Sabine von Herbert

Mahatma Gandhi is one of the most influential political figures of the twentieth century. Like many others in the West, Gandhi's ideas have captivated a young, bright, politically active girl from a western German city during the mid-1980s. More than anyone else Gandhi influenced her on her ideas on democracy, peace, non-violence, decentralization, equality, environmentalism, and justice. For two decades she followed Gandhi wholeheartedly. But when she began to read Gandhi's own writings, to her shock, she realized that her idol was not necessarily the same as she thought him to be. This book is a personal account of what she has found out: Gandhi to be a conservative, authoritarian, patriarchal, Victorian reactionary. In seven short chapters, this book polemically puts Gandhi in a new light, mostly by quoting from his own colossal writings that altogether comprise of around 49,000 pages.

While this is not a biography of Gandhi in a conventional sense, this could be a thematic biography written in an autobiographical style. Sabine von Herbert is a pseudonym of an internationally published academic based at a German university.