Gandhi: Naked Ambition. Jad Adams

Gandhi Naked Ambition Jad Adams this pre-eminent political and spiritual leader of India's independence movement, pioneer of non-violent resistance to tyranny through mass civil disobedience (satyagraha), honoured in India as 'father of nation', Mohandas K. Gandhi has inspired movements for civil rights and political freedom across the world. Jad Adams offers a concise and elegant account of Gandhi's life: from his birth and upbringing in a small princely state in Gujarat during the high noon of the British Raj, to his assassination at the hands of a Hindu extremist in 1948 only months after the birth of the independent India which he himself he had done so much to bring about. He delineates the principal events of a career that may truly be said to have changed the world: his training as a barrister in late Victorian London; his civil rights work in Boer War-era South Africa, his leadership of the Indian National Congress, his focus on obtaining self-government and control of all Indian government institutions, and the campaigns of non-cooperation and non-violence against British rule in India whereby he sought to achieve that aim (including the famous 'Salt March' of March/April 1930), his passionate opposition to partition in 1947 and his fasts-unto-death in a bid to end the bitter and bloody sectarian violence that attended it. Jad Adams's accessible and thoughtful biography not only traces the outline of an extraordinary life with exemplary clarity, but also examines why Mahatma Gandhi and his teachings are still profoundly relevant today.

About the Author

Jad Adams is an independent historian working as an author and television producer. His books include Kipling (2006) and The Dynasty: The Nehru-Gandhi Story (1997). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and is a Visiting Research Fellow of the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He also working on an updating of my biography of Tony Benn which originally came out in 1992. He has written new chapters to take in the last twenty years of Tony Benn's very active life, and revised previous chapters. The new book published by Biteback. He has also worked on characters from the 'English Decadence' of the 1890s, such as Ernest Dowson, and planning a book on 'decadent women' writers.