Famous deaths august 13 biography of mahatma
August 13 history...
Famous deaths august 13 biography of mahatma
The man who chronicled Gandhi
- Nachiketa Desai*
Gandhi with Mahadev Desai (right) at the All India Congress Committee meeting in Bombay, August 8, 1942, the day that the Quit India resolution was moved.
Mahadev Desai — or Mahadevbhai as he was called — could not fulfil his lifelong desire to write Mahatma Gandhi’s biography because of his untimely death on August 15, 1942, aged 50, while imprisoned in the Aga Khan Palace in Pune.
His son, Narayan Desai, however, wrote a four-volume biography of Gandhi, as a tribute to his father.
Titled My Life is My Message, the books drew heavily from the diaries that Mahadevbhai kept, in which he meticulously recorded letters, speeches, conversations and even the Mahatma’s thoughts during their 25 year-long association as Gandhi’s secretary.
So authentic were the reports of Gandhi’s speeches, delivered extempore mostly in Gujarati and Hindustani that The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi — the 100-volume collection of Gandhi’s writings