Hitting the Gandhi trail in India

For millions of foreign tourists who visit India every year, the blockbuster attractions still are the grand palaces of the medieval maharajahs and that delicate marble monument to timeless love, the Taj Mahal.

Recently, though, a new trend of theme-based tours sprang up. The Buddhist trail lured visitors looking for nirvana. Rural tourism took travelers to spruced-up villages. Slum tours led them down sewer-lined alleys for a brush with poverty.

Now comes the latest variant: Gandhi tourism.

There's been a mushrooming of tours tracing the footsteps of independence leader Mohandas Gandhi, the ascetic whose philosophy of nonviolence helped Indians overthrow 200 years of British colonial rule.

Tour operators have enlisted historians, Gandhi disciples and even direct descendants of the Gandhi family to lead visitors to the leader's birthplace in the western state of Gujarat, the site of his 1948 assassination in New Delhi and a number of museums and memorials.

In February, Martin Luther King III came to retrace the journey his father, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., took to India 50 years ago to study Gandhi's campaign of nonviolence.

"It is very heartening to see a resurgence of interest in Gandhi across the world," said Varsha Das, director of the National Gandhi Museum near Rajghat, the peaceful riverside memorial where Gandhi's bullet-riddled body was cremated.

Tour participants might drop in for tea with a member of the Gandhi family, attend a musical prayer session, or participate in a hands-on workshop where they squat on the ground and learn how to operate a wooden spinning wheel like the one Gandhi used to make hand-spun cloth in a protest against imported textiles. One company offers a four-hour tour called "The Assassination of Gandhi," in which tourists are taken to the site of Gandhi's killing.

Later this year, during the winter tourist season, Gandhi's great-grandson, 49-year-old Tushar Gandhi, will join with a New York-based company called Go Philanthropic. It will target affluent people interested in assisting Indian projects that follow Gandhi's principles, including setting up schools and shelters for former child laborers.