As Gandhi’s campaign of non-violent resistance developed, he found in Millie Polak a constantly challenging conversational sparring-partner. She questioned him about the treatment of women in Indian culture, about his renunciation of sex, about his ever changing food-fads, and about the nature of his religious beliefs. To her, he was not yet the ‘Mahatma’: he was a difficult, witty and contradictory man; and perhaps nothing reveals more about the young Gandhi than the conversations Millie Polak recorded. She places them in the context of communal life at Phoenix – where the dogs were expected to be vegetarian and there was endless heart-searching over whether green mambas could be killed.

This programme recreates the Gandhi-Polak conversations; and Professor Judith Brown – Britain’s leading expert on Gandhi’s life and thought – assesses the importance of Gandhi’s domestic arrangements in his ‘experimental’ development. There is also a report from the Phoenix Settlement as it is today: destroyed in ethnic violence during the 1980s, it’s being restored as a symbol for a new South Africa.