Rajmohan Gandhi's book on Mahatma Gandhi has created a controversy mainly because one of the chapters is devoted to Gandhiji's relations with Saraladevi Choudharani whom he called his spiritual wife. Girja Kumar gives a more vivid characterisation of this relationship in his book which was released last year. This book, in fact, gives an authentic account of the Mahatma's relations with various other women associates and the repercussions these romantic liaisons produced on those close to him, including 'Ba' (Kasturba Gandhi).The book is ready to go into reprint and the paperback edition will shortly hit the stands. A Hindi edition is also coming up.

Manu Gandhi, M.K. Gandhi’s grand-niece, joined him in 1943 at the age of fifteen. An aide to Gandhi’s ailing wife Kasturba in the Aga Khan Palace prison in Pune, Manu remained with him until his assassination. She was a partner in his final yajna, an experiment in Brahmacharya, and his invocation of Rama at the moment of his death. Spanning two volumes, The Diary of Manu Gandhi is a record of her life and times with M.K. Gandhi between 1943 and 1948. Authenticated by Gandhi himself, the meticulous and intimate entries in the diary throw light on Gandhi’s life as a prisoner and his endeavour to establish the possibility of collective non-violence. They also offer a glimpse into his ideological conflicts, his efforts to find his voice, and his lonely pilgrimage to Noakhali during the riots of 1946. The first volume (1943–44) chronicles the spiritual and educational pursuits of an adolescent woman who takes up writing as a mode of self-examination. The author shares a moving portrait of Kasturba Gandhi’s illness and death and also unravels the deep emotional bond she develops with Gandhi, whom she calls her ‘mother’.

Rajmohan Gandhi's book on Mahatma Gandhi has created a controversy mainly because one of the chapters is devoted to Gandhiji's relations with Saraladevi Choudharani whom he called his spiritual wife. Girja Kumar gives a more vivid characterisation of this relationship in his book which was released last year. This book, in fact, gives an authentic account of the Mahatma's relations with various other women associates and the repercussions these romantic liaisons produced on those close to him, including 'Ba' (Kasturba Gandhi).The book is ready to go into reprint and the paperback edition will shortly hit the stands. A Hindi edition is also coming up.

Opening in July 1914, as Mohandas Gandhi leaves South Africa to return to India, Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1918 traces the Mahatma’s life over the three decades preceding his assassination. Drawing on new archival materials, acclaimed historian Ramachandra Guha follows Gandhi’s struggle to deliver India from British rule, to forge harmonious relations between India’s Hindus and Muslims, to end the pernicious practice of untouchability, and to nurture India’s economic and moral self-reliance. He shows how in each of these campaigns, Gandhi adapted methods of nonviolence that successfully challenged British authority and would influence revolutionary movements throughout the world. A revelatory look at the complexity of Gandhi’s thinking and motives, the book is a luminous portrait of not only the man himself, but also those closest to him—family, friends, and political and social leaders.

‘Sex underlies human existence, and if human life is sacred, how can sex not be?’ As squeamish as India is today about sex, this is also the land where queens once copulated with head horses at religious ceremonies, where the art of love-making was declared the revelation of the gods and recorded in elaborate detail in the kama sutras and prostitution was a form of sacred offering at temples adorned with erotic sculptures. Using India as a paradigm, Rita Banerji illustrates that sexual morality is not an absolute but a facet of living that undergoes periodic upheavals. She delineates four major periods in Indian history when there were significant shifts in the collective social perception of sex and sexuality, and the associated customs and beliefs. What causes this revision in sexual ethos? To explain this, Sex and Power proposes a modified version of Nietzsche’s slave versus master morality theory. The theory, which is tested against the dynamics of each of the four defined periods, establishes that the moral overview of any given period is determined not by a set of pre-existing ethics but by the existent power structure of the period in question. The accepted moral code actually serves the party in power. How would this theory play out in the context of India today? Banerji examines this question at length as one of extreme urgency, and concludes that the three most burning issues facing the country today—population explosion, AIDS and female genocide—are the manifestations of a collective sexual malfunctioning of society and need to be redressed in the context of an existent social and economic power hierarchy.

The author, the grandson of Mohandas Gandhi, describes the life of the Indian leader as well as the history of India during Gandhi's time.