100 years of Gandhi’s autobiography: ‘Still being read so widely because of its honesty, truthfulness’

On November 29, 1925, the first chapter of Gandhi’s autobiography was published in Navajivan. And the serial ended on February 3, 1929. The autobiography, originally written in the Gujarati language, was published in a total of 166 chapters. In a similar serialised manner, the English translation of the autobiography was published in Young India, another weekly journal published by Gandhi. The first chapter of the English translation was published on December 3, 1925 and ended in the edition of Young India dated February 7, 1929.

The English translation of the chapters, except for chapters 29 to 43, was done by Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s secretary. Chapters 29 to 43 were translated into English by Pyarelal Nayyar owing to Desai’s absence in Bardoli during an inquiry on the Bardoli Satyagraha by the Broomfield Committee in 1928-29.
The title of the autobiography in Gujarati is ‘Satya na Prayogo athva Atmakatha’ whereas, the title of its English version is ‘An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth’.

The autobiography was later published in a book format in two volumes – Volume I in 1927 and Volume II in 1929.
The autobiography has a total of 43 chapters in five parts. Volume I included the first three parts. Whereas, Volume II contained fourth and fifth parts of the autobiography. The autobiography was made available in a single book form from 1940 by the Navajivan.

As noted by Desai in his preface to the autobiography, “The first edition of Gandhiji’s Autobiography was published in two volumes. Vol. I in 1927 and Vol. II in 1929. The original in Gujarati which was priced at Re. 1/-…”
Gandhi stayed at Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad when he wrote the autobiography. He stayed at the Ashram between 1917 and 1930.

In his introduction to the autobiography, Gandhi has indicated that he decided to write the autobiography in a serialised manner in chapters for Navajivan every week. At this juncture, he also wrote that the idea of writing an autobiography was resisted by a “God-fearing friend” who called it a “practice peculiar to the West.”

Gandhi noted, “But a God-fearing friend had his doubts, which he shared with me on my day of silence. ‘What has set you on this adventure?’ he asked. ‘Writing an autobiography is a practice peculiar to the West. I know of nobody in the East having written one, except amongst those who have come under Western influence. And what will you write? Supposing you reject tomorrow the things you hold as principles today, or supposing you revise in the future your plans of today, is it not likely that the men who shape their conduct on the authority of your word, spoken or written, may be misled? Don’t you think it would be better not to write anything like an autobiography, at any rate just yet?’”

Referring to the friend’s arguments, Gandhi noted, “The argument had some effect on me. But it is not my purpose to attempt a real autobiography. I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with truth, and as my life consists of nothing but those experiments, it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography. But I shall not mind, if every page of it speaks only of my experiments.”

A century has gone by, but Gandhi’s autobiography has remained one of the bestsellers of Navajivan Trust, the publishing house established by Gandhi and which held copyrights on all the writings of Gandhi till 2009. It continues to publish Gandhi’s works including the autobiography.

Speaking with The Indian Express, Managing Trustee of Navajivan Trust Vivek Desai said that Gandhi’s autobiography remains their best seller till date.

Navajivan publishes Gandhi’s autobiography in 18 languages; Gujarati, English, Assamese, Malayalam, Konkani, Marathi, Kannada, Bodo, Kashmiri, Bengali, Hindi, Sanskrit, Urdu, Tamil, Punjabi, Odia, Telugu and Manipuri.
As per the data available from Navajivan, till date they have sold around 1.09 crore copies of Gandhi’s autobiography. The English version of the autobiography has been sold maximum with around 65.09 lakh copies. It is followed by the Malayalam edition with 9.12 lakh copies and Tamil edition with 7.75 lakh copies. Navajivan has sold over 14 lakh Gujarati edition copies of Gandhi’s autobiography.

Speaking about the immense popularity of Gandhi’s autobiography Soham Patel, trustee of Navajivan Trust and an inquisitive student of Gandhian literature, said, “It is (so popular) because of its honesty. The book has an echo of truth. There is no autobiography where truth has been confessed to this extent…Gandhiji has made all the confessions and his churning in the autobiography. So, it is being read so widely because of its honesty and its truthfulness.”