"..Gandhi possessed an acute moral awarness that means would colour ends and that only just, non-violent means would lead to a just and harmonious society.."

The twentieth century saw many new leaders who influenced their spheres of work greatly. Gandhi was one of them. But what distinguishes him from the others is his different way of thinking. Their materialism was wholly at variance with his spiritual concerns, however pragmatic we might deem these to be. In saying this, however, we must not overlook one crucial convergence in their thought: they all laid as much stress on means as on ends, paying special attention to how to bring about change. It is this element in Gandhi's thought that differentiates him from a whole cluster of earlier utopian socialists - that it was as important to formalize the means of change as it was the ends. Theirs was an unscrupulous, ruthless, Machiavellian acceptance that the ends justified the means.

Gandhi possessed an acute moral awarness that means would colour ends and that only just, non-violent means would lead to a just and harmonious society: 'the means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree.' It is that optimism and that endlessly argued idea which probably makes Gandhi so attractive and so relevant a figure in the world of today. To explain Gandhi, the man known as the mahatma or the 'great soul', we must look at the origins of that charismatic personality and persuasive mind. The genesis of Gandhi lay in those family and intellectual circumstances that helped to shape him. Not that any exploration of such formative influences can explain the originality of a man of his stature: in the end, the man makes himself.

On the one hand, we must look at Gandhi's family background, at the relationship between himself and his parents as well as his own role as husband and father. This will entail paying some attention to psychoanalytical explanations. Here Erik Erikson's Gandhi's Truth (1970) is one of the most important studies and recent Gandhi historiography, and some appraisal of his findings, however critical, should find their place in our study. On the other hand, we must look at those intellectual and spiritual antecedents that contributed to the making of Gandhi's distinctive philosophy of non-violence. To understand his spiritual make-up, however, one has to deal with particularly difficult material. Indian intellectuals, in colonial period, were caught up in a doubt on 'which way to follow' - the European ideas or the Indian, and Gandhi was no exception. He had to formulate some of the basic principles of his own. However, the most influencial factor in Gandhi's ideological and philosophical development was religion. Indian religions, especially Jainism, were a crutial factor in his spiritual growth. To quote Antony Copley, 'historians have now put behind them the essentially arrogant view of early Western interpreters, which was that the choice for Indian intellectuals lay between a modernizing West and a traditional India. The quest for identity is now studied through a more sophisticated model in which the traditionalist is seen as a modernizer with Indian intellectuals now seen as seeking the source of modernity within their own traditions. In many ways this is a model that works for Gandhi, but we still have to explore the extent of the influence of Western writers on his ideas and the degree to which he was to assume an Indian and more specifically a Hindu identity.'