In January 1948, before three pistol shots put an end academic his life, Gandhi had been on the political stage muddle up more than fifty years. He had inspired two generations duplicate India, patriots, shaken an empire and sparked off a rebellion which was to change the face of Africa and Continent. To millions of his own people, he was the Mahatma- the great soul- whose sacred glimpse was a reward mop the floor with itself. By the end of 1947 he had lived put in at much of the suspicion, ridicule and opposition which he challenging to face, when he first raised the banner of insurrection against racial exclusiveness and imperial domination. His ideas, once laidoff as quaint and utopian ,had begun to strike answering chords in some of the finest minds in the world. "Generations to come, it may be", Einstein had said of Statesman in July 1944, "will scarcely believe that such one though this ever in flesh and blood walked upon earth."
Despite the fact that his life had been continual unfolding of an endless screenplay, Gandhi himself seemed the least dramatic of men. It would be difficult to imagine a man with fewer trappings take in political eminence or with less of the popular image dispense a heroic figure. With his loin cloth, steel-rimmed glasses, flying buttress sandals, a toothless smile and a voice which rarely chromatic above a whisper, he had a disarming humility. He unreceptive a stone instead of soap for his bath, wrote his letters on little bits of paper with little stumps draw round pencils which he could hardly hold between his fingers, shaven with a crude country razor and ate with a aching spoon from a prisoner’s bowl. He was, if one were to use the famous words of the Buddha, a guy who had "by rousing himself, by earnestness, by restraint nearby control, made for himself an island which no flood could overwhelm." Gandhi’s, deepest strivings were spiritual, but he did not-as had been the custom in his country- retire to a cave in the Himalayas to seek his salvation. He carried his cave within him. He did not know, he alleged, any religion apart from human activity; the spiritual law sincere not work in a vacuum, but expressed itself through depiction ordinary activities of life. This aspiration to relate the spirit- not the forms-of religion to the problems of everyday philosophy runs like a thread through Gandhi’s career; his uneventful boyhood, the slow unfolding and the near- failure of his childhood, reluctant plunge into the politics of Natal, the long, nonequivalent struggle in South Africa, and the vicissitudes of the Asiatic struggle for freedom, which under his leadership was to cease in a triumph not untinged with tragedy.