Photo essay: Mahatma Gandhi

"If blood be shed, let it be our own. Let us cultivate the calm courage to die without killing." - Mahatma Gandhi

Telford Vice / Delhi

MAHATMA Gandhi was, like all great people, a complicated figure. He was at once a victim and a product of colonialism, a liberation hero and the father of a nation.

But he also refused to allow his wife, Kasturba, the penicillin injection that would have saved her life. Maybe that happened because the then new treatment was being offered by British doctors. Would you trust those who had brutally subjugated your people for nearly 200 years to act in the best interests of you and your loved ones?

After Kasturba’s death in February 1944, Gandhi took to sleeping naked next to his female doctor, Sushila Nayar, and his teenaged grandnieces, Manu and Abha, to test his commitment to celibacy. This practice, which he discussed openly, led to controversy among his followers.

Even so, Gandhi remains a giant of courageous peace-making who stood as a towering example to many across the world.

A visit to the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, which Gandhi established in May 1915, yielded these images. (The photographs themselves were lost in the move off WordPress and couldn't be recovered — what's left is what they showed.)

A statue of Gandhi in the garden. Gandhi in 1886 — now that, people, is hair. A painting of a much older Gandhi. A sample of Gandhi's handwriting. A painting of Gandhi at a spinning wheel, creating the thread that becomes khadi cloth. A woman demonstrates spinning. Detail of a spinning wheel. A replica of Gandhi's spectacles, and of his Three Wise Monkeys. A watercolour, by Jamini Roy, of Gandhi (right) and his great friend Rabindranath Tagore, the polymath who is thought to have first referred to him as mahatma, or great soul.

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