Introductory Remarks for Jospeh Lelyveld by Tara Needham

Introductory Remarks for Jospeh Lelyveld, Written and delivered by Tara Needham April 3, 2012, Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, University at Albany.

"Gandhi is enshrined in many ways: in the dominant narrative of the Indian nationalist movement; in the theory and literature of peace and conflict studies; as the gaunt, bespectacled man draped in white, and as Joseph Lelyveld consistently point out in Great Soul, in the landscape and iconography of modern South African and India. It is this enshrinement that punctuates and propels his investigation into Gandhi with an urgency, lest Gandhi be enshrined to the past, to impenetrable and even dangerous myth...."

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Gandhi: Was He a Spectacular Political Failure?

In a New Yorker review of Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India (2011), by Joseph Lelyveld (who visits today), Pankaj Mishra says:

"Mohandas Gandhi was the twentieth century’s most famous advocate of nonviolent politics. But was he also its most spectacular political failure? The possibility is usually overshadowed by his immense and immensely elastic appeal.... And yet the Indian leader failed to achieve his most important aims, and was widely disliked and resented during his lifetime." Read more.

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Gandhi in South Africa

Here's an exerpt from Great Soul, Joseph Lelyveld's bestselling new biography of Gandhi, which he presents tomorrow at the New York State Writers Institute:

Prologue: An Unwelcome Visitor

"It was a brief only a briefless lawyer might have accepted. Mohandas Gandhi landed in South Africa as an untested, unknown twenty-three- year-old law clerk brought over from Bombay, where his effort to launch a legal career had been stalled for more than a year. His stay in the country was expected to be temporary, a year at most. Instead, a full twenty-one years elapsed before he made his final departure on July 14, 1914. By then, he was forty-four, a seasoned politician and negotiator, recently leader of a mass movement, author of a doctrine for such struggles, a pithy and prolific political pamphleteer, and more-a self-taught evangelist on matters spiritual, nutritional, even medical. That's to say, he was well on his way to becoming the Gandhi India would come to revere and, sporadically, follow."

More on the Powell's Books website.

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Gandhi-- A Tough Nut to Crack

Joseph Lelyveld, who visits the Writers Institute this coming Tuesday, April 3rd, talks about his new biography of Gandhi this week in a video interview on the New York Times blog "India Ink."

Gandhi was “a tough nut to crack,” Mr. Lelyveld said.

“I thought the book might be controversial because here is a foreigner lecturing Indians on what Gandhi might have meant for India, and telling them that India had disappointed the father of the nation,” he said.

Read more on the New York Times "India Ink" blog and watch the video clip.

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Gandhi Book and A Firestorm of Controversy

Joseph Lelyveld, former editor of the New York Times, visits April 3rd to present the paperback edition of his new biography, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India. The book caused a firestorm of controversy in India last year, and was banned in Gandhi's home state of Gujarat.

NPR's Bilal Qureshi discussed the controversy in March 2011:

"Sir Ben Kingsley in a universally acclaimed bio-epic? Definitely not this time around."

"Joseph Lelyveld's new biography of Mahatma Gandhi, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India hasn't even hit bookstores in India, but it has already unleashed a firestorm of controversy."

"The state of Gujarat, where the icon of the Indian Independence movement was born, has already banned the book. There are some Indian leaders now calling for a national boycott of Great Soul, the latest work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who once covered India for The New York Times." More.

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