Life stories

An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth

M. K. Gandhi

Gandhi's own account of his life up to 1921: a shy boy from Porbandar who became a lawyer in South Africa, found the method he called satyagraha, and brought it home to India

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  • Published 1927

Introduction

Gandhi wrote this book in Gujarati, as weekly chapters for his journal Navajivan, between 1925 and 1929. He says it is not a real autobiography: he wants to tell the story of his “experiments with truth” in diet, family life, religion and public work, and to show his faults as openly as his successes. The story runs from his birth in Porbandar in 1869, through his marriage at thirteen, his law studies in London and about twenty years in South Africa, to his return to India in 1915 and the campaigns of 1917 to 1920. It stops in 1921, because, Gandhi says, from then on his life was so public that people already knew it.

After a short introduction, the book has five parts of 167 short chapters and a farewell. Part One covers his childhood and London; Part Two his first years in South Africa and a visit home in 1896; Part Three the years from 1897 to 1902, including a stay in India; Part Four the rest of the South African years, to 1914; and Part Five India from 1915. For the struggle in South Africa itself Gandhi refers readers to his separate book, Satyagraha in South Africa, and tells only personal incidents from it here.

The English quotes come from the translation by Mahadev Desai, Gandhi's secretary, first published in two volumes in 1927 and 1929. As Desai notes in his preface, Chapters 29 to 42 of Part Five were translated by his colleague Pyarelal. This summary follows Gandhi's own account; the judgments of people and events in it are his, and others who took part have told some events differently.

  1. 1Gandhi says he is not writing a real autobiography but the story of his experiments with truth, which for him is another name for God
  2. 2He describes himself as a shy, ordinary boy moved by stories of truth and devotion, who was married at thirteen, a custom he later condemned
  3. 3Secret meat-eating taught him that lying to his parents was worse, and his father's tears over a written confession taught him a lesson in ahimsa
  4. 4In London he kept the vow he had made to his mother, became a vegetarian by conviction, gave up playing the English gentleman, and first read the Gita and the Bible
  5. 5Thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg in 1893, Gandhi decided not to go home but to fight what he called the deep disease of colour prejudice
  6. 6In Pretoria he learned that a lawyer's real work is to bring the two sides together, searched among the religions, and then stayed in Natal to organize its Indians
  7. 7Beaten by a white mob in Durban in 1897, he refused to prosecute anyone, and in the Boer War and the Zulu “rebellion” he led Indian volunteers carrying the wounded
  8. 8A night with Ruskin's Unto This Last changed his life, and he moved his newspaper and co-workers to the Phoenix farm to live by their own labour
  9. 9He tells frankly how harshly he once treated his wife, how he took a lifelong vow of self-restraint in 1906, and how satyagraha was born soon after
  10. 10Back in India, he founded an ashram that took in a family treated as untouchable, and in Champaran in 1917 he disobeyed an order to leave rather than abandon the peasants
  11. 11In Ahmedabad and Kheda in 1918 he set strict rules for non-violent struggle, and learned that a fast can put pressure on the wrong people
  12. 12After the violence of 1919 he confessed a “Himalayan miscalculation”, then made Hindu-Muslim unity his cause and launched non-cooperation

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An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth: summary | Daridanesh