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Synopsis This book by Mr. Mahadev Desai, one of Mahatma Gandhi’s trusted followers and his Private Secretary, describes the incidents that happened in some of India’s villages when Gandhiji toured them early in the year 1925. The villages that Gandhiji visited did not all belong to one province. Some of them were in Kathiawar, in Central India, some in Bengal, in the remote recesses of that province, some as far as south as in Malabar and Travancore. In all these Gandhiji was presented with welcome addresses and was given an opportunity to study the most important wants of the villagers and their exact situation. In this tour, he came across many classes of people, the poor and the down-trodden more than the rich and the privileged, and the conversations he had with the villagers and the advice he gave them are described and reported in the pages of this book. The book reveals the problem of India in its many aspects, the identity of the essential features thereof in every province, the common bonds that bind the people together in spite of their differences in language and other respects, their intensely spiritual outlook and their striking response to a movement which appealed to their higher mind instincts. The idyllic simplicity of the villagers, their susceptibility to superstition, and their respect for tradition and custom in spite of the fact that they had the effect of keeping them down as helots, and in places their keen resentment at their existing state—all these Mr. Desai describes in a manner which is most touching. Mahatma Gandhi’s own account of his tour in certain provinces and a few of Mahadev Desai articles in Young India have been included as appendix as further elucidating the problems in Indian villages.