My paper intends to explore the relation between the freedom to write and the writing of freedom through the analysis of Raja Rao’s almost forgotten biography of Mahatma Gandhi, The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi, first published in India in 1998. In his voluminous account of Gandhi’s life and politics Rao utilises the example of the Indian leader as a synecdoche for the concept of Indian freedom, expressed in Gandhi’s conception of Satyagraha. A father to the free Indian nation of today according to Rao, Gandhi combines the complex and ambivalent position of an upper-class Indian, British-educated barrister and subject’s “freedom” to write with the writing of freedom exerted through his representing position as defender of the rights of his poorer compatriots—the coolies emigrated to Africa during Gandhi’s permanence in Natal and their Indian counterpart in his motherland.

As Raja Rao underlines, “Mohandas Gandhi was the first Hindu who came to Africa that was not a coolie. He was a British Indian gentleman. And this set more problems than politics or goodwill could resolve.” By not only emphasising the way the Mahatma managed to reach a “compromise” with the African, Boer, and British governments but also by intertwining his creed with one of the most ancient Indian philosophies, Rao succeeds in combining two different historical moments, the past related to Gandhi’s time and the present of Rao’s writing. The two ideas of freedom might differ, but the core of their discourse remains unchanged.