BY D N Singh
From the pages of history and now into an era when the nation must know something other than the history already has. “Mahadevbhaini Dairy” may be unknown to majority of Indians of the day, but the chronicler of the above dairy had not even skipped minutes of the details of Mahatma Ganhdi and the events in his life.
Mahadev Desai , supposedly one of the closest men remained the personal secretary from 1917 to 1942 and, perhaps, was sleeping less than the Mahatma himself.
To many readers it may come as a revelation that the anecdotes about Gandhi’s life, his philosophies and of course peculiarities, his reading habits and many things on Gandhi’s life.
“He was much more than that (a private secretary),” Verrier Elwin, the British-born Indian anthropologist, ethnologist and tribal activist, has said of Desai.
“He was in fact Home and Foreign Secretary combined. He managed everything. He made all the arrangements. He was equally at home in the office, the guest-house and the kitchen. He looked after many guests and must have saved 10 years of Gandhi’s life by diverting from him unwanted visitors.” Said Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi’s paternal grandson.
A Chronicler And Buddha for Gandhi
Rajmohan Gandhi, goes even further: “Waking up before Gandhi in pre-dawn darkness, and going to sleep long after his Master, Desai lived Gandhi’s day thrice over, first in an attempt to anticipate it, next in spending it alongside Gandhi, and finally in recording it into his diary.”
It’s little wonder that Desai has been described on various occasions as Gandhi’s Boswell, a Plato to Gandhi’s Socrates and an Ananda to Gandhi’s Buddha.
Deserving Platitude
The platitudes are richly deserved for the man who translated Gandhi’s autobiography, “The Story of My Experiments with Truth” into English from the Gujarati original and was posthumously conferred the Sahatiya Akademi Award for “Mahadevbhaini Dayari”.
He was at ease with Gujarati, Bengali and English and is highly regarded as a translator and writer in Gujarati. He wrote several biographies, among them, “Vir Vallabhbhai” and “Be Khudai Khidmatgar” (on Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan and his brother Khan Abdul Jabbar Khan).
A founding member of the All India Newspaper Editors’ Conference, Desai was also a regular contributor to Gandhi’s publications “Young India” and “Navjivan”, and for two years ran the “Independent” newspaper from Allahabad when Motilal Nehru requisitioned his services from Gandhi.
Born in an Avanil Brahmin family in the village of Saras in Gujarat’s Surat district, Mahadev Haribhai Desai (January 1, 1892-August 15, August 1942) was educated at the Surat High School and Bombay’s Elphinstone College, earning a BA degree. After obtaining an LLB in 1913, he took a job as an inspector at Bombay’s Central Cooperative Bank.
Desai first met Gandhi in 1915 when he sought his advice on how best to publish his book (a Gujarati translation of John Morley’s English book “On Compromise and joined the Sabramati Ashram in 1917.
Beginning his diary on November 13 of that year, he maintained it till August 14, 1942, the day before his death of a massive heart attack at Poona’s Aga Khan Palace, where he was interred with Gandhi for participating in the Quit India movement that had been launched on August 8 of that year.
In 1919 when the colonial government arrested Gandhi in Punjab, he named Desai his heir. Desai was for the first time arrested and sentenced to a year in prison in 1921 for his writings.
