7. Mahatma Gandhi

The episode profiles Mahatma Gandhi through a long conversation between hosts Anita Anand and William Dalrymple and guest historian Ramachandra Guha, tracking Gandhi's life from provincial Gujarat to global prominence and the contested afterlife of his image. The hosts open by situating Gandhi as ubiquitous in India (on currency, roads named after him) and note common myths — the loincloth caricature popularised in the West — before Guha reconstructs the formative influences: an Edwardian London immersed in Theosophy, the example of British suffragettes, and his professional training as a lawyer (called to the bar at 22). Those strands converged in South Africa, where incidents such as the Pietermaritzburg ejection and the racist Transvaal pass regime (1906) catalysed the development of Satyagraha — a spiritually inflected program of non‑violent civil resistance.

Guha and the hosts chronicle Gandhi's political evolution: early loyalty to the empire (volunteering as a stretcher‑bearer in 1900 and public support during WWI) gave way after Jallianwala Bagh and the cumulative injustices of colonial rule. The podcast covers Gandhi's major campaigns in India — Non‑Cooperation (1920s), the 1930 Salt March (78 companions, ~3 weeks to the sea), and Quit India (1942) — noting tactical savvy (public theatre, vernacular newspapers) and limits (movements halted after outbreaks of violence). Guha stresses Gandhi's institutional achievements — vernacularising the Congress, recruiting peasants, artisans and women — while also confronting tensions with contemporaries (Nehru, Jinnah, Ambedkar) and darker aspects of his biography: intense private relationships (letters to Sadāla Devi), and ethically fraught celibacy 'experiments' with his young niece that Guha calls an inexcusable act of vanity. The episode ends by connecting history to the present: Guha explains BJP‑era revisionism (masculinity, discomfort with Gandhi's Muslim‑inclusive vision), Gandhi's enduring global influence (MLK, Mandela), his early environmentalism (1938 warning about industrialisation), and the renewed Indian focus on colonial symbols like the Koh‑i‑Noor diamond. Throughout, Anita, William and Guha largely agree on Gandhi's monumental historical importance while insisting on a candid, unromantic reassessment of his complexities and contradictions.