Reflections on Gandhi
[2] Later he worked for the BBC's Indian Section, writing and producing reviews and commentaries on news for broadcast in India and Southeast Asia from 1941 to 1943.
[5] The book describes Gandhi's childhood, his time spent in London and South Africa, and life in India until the 1920s, with a focus on the author's moral and religious development.
[10] Orwell quickly accepted Phillips' invitation, writing the essay in late 1948 while revising Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the review was published in January 1949.
[11][12] "Reflections on Gandhi" was one of a number of essays by Orwell published in the years between the publication of Animal Farm in 1945 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949; others include "Notes on Nationalism", "Politics and the English Language", "Why I Write", "The Prevention of Literature" and "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad".
[21] In August 1949, months before Orwell's death, he wrote to Fredric Warburg with a proposal for a new collection of essays, in which "Reflections on Gandhi" would be reprinted alongside "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool", "Politics and the English Language", "Shooting an Elephant", "How the Poor Die", and planned essays on Joseph Conrad and George Gissing.
[23] Orwell recalls reading the autobiography in is original serialised form, and finding that it challenged his preconceptions about Gandhi as not posing a threat to British rule.
[26] Discussing Gandhi's pacifism, Orwell praises him for not evading difficult questions such as those surrounding the Holocaust, but notes that a Gandhian political strategy requires the existence of civil rights, and suggests it would not be successful in a totalitarian society.
[31]In a 2003 essay in The New Yorker, Louis Menand described "Reflections on Gandhi" as "a grudging piece of writing" and suggested that the successful use of nonviolent resistance by Martin Luther King Jr. indicated that Orwell was wrong to doubt the tactic's effectiveness.
[36] Rosenwald takes "Reflections on Gandhi" as a contemplation of "the idea that certain nonviolent practices can be formidably resistant, as uncompromising as battle", which would be articulated in later work by Denise Levertov and Gene Sharp.
[38] Atkins situates Orwell's argument, in particular his rejection of Gandhi's spirituality, as the culmination of a tradition of essay-writing inaugurated by Michel de Montaigne.
[39] Atkins contends, however, that the distinction Orwell draws between Gandhian spirituality and the necessities of politics is a false dichotomy, and that religious commitments can in fact emerge from quotidian life.
[40] Marks finds that, for Orwell, Gandhi is a more complex and compelling figure than Tolstoy due to his combination of spiritual sentiment and political astuteness.
[46] In Orwell's Roses, Rebecca Solnit argues that "Reflections on Gandhi" recapitulates some of the guiding ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four, such as a rejection of "inflexible absolutism".
