Every October, Gandhi returns as an image: Fixed in statues, printed on stamps, invoked in slogans. He is made to stand still as icon and monument. Yet if we step aside from these rituals of homage, Gandhi can also be approached differently—not as a moral monument, but as a literary event. His autobiography, his letters, his journalism, his speeches: These do more than transmit doctrines. They form a sprawling text, provisional and unsettled, always open to interpretation. Gandhi resists closure; he demands to be read, misread, and read again. To take him seriously is to read him as literature.
Gandhi Jayanti 2025: Gandhi Jayanti is a significant day for Indians, celebrated on October 2.
But not literature in the narrow sense of crafted fiction or lyrical prose. Rather, literature as the name for a mode of writing that resists closure, that refuses to deliver itself whole, that requires the reader to enter into the work as a participant. Gandhi’s Story of My Experiments with Truth is not the tidy recollection of a life completed, nor the smooth confession of a saint who has arrived at certainty. It is a text full of hesitation, contradiction, revision. He writes of dietary vows he later breaks, of convictions he alters, of resolutions abandoned or postponed. Such honesty unsettles the reader: Is this a failure? or is this what truth looks like when it is lived in time?
Read this way, Gandhi becomes what Italian literary theorist Umberto Eco calls an “open text.” His narrative is porous to interpretation, never giving itself fully to one meaning, never reducible to one genre. It is at once autobiography, spiritual journal, political manifesto, and pedagogical experiment. And like any genuinely open text, it resists the reader’s wish for final answers. What are we to make of his experiments with food, with celibacy, with spinning? They look eccentric from the outside. Yet within the narrative they take on the force of metaphors—metaphors of self-discipline, of re-imagining the relation between the body and the world, of learning that truth begins in the smallest gestures.
To read Gandhi as literature is also to notice a unique style. His prose is deceptively plain, without the ornament one might expect of a national leader. The very flatness of the language becomes an ethical device. It forces attention on the weight of small details—how he describes the struggle to give up salt, or the embarrassment of courtroom procedure, or the awkward silences of political meetings. These are not flourishes; they are cues, fragments that ask the reader to join in the work of making sense. His writing does not pretend to be complete; it gestures outward, inviting response.
That is why Gandhi, as a literary text, is not closed upon himself. He is always in conversation—with the Gita, with Tolstoy, with Ruskin, with Christian and Islamic traditions, with the lives of those around him. His words open into a larger chorus. The reader is not asked to agree but to listen, to weigh, to experiment alongside him. The text becomes a kind of rehearsal space, where ideas are tried out, fail, and try again.
One might say that Gandhi’s writing trains the reader. It trains us to attend to ambiguity rather than dismiss it, to see how meaning emerges not from grand systems but from repeated gestures, small corrections, stubborn persistence. Each time Gandhi revises his path, the reader is reminded that interpretation too is revision, that truth is less a fixed point than a direction taken. Literature at its most vital does exactly this: It teaches us to live with the unsettled, the partial, the ongoing. Gandhi’s life, written and re-written, performs that very lesson.
And then there is play. It is easy to forget that Gandhi’s texts are full of humour, self-mockery, irony. He laughs at his own failed experiments, admits to foolishness, refuses the grandeur of infallibility. This playfulness, woven into the fabric of his narrative, prevents sanctification. We do not encounter a saint carved in marble, but a restless, vulnerable human being who tries and fails and tries again. In this sense, Gandhi is closer to Cervantes or Sterne than to the didactic reformers of history: He becomes a character in an unfinished novel, a life that knows its comedy as well as its tragedy.
Reading Gandhi as literature is refusing to treat him as a solved equation. Instead, he appears as a text always open, always shifting, always demanding that the reader co-author the meaning. This is why perhaps he endures. Not because he provided answers, but because he composed a life that still demands interpretation and engagement. His autobiography is unfinished, not because it lacks an ending, but because it hands itself over to us, the later readers, to continue the experiment.
In other words, to read Gandhi as a literary text is to step into a drama without a final curtain. Each chapter of his life carries the sense of an unfinished scene, where interpretation must be supplied by the reader. Consider how he narrates the great events that would later become milestones of history—the Salt March, the Non-Cooperation Movement, the struggles in South Africa. These appear in his writings not as monuments but as episodes in a larger story of trial, error, correction. The grandeur of politics dissolves into the rhythm of experiment, a rhythm we recognise from fiction more than from political theory.
The temptation with figures like Gandhi is to search for coherence: To ask, what did he finally believe? what was his ultimate philosophy? Yet his own writings resist this urge. They circle, digress, double back. They echo the narrative forms of the great novels, where meaning is never contained in a single proposition but unfolds in side-paths, in moments of hesitation, in what remains unsaid. Casting Gandhi as literature is to see that the very inconsistencies—his retreat after violence, his changing dietary rules, his simultaneous faith and doubt—are not flaws to be ironed out but textures to be read. Like Dostoevsky’s characters, Gandhi speaks in a polyphony of voices, none of which can claim final authority.
There is, too, the quality of interruption. Just as modernist novels disrupt linear time, Gandhi’s writings interrupt themselves with confessions, detours, recollections. The reader is carried along not by the logic of argument but by the rhythm of life unfolding. This quality makes him less the system-builder and more the storyteller. Truth, for him, does not arrive as a thesis; it arrives in fragments, in sudden illuminations, in provisional formulations that may change tomorrow. The effect is not dissimilar to reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace—a sense that life exceeds the categories with which we try to contain it.
Seen in this way, Gandhi offers us not a doctrine but a pedagogy. His text teaches us how to read: slowly, attentively, with tolerance for ambiguity. The experiments he records are not exemplary in the sense of models to be copied; they are exemplary in the sense that they open space for the reader’s own trials. The point is not to imitate Gandhi’s vow of spinning or his diets, but to learn from the form: to recognise that living ethically is an art of revision, of trying, failing, and trying again. Gandhi becomes, in effect, a teacher of sensemaking. His life is literature because it demands from us the very skills that literature cultivates—patience, imagination, responsiveness, responsibility.
If Gandhi is literature, he is not the “classic” sealed off from the present. He is what Roland Barthes calls a writerly text: One that does not merely offer content but demands that the reader become co-creator. His autobiography does not say: “Here is the truth of my life.” It says: “Here are the fragments of my search; now you, too, must join in the search.” In this sense, Gandhi’s writing enacts the very future of literature, where the boundary between writer and reader dissolves. Each act of reading is itself an experiment, another attempt in the long series he began.
What does such a reading illuminate? First, that Gandhi’s significance cannot be captured by political history alone. He belongs as much to the history of literature, to the lineage of texts that refuse closure and instead open themselves to generations of readers. Second, it reveals that his real legacy may not be any single principle but a mode of attention: To treat life as text, provisional, ambiguous, requiring interpretation. Third, it reminds us that literature itself is not a luxury or an escape, but a practice of living—an apprenticeship in making sense without guarantees.
And finally, it shows that Gandhi, far from being the figure locked in sepia photographs, is a contemporary writer whose work is not yet finished. We are still reading him, still interpreting him, still experimenting in his company. Like all great literary texts, his work exceeds the moment of its writing. It waits for each new reader to complete it, differently.
As his birth anniversary returns, perhaps the most imaginative tribute we can offer is to resist treating Gandhi as a concluded story. To read him as literature is to allow his life to remain open—open to contradiction, to play, to experiment, to our own unfinished readings. In this openness lies his enduring vitality. Gandhi’s text, like all living literature, is never exhausted. It waits, still, for us to turn the page.
This article is authored by V Krishnappa, professor, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, RV University, Bengaluru.
