Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre

Pietermar-itzburg, the timid, withdrawn youth was a changed person. The little lawyer had reached the most important decision of his life. Mohandas Gandhi was going to say "No."
    A week later, Gandhi delivered his first public speech to Pretoria's Indians. The advocate who had been so painfully shy in the courtrooms of Bombay had begun to find his tongue. He urged the Indians to unite to defend their interests and, as a first step, to learn how to do it in their oppressors' English tongue. The following evening, without realizing it, Gandhi began the work that would ultimately bring 300 million Indians freedom by teaching English grammar to a barber, a clerk and a shopkeeper. Soon he had also won the first of the successes that would be his over the next half-century. He wrung from the railway authorities the right for well-dressed Indians to ride first or second class on South Africa's railways.
    Gandhi decided to stay on in South Africa when the case that had brought him there had been resolved. He became both the champion of South Africa's Indian community and a highly successful lawyer. Loyal to the British Empire despite its racial injustice, he even led an ambulance corps in the Boer War.
    Ten years after his arrival in South Africa, another long train ride provoked the second great turning point in Gandhi's life. As he boarded the Johannesburg-Durban train one evening in 1904, an English friend passed Gandhi a book to read on the long trip, John Ruskin's Unto This Last.
    All night Gandhi sat up reading the work of the English social philosopher as his train rolled through the South African veld. It was his revelation on the road to Damascus. By the time his train reached Durban the following morning, Gandhi had made an epic vow: he was going to renounce all his material possessions and live his life according to Ruskin's ideals. Riches, Ruskin had written, were just a tool to secure power over men. A laborer with a spade serves society as truly as a lawyer with a brief,
    and the life of labor, of the tiller of the soil, is the life worth living.
    Gandhi's decision was all the more remarkable because he was, at that moment, a wealthy man earning over five thousand pounds sterling a year from his law practice, an enormous sum in the South Africa of the time.
    For two years, however, doubts had been fermenting in Gandhi's mind. He was haunted by the Bhagavad Gita's doctrine of renunciation of desire and attachment to material possessions as the essential stepping stone to a spiritual awakening. He had already made experiments of his own: he had started to cut his own hair, do his laundry, clean his own toilet. He had even delivered his last child. His doubts found their confirmation in Ruskin's pages.
    Barely a week later, Gandhi settled his family and a group of friends on a 100-acre farm near Phoenix, fourteen miles from Durban. There, on a sad, scrubby site consisting of a ruined shack, a well, some orange, mulberry and mango trees, and a horde of snakes, Gandhi's life took on the pattern that would rule it until his death: a renunciation of material possessions and a striving to satisfy human needs in the simplest manner, coupled with a communal existence in which all labor was equally valuable and all goods were shared.
    One last, painful renunciation remained, however, to be made. It was the vow of Brahmacharya (chastity, or sexual continence), and it had haunted Gandhi for years.
    The scar left by his father's death, a desire to have no more children, his rising religious consciousness—all drove him toward his decision. One summer evening in 1906 Gandhi solemnly announced to his wife, Kasturbai, that he had taken the vow of Brahmacharya. Begun in a joyous frenzy at the age of thirteen, the sexual life of Mohandas Gandhi had reached its conclusion at the age of thirty-seven.
    To Gandhi, however, Brahmacharya meant more than just the curbing of sexual desires. It was the control of all the senses. It meant restraint