Since this year marks the centenary of Gandhi's birth, there will be many appraisements of him. It therefore seems fitting to look at his work as a whole, and not consider him simply as a politician.

The Gandhi the world knows was the Mahatma, the ‘great soul’ who led India's drive for independence from British domination, the prophet of non-violent revolution, and the practitioner of civil disobedience. The Gandhi the world does not know was the spindling lad from Kathiawad, so determined to see England that he defied his sub-caste's chief and cheerfully accepted outcasteing as the price of making the polluting voyage to an impure land. The Gandhi the world has forgotten was the shy young lawyer who sang ‘God save our gracious Queen’ as fervently as any other subject of Her Majesty Queen Victoria—even after suffering the bitterest insults and beatings in South Africa because of his brown skin and his loyalty to his Indian heritage. Mahatmas are made, not born, and the making of this Mahatma was a long and often painful process. We can add to our understanding of that process by piecing together hundreds of bits of information about the first eighteen years of Gandhi's life—information from his own writings and from the Indian environment which shaped his evolution from infancy to young manhood.

Centenary celebrations of the birth of any prominent man attract assessments of his character, career and influence. Nothing could be more understandable, particularly in the case of M. K. Gandhi, who was by common consent one of the greatest leaders Asia has produced in an era of colonial nationalisms and decolonization, who in his own life time was called a saint and a machiavellian politician, and who has become in independent India both a national myth and an embarrassment. Accounts of the importance of Gandhi in modern India tend to fall into two main categories. There are those who dismiss him, often regretfully, as an idealist whose Utopian plans for a democracy of village commonwealths and a non-violent society have collapsed in the face of economic and political necessity and the machinations of unscrupulous politicians. In the words of Jayaprakash Narayan, ‘If you consider the political ideologies attaining in India today, you would find that somehow one who is called the Father of the Nation is completely missing from all of them’. Such pessimism assesses Gandhi as if he had been solely a dispenser of blue-prints for a brave new world, and fails to see him as a dynamic leader whose greatest influence flowed from the type of movement he led and the techniques he used, rather than from the peculiarly personal ideals he held. On the other hand, there are those who hail him as the Father of India and try to draw direct causal connexions between his ideals and many of the major changes which have occurred in India since 1947, particularly the official abolition of Untouchability and the institution of panchayat raj. But this is the perspective of the biographer. It underrates the complexities of politics and society and their interaction, and turns a blind eye to the innumerable cross currents which make up the main stream of Indian social and political activity.

Between 1920 and his death in 1948 Gandhi was the dominant personality in Indian affairs and the most admired of the great world figures of the time. Twenty years later it is customary, and justified, to lament that in India, at least, little is now apparent of the enormous impression he created. His eclipse is of course due in large part to Nehru, but it is possible to assign more general causes.

The historian who compares the disintegration of political societies like the Dual Monarchy of Austria and Hungary with the emergence of political societies like India is immediately struck by the different meanings which nationalism can assume in different contexts. The historian who carries out such a comparison would be justified in drawing the conclusion that nationalism in Europe in the nineteenth century was quite different from nationalism in India in the twentieth century. In the former instance, nationalism led to the breakdown of societies which embraced diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic groups into relatively homogeneous communities; in the latter instance, it ostensibly led to the fusion of peoples who spoke different languages, who belonged to different cultures, and who subscribed to different traditions, into a single nation. The nationalists of Europe pointed with pride to the close ties of language, culture and race which held together the new States of Europe; the nationalists of India, however, pointed with equal pride to their achievement in forging peoples who were racially distinct from each other, and who subscribed to distinct historical traditions, into a single political community.

The purpose of this article is to analyse Gandhi's ideology and more particularly his understanding of authority. The first part will consider the main elements of Gandhi's ideology as they emerged during his nationalist experience, and their relationship to his style of leadership. The second part will turn to a comparative analysis of Gandhi and Rousseau, in an attempt to illuminate further implications of Gandhi's conception of authority.