The Personal as Public: An Autobiographical Perspective on Gandhi’s The Story of my Experiments with Truth

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 Therefore this paper claims that the autobiography of Gandhi is less of his autobiography but more of a historical document resembling Indo-Pak history at many instances.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.