Autobiography: An Autobiography

Overview
Mahatma Gandhi’s An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, first published in 1927, recounts his life up to the early 1920s as a series of disciplined trials to approach truth and nonviolence. Rather than offering a full political chronicle, Gandhi frames decisive episodes as moral experiments, tracing how character, faith, and daily conduct shaped his public action. He writes plainly and with self-scrutiny, measuring success and failure against the ideal of satya (truth) and ahimsa (nonviolence), and insisting that means and ends are inseparable.

Early Life and Education
Born in Porbandar and raised in Rajkot in a devout Vaishnava household, Gandhi recalls boyhood timidity, adolescent waywardness, and an early marriage to Kasturba. He confesses episodes of meat-eating, smoking, and stealing to pay a brother’s debt, setting the tone for the book’s candor. A written confession to his father becomes his first profound lesson in the purifying power of truth. In London to study law, he pledges abstinence from meat, wine, and sexual indulgence, and turns dietary rules into ethical discipline. The Vegetarian Society, the Bhagavad Gita, the Sermon on the Mount, and readings in Tolstoy and Ruskin deepen his search for a life grounded in self-restraint, service, and simplicity. He begins to see truth as God, and the control of appetite and desire as the path to freedom.

South Africa and the Birth of Satyagraha
A legal posting takes him to South Africa in 1893, where a train ejection at Pietermaritzburg awakens him to racial injustice. He organizes the Indian community through the Natal Indian Congress, learns the power of public opinion, and starts the newspaper Indian Opinion. Phoenix Settlement and later Tolstoy Farm become laboratories for communal living, manual labor, sanitation, interfaith practice, and education. Out of hard lessons, imprisonment, negotiations with authorities, and the struggle against registration and pass laws, emerges satyagraha, the force of truth expressed through disciplined noncooperation and willingness to suffer without hatred. In 1906 he vows brahmacharya, aligning celibacy, poverty, and fearlessness with political work.

Return to India and Ashram Discipline
Back in India in 1915, Gandhi founds the Sabarmati Ashram and codifies vows around truthfulness, nonviolence, celibacy, non-possession, bread labor, control of the palate, and the removal of untouchability. The ashram functions as a training ground where spinning, sanitation, and prayer knit ethics to everyday life. He insists that political power must rest on personal self-purification, placing constructive work, khadi, village uplift, Hindu-Muslim unity, alongside agitation.

Campaigns and Experiments in India
Guided by patient inquiry rather than instant agitation, Gandhi enters mass politics through local grievances: indigo cultivation in Champaran, famine relief and tax suspension in Kheda, and arbitration in the Ahmedabad mill strike. Satyagraha, he argues, demands strict adherence to truth, restraint in speech, and readiness for imprisonment. He fasts as a means of self-purification and moral appeal, warning against coercion masked as conscience. With noncooperation, he calls for boycott of titles, schools, and cloth, linking national freedom to the individual’s capacity for self-rule. When violence erupts, he suspends movements, accepting blame for asking people to bear a discipline they have not yet mastered. Jail, illness, and the limits of his judgment become further experiments, not defeats.

Philosophy, Influences, and Method
The Gita’s teaching of desireless action underwrites Gandhi’s view that right means are the only path to right ends. Ruskin’s Unto This Last shapes his belief in the dignity of labor and trusteeship; Tolstoy strengthens his conviction in love as social force; Jain practices inform his vows of nonviolence and self-restraint. He critiques modern civilization’s worship of speed and consumption in Hind Swaraj, advocating swadeshi and village industry as moral economy. As a lawyer he refuses to coach falsehood and prefers compromise grounded in truth. He records failures, family tensions, medical experiments, errors of judgment, with the same austerity he brings to prayer and diet, arguing that truth advances through transparent admission and renewed effort.

Scope and Significance
The narrative closes before later landmarks like the Salt March, offering instead a template for ethical politics. By yoking inner reform to public struggle, Gandhi makes character itself the lever of change, and frames freedom as a daily practice of truth.