Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World 1914-1948. By Ramachandra Guha. Knopf; 1,104 pages; $40. Allen Lane; £40.

THE stock of national heroes fluctuates over time. For decades Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, was venerated at home. A gifted writer, he turned out impressive books while incarcerated in British-run prisons. In power he kept his multi-religious country democratic and stable, despite enormous strains. Abroad he guided it away from cold-war entanglements. Yet today the admiration is fading: “the popular mood in India has turned fiercely against Nehru and his legacy,” observes Ramachandra Guha, a historian.

The shrivelling of Congress, once India’s dominant party, partly explains that shift. Official propaganda used to fete Nehru and his descendants, prime ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. When Congress was in power, every dynastic birthday was celebrated on billboards and in fawning press notices. Today Hindu nationalists hold office and forcefully reject that legacy. The old rulers are ridiculed for corruption, economic mismanagement and the military enfeeblement they are said to have overseen.

Narendra Modi, the current prime minister, reveres others instead. Foremost among his heroes is Nehru’s deputy, Vallabhbhai Patel, a more muscular nationalist and pro-Hindu politician. Patel supervised the sometimes violent incorporation of Muslim-run princely states into India proper. This month a monument to him—at 182 metres, the world’s tallest statue—will be inaugurated in a remote area of Gujarat, Mr Modi’s home state.

Other historical figures and episodes have been re-evaluated, too. Mr Modi has encouraged popular acceptance of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a movement that was banned under Nehru after Mohandas Gandhi was shot dead in 1948 by a Hindu extremist associated with it. Occasionally Mr Modi celebrates Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a brilliant radical who reviled Gandhi and advocated violence against Muslims (and was close to the RSS and the assassin).

What of the reputation of the most venerated luminary of all? Gandhi was India’s pre-eminent nation-builder. He did more than anyone else to secure the end of imperial rule. His decades of agitation, civil disobedience, marches, fasting, lobbying, imprisonment and publicity-seeking—techniques he first practised in British-run South Africa—gradually made India’s freedom inevitable.

He built up Congress from an elitist to a mass movement. He pressed for Hindu-Muslim harmony, for the interests of Dalits (formerly “untouchables”), for women’s equality and the shunning of industrialisation in favour of village-based crafts. In all of these endeavours, except the last, he shaped India’s subsequent democratic character. Crucially, he also nurtured successors, most obviously Nehru. The contrast with militaristic, unstable and often repressive Pakistan under Muhammad Ali Jinnah could not be more striking.

Every generation of Indians must revisit Gandhi for themselves, argues Mr Guha in his magnificent new biography. It isn’t only that the changing political climate entails a reassessment. The growing mounds of Gandhi-related material require constant resifting. At times he churned out 80 letters a week; his collected works run to 97 volumes. Researchers, including Mr Guha, continue to unearth neglected writings.

Great soul, no saint

Mr Guha’s book—the second of two volumes—begins in 1914, as his subject returns from South Africa. His narrative is sympathetic, if needlessly detailed in places: sadly its bulk may deter many would-be readers. He conveys Gandhi’s playfulness as well as his intellect. Dispensing endless health advice to correspondents, Gandhi referred to himself self-deprecatingly as a “quack” doctor. Mr Guha celebrates his skill with a pen. Seepersad Naipaul (father of V.S.) praised Gandhi for writing passionately and directly, “from the belly rather than from the cheek”.

The Mahatma, or great soul, does not emerge as a saint. Gandhi admitted he could be a “beast” to his wife, Kasturba. He was often inconsistent, self-regarding or irrational, as when he claimed his habit of celibacy could somehow end religious violence. He was a bore in his insistence that others should shun sex and contraception. He erred in telling German Jews, Czechs and Britons not to resist Nazi attackers. Mr Guha also reveals a long-kept, juicy secret: in the 1920s Gandhi had a prolonged (if unconsummated) infatuation with the niece of Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali poet, whom he called his wife in some letters.

The author skilfully traces the evolution of Gandhi’s political beliefs. For example, he was an early campaigner against the ill-treatment of Dalits, yet for much of his life kept faith in Hinduism’s caste divisions and failed to support inter-caste marriages (initially he was also against Hindu-Muslim unions). Only gradually did he reject caste outright. “No upper-caste Hindu did as much to challenge untouchability as Gandhi,” Mr Guha concludes, convincingly. He rejects revisionist, left-leaning critics such as Arundhati Roy, who have labelled Gandhi a sell-out on caste.

Many details in the book are fresh. More closely than any other biographer, Mr Guha tracks the forgotten influence of Gandhi’s long-serving secretary, Mahadev Desai. He offers lively trivia. Gandhi, it transpires, saw just one film in his lifetime and had no idea who Charlie Chaplin was when they met. He charmed many he encountered. Dressed only in a loincloth, Gandhi had an amicable exchange with King George V, though the pope refused the Indian an audience, objecting to his attire.

But Mr Guha’s analysis is most valuable on the big issues. Even more important than securing independence, reckoned Gandhi, India had to seek Hindu-Muslim peace. Upset by the bloodshed of partition, he especially pressed moderation on fellow Hindus, enshrining the idea that India should not be dominated by one religion, becoming a Hindu raj. He did this despite earlier British efforts to set Muslims and Hindus against each other, and notwithstanding the antics of Jinnah, Savarkar and others who stirred up antipathy for narrow partisan gain.

It would be reckless to forget Gandhi’s warnings. But, with good reason, Mr Guha fears that is indeed happening. At a time of hardening Hindu nationalism, crude attacks on Gandhi have become routine online: “worryingly, there is a wider disenchantment with Gandhi’s ideas of religious pluralism,” Mr Guha notes. The likes of Mr Modi may offer lip-service to Gandhi, but then they “seek to diminish his stature by elevating their own heroes,” such as Savarkar.

More than ever, perhaps, Indians and outsiders would benefit from reacquaintance with Gandhi’s belief in compromise. Mr Guha’s magisterial account of a compassionate man provides a timely opportunity. Yet, as Gandhi knew, in the end it is political actors, not writers, who bring about real change.