A fighter against colonialism, a religious thinker, a pragmatist, a radical who effectively used non-violence to fight for his own ends, a shrewd politician and a capricious Hindu patriarch.
But was India's greatest leader also a racist?
The authors of a controversial 2015 book about Gandhi's life and work in South Africa certainly believe so.
South African academics Ashwin Desai and Golam Vahed spent seven years researching the complex story of a man who lived in their country for more than two decades - from 1893 to 1914 - and fought there for the rights of the Indian people.
In the book South Africa's Gandhi: Bearer of the Stretcher of Empire, Desai and Vahed wrote that during his time in Africa, Gandhi separated the Indian struggle "from that of Africans and Coloreds, even though they too were denied political rights on the basis of skin color and also claimed the right to be British citizens."
They write that Gandhi's political strategies - fighting for the overthrow of unjust laws or freedom of movement and trade - built an exclusivist Indian identity that "was based on understanding 'Indian' issues separately from African ones, while his views in his early years mirrored those of whites." ".
Gandhi, the authors write, did not care about the suffering of the disenfranchised and believed that the power of the state should remain in the hands of whites, and during most of his stay in the country he called black Africans "Kaffirs", which was a derogatory term.
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Racial segregation
In 1893, Gandhi wrote to the Parliament of the Colony of Natal saying that "the general opinion seems to prevail in the Colony that the Indians are very little better, if at all, than the savages or natives of Africa".
In 1904, he wrote to the health officer in Johannesburg that the council "must withdraw the Kafirs" from the unsanitary slums called "workhouses", where large numbers of Africans lived alongside Indians.
"I must confess that I am expressly opposed to the cohabitation of Kaffirs and Indians."
In the same year, he wrote that, unlike Africans, Indians have "no war dances, nor do they drink Kaffir beer."
When plague struck Durban in 1905, Gandhi wrote that the problem would continue as long as Indians and Africans were "indiscriminately crammed together into the same hospitals."
This, in itself, historians claim, is not an entirely new discovery.
Some South Africans have also always accused the man who led India to independence of collaborating with the British colonial authorities in advocating racial segregation.
In April 2015, a man was arrested in connection with the desecration of Gandhi's statue.
Hashtag #Ghandimustfall started gaining popularity on social media.
Gandhi's biographer and grandson Rajmohan Gandhi says that the younger Gandhi - who arrived in South Africa as a 24-year-old lawyer without clients - was undoubtedly “occasionally inconsiderate and prejudiced against black South Africans".
He believes, however, that Gandhi's "struggle for Indian rights in South Africa paved the way for the struggle for black rights".
He argues that "Gandhi was also an imperfect human being," but "such an imperfect Gandhi was more radical and progressive than most of his contemporaries."
Ramachandra Guha, author of the master's thesis Gandhi before India, it says that "talking about the comprehensive equality of people of color was premature at the beginning of the 20th century in South Africa".
Attack Gandhi for racism, another commenter wrote, means "to take a simplified attitude towards a complex life".
The authors of the new book disagree.
"Gandhi believed in Aryan brotherhood. It implied that whites and Indians are on a higher civilization ladder than Africans. He was racist to that extent. He erased Africans from history or was eager to ally with whites in their subjugation, to that extent he was racist," Ashwin Desai tells me.
"He accepted the power of the white minority, but he was willing to be their minority partner, to that extent he was racist. Thank God he didn't succeed in that, because we would have been complicit in the horrors of apartheid."
"But if Gandhi was part of the racist mainstream of the time, how does that qualify him as a person to be seen as part of the pantheon of South African liberation heroes?"
"You cannot have Gandhi as an accomplice of colonialist subjugation in South Africa and then defend his liberating merits in South Africa."
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"squinting"
Desai also doesn't accept the view that Gandhi paved the way for local black rights struggles - "in one sentence," he says, "you're erasing the history of African resistance to colonialism that took place long before Gandhi even got there."
In his book, Guha writes about what a friend from Cape Town once told him about Gandhi.
"You gave us a lawyer, and we gave you back a Mahatma (Great Soul)".
Ashwin Desai thinks it's a "ridiculous claim" about a man who is "supported higher taxes for poor African people and turned a blind eye to Empire's brutality against Africans."
The authors of the new book are not the first to challenge Gandhi's conventional Indian historiography.
Historian Patrick French wrote eloquently in 2013 that "Gandhi's erasure of Africans is the black hole at the heart of his saintly mythology."
More than a hundred years after he left Africa, there was a kind of resurrection of Gandhi in South Africa.
Despite their reservations about the "man of the Empire," Desai and Vahed acknowledge that Gandhi "made universal demands for equality and dignity."
But even the greatest men have flaws.
And Gandhi was probably no exception.
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