The Personal as Public: An Autobiographical Perspective on Gandhi’s The Story of my Experiments with Truth
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Department of English
Abstract
This research examines Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography The Story of My
Experiments with Truth and unravels the instances of Gandhi’s personal and public
life that are significant parts of public history. For this, this paper uses Sidonie Smith
and Linda Anderson’s theories of autobiography in order to scrutinize the life of
Gandhi and associate his important instances to the public history. This association
thus leads to the finding that Gandhi’s life determines and shapes the history of India
and Pakistan. Therefore this paper claims that the autobiography of Gandhi is less of
his autobiography but more of a historical document resembling Indo-Pak history at
many instances. Such a finding leads to a result that contrasts the normal
expectations of an autobiography that it explains an individual’s life and enables the
readers to understand that even an autobiographical text can parallel public history
in carrying intra and international facts.