's assumption, one he does not really allow the evidence he has presented here (which does not show Churchill as a great man) to challenge.

Whereas with Gandhi, it's kind of the opposite problem. We do learn a great deal about many of the events of Gandhi's life--but I simply don't know how much of what Herman says about the Indian leader is to be believed. Time after time he asserts that the standard account of Gandhi's career is wrong, but almost never presents evidence to support his assertion. If he were trustworthy on Gandhi, such assertions would be quite helpful for all who want the most accurate account of one who certainly has been the object of much hagiography. But the best I can bring myself to say about Herman's Gandhi sections is that they raise provocative questions and challenge one to look more closely at the sources.

Throughout the book Herman combines two types of comments regarding Gandhi that seem deeply in tension--one is how just about every major campaign or other initiative Gandhi took was essentially a failure or at least of negligible significance (going back to the emergence of sayagraha in South Africa down to Gandhi's last days of seeking for Hindu/Muslim reconciliation); the second was how powerful and highly influential Gandhi was in India and globally. The significance for Herman of Gandhi's influence is almost always to suggest how problematic that influence was, how Gandhi bore so much responsibility when events turned bad. But how can both of these dynamics be true-Gandhi's utter ineffectiveness and Gandhi's powerful and regrettable influence? If Gandhi was always so ineffective, how did he come to have so much influence?

Part of the problem is that Herman makes no attempt whatsoever to account for Gandhi's philosophy, other than occasional disparaging comments often pointing either to Gandhi's hypocrisy or out of touch idealism. The reader of this book will learn virtually nothing about the meaning that satyagraha had for Gandhi, where it came from and how he sought to apply it. There are no reflections on Gandhi's powerful influence on various social change efforts around the world.

Here is one quote that captures a great deal of Herman's sensibility: "The confrontation [between Churchill and Gandhi] was between two different conceptions of life. One rested on secular and humanistic traditions that had been tested by history and centuries of human conflict. The other rested on a vision of spiritual purity in which history and material things (including Gandhi's own body) counted for nothing. Churchill valued human liberty as the product of struggle, as man's supreme achievement. Gandhi, by contrast, valued liberty as God's supreme achievement. It was man's duty to live up to that standard. Without it, Gandhi believed, life was meaningless, including his own" (page 507).

The idea that a racist and imperialist such as Churchill, who fought bitterly to keep India's hundreds of millions of people under the dominance of Great Britain, valued "liberty" supremely seems ludicrous. And we can ask how "humanistic" any tradition is that undergirds such racism and imperialism and that so comfortably resorts to such violations of standards of restraint in warfare as seen in the Churchill-approved saturation bombing of civilian populations in cities such as Dresden and Hamburg during World War II.

The relation between Gandhi's philosophy and practice of nonviolence and "history and material things" is a point of major debate--a debate that will be extremely difficult to resolve in part due to the incomplete evidence we have concerning where history actually is going and in part due to the importance of our assumptions in how we address such a question. However, I want to argue that in fact Gandhi's philosophy is extraordinarily important for human history, is at its core anchored in history, and is actually our best hope for on-going human existence in history.

As I mentioned above, I did find this book highly enjoyable to read. And I think Herman deserves our gratitude for taking on such an interesting and important project. In the end, though, I don't really think that what the world today needs is an exaltation of Churchillian imperialism combined with an attempted debunking of Gandhian satyagraha--rather, what we need is an account of this story that take the opposite tack in dealing with each of its main characters.

"Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age", Arthur Herman, Bantam Books, NY 2008. ISBN 978-0-553-80463-8, HC 609/722. Notes 50 pgs., Ref., 12 pgs., Index 34 pgs., Glossary 3 pgs., Dates 3 pgs., 9 ¼" x 6 ¼". Inveiglements include 35 glossy B/W photos and 3 schema maps of Africa & India.


This detailed, lengthy chronicle, thoughtfully divided into 31 chapters, is brilliantly written in fast-moving style by best-selling author Arthur Herman. It's a narrative journal about two legendary worldly figures - Gandhi and Churchill whose lives and life forces entwined as both struggled relentlessly against one another, ...so much sound and fury wont to evoke primal screams of differing secular humanisms. We learn about their early years, of their accomplices or sidekicks, of their rise in worldly stature via victories and losses, where sophistication can be triumphed by naivety, and where melancholy necessitates time out, and about a blood-bath too frequently skipped over unequalled in history.

We generally think of fiction as attention-getting and if its really good, something hard to put down -- but this is so true of Herman's book, which is basically recent history - much of which most of us likely experienced dispassionately, unless we served overseas in military combat.

Did you ever think reading history could be exciting, that experiencing history as it is written and told is all but invariably propagandized whereby accounts by third parties sounds distantly foreign but can be verified by reliable sources? Well, "Gandhi & Churchill" is a tremendous read and you'll wonder why so much passed you by - you'll discover the personages in detail and understand better why Rommel and British Army were in Africa, of the racial-ethnic caste mix in India, of India's division into Bangledesh, Pakistan and India, locations Japanese invaded India, parental forces which drove Churchill, whether Winston truly drank whiskey in the morning, and if Gandhi enjoyed sex? and what he really died from - and so much, much more.

Author Herman could have written separate books on these two personages, but combining them was grandiose. Do not miss this book!