The Mahatma, the text and the critic - in South Africa

South African literary criticism has predictably reflected the different facets of our national life, history, culture and politics. However, literary critical writing on Gandhi, Satyagraha and Passive Resistance has been grossly neglected in South African literary studies, and scholarship in South Africa on Gandhi has largely focused on historical, political and socio-cultural elements pertinent to Gandhi's life and philosophy. This paper attempts, then, to draw attention to a lacuna in South African literary studies. It gives a broad overview of the corpus of literary writings in South Africa that refers to Gandhi in one form or another, and includes the genres of autobiography, biography and memoir, which are, arguably, also seen as literary sub-genres. Since this is a new terrain for study, the paper concludes by pondering over some of the questions and issues that might be considered in the development of critical frameworks for the reading of these texts, and tacitly suggests ways in which the project might be further developed.