Gandhi before India by Ramachandra Guha After 20 years of Gandhi's leadership, the £3-per-head tax on Asiatics was abolished and non-Christian marriages were recognised. Other civil rights that had been sought were not granted: the rights of entry and movement, the franchise. It could reasonably be argued that had there been no resistance, the South African state would have succeeded in putting Asians on a level with the despised Africans. Even staying still in terms of civil rights was a plus. Guha has found some new letters from Gandhi and for the first time publishes many letters sent to Gandhi from his admirers. He has examined the papers of Gandhi's close friend Hermann Kallenbach, whose homoerotic (though emphatically not homosexual) relationship with Gandhi Guha describes as a "joint experiment in celibacy." Guha often fails to tease out his subject's nuances. For example, he notes that the young Gandhi experimented with meat-eating as a way of growing tall, like "the Englishman," to help in gaining India's independence. He does not connect this with the later manipulation of diet and fasting that Gandhi considered so essential for the spiritual ascendancy necessary for the independence struggle. Yet it was the same person, same stomach, same political objective. Most nationalists in the 20th century, after all, did not think diet was linked to achieving independence. The justification for a long book on an already well-covered subject is new insights or new material. This book is light on the former and, while the latter exists, it adds little but bulk. There are eight pages on what was said and who was who at farewell parties for Gandhi when he left South Africa. That sort of thing can be read in the biographies already written, such as the 10 volumes by Pyarelal and Sushila Nayar and the eight of DG Tendulkar. This work attempts to elevate Gandhi as a thinker, though his key notion of satyagraha (truth- or soul-force) has not come into common use. Most people would struggle to define it past the assertion that it is non-violent. In the period covered by this book, Gandhi published his manifesto for Indian independence, Hind Swaraj (1909), with its vision of a village nation free of all the trappings of civilisation: trains, hospitals, law courts, factories. India is fortunate he never had the opportunity to pursue this model of society, which to my knowledge has been attempted only by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia under the name "Year Zero." It did not go well. Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha Allen Lane, £30, 673pp