History, selfhood, and knowledge: Gandhi’s autobiography as an intervention in the colonial epistemic order

This study examines The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927) as Mahatma Gandhi’s (d. 1948) engagement with colonial epistemologies and the intellectual crises of the early twentieth century. It argues that Gandhi’s self-narrative critiques the colonial order of knowledge, resisting the dominance of scientific rationalism and secular materialism. By framing his life as a series of experiments, Gandhi reclaims indigenous knowledge traditions within a discourse shaped by Western empiricism. Drawing on Jacques Presser’s concept of ego documents, this study explores how Gandhi employs experiment, truth, and story to construct a counter-epistemology that bridges personal experience, Hindu morality, and critique of colonial authority. His autobiography subverts Western autobiographical conventions while reasserting the moral and spiritual dimensions of truth-seeking in a disenchanted world. This analysis demonstrates how Gandhi’s rhetorical strategies function both as a personal moral laboratory and a critique of the secularization of knowledge in colonial modernity.