Examine the different kinds of sources from which political career of Gandhiji and the history of the national movement could be reconstructed.

Different kinds of sources to know about the political career of Gandhiji and the history of the national movement : There are many different kinds of sources from which we can reconstruct the political career of Gandhiji and the history of the nationalist movement.
(i)    Public voice and private scripts : One important source is the writings and speeches of Mahatma Gandhi and his contemporaries, including both his associates and his political adversaries. Speeches, for instance, allow us to hear the public voice of an individual while private letters gives us a glimpse of his or her private thoughts. Conversely, the fear that a letter may get into print often prevents people from expressing their opinion freely in personal letters. Mahatma Gandhi regularly published in his journal Harijan, letters that others wrote to him. Nehru edited a collection of letters written to him during the national movement and published a bunch of old letters.
(ii)    Framing a Picture : Autobiographies similarly give us an account of the past that is often rich in human detail. But here again we have to be careful of the way we read and interpret autobiographies. We need to remember that they are retrospective accounts written very often from memory. They tell us what the author could recollect.
(iii)    Through police eyes : Another vital source is government records, for the colonial rulers kept close tabs on those they regarded as critical of the government. The letters and reports written by policemen and other officials were secret at the time but now can be accessed in archives.
If you see the fortnightly reports for the period of the Salt March you will notice that the Home Department was unwilling to accept that the Mahatma Gandhi’s actions had evoked any enthusiastic response from the masses.

(iv)    From Newspapers : One more important source is contemporary newspapers, published in English as well as in the different Indian languages, which tracked Mahatma Gandhi’s movements and reported on his activities, and also represented what ordinary Indians thought of him.

These ideas shaped what was published and the way events were reported. The accounts that were published in a local newspaper would be different from the report in an Indian nationalist paper.