There is a list of books Gandhiji read in Yerawada jail between 1922 and 1924. The number exceeds 150 plus.
Gandhi was a statesman among saints.
R.G. Casey, Australian statesman
Gandhiji was not an intellectual in the conventional sense, contrary to a widely held view, he was a very well read person.
In volume 2 of Raghavan Iyer’s, The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, there is a list of the books Gandhiji read while in Yerawada jail between 1922 and 1924.
The number exceeds 150 plus. I give a few titles, Natural History of Birds; Tom Brown’s School Days; Ramayana; the Quran; Kipling; Socrates; Goethe’s Faust; Jules Verne’s Dropped From The Clouds; Gibson’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Tilak’s Gita; the Upanishads; several Urdu books; Tagore’s Sadhana; Max Muller’s books; Mirza’s Ethics of Islam; Gokalchand’s Rise of Sikh Power; McAuliffe’s History of Sikhism; Dadachandji’s Avesta, Kishorilal’s Buddha and Mahavir; Shaw’s Man and Superman; Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe; R.L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde…
Karl Marx (1818-83) he read extensively in 1942 while interned in the Agha Khan Palace in Poona. In Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase, Pyarelal, his devoted secretary, had a lively and in depth discussion on the author’s The Communist Manifesto and Das Capital. Gandhiji said to Pyarelal that he could have written Marx better than Marx, if he had his scholarship, which he did not. He also criticised Marx for making, “simple things appear difficult”.
Pyarelal. who had obviously studied Marx, asked, “Were not the economic interpretation of history and the materialistic theory of knowledge outstanding contributions of Marx to the understanding of social phenomena?” Gandhiji asked Pyarelal to elaborate. Pyarelal said, “Marx showed us that our ideologies, institutions and ethical standards, literature, art, customs, even religion, are a product of our economic environment.” Gandhiji disagreed: “The Marxist regards thought, as it were, a secretion of the brain and mind, a reflex of the material environment. I cannot accept that. Above and beyond both matter and mind is he. I have an awareness of that living principle within me, no-one can fetter my mind. The body might be destroyed, the spirit will proclaim its freedom. This to me is not a theory, it is a fact of experience.” This answer did befuddle Pyarelal. He told Pyarelal that his interpretation was un-Marxist adding that “…I was wondering whether we cannot take the best out of Marxism and turn it to account for the realisation of our social aims.”
Every rational and Marxist explanation that Pyaralel gave, Gandhiji repudiated it by bringing in non-Marxist vocabulary. He did finally conclude that “We may criticise Marx but that he was great man who can deny? His analysis of social ills or the cures he prescribes for them may or may not be correct. I do not accept his economic theories but this much I know that the poor are being ground down. Something has to be done for it. Marx set out to do this in his own way. He had acumen, scholarship, genius.”
Romain Rolland wrote the first biography of Mahatma Gandhi in 1924. Rolland had won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1916. His book made Gandhiji better known in the West. The Mahatma subscribed to this view. The two did not meet till December 1931. Gandhiji broke journey in Switzerland to meet Romain Rolland, who lived in Switzerland. The Mahatma was on his way back to India after attending the second Round Table Conference.
As early as 1924 Rolland had written to C.F. Andrews, warning him that the Bolshevik government was planning to invite Gandhiji to Moscow. “I expect Gandhi (wrote Rolland) will be shrewd enough to unravel Moscow’s true motives, but I thought it was worth telling you about it, so that you can help to enlighten him if necessary”.
The first anti-Gandhi treatise was written by communist S.A. Dange: Gandhi-Lenin was highly critical of Gandhiji and his philosophy. It made no impact.