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offered him. Dark splotches of the mud packed inside it oozed through the bag's porous folds. The man carefully patted the sack onto his abdomen. Then, he took a second, smaller bag and stuck it on his bald head.
    He seemed, lying there on the floor, a fragile little creature. The appearance was deceptive. That wizened seventy-seven-year-old man beaming out from under his mudpack had done more to topple the British Empire than any man alive. It was because of him that a British prime minister had finally been obliged to send Queen Victoria's great-grandson to New Delhi to find a way to give India her freedom.
    Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was an unlikely revolutionary, the gentle prophet of the world's most extraordinary liberation movement. Beside him, carefully polished, were the dentures he wore only when eating and the steel-rimmed glasses through which he usually peered out at the world. A tiny man, barely five feet tall, he weighed 114 pounds; all arms and legs, like an adolescent whose trunk has yet to rival the growth of his limbs. Nature had meant
    Gandhi's face to be ugly. His ears flared out from his oversized head like the handles of a sugar bowl. His nose buttressed by squat, flaring nostrils thrust its heavy beak over a sparse white mustache. Without his dentures, his full lips collapsed over his toothless gums. Yet Gandhi's face radiated a peculiar beauty, because it was constantly animated, reflecting with the quickly shifting patterns of a lantern camera his changing moods and his impish humor.
    To a century fraught with violence, Gandhi had offered an alternative, his doctrine of ahimsa —"nonviolence." He had used it to mobilize the masses of India to drive England from the subcontinent with a moral crusade instead of an armed rebellion, prayers instead of machine-gun fire, disdainful silence instead of the fracas of terrorists' bombs.
    While Western Europe had echoed to the harangues of ranting demagogues and shrieking dictators, Gandhi had stirred the multitudes of the world's most populous area without raising his voice. It was not with the promise of power or fortune that he had summoned his followers to his banner, but with a warning—"Those who are in my company must be ready to sleep upon the bare floor, wear coarse clothes, get up at unearthly hours, subsist on uninviting, simple food, even clean their own toilets." Instead of gaudy uniforms and jangling medals, he had dressed his followers in clothes of coarse, homespun cotton. That costume, however, had been as instantly identifiable, as psychologically effective in welding together those who wore it, as the brown or black shirts of Europe's dictators had been.
    Gandhi's means of communicating with his followers were primitive. He wrote much of his correspondence himself in longhand, and he talked—to his disciples, to prayer meetings, to the caucuses of his Congress Party. He employed none of the techniques for conditioning the masses to the dictates of a demagogue or a clique of ideologues. Yet, his message had penetrated a nation bereft of modern communications, because Gandhi had a genius for the simple gestures that spoke to India's soul. Those gestures were all unorthodox. Paradoxically, in a land ravaged by cyclical famine, where hunger had been a curse for centuries, the most devastating tactic Gandhi had devised was the simple act of depriving himself of food—a fast. He had humbled Great Britain by sipping water and bicarbonate of soda.
    God-obsessed India had recognized in his frail silhouette, in the instinctive brilliance of his acts, the promise of a Mahatma—a "great soul"—and followed where he led. He was indisputably one of the galvanic figures of his century. To his followers, he was a saint. To the British bureaucrats whose hour of departure he had hastened, he was a conniving politician, a bogus messiah whose nonviolent crusades always ended in violence and whose fasts unto death always stopped short of death's door. Even a