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several hundreds of people Gandhi’s pronouncements specific period of time. engaged in offering a true
involved must have de- the semblance of a self- However, this jagged report of his activities.
manded energies beyond referential narrative. It is and rather haphazard This remarkable achieve-
the capacity of ordinary self-evident that the book recounting of events in a ment of the autobiographi-
mortals. can only reproduce what first person narrative is cal mode is lacking in the
Moreover lodged at Yer- Gandhi has been recorded discomfiting. grandson’s constructed
awada Jail in solitary con- to have said: any extended Related to this is the ‘autobiography’.
finement in his very first meditation on a specific question of autobiographi- Even as the significance
jail term in India, Gandhiji event quite clearly cannot cal voice. While the words of this stitched-together
caught up on his reading. be expected as it would ascribed to the Mahatma account of the Mahatma in
The vast reading inventory be in an autobiographi- may convey the tone, yet his own words is undeni-
comprising more than 150 cal narrative. Besides the to have the autobiographi- able given the present
books provides an indi- fact that such expectations cal ‘I’ ascribe agency to ethos, the artifice em-
cation of his formidable cannot be fulfilled is the itself in ordinary actions is ployed to give the impres-
capacity to apply himself to additional disadvantage of to fluff the narrator into a sion of a life-narrative jars.
tasks. Richly detailed, such having seemingly arbitrary rather narcissistic observ- In the bleak murkiness of
a precise recording of the events spliced together er, jotting down details our post-modern, post-
Mahatma’s life is invalu- in a single chapter, given of his own responses and truth times, one wishes
able. this is a chronological and gestures. the Mahatma, at least, had
It is at this point, linear narrative. Gandhi’s own autobi- been spared this posthu-
however, that it becomes It is obvious that the ography Experiments is a mous impression of arti-
necessary to dwell upon connection between case in point: quite clearly, fice that the book confers
the contrivances that random events jostling the autobiographical ‘I’ on the narration.
the editor adopts to give together in a given chapter there is far from narcis- ROHINI MOKASHI-
his selected culling and is because they have sistic even as Gandhi is PUNEKAR (The Book
stitching together of all taken place within a focused on himself and Review)

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