The Story of My Experiments with Truth

• 1. Introduction

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  The Story of My Experiments with Truth is the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, and it begins with a confession: Gandhi never intended to write an autobiography at all. He considered it a Western practice, something he said "nobody does in the east." What he wanted was something stranger and more personal: a record of his experiments. Because, as he put it, his life consisted of nothing but experiments, the story took the shape of an autobiography almost by accident.

  He began writing in the winter of 1925, at the age of 56, fresh from two years in prison. The book appeared in weekly installments in his journal Navajivan, which means New Life in Gujarati, and it ran for 166 installments over more than three years. What poured out over those years was not the triumphant life of a political hero. It was a story of humiliations endured, passions fought, and a man perpetually trying to make himself worthy of the ideals he preached.

  The questions that hang over every page are: What does a person have to become before they can change the world? And is that becoming ever truly finished? Gandhi's answer, written in the farewell to his readers, suggests it is not.

• 2. A Book Born in Prison

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  C.N. Broomfield was the judge who sentenced Gandhi in India for the first time, and he hesitated. Gandhi was clearly guilty, having admitted to supporting open civil disobedience, and had even asked for the heaviest possible sentence. Broomfield sentenced him to six years, though Gandhi served only two before being released on health grounds.

  It was during that imprisonment at Yerwada Central Jail that Gandhi resumed his thinking about an autobiography. A fellow prisoner named Jeramdas urged him to write it, and Gandhi mentioned in his introduction that he had actually undertaken the project as early as 1921, but his political engagements had pushed it aside. The colonial government, somewhat counterproductively, allowed him a spinning wheel and reading materials during his confinement. He wrote much of the book there.

  Before Gandhi agreed to write it at all, his close co-workers, led by Swami Anand, had pressed him for years to explain the background behind his public campaigns. Gandhi initially refused to adopt a book format entirely. He agreed only to a serialized form, with individual chapters published weekly. The first installment appeared on the 25th of November 1925, and the last on the 3rd of February 1929.

• 3. Childhood and Early Formation

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  Gandhi was married at the age of 13, and he did not forgive himself for it. He wrote, in words that still carry their sting, "It is my painful duty to have to record here my marriage at the age of thirteen. I can see no moral argument in support of such a preposterously early marriage."

  The first part of the autobiography also records his childhood experiments with eating meat, smoking, drinking, and stealing, followed by what he described as atonement. Two texts from his childhood stayed with him. The play Harishchandra haunted him so deeply that he wrote, "I must have acted Harishchandra to myself times without number." The second was Shravana Pitrabhakti Nataka, a play about Shravan's devotion to his parents, which shaped his sense of filial obligation.

  His disdain for gymnastics at school appears in the text alongside the death of his father, Karamchand Gandhi, which he documented as a formative loss. These early chapters carry a quality that George Orwell, writing in his 1949 essay "Reflections on Gandhi," described as the "commonplaceness of much of its material," arguing that the autobiography was "not a literary masterpiece" but was more impressive because of that very ordinariness. Orwell saw in these pages a man who could, if he had chosen, have been a brilliant success as a lawyer, an administrator, or even a businessman.

• 4. South Africa and the Birth of Satyagraha

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  Gandhi was thrown off a train at Maritzburg when he refused to leave his first-class compartment, and that incident has, in his own words, become justly famous. But the autobiography makes clear that the humiliation at Maritzburg was only one in a long sequence. He struggled to be admitted to hotels. He watched Indian laborers, who outnumbered him in vulnerability, face even harsher treatment than he did.

  His initial bafflement quickly became outrage, and that outrage propelled him into public life. He delivered his first speech at an assembly of Transvaal Indians, urging them not to accept inequality but to unite, learn English, and observe clean living habits. He began reading Tolstoy, eventually starting a prolific correspondence with him. Both men considered themselves followers of the Sermon on the Mount and shared a philosophy of non-violence. Gandhi also turned to the Bhagavad Gita and to his Jain friend from Bombay, Raychandra, who helped him appreciate Hinduism as a non-violent faith.

  The political catalyst came with the Indian Franchise Bill, which the Natal legislature intended to use to strip Indians of the vote. Gandhi organized a petition that reached the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London and drew editorials from both the Times of London and the Times of India. He founded the Natal Indian Congress and produced two major pamphlets: An Appeal to Every Briton in South Africa, and The Indian Franchise: An Appeal.

  He had intended to stay in South Africa for a month, or a year at most. He stayed for about twenty years. During those years he read John Ruskin's Unto This Last, moved his family to a Transvaal farm called Phoenix, and formulated Satyagraha, from the Sanskrit meaning truth-force. On the 8th of September 1906, at a large gathering in Transvaal, he asked the entire Indian community to take a vow of disobedience. He then became the first Indian to appear before a magistrate for refusing to register, and he asked for a heavier sentence than the two months he received.

• 5. Returning to India

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  Gopal Krishna Gokhale, one of the most prominent Indian politicians of his era, supported Gandhi's resolution for the rights of Indians in South Africa at the 1901 Indian National Congress meeting, and the resolution passed. Gandhi stayed in Gokhale's house for a month and built the political connections that would serve him throughout his Indian career. He regarded Gokhale as a political mentor, and Gokhale's death later shook him deeply.

  Back in India, Gandhi created a new settlement on the 25th of May 1915, near the town of Ahmedabad, close to his birthplace in Gujarat. He called it the Satyagraha ashram, derived from the Sanskrit word for truth. Every inhabitant, including one family of untouchables, swore to poverty and chastity. His decision to live communally with untouchables troubled many of his financial supporters, who believed their presence defiled higher-caste Indians. Gandhi considered moving his ashram to a district inhabited entirely by untouchables before a generous Muslim merchant donated enough money to sustain the current space.

  His public re-entry came at the opening of the new Hindu University in Benares in 1916, where he spoke about independence and documented the sanitation conditions facing the lower classes. He then took up the cause of impoverished indigo cultivators in the Champaran district, which led to the appointment of a government commission to investigate abuses against the planters. When Ahmedabad mill workers went on strike and turned violent, he fasted until they returned to peace. The fast lasted three days before workers and employers reached an agreement. That episode, Gandhi wrote, revealed the fast as one of his most effective weapons.

• 6. Civil Disobedience and the Massacre

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  On the 6th of April 1919, millions of Indians did not go to work. Gandhi had proposed that the entire country observe a day of prayer, fasting, and abstention from physical labor as a protest against the Rowlatt Act, which retained wartime restrictions including measures to suppress free speech. The response was overwhelming, and the British colonial government arrested Gandhi.

  Angry crowds filled the streets, and violence broke out, which Gandhi could not tolerate. He called off the campaign and asked everyone to return home, firm in his belief that satyagraha should not take place at all if it could not be carried out without violence. In Amritsar, capital of the Punjab, the colonial government had already deported local Hindu and Muslim Congress members. Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer was summoned to restore order. He prohibited public meetings and instituted public whippings for Indians who confronted police.

  A crowd of over ten thousand people had gathered for religious purposes when Dyer's troops opened fire without warning. The protesters were tightly packed with nowhere to run. When some threw themselves on the ground, the fire was directed at the ground. It ceased only when the troops ran out of ammunition. Hundreds died and many more were wounded. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre outraged the British public almost as much as Indian society, and the authorities in London eventually forced Dyer to resign.

  Gandhi obtained permission to travel to Amritsar and conduct his own investigation. The report he produced months later brought him into contact with politicians who now openly advocated independence. In April 1920, he urged all Indians to begin a non-cooperation protest, and on the 1st of August he returned the kasar-i-hind medal he had received for medical service during the Second Boer War.

• 7. The Farewell and Its Limits

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  Gandhi ended his autobiography not with a political verdict but with a personal one. He admitted that he continued to experience and fight "the dormant passion" within his own soul. In his farewell to readers he wrote, "To conquer the subtle passions is far harder than the physical conquest of the world by the force of arms."

  The book stops abruptly after a discussion of the Nagpur session of the Indian National Congress in 1915, covering his life only up to 1921. Gandhi had warned readers in his preface that he simply wanted to tell the story of his experiments with truth, stating: "I shall not mind if every page of it speaks only of my experiments." The autobiography was never a political memoir and was never meant to be.

  The translation from Gujarati to English was the work of Mahadev Desai. Chapters XXIX through XLIII of Part V were translated by Desai's colleague Pyarelal Nayyar. Desai's preface noted that the original Gujarati edition was priced at one rupee and had gone through five editions by the time he wrote. Fifty thousand copies had sold in Gujarati. The expensive English edition, Desai observed, was preventing Indians from purchasing it, and he called for a cheaper version.

  The book was first published in the United States in 1948 by Public Affairs Press of Washington, D.C. In 1998, a committee of global spiritual and religious authorities named it one of the 100 Best Spiritual Books of the 20th Century. Gujarati writer Harivallabh Bhayani, in a 1998 interview, named it among the most important works to emerge from Gujarat in the previous fifty years, placing it alongside Govardhanram Tripathi's Saraswatichandra. K. Madhavanar, an independence activist and journalist from Kerala, had already translated it into Malayalam in 1928, where it was serialised in the Mathrubhumi Weekly before being published as a book.