A new two volume biography of Mohandas Gandhi by Ramachandra Guha looks to be a good addition.  Reviewed in The Literary Review,  the first takes us up through his formative years in South Africa where he was a lawyer and community organizer.

Gandhi’s view of a woman’s place was highly traditional – at least until one of his close colleagues in South Africa, the Jewish feminist Millie Polak, and the direct role many women took in his third and final satyagraha movement of 1913, undermined this prejudice. One of Gandhi’s great virtues was his willingness to learn and change. And he did change over his years in South Africa, the transformation illustrated, superficially, by the ways he presented himself: at the start in formal European legal outfit, with a black coat, high collar and tie; by the end in simple white dress, shaven head and bare feet. By then he had also come to be called ‘Mahatma’ (‘great soul’). So he was ready for India.

And another review in The Guardian.