Books Written by Mahatma Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi trained as a lawyer in London, spent twenty-one years developing his philosophy of nonviolent resistance in South Africa, and returned to India to lead its independence movement using methods he had tested on himself first. He wrote constantly — pamphlets, prison memoirs, a health manual, and one of the most widely read autobiographies of the twentieth century — almost always in service of a single question: how does a person act rightly when the system around them is built on injustice? Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience shaped his early thinking on satyagraha, and Gandhi’s own writing later shaped Martin Luther King Jr.’s. Below is his core body of published work, in order.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · 1909–1942 · Updated July 2026
Where to start
His best-known work, and rightly so
An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1929) — his own account of the failures and doubts behind the public figure.
If you want the political theory first
Hind Swaraj (1909) — short, blunt, and written before any of what he’d later become known for.
Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule
Written in ten days aboard a ship returning from London, this short dialogue between an “Editor” and a “Reader” lays out Gandhi’s earliest and most radical argument: that Indian self-rule would mean nothing if it simply replaced British institutions with Indian people running the same machinery. He rejects industrial civilisation itself, not just colonial administration, and the book remains the clearest, least compromising statement of his politics — written well before he had any power to act on it.
Read this first if you want Gandhi’s ideas before Gandhi the icon. It is combative, occasionally contradictory, and far stranger than the sanitised version of him taught in schools.
Satyagraha in South Africa
Gandhi’s own account of the twenty-one years he spent in South Africa developing satyagraha — his method of organised, disciplined nonviolent resistance — against discriminatory laws targeting the Indian community. It documents the campaigns, the jail terms, and the slow, deliberate process of testing a political method before exporting it to India.
Essential for understanding that satyagraha was not a theory Gandhi arrived at and then applied — it was built through two decades of trial, failure, and adjustment on the ground, long before Hind Swaraj gave it a name.
An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with TruthStart here
Serialized in weekly instalments from 1925 and published in two volumes, this is Gandhi’s account of his own moral development — his shame as a young husband, his failures as a father, his early racism in South Africa that he later disavowed, his uncertain and experimental approach to truth and celibacy. He frames his entire public life as a series of “experiments,” openly admitting where they went wrong.
What makes this different from most political memoirs is how little Gandhi protects himself in it. He documents his own errors and prejudices in detail rather than editing them out, which is part of why the book has remained credible reading material for a century rather than aging into hagiography.
From Yeravda Mandir (Ashram Observances)
Written while imprisoned at Yeravda Central Jail, this short book lays out the eleven vows Gandhi asked residents of his ashrams to observe — truth, nonviolence, celibacy, non-possession, and others — along with his reasoning for each. It is less a political text than a practical rulebook for the disciplined communal life he tried to build around himself.
Useful for readers who want to understand the ashram discipline underneath the public politics — the daily, unglamorous structure Gandhi believed had to exist before any large-scale nonviolent action could hold together.
Constructive Programme: Its Meaning and Place
A practical manifesto arguing that independence could not be won through protest and resistance alone — it required simultaneous, unglamorous work: promoting village industries, communal harmony, sanitation, and education. Gandhi insisted that this “constructive programme” was at least as important as satyagraha itself, since it was what would make self-rule actually workable once achieved.
A corrective for anyone who thinks of Gandhi purely as a protest strategist. This book is where he spells out that resistance without concurrent nation-building was, to him, only half the work.
Key to HealthShortest read
A brief manual on diet, natural remedies, and what Gandhi considered a properly disciplined relationship to one’s own body, written from his conviction that self-rule began with self-control over physical appetite. Much of it reflects his personal experiments with fasting, vegetarianism, and nature cure rather than mainstream medical consensus of any era.
Read this as a window into Gandhi’s broader belief that political and physical discipline were the same discipline, not as a medical reference — several of the specific health claims in it were contested even in his own time.
Where Gandhi’s ideas actually led
Gandhi did not invent nonviolent resistance from nothing — he read Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience while developing satyagraha in South Africa, and cited it directly as an influence. His own writing and example then shaped Martin Luther King Jr.’s strategy during the American civil rights movement — a direct line from a Massachusetts pond to a Birmingham jail cell.
Frequently asked questions about Mahatma Gandhi’s books
Archival newsreel footage: "Mahatma Gandhi Arrives in the U.K." (1931), from the British Pathé historical collection — genuine footage, not a recreation.
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