Imagine a twilight realm where the setting sun casts long shadows across a dusty plain. In this liminal space stands the colossal figure of Mahatma Gandhi, his silhouette etched against the sky – a saint, a liberator, an enigma draped in homespun cloth.

Rajesh Talwar enters this scene not with a torch to burnish the icon, nor an axe to shatter it, but with a cracked mirror, its surface glinting with the promise of revelation. His critique of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, The Mahatma’s Manifesto, is not a mere academic dissection; it is a bard’s tale, a narrative that dances between reverence and reckoning, weaving a tapestry both luminous and shadowed. Let us explore this landscape, tracing the contours of Talwar’s narrative as it probes the soul of a man who liberated a nation, yet bound it with paradox.

Our tale begins on the turbulent waves of the Indian Ocean in 1909, aboard the Kildonan Castle, where Gandhi, a 40-year-old barrister turned visionary, commits his manifesto to paper – a slim scroll of 30,000 words titled Hind Swaraj. It is a clarion call against colonial chains, a hymn to self-rule, yet also a fervent sermon decrying modernity’s trappings. Talwar, our guide, boards this ship not as a disciple bowing to a prophet, but as a navigator charting a tempestuous sea. In the preface, he reveals the inner turmoil he experienced upon first encountering Gandhi’s words – a gale of agitation, a thunderclap of disbelief at the Mahatma’s condemnation of machinery, medicine, law, and the English language. This inner storm propels our journey, driving a narrative that seeks not to idolise, but to illuminate.

Talwar portrays Gandhi as a mariner of contradictions, a man who navigated India’s liberation with a spinning wheel yet steered into waters of absurdity. Picture the Mahatma on deck, his dhoti billowing like a flag of defiance, condemning railways as the Devil’s chariot – yet historical accounts reveal he used them to mobilise his followers. He brands English a shackle on India’s spirit, yet his own pen dances in that language with a barrister’s grace, translating Hind Swaraj for the world. Talwar does not hurl these paradoxes like stones; he strings them like pearls, each a shimmering facet of a man both sage and enigma. The preface sets the stage: this is neither hagiography nor hatchet job, but a mirror held to a saint’s face, reflecting a visage noble yet flawed.

In Chapter 9, ‘The Saint’s Commandments’, Talwar leads us to a metaphorical mountaintop, a Sinai where Gandhi lays down his laws. Here, the Mahatma’s voice booms: shun........

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