Manilal Gandhi

• 1. Introduction

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  Manilal Mohandas Gandhi was born on the 28th of October 1892 in Rajkot, British India, the second of four sons in one of the most consequential families of the twentieth century. His father was Mohandas Gandhi. His life would be shaped, tested, and in many ways defined by that single fact.

  What does it mean to grow up as the son of a man revered by millions? To choose the same struggles, the same newspaper, the same prison cells, and still remain almost unknown to history? Manilal Gandhi spent nearly four decades editing a weekly publication in Durban, marched beside his father in 1930, went to prison for his beliefs, and raised children who became activists in their own right. His story raises a question worth carrying through this documentary: was Manilal Gandhi simply following his father, or was he building something of his own?

• 2. Two Settlements, One Education

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  Manilal first traveled to South Africa in 1897, when his father had already been living there for several years. He was a young child when the family settled in Durban and later Johannesburg, cities that were then centers of Indian immigrant life under British colonial rule.

  Between 1906 and 1914, Manilal lived at two deliberately experimental communities his father had established. Phoenix Settlement, in the region now known as KwaZulu-Natal, was the first. Tolstoy Farm, in what is now Gauteng, was the second. Both were places built on the idea that people could live simply, work the land, and resist injustice without violence. Growing up in these settlements was not a conventional childhood. It was a living education in the principles his father was developing, tested daily against the realities of colonial South Africa.

  The older brother Harilal and the younger brothers Ramdas and Devdas each found their own paths. Manilal's path, more than any of theirs, would circle back to South Africa.

• 3. Indian Opinion and a Life's Work

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  Manilal returned to South Africa in 1917, after a brief visit to India with his parents. His purpose was specific: to assist with the printing of Indian Opinion, a Gujarati-English weekly publication based at Phoenix, Durban.

  By 1918, he was doing most of the work for the press himself. Two years after that, in 1920, he took over as editor. He held that position for the rest of his life, thirty-six years in all, until his death in 1956. A weekly paper in two languages, serving a diaspora community navigating colonial rule, was not a glamorous post. It was grinding, necessary work. Indian Opinion had been a vehicle for his father's early political writing; under Manilal, it became something he maintained and sustained through decades of change, imprisonment, and personal difficulty.

  Manilal died on the 5th of April 1956, from a cerebral thrombosis following a stroke. The paper he had edited for nearly four decades outlasted him only by the fact of his death.

• 4. The Salt March and the Prison Cells

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  In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi organized one of the most famous acts of civil disobedience of the twentieth century: a march to the sea to protest the British salt tax. Manilal was one of the initial 78 marchers who accompanied his father on that journey. That number mattered. Seventy-eight people setting out on foot carried a different weight than a large organized crowd; each name was known, each arrest was personal.

  Manilal was imprisoned for his participation, as he had been imprisoned before and would be again. Like his father, he was jailed multiple times by the British colonial government after protesting against laws he considered unjust. His willingness to go to prison was not simply filial loyalty. It was a commitment to the same principles of non-violent resistance that had shaped his upbringing at Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm. Being one of those 78 marchers placed Manilal in the historical record of the Salt March directly, not as a supporting figure in the background but as a participant from the very first step.

• 5. A Marriage His Father Opposed

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  In 1926, Manilal told his father about Fatima Gool, a Muslim woman of Gujarati descent with whom he had fallen in love in South Africa. Mahatma Gandhi's response was clear and unambiguous. He wrote to his son warning against the match on religious grounds, asking what faith any children would follow and arguing that conversion for the sake of marriage was not a genuine act of faith. He used a vivid image: two swords could not fit in one sheath.

  The following year, 1927, Manilal married Sushila, a woman from his own community and background, in an arrangement organized by their families in the customary Indian way. It was Mahatma Gandhi himself who sought her hand for his son. Sushila was born on the 24th of August 1907 and was the daughter of Nanabhai Mashruwala of Akola, Bombay State. Her uncle, Kishorlal Mashruwala, was a close associate of Gandhi and lived at Sevagram ashram. After the wedding, Sushila moved to South Africa to join Manilal. They had three children together: Sita, born in 1928; Arun, born in 1934; and Ela, born in 1940.

• 6. The Generation That Followed

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  Manilal's two younger children, Arun and Ela, became social and political activists in their own right. Arun Manilal Gandhi, born in 1934, lived until 2023. Ela Gandhi, born in 1940, later took the married name Ramgobin.

  Sita, the eldest, born in 1928, had a daughter named Uma D. Mesthrie, who wrote a biography of Manilal. That biography is one of the few sustained efforts to tell his story as a subject in itself rather than as a footnote to his father's. Sushila, who outlived Manilal by more than three decades, died in 1988. The family Manilal built in South Africa, far from Rajkot where he was born, became its own thread of the Gandhi legacy, one rooted not in Indian independence but in the long, ongoing struggle against racial injustice in southern Africa.