Gandhi's Printing Press

<p>At the same time that Gandhi as a young lawyer in South Africa began fashioning the tenets of his political philosophy he was absorbed by a seemingly unrelated enterprise: creating a newspaper. <i>Gandhi's Printing Press</i> is an account of how this project an apparent footnote to a titanic career shaped the man who would become the world-changing Mahatma. Pioneering publisher experimental editor ethical anthologist--these roles reveal a Gandhi developing the qualities and talents that would later define him. <p/>Isabel Hofmeyr presents a detailed study of Gandhi's work in South Africa (1893-1914) when he was the some-time proprietor of a printing press and launched the periodical <i>Indian Opinion.</i> The skills Gandhi honed as a newspaperman--distilling stories from numerous sources circumventing shortages of type--influenced his spare prose style. Operating out of the colonized Indian Ocean world Gandhi saw firsthand how a global empire depended on the rapid transmission of information over vast distances. He sensed that communication in an industrialized age was becoming calibrated to technological tempos. <p/>But he responded by slowing the pace experimenting with modes of reading and writing focused on bodily not mechanical rhythms. Favoring the use of hand-operated presses he produced a newspaper to contemplate rather than scan one more likely to excerpt Thoreau than feature easily glossed headlines. <i>Gandhi's Printing Press</i> illuminates how the concentration and self-discipline inculcated by slow reading imbuing the self with knowledge and ethical values evolved into <i>satyagraha </i> truth-force the cornerstone of Gandhi's revolutionary idea of nonviolent resistance.</p>