The Story of My Experiments with Truth — Gandhi's Autobiography सत्य के प्रयोग

Who was M. K. Gandhi?

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was born in Porbandar, studied law in London, and spent 1893 to 1914 in South Africa, where he developed satyagraha, the method of non-violent resistance. Returning to India in 1915, he became the leading figure of the Indian National Congress, directing the Non-Cooperation movement, the Salt March of 1930 and the Quit India movement of 1942, and campaigning against untouchability and for Hindu–Muslim unity. He was assassinated in Delhi on 30 January 1948.

By 1925, when he began the autobiography, Gandhi had served a prison sentence at Yeravda (1922–24), the Non-Cooperation movement had been called off, and he had stepped back from front-line politics to concentrate on khadi, village work and his ashram at Sabarmati. The English translation was the work of Mahadev Desai (1892–1942), his secretary and close companion for a quarter of a century.

When and why it was written

Gandhi explains in the Introduction, dated at Sabarmati on 26 November 1925, that co-workers had urged him to write his life story years earlier. He began it but was interrupted by the Bombay riots of 1921 and then his imprisonment; a fellow prisoner at Yeravda pressed him to continue. After finishing his history of Satyagraha in South Africa, he agreed to Swami Anand's proposal to write it for Navajivan, a chapter each week, because he had no time to write a separate book.

The Gujarati original, Satyana Prayogo athva Atmakatha, ran in Navajivan from late November 1925 to early February 1929 and appeared simultaneously in the Hindi edition of the journal. Mahadev Desai's English translation was serialised in Young India with Gandhi's revisions and published in two volumes in 1927 and 1929. According to Desai's preface, chapters 29 to 43 of Part V were translated by Pyarelal while Desai was away at Bardoli in 1928–29, and the one-volume edition was revised for language by an eminent English scholar who asked not to be named. It was also reprinted in Indian Opinion in South Africa and in the American journal Unity; a Malayalam translation by K. Madhavanar appeared as early as 1928.

Gandhi anticipated an objection: autobiography was a Western habit, and readers might be misled if he later changed his views. His answer shapes the whole book. He was not writing to show how good he was, but to describe experiments in the science of satyagraha, and he promised to be as harsh with himself as truth required.

Part by part

• Introduction — Why he is writing: his aim is not a life story but an account of experiments in the spiritual field, from which he drew whatever power he had in politics. The goal behind all his work, he says, is self-realisation, seeing God face to face, moksha.
• Part I (25 chapters), 1869–1891 — Childhood and London: his family in Porbandar and Rajkot; marriage to Kasturba at thirteen, which he later condemned; secret meat-eating with a school friend and a theft confessed in writing to his dying father (‘Stealing and Atonement’); his shame at being away from his father's bedside at the moment of death. In London he tries to become an English gentleman with dancing and violin lessons, then gives it up; he keeps his vow to his mother to avoid meat, wine and women, joins the vegetarian movement, first reads the Bhagavad Gita (in Edwin Arnold's translation) and the New Testament, and is called to the bar in 1891.
• Part II (29 chapters), 1891–1896 — The shy lawyer goes to South Africa: back in India he meets the Jain thinker Raychandbhai (Shrimad Rajchandra), who becomes a spiritual guide, and fails as a lawyer — he cannot speak at his first case. In 1893 he sails to South Africa, is thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg and beaten on a stagecoach, and resolves to resist racial injustice. In Pretoria he studies religion with Christian friends; in Natal he founds the Natal Indian Congress (1894), takes up the cause of the indentured labourer Balasundaram and fights the £3 tax, then visits India in 1896 to rally support.
• Part III (23 chapters), 1896–1902 — Storm and service: a white mob attacks him on landing at Durban in January 1897, and he refuses to prosecute. He experiments with educating his children at home, simple living, nursing and the first thoughts of brahmacharya. He leads an Indian ambulance corps in the Boer War, returns to India in 1901, attends the Calcutta Congress, spends a month with Gokhale, travels third class, and sets up practice in Bombay before being recalled to South Africa in 1902.
• Part IV (47 chapters), 1902–1915 — Satyagraha is born: in the Transvaal he confronts the new Asiatic department and starts the journal Indian Opinion (1903–04). Reading Ruskin's Unto This Last on a train (‘The Magic Spell of a Book’) leads to the Phoenix Settlement. After serving with a stretcher-bearer corps in the Zulu rising of 1906 he takes a lifelong vow of brahmacharya, and the mass campaign against the Transvaal registration law gives birth to satyagraha. The part also covers earth-and-water cures, fasting, his often difficult household life with Kasturba, schooling at the settlement, his ambulance work in London at the outbreak of the First World War, an attack of pleurisy, and reminiscences of his legal practice.
• Part V (43 chapters and ‘Farewell’), 1915–1920 — India: he spends a year observing India at Gokhale's request, visits Shantiniketan and the Kumbh Mela, founds his ashram (first at Kochrab, later Sabarmati) and admits an untouchable family to it. He campaigns against indentured emigration, leads the Champaran inquiry into indigo planters (1917), fasts during the Ahmedabad mill strike and leads the Kheda satyagraha (1918), recruits for the army and falls dangerously ill. He launches satyagraha against the Rowlatt Bills (1919), calls it off over violence as ‘a Himalayan miscalculation’, starts Navajivan and Young India, investigates the Punjab atrocities, supports the Khilafat cause, discovers the spinning wheel and khadi, and ends with the non-cooperation resolution at Nagpur in December 1920.
• Farewell — From this point, he writes, his life became so public that there is little the people do not know. He closes with his conviction that truth can be seen only through ahimsa, that religion cannot be kept out of politics, and that he must reduce himself to zero.

Key arguments

Life as a laboratory. The book's organising idea is that every choice — what to eat, how to raise children, how to fight a law — can be treated as an experiment in truth, provisional and open to correction. Gandhi presents his conclusions not as doctrine but as results others are free to test.

Confession as method. The most remembered passages are failures: the meat-eating, the theft, the night of his father's death, his jealousy and harshness as a young husband. Gandhi treats honest self-examination as part of the practice of truth, and the frankness is a large part of the book's lasting appeal.

The private and the public are one. Diet, celibacy, nursing and sanitation sit beside lawsuits and political campaigns because, for Gandhi, self-purification and public service are the same discipline. Satyagraha grows out of personal vows before it becomes a political technique.

Many teachers, one search. The book records the influence of Raychandbhai, the Gita, the Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoy and Ruskin, and describes Gandhi's study of several religions. It shows a Hindu who found in his own tradition the resources to respect others.

Truth through non-violence. The closing chapter draws the threads together: a perfect vision of truth follows only from complete ahimsa, and ahimsa requires the deepest humility.

In the author's words

What I want to achieve - what I have been striving and pining to achieve these thirty years - is self-realization, to see God face to face, to attain Moksha.

I must reduce myself to zero. So long as a man does not of his own free will put himself last among his fellow creatures, there is no salvation for him. Ahimsa is the farthest limit of humility.

Reception and criticism

The autobiography was a success in Gujarati from the start; by the time of Desai's one-volume edition it had sold some 50,000 copies at one rupee. Gujarati critics praise its plain, idiomatic prose, and the literary scholar Harivallabh Bhayani ranked it among the most important Gujarati works of its half-century. In English it reached a world audience: George Orwell's essay Reflections on Gandhi (1949) was written in response to it, and in 1998 a committee of religious writers and scholars placed it on a list of the 100 best spiritual books of the twentieth century. It remains a standard school and university text and a principal source for films and biographies.

Scholars have also read it critically. The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, in Gandhi's Truth (1969), examined its account of his father's death and his sexuality. Historians note that the book is a carefully shaped self-portrait written for a political and moral purpose, ending just as Gandhi became a national leader and leaving out the controversies of later years. Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, in The South African Gandhi (2015), argue that the South African chapters pass lightly over his early attitudes towards Black Africans and his support for the British Empire in the Boer War and the 1906 Zulu rising. Readers have also questioned his treatment of Kasturba and his sons, which the book itself admits was often domineering. Gandhi's admirers respond that the book's value lies precisely in its willingness to expose the author's faults, and that it records a man changing his mind over time.

Where to read it

The complete Mahadev Desai translation is free on mkgandhi.org, chapter by chapter and as a downloadable PDF and ePub. Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, still publishes low-cost editions in English, Gujarati (Satyana Prayogo), Hindi (Satya ke Prayog) and many other languages. A modern critical edition, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth: A Critical Edition, with an introduction and notes by Tridip Suhrud, was published by Penguin and Yale University Press in 2018.

Read more on this site

• Mahatma GandhiThinkers
• Mahatma Gandhi — life storyGreat Lives
• Hind Swaraj (1909) explainedBooks & Ideas
• Glossary: Satyagraha, Swaraj, SwadeshiShabdakosh
• The Bhagavad GitaGita

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