I found this fascinating. It turns out that your average Westerner's appreciation of Gandhi may be just as superficial as their appreciation of Eastern spirituality. Apparently, Gandhi was not just a traditionalist who championed the Indian caste system but he was also a racist.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-34265882
Here is a collection of some rather interesting quotes.Ramachandra Guha, writer of the magisterial Gandhi Before India, writes that "to speak of comprehensive equality for coloured people was premature in early 20th Century South Africa". Attacking Gandhi for racism, wrote another commentator, "takes a simplistic view of a complex life".
The authors of the new book disagree.
"Gandhi believed in the Aryan brotherhood. This involved whites and Indians higher up than Africans on the civilised scale. To that extent he was a racist. To the extent that he wrote Africans out of history or was keen to join with whites in their subjugation he was a racist," Ashwin Desai told me.