ZEALOUS DISCIPLE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 810, 4 February 1955, Page 14

ZEALOUS DISCIPLE

MY GANDHI, by John Haynes Holmes; Allen and Unwin, English price 10/6. ANDHI has been variously described" as a mystic, a revolutionary, a half- : wi

maked fakir, a saint and the Mahatma. Which of these most nearly describes Gandhi the man? What was his creed? What was his tremendous hold on the Indian pedple? It was with these queries and many more that I started to read this book. Dr. Holmes, an American clergyman, and a self-styled pacifist, answers some of the questions in his portrait of Gandhi as a person. He first became aware of Gandhi through an article, by Gilbert Murray, in an Amefican magazine. This, was in 1918, when Dr. Holmes was suffering the mental pains of a reaction against the horrors and brutality of war. Having studied all the reports he could find about Gandhi and his work during the next three years, Dr. Holmes was convinced that in Gandhi the world had a man capable of solving all its major problems. In 1931 Dr. Holmes first met Gandhi; and he describes this anid subsequent meetings in some detail. These pictures of the "off-stage" Gandhi are the real purpose of the book. Dr. Holmes feels that Christianity is the poorer because of a lack of stich a record by those who knew Christ. Likening Gandhi to Christ, the author sees it as a duty to place on record his experiences for the benefit of posterity. There is no doubt that Dr. Holmes was a devout follower of Gandhi; in fact, at times he seems to have been in danger of losing sight of Gandhi’s essential humanity. In several parts of the book this near-fanaticism is so evident that one cannot help feeling that posterity would have had a more life-like impression from the pen of a less zealous disciple.

B.

C.