"Quiet, dark eyes. A small, feeble man, with a thin face and large, spread ears. Wearing a white cap, dressed in rough white fabric, his feet bare. He eats rice and fruit, he doesn't drink. only water, he sleeps on the floor, he sleeps little, he works incessantly His body does not seem to matter, at first, nothing but an expression of great patience and great love. (...) Here is the man who raised three hundred million men, shook the British Empire, and inaugurated the most powerful movement in human politics for nearly two thousand years.

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The interest of this work is to underline Gandhi's intellectual training, both his reading of Tolstoy and the more surprising reading of the New Testament, and in particular the Sermons on the Mount. From his education in England as a lawyer to his fight in favor of Indians in South Africa, Romain Rolland recalls all the stages of Gandhi's life while showing that he was an active resistance fighter and not this "non-resistance" perceived by Europeans. He recalls all the philosophical principles of his discipline: the vow of truth, the vow of “non-killing”, the vow of celibacy, the vow of non-stealing, the vow of non-possession. Eliminating excess, simplifying life, these are Gandhi's principles of life and thought which remain relevant today.

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The interest of this work is that it is written by a novelist and writer, the author of Jean-Christophe, Nobel Prize winner for Literature. One pacifist meets another, while Europe is barely recovering from the First World War and feels the threats weighing on it. Two great writers, one Western, the other Eastern, seem to be in dialogue to improve the human condition, to work for universal peace. This first moving biography of humanity will appeal to lovers of spirituality as well as literature.