Lelyveld wants us to understand Gandhi as a radical and a revolutionary in the context of his time and place even if ‘the political Gandhi’ tends to be eclipsed by ‘the religious Gandhi.

Great Soul concentrates on what he calls Gandhi’s evolving sense of his constituency and social vision, and his subsequent. ‘Gandhi kept changing, experiencing a new epiphany every two years or so,’ writes Lelyveld, ‘each representing a milestone on the path he was blazing for himself.’ He drifted away from his family and dressed in the garb of a Hindu holy man, ‘but he would always be the opposite of a dropout.’ Rather, Gandhi variously reincarnated as a ‘age, spokesman, pamphleteer, agitator, seer, pilgrim, dietitian, nurse and scold.’ Indeed, he spoke of himself as ‘a scavenger, a spinner, a weaver, a farmer and a laborer’) as a way of declaring his disdain for distinctions based on color, class or caste. It is this last avatar that interests Joseph Lelyveld most. He spent time as a correspondent in South Africa, where Gandhi started out as a callow 23-year-old ‘briefless lawyer,’ and India, where Gandhi arrived at age 44 as a political figure of influence and consequence and where he was dubbed a mahatma (‘great soul’) by the poet Rabindranath Tagore. Joseph Lelyvelds biography, Great Soul: Mahatama Gandhi and His Struggle with India, has been praised as 'scrupulous' by Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic, as 'judicious and thoughtful'. Lelyveld, a former editor of the New York Times as well as a foreign correspondent for the paper, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the book ‘Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White’ (1985). As Joseph Lelyveld shows in Great Soul, Gandhi possessed quirkiness, elusiveness, and genius for reinvention, with occasional cruelty and deep humanity.

Great soul by joseph lelyveld