The Story of My Experiments with Truth · Characters
Character guide
Key figures in The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi.
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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
major
Also known as Mr. Gandhi, Gandhi, Mahatma, Gandhibhai
Born the youngest son of a short-tempered but incorruptible diwan, he stumbles through childhood — stealing, smoking, and once eating goat's meat to prove his courage — while haunted by remorse. His marriage to Kasturbai at thirteen and his father's deathbed become early wounds he never stops examining. What makes him compelling is not saintliness but the stubborn habit of turning every failure into an experiment, which is why the book's first half reads less like a monument and more like a confession.
Kasturbai Gandhi
major
Also known as Kasturbai, Kasturba, Mrs. Gandhi
As a child bride she was pulled from her family and thrust into a household where her husband policed her movements, resented her independence, and later demanded celibacy she had no say in. She pushed back — sneaking out to temples, refusing to be lectured — and their quarrels expose the young Gandhi at his most possessive. Her quiet endurance and flashes of defiance make her the book's most human counterweight to his relentless self-improvement.
Gopal Krishna Gokhale
major
Also known as the late Mr. Gokhale, Gokhale
Gokhale was the moderate, exacting figure Gandhi sought out in India after returning from South Africa, a man whose approval mattered more than any crowd's. He imposed conditions — a year of silence, no public speaking, careful listening — that Gandhi found humbling and formative. His mentorship gives the narrative a rare glimpse of Gandhi as a disciple rather than a leader, and his death leaves a vacuum Gandhi must fill alone.
Raychandbhai
supporting
Also known as Raychandbhai
Raychandbhai was no ascetic lecturer but a householder who spoke of religion the way others speak of weather, calmly and without performance. Gandhi brought him his hardest questions — about renunciation, about the soul, about whether to leave his family — and often left unsatisfied yet steadied. He matters because he represents the Indian spiritual tradition Gandhi never abandoned, even as he tested it against Tolstoy, the Bible, and his own restless conscience.
Narayan Hemchandra
supporting
Also known as Narayan Hemchandra
Narayan Hemchandra arrived in London with no money, no polish, and no interest in acquiring either, cheerfully demanding introductions to editors and refusing to be embarrassed by his rough manners. Gandhi, still fussing over collars and vegetarian restaurants, found him both exasperating and instructive. Their friendship becomes an early lesson in the book: that self-respect does not depend on English approval, a theme that will grow into something much larger.
Parsi Rustomji
supporting
Also known as the late Parsi Rustomji, Rustomji, Parsi Rustomji, The good Parsi, the old Parsi
Rustomji was the kind of supporter every movement needs — wealthy, well-connected, and generous to the point of recklessness — but he was also human, and once smuggled goods in a moment of weakness that Gandhi refused to cover up. Their confrontation over that lapse tests whether Gandhi's ethics applied to friends as strictly as to enemies. He matters because he shows the early satyagraha as a fragile coalition of imperfect, loyal men rather than a chorus of saints.
Sir Pherozeshah Mehta
supporting
Also known as Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, Pherozeshah Mehta, Sir Pherozeshah
Pherozeshah Mehta looms over Gandhi's early Bombay years as the gold standard of legal brilliance — the man whose acumen, memory, and ability seem to make an ordinary career impossible. When a kindly Englishman tells the anxious young barrister that Pherozeshahs are rare and honesty plus industry will suffice, Mehta becomes less a rival than a relief. His distant eminence frames Gandhi's quiet discovery that greatness need not be his model.
Hermann Kallenbach
supporting
Also known as Mr. Kallenbach, Kallenbach
Kallenbach is the friend who refuses to let Gandhi travel alone when news of a moral failure among the ashram youth shatters him. When Gandhi imposes a seven-day fast and months of one meal a day as penance, Kallenbach argues against it, then insists on joining. His devotion turns private grief into shared discipline, showing how the satyagraha community bound itself through voluntary suffering rather than punishment.
Albert West
supporting
Also known as Gilbert, Mr. Albert West, Mr. West, West
West belongs to the small circle of Europeans who cast their lot with Gandhi's South African experiments, tending the daily life of Phoenix while its founder shuttles between Johannesburg and the coast. His presence embodies the strange coalition Gandhi built — Englishmen, Jews, Indians, and children — held together less by doctrine than by willingness to share hardship. Without such hands, the ashram's ideals would have remained paper.
Henry Polak
supporting
Also known as Mr. Henry Polak, Mr. Polak, Polak
Polak moves through Gandhi's South African years as confidant, publicist, and fellow seeker after a disciplined life. His interest in vegetarianism and health reform intersects with Gandhi's own evolving experiments, where diet begins as bodily care and ends as spiritual practice. He represents the network of sympathetic outsiders whose intellectual companionship shaped Gandhi's public work and private discipline alike.
Maganlal Gandhi
supporting
Also known as Maganlal Gandhi, Gandhi, Maganlal
Maganlal belongs to the family-and-ashram web that made Gandhi's public life possible, taking on the unglamorous labor of running settlements and instructing the young. His role sits at the intersection of kinship and conviction, where relatives became coworkers in an experiment that demanded as much of them as of strangers. The farms' survival depended on such steady hands, not on Gandhi's charisma alone.
Manilal Gandhi
supporting
Also known as Manilal
Manilal grows up as both son and pupil in a household where fatherhood and moral instruction were inseparable, and where the children of the community received the same exacting care as Gandhi's own. His presence shadows the autobiography's reflections on education, responsibility, and the cost of a father who belonged first to his experiments. The early chapters on family quietly set up the tensions that will shape his later life.
Dadabhai Naoroji
supporting
Also known as Dadabhai Naoroji, Dadabhai
In London, Dadabhai Naoroji looms as the elder statesman every young Indian student is urged to consult, yet Gandhi's own shyness turns the offered mentorship into a test of self-reliance. The gap between the advice he could have sought and the advice he actually took shapes his early London years, where he leans instead on strangers like Mr. Pincutt. Naoroji matters less for what he says than for what he represents: the distant standard of Indian public life that Gandhi measures himself against.
Lokamanya Tilak
supporting
Also known as Lokamanya Tilak, the Lokamanya, Tilak, Lokamanya, the late Lokamanya
Tilak belongs to the world of assertive Indian politics that Gandhi encounters on his return from South Africa, a figure whose reputation precedes him even in brief meetings. The autobiography treats him less as a developed personality than as a landmark Gandhi passes on his way to his own methods. His presence sharpens the contrast between inherited nationalist fervor and Gandhi's emerging ethic of self-purification and restraint.
Rajkumar Shukla
supporting
Also known as Rajkumar Shukla, The ubiquitous Rajkumar, Poor Rajkumar, Rajkumar
Rajkumar Shukla is the peasant who attaches himself to Gandhi with a persistence that borders on the comic and the heroic, following him from place to place until his cause is heard. His stubbornness embodies the grievances of indigo cultivators, and his refusal to be dismissed forces Gandhi toward the rural India he had largely avoided. Without this farmer's doggedness, the Champaran chapter, and much of Gandhi's later turn to the peasantry, would not begin.
Kaba Gandhi
supporting
Also known as Kaba Gandhi
Kaba Gandhi served as Prime Minister in Porbandar, Rajkot, and Vankaner, earning a reputation for truthfulness and impartiality while remaining uneducated in anything but practical experience. He married four times, was given to some indulgence, yet stood firm against a British Agent's insult to his chief and accepted detention rather than apologize. His blend of moral spine and human frailty gives the young Gandhi both an ideal and a warning about the cost of principle.
Putlibai Gandhi
supporting
Putlibai, Kaba Gandhi's fourth wife, raised her youngest son in a household saturated with vows, fasts, and visits to temples, her religiosity unshowy but absolute. Her willingness to keep difficult vows, even when it worried her family, modeled a form of discipline Gandhi would later remake as satyagraha. She is the quiet origin of his conviction that truth and self-denial are inseparable, a thread running from Porbandar to the ashrams.
Dada Abdulla
supporting
Also known as Dada Abdulla, Messrs. Dada Abdulla, Dada Abdulla and Co.
Dada Abdulla, head of a prosperous firm in Natal, summons Gandhi to South Africa for a lawsuit, and the assignment, meant to last a year, becomes the hinge of Gandhi's life. The merchant's world of Indian traders abroad exposes Gandhi to racial humiliation and colonial injustice he had never faced in London or Rajkot. What begins as a professional errand for Dada Abdulla turns into the laboratory where Gandhi's political conscience first takes shape.
Abdulla Sheth
supporting
Also known as Abdulla Sheth, Sheth Abdulla, Financially Sheth Abdulla Haji Adam
Abdulla Sheth is the prosperous Gujarati trader whose Pretoria establishment becomes Gandhi's base during his early South African years, a patron who can open doors and close them just as quickly. He is proud of his standing among the local Indian merchants yet bristles at the racial humiliations they all endure, and he tests Gandhi's convictions by expecting deference and communal loyalty in return for his help. Their friction over money, manners, and the meaning of Indian solidarity shapes Gandhi's first experiments in satyagraha and self-scrutiny, making Abdulla the practical counterweight to Gandhi's moral ambitions.
Mr. Coates
minor
Also known as Mr. Coates
A Christian friend who introduced Gandhi to the Bible in Pretoria.
Mr. A. W. Baker
minor
Also known as Mr. A. W. Baker, Mr. Baker
A Christian missionary who befriended Gandhi in Pretoria.
Balasundaram
minor
Also known as Balasundaram
An indentured Tamil clerk who became Gandhi's first client in Natal.
Sorabji Adajania
minor
Also known as Sorabji Adajania, Mr. Sorabji Adajania, Sorabji
A Parsi coworker and manager of the Indian Opinion press.
Mrs. Polak
minor
Also known as Mrs. Polak, Polak
Wife of Henry Polak, who supported the Phoenix community.
Mr. Pestonji Padshah
minor
Also known as Mr. Pestonji Padshah, Pestonji, Pestonji Padshah
A friend and fellow student from Gandhi's London days.
Mr. Chamberlain
minor
Also known as The late Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Chamberlain, Chamberlain
British Colonial Secretary who met with Indian delegations.
Mr. Harry Escombe
minor
Also known as Mr. Escombe, Mr. Harry Escombe, the late Mr. Escombe
A Natal statesman and lawyer involved in Indian rights issues.
Pandit Malaviyaji
minor
Also known as Pandit Malaviyaji, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviyaji, Malaviyaji
A Hindu leader and educator who worked with Gandhi on national issues.
Dr. P. J. Mehta
minor
Also known as Dr. P. J. Mehta, Dr. Mehta
A physician and early associate of Gandhi in South Africa.
Brajkishore Prasad
minor
Also known as Brajkishorebabu, XVII Companions Brajkishorebabu, Brajkishore Babu, Babu Brajkishore Prasad
A Bihari lawyer who assisted Gandhi during the Champaran campaign.
Mavji Dave
minor
Also known as Mavji Dave, Kevalram, old Mavji, Kevalram Mavji Dave, Kevalram Dave
A Brahmin friend who advised Gandhi on religious matters.
Swami Shraddhanandji
minor
Also known as Swami Shraddhanandji, Shraddhanandji, Swami, the Swami, the late Swami Shraddhanandji
A Hindu monk and educationalist who collaborated with Gandhi.
Gangabehn Majmundar
minor
Also known as Gangabehn Majmundar, Gangabehn
A woman who joined Gandhi's ashram and became a devoted follower.
Ramdas Gandhi
minor
Also known as Ramdas
Gandhi's third son, who participated in his father's movements.
Tryambakrai Mazmudar
minor
Also known as Tryambakrai Mazmudar, Mazmudar
A fellow lawyer and friend from Gandhi's early career in India.
Mahadev Desai
minor
Also known as Mahadev, Mahadev Desai
Gandhi's devoted secretary and chronicler for many years.
Vallabhbhai Patel
minor
Also known as Patel, Vallabhbhai Patel, Vallabhbhai
A future Indian leader who worked with Gandhi in the Kheda Satyagraha.
Sjt. Madanjit
minor
Also known as Sjt, Madanjit, Sjt . Madanjit
A coworker who helped run the Indian Opinion press in Durban.
Mrs. Besant
minor
Also known as Mrs. Besant
A prominent theosophist and Indian independence activist.
Dr. Booth
minor
Also known as Dr. Booth, Dr.
A missionary doctor who treated Gandhi during his illness in South Africa.
Mr. D. E. Wacha
minor
Also known as Mr. D. E. Wacha, Mr. Wacha
A Bombay politician and member of the Indian National Congress.
Mahadeo Govind Ranade
minor
Also known as Mahadeo Govind Ranade, Ranade
A judge and social reformer who influenced Gandhi's early political views.
Dr. Jivraj Mehta
minor
Also known as Dr. Jivraj Mehta, Dr. Mehta, Dr. Jivray Mehta
A physician and later a political leader who treated Gandhi.
Mohanlal Pandya
minor
Also known as Mohanlal Pandya, Mohanlal, Pandya
A coworker in the Kheda Satyagraha and ashram member.
Mansukhlal Naazar
minor
Also known as the late Sjt . Mansukhlal Naazar, Mansukhlal Naazar, Sjt . Mansukhlal
A coworker who managed the Indian Opinion in South Africa.
Dr. Dev
minor
Also known as the late Dr. Dev, Dr. Dev
A physician who treated Gandhi during his pleurisy in 1918.
Maulana Hasrat Mohani
minor
Also known as Maulana Hasrat Mohani, Hasrat Mohani, the Maulana
A Muslim poet and political activist in the Congress.
Virchand Gandhi
minor
Also known as Virchand Gandhi, Gandhi
A relative who accompanied Gandhi to London and later fell out.
Adamji Miyakhan
minor
Also known as the late Adamji Miyakhan, the Sheth, Adamji Miyakhan, Miyakhan, Sheth Adamji Miyakhan
A Muslim merchant who supported Gandhi's work in South Africa.
C. F. Andrews
minor
Also known as Mr. Andrews, Andrews, Mr. C. F. Andrews, Dinabandhu Andrews
An Anglican missionary and close friend who supported Indian causes.
Hakim Ajmal Khan
minor
Also known as Hakim Saheb, Hakim Ajmal Khan Saheb, the late Hakim Ajmal Khan Saheb, the late Hakim Saheb
A Muslim physician and political leader in the Khilafat movement.
Umar Sobani
minor
Also known as Umar Sobani, the late Mr. Umar Sobani, Mr. Umar Sobani, The late Umar Sobani, Mr. Sobani, Messrs. Umar Sobani, Messrs. Sobani
A Muslim businessman and supporter of Gandhi's movements.
C. Rajagopalachari
minor
Also known as Rajagopalachari
A future Indian statesman who worked with Gandhi in the Congress.
Sjt. Vijayaraghavachari
minor
Also known as Sjt . Vijayaraghavachari, Vijayaraghavachari
A Congress leader who presided over the Nagpur session.
Chittaranjan Das
minor
Also known as Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, the Deshbandhu, Deshbandhu, The Deshbandhu
A prominent Bengali lawyer and nationalist leader in the Congress.
Shankarlal Banker
minor
Also known as Shankarlal Banker
A coworker in the Ahmedabad textile labour movement.
Surendranath Banerji
minor
Also known as Surendranath Banerji, Surendranath
A veteran Indian nationalist leader and Congress veteran.
Shrimati Sarojini Naidu
minor
Also known as Shrimati Sarojini Naidu
A poet and political leader who worked with Gandhi in the Congress.
Pandit Motilal Nehru
minor
Also known as Pandit Motilalji, Motilalji, Pandit Motilal Nehru
A prominent lawyer and Congress leader from Allahabad.
Mr. Jinnah
minor
Also known as Mr. Jinnah
A rising Muslim political leader who interacted with Gandhi.
Maulana Mazharul Haq
minor
Also known as Maulana Mazharul Haq
A Bihari Muslim leader who supported the Champaran movement.
Anasuyabehn
minor
Also known as Anasuyabehn, Shrimati Anasuyabehn, Shrimati Anasuyabai
A woman who joined Gandhi's ashram and became a follower.
Sheth Ambalal
minor
Also known as the Sheth, Sheth Ambalal
A mill owner in Ahmedabad involved in the labour dispute.
Mr. Laughton
minor
Also known as Mr. Laughton
A lawyer who assisted Gandhi in his early South African cases.
Bhupenbabu
minor
Also known as Bhupenbabu
A friend and fellow student from Gandhi's London days.
Mr. Lely
minor
Also known as Mr. Lely, Lely
A British official in Porbandar who Gandhi encountered as a youth.
Professor Kripalani
minor
Also known as Professor Kripalani, Kripalani, Principal Kripalani
A teacher who later became a follower and ashram member.
Mr. Saunders
minor
Also known as Mr. Saunders
A British official who dealt with Indian grievances in South Africa.
Mr. Ritch
minor
Also known as Mr. Ritch
A lawyer who assisted Gandhi in the Natal Indian Congress.
Tyeb Haji Khan Muhammad
minor
Also known as Tyeb Haji Khan Muhammad, the Sheth, Sheth Tyeb Haji Khan Muhammad, the late Sheth Tyeb Haji Khan Muhammad
A Muslim merchant who supported Gandhi in South Africa.
Babu Motilal Ghose
minor
Also known as the late Babu Motilal Ghose, Motilal
A journalist and editor of the Amrita Bazar Patrika.
Lady Cecilia Roberts
minor
Also known as Lady Cecilia Roberts, Lady Cecilia
A British woman who helped Gandhi during his London visit.
Dr. Allinson
minor
Also known as Dr. Allinson
A dietetic expert whose views influenced Gandhi's experiments.
Mr. Hills
minor
Also known as Mr. Hills
A British vegetarian activist who corresponded with Gandhi.
Shankarlal Parikh
minor
Also known as Shankarlal Parikh, Shankarlal Parikh of Kathlal
A coworker in the Kheda Satyagraha campaign.
Principal Sushil Rudra
minor
Also known as Principal Sushil Rudra, Sushil Rudra, Principal Rudra
A Christian educator who hosted Gandhi at Shantiniketan.
Sjt. Ghosal
minor
Also known as Ghosal, Sjt . Ghosal, Sjt
A fellow lawyer and friend from Gandhi's early legal practice.
Dr. Talvalkar
minor
Also known as Dr. Talvalkar
A friend and fellow experimenter in dietetics in South Africa.
Ladha Maharaj
minor
Also known as Ladha Maharaj, Maharaj, the Maharaj, Rama—Ladha Maharaj of Bileshvar
A religious figure who influenced Gandhi's spiritual thinking.
Shrimati Avantikabai Gokhale
minor
Also known as Shrimati Avantikabai Gokhale, Shrimati Avantikabai, Avantikabai, Gokhale
A woman who joined Gandhi's ashram and became a follower.
Kakasaheb Kalelkar
minor
Also known as Kakasaheb Kalelkar, Kalelkar, Kakasaheb
A teacher and follower who joined Gandhi's ashram.
Jairamdas
minor
Also known as Jairamdas
A Sindhi follower who worked with Gandhi in the Congress.
Kalyandas
minor
Also known as Kalyandas
A follower who joined Gandhi's ashram and worked for khadi.