Mahadev Desai

• 1. Introduction

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  Mahadev Haribhai Desai spent the last morning of his life exactly where he had spent so much of the previous twenty-five years: beside Mahatma Gandhi, inside a jail. It was the 15th of August 1942. Desai was fifty years old. He had been arrested just six days earlier, in the first hours after the Quit India Declaration, and interned at the Aga Khan Palace. When his heart gave out that morning, Gandhi called out his name in agitation, again and again. Asked later why he had done so, Gandhi said he felt that if Mahadev had opened his eyes and looked at him, he could have ordered him to get up. In twenty-five years, he said, Mahadev had never once disobeyed him.

  That story is a small window into one of the strangest and most demanding working relationships in the history of Indian independence. Desai has been described as Gandhi's Boswell, a Plato to Gandhi's Socrates, and an Ananda to Gandhi's Buddha. He was born in 1892 in a small village in the Surat district of Gujarat, trained as a lawyer, and became Gandhi's secretary in 1917. He filled that role until the day he died. What his life looked like inside that role, how he shaped it, and what he left behind when he was gone, is the story worth telling.

• 2. Village to Viceroy's City

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  Mahadev Desai was born on the 1st of January 1892 in Saras, a village in the Surat district of Gujarat. His father, Haribhai Desai, was a school teacher. His mother, Jamnabehn, died when Mahadev was seven. He was married at thirteen to Durgabehn, in 1905. He attended Surat High School, then the Elphinstone College in Mumbai, where he earned a BA degree. By 1913 he had also earned his law degree, an L.L.B., and taken up work as an inspector at the central co-operative bank in Bombay.

  It was during his college years that Desai first discovered what would become a lifelong vocation: translation. He translated John Morley's English book On Compromise into Gujarati, and for that work he won a prize of a thousand rupees from the Farbas Gujarati Sabha. The translation was later published under the title Satyagrahni Maryada. That early act of crossing languages would prove formative. It was this same translation project that brought Desai to Gandhi in 1915, when he went to seek Gandhi's advice on how best to publish it. The meeting changed the trajectory of his life.

• 3. A Life Lived Thrice Over

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  Desai joined Gandhi's ashram in 1917, and almost immediately, the demands on him were extraordinary. He accompanied Gandhi and Durgabehn to Champaran that same year, where Gandhi was investigating the conditions of indigo farmers. Desai began keeping a diary on the 13th of November 1917. He did not stop until the 14th of August 1942, the evening before he died. It ran to twenty-five years of continuous daily record.

  Verrier Elwin, who knew Gandhi's circle well, wrote of Desai that he was much more than a personal secretary. He described Desai as Home and Foreign Secretary combined, a man who managed everything, made all the arrangements, and was equally at home in the office, the guest-house, and the kitchen. He looked after many guests and, in Elwin's words, must have saved ten years of Gandhi's life by diverting unwanted visitors. Rajmohan Gandhi captured the shape of Desai's days with particular precision: Desai woke before Gandhi in the pre-dawn darkness and went to sleep long after his master, living Gandhi's day three times over, first trying to anticipate it, then spending it alongside Gandhi, and finally recording it all into his diary.

  In 1919, when the colonial government arrested Gandhi in Punjab, Gandhi named Desai his heir. The trust that gesture expressed went both ways. Desai was the only person to accompany Gandhi when Gandhi met with King George V.

• 4. Arrests, Editors, and Jail Reform

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  In 1920, Motilal Nehru asked Gandhi to release Desai to help run his newspaper, the Independent, published from Allahabad. When British authorities confiscated the paper's printing press, Desai improvised, producing a hand-written cyclostyled edition instead. The stunt made news. In 1921, he was arrested and sentenced to a year's rigorous imprisonment for his writings, his first time in prison.

  What Desai saw inside jail he did not keep to himself. He observed prison authorities beating and flogging inmates, and wrote a detailed report describing conditions. That report appeared in Young India and Navajivan, the publications Gandhi ran, and it compelled British authorities to carry out what the source describes as drastic jail reform measures. Few pieces of writing Desai produced had more immediate real-world consequence.

  By 1924 he had become editor of Navajivan. The following year he took on two more tasks simultaneously: he began the English translation of Gandhi's autobiography and its serial publication in Young India, and he won a prize from the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad for an article he published in Navajivan. In 1926 he became chairman of the executive committee of the Satyagraha Ashram. He then joined Sardar Patel in the Bardoli Satyagraha and wrote its history in Gujarati, later translating the book into English as The Story of Bardoli.

• 5. Round Tables and Repeated Imprisonment

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  For his participation in the Salt Satyagraha, Desai was arrested and imprisoned again. Following the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, he was released and accompanied Gandhi to the Second Round Table Conference in London, along with Mirabehn, Devdas Gandhi, and Pyarelal.

  When the Gandhi-Irwin Pact collapsed and the Round Table Conference deadlocked, Gandhi revived the Civil Disobedience Movement. The response from Lord Willingdon, the new Viceroy, was a determined crackdown on the Indian National Congress. In 1932, Desai was arrested again, this time sent to prison alongside Gandhi and Sardar Patel. After his release in 1933, he was re-arrested and held at the Belgaum Jail. It was during that stretch of imprisonment that he wrote Gita According to Gandhi, which was published posthumously in 1946.

  In 1939, he helped organise people's movements in the princely states of Rajkot and Mysore. During the Individual Satyagraha of 1940, he was put in charge of selecting satyagrahis. When the Quit India Declaration came on the 8th of August 1942, Desai's final arrest followed the very next morning.

• 6. The Writer and the Translator

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  Desai worked across three languages, Gujarati, Bengali, and English, and left behind a body of writing that spans translation, biography, journalism, and history. He began translating as a student, and the range of authors he brought into Gujarati is striking. From Bengali, he translated Saratchandra Chattopadhyaya's short stories as Tran Vartao in 1923 and the novella Virajvahu in 1924. He translated works by Rabindranath Tagore into Gujarati as well, including Prachin Sahitya in 1922 and Chitrangada and Viday Abhishap in 1925. He also translated Nehru's Autobiography into Gujarati under the title Mari Jeevanktha in 1936.

  His English translation of Gandhi's autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, from its Gujarati original stands as perhaps his most widely-read work. Among his biographies in Gujarati, he wrote lives of figures including Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan and his brother Khan Abdul Jabbar Khan, published in 1936 as Be Khudai Khidmatgar. He wrote Sant Francis in 1936 and Vir Vallabhbhai in 1928.

  His English-language books include Gandhiji in Indian Villages in 1927, With Gandhiji in Ceylon in 1928, The Story of Bardoli in 1929, and A Righteous Struggle in 1951. He was a founding member of the All India Newspaper Editors' Conference and a regular contributor to Gandhi's publications as well as nationalist papers including the Hindustan Times, The Hindu, The Bombay Chronicle, Free Press, and Amrita Bazar Patrika.

  The diaries Desai kept from November 1917 to August 1942 were eventually published in a twenty-two-volume edition called Mahadevbhaini Dayari, issued between 1948 and 1997. The first six volumes were edited by Narhari Parikh; Chandulal Bhagubhai Dalal edited volumes seven through twenty-two. In 1955, the work was posthumously awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award.

• 7. Death and What Remained

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  After Desai's heart stopped on the morning of the 15th of August 1942, Gandhi washed his body himself. Desai was cremated on the grounds of the Aga Khan Palace, and his samadhi remains there today.

  His son Narayan Desai went on to become a noted Gandhian activist and writer in his own right, eventually writing a biography of his father titled The Fire and the Rose. The Indian Department of Posts issued a commemorative stamp in Mahadev Desai's honour in 1983. The faculty of social sciences, arts and humanities at Gujarat Vidyapith, called the Mahadev Desai Samajseva Mahavidyalaya, was named in his honour. The Sahitya Akademi Award for the diaries arrived more than a decade after his death, a formal recognition of work he had carried out quietly, day by day, for a quarter of a century. The diaries remain, as the source puts it, a close look at Gandhi's life and a chronicle of the major events of the Indian independence movement.