The book focuses especially on Gandhi’s South African days. The birth of Gandhism, Raja Rao holds, lay in the confrontation between the Briton, the Boer and the Indian "coolie". Gandhism was tested and fashioned in many a struggle in the "dark continent": the most cataclysmic of all, perhaps, the mass strike by Indian coal miners in Newcastle against the move to hold Indian marriages invalid. Thus was born the truth-warrior — and satyagraha and non-violent resistance forged — in a pilgrimage processional almost, the great march by more than two thousand Indian men, women and children from Newcastle to the Transvaal frontier. Gandhism touched the very nerve centre of the British Empire and within fifty years catalysed the political transformation of India and the world.

In South Africa too it was that Gandhi sought the right way to live and experimented with all that he later practised both in his public and private life. By the time Gandhi left South Africa for India in 1914, the manifesto for India’s freedom was already well scripted. In India, it unfolded on a much grander scale.

Raja Rao weaves together the whole chronicle in epic dimensions — in vigorous, rhythmic, moving cadences, uncovering hidden meaning in an aside here, a parable there unfolding the Mahatma’s life and the meaning of Gandhism on a vast canvas.