Mahadevbhai: Mahatma’s Publicist

 Mahadevbhai: Mahatma’s Publicist

Nikhil Desai, Gandhian Researcher
{In Nachiketa Desai, ed. (2023), Mahadev Desai MG’s Frontline Reporter, pp. 536-540 excerpted from a longer essay A Disciple, Servant, Son Who Died so His Teacher, Master, Father Would Live, Draft 1 7Dec22}

Mahadev Desai was more than a chronicler of events. He was a quiet, diligent, self-effacing servant but nonetheless sharp and stubborn follower, a friend, a scholarly disciple, an alter-ego of and a son to M K Gandhi. He was a meticulous observer, a relationship manager, and as a translator he brought Gandhi and their India to the English-speaking world where Gandhi’s legacy survives and keeps growing.

The book, Mahadev Desai: Mahatma Gandhi’s Frontline Reporter, inspired me to examine these issues: i) what the Mahatma saw in Mahadev; ii) how Mahadev cultivated the foreign, particularly US, press and intelligentsia to show Mohandas and his associates; and rather scanty coverage and analysis of Mahadev’s legacy.

Mahadev translated Gandhi’s autobiography, running the weekly serialization in English Young India as Gandhi did in Navajivan (Gujarati). He also translated Gandhi’s Gujarati translation of the Bhagvad Gita. As someone who had shared daily life and activities with Gandhi, Mahadev’s saying ‘every moment of [Gandhi’s] life is a conscious effort to live the message of the Gita is possibly the deepest spiritual and scholarly tribute to Gandhi.

What the Mahatma Saw in Mahadev
Just a single paragraph from C. N. Patel’s to Mahadev’s biography Agnikund ma Ugelu Gulab in Gujarati which was translated in English as The Fire andthe Rose (F&R):

Describing Mahadevbhai’s character, Gandhiji said, ‘If someone

were to ask me of the noblest trait of Mahadev’s character, I would

say the capacity to turn into a zero if an occasion so demanded.’

Gandhi was famously a hard taskmaster, a disciplinarian, authoritarian, insisting on compliance with all his rules for the ashram dwellers whose lives he dwelled deep into. He would scold, he would castigate; he had thought through everything and at times seems to have forgotten that all around him as well as his followers were testing their truths.

Mahadev was not the only one living on the mouth of the volcano. Mahadev had studied Philosophy and Logic as an undergraduate and for his LL. B. (1913), legal theory and philosophy, their origins in Greek and Latin thought. That Mahadev had worked for the Oriental Translators’ Office was a further proof that the young man was the right choice for the politician, social reformer, who was just beginning to find his feet in a land he had not really been anchored, having been away most of the previous 30 years.

Mahadev started his diaries on 13th November, 1917, initially copying Gandhi’s important letters, adding impromptu declarations and advice by Gandhi, and honed his reporting skills under his master, another multilingual journalist who had run Indian Opinion in South Africa. In 25 years of service, Mahadev took only a single one-month break in 1938, forced to go to Shimla to rest because of his ill health.

His Diaries – journals, though limited to Gandhi and his affairs – are thus an integral part of his journalism. He never named individuals Gandhi spoke or wrote to on delicate private matters. This was his trait of “becoming a zero when the occasion demands”.

Perhaps the best description of Mahadev’s union with Gandhi comes from the quote at the beginning of his Diaries Vol IV (though chronologically the earliest):

Like most human things, discipleship has its good and its evil, its

strong and its poor and dangerous side; but it really has a good and

strong side, -- its manly and reasonable humility, the enthusiasm

of having and recognizing a great master, and doing what he wanted

done.

This is what Mahadev strove to do and which is how Gandhi became a Great Master, not a Great Ruler, a Guide, not a priest. Alas, Mahadev did not stay with us long enough to pick any students for himself, except his own son who did not have formal schooling and yet became a great scholar, writer, and lecturer, a Kathakar.

He began writing his diary on November 13, 1917, a week after he joined Gandhiji as his secretary, and continued writing till August 14, 1942, a day before he died.

Mahadev woke up before his boss at 4 a.m. to prepare the agenda for the day. He made notes on all of Gandhi’s meetings, drafted his letters and articles where Gandhi only had to change the authorial initials from MD to MKG.

As Kishorelal Mashruwala described him: ‘Inspite of being a learned philosopher, poet, writer, singer, he would turn into a sweeper, cook, washerman, secretary, clerk, teacher, an ambassador who could accomplish delicate errors with skills, an arbitrator who would remove any misunderstanding his master had about you, a man of highest balance”.

To call Mahadev “Bapu’s right hand” is not enough. He was Gandhi’s alter ego. I imagine their minds to have been glued, one writing or speaking like the other.

The Publicist of Gandhi
It is while reading Mahadev in Gujarati that one gets a sense of what may lie in his other writings – in Gujarati, five biographies and eight translations (from Bangla, English), miscellaneous essays, and nine books or booklets in English. The epitome is his “The Gita According to Gandhi”, a work from his

days in Belgaum jail in 1933-4 but published posthumously because Gandhi had postponed going through the manuscript.

That anybody could cultivate such scholarship and a writing career while living by Gandhi’s rules, being Gandhi’s servant, his partner, porter and scribe, earning a pittance and that too supplemented by selling selfspun yarn, is a historical singularity.

Mahadev’s translations from Gujarati into English brought Gandhi to the world. Gandhi wrote in Gujarati as a matter of principle and also because he single-handedly created a new vocabulary, even shaped modern Gujarati by his project for the first complete dictionary. Further, he knew that in order to get across to the masses in India, he had to argue his position out in Gujarati first, then other Indian languages.

We see Mahadev’s scholarship in his ‘My Submission’, a 120-page exegesis in its own right, before his 100-page translation into English of Gandhi’s Gujarati translation. That book deserves a high place in Indian English Literature as his translation of Gandhi’s autobiography has been. These two books set the stage for understanding Gandhi’s life and thought in the subsequent 20+ years. Together these two books in English did for the world what Gandhi’s Gujarati writings had done for Gujaratis.

In the late 1920s, Mahadev grew into the publicist, making a shrewd, strategic move, the above-board deviousness that Gandhi could have devised. He reached out to the American press to both win sympathy for India’s independence struggle and to counter the self-serving narrative of the establishment British press. Mahadev grabbed the opportunity to market Gandhi to the sympathetic Indian press and the American press, building on the reputation he had already built with the British press during his South Africa days.

Mahadev’s writings caught the attention of the growing Indian media, some under British ownership and control, and then of the British and American journalists. He nurtured a taste for Gandhi worldwide. The

Associated Press of India had Mahadev as its “Gandhi camp correspondent”. In parallel, Mahadev entertained, suffered, and monitored the invasion of American journalists by 1930 and thereafter – John Gunther, Howard Thurman, Web Miller, Vincent Sheean, William Shirer, James A. Mills, and Louis Fischer. He also had to be the gatekeeper of his master, and control access timings, duration, formats.

We are indebted to Mahadev for this post-1930 Gandhi image in the American and the world’s eyes. It was Mahadev who cultivated relationships with foreign reporters who came to visit Gandhi in India, beginning with Ahmedabad in 1918. Gandhi had come to be reported in the NY Times by 1921, in the first story of his many trials and imprisonments.

By 1924, the Associated Press (AP) had begun distributing news reports on Gandhi. The Dandi March and subsequent protests had possessed the world press. Gandhi gave his first television interview to an American station in April, 1931, by when AP had a Bombay bureau with Jim Mills as the chief, who had by then become a fixture with Gandhi and Mahadev. Mills reported, while both Max Desfor and he took pictures. Mahadev went with Gandhi to London for the Second Round Table Conference, then to Paris, Villeneuve (on Lake Geneva), and Rome.

Gene Sharp writes of the aftermath of the Dandi March, “The campaign in Gujarat which had set the whole district aflame had been directed by Mahadev Desai”, and also reports on Mahadev’s arrest and then sentenced to imprisonment, in December, 1930.

Keeping the Record, Building Inquiries

Where Mahadev matters is in his intimate descriptions of Gandhi’s daily life; unlike any other prophets or issuers of manifestos. I imagine Mahadev’s diaries will put to rest the argument that Gandhi was fanciful, a dilettante in world affairs, impractical, regressive, casteist, a Hindu nationalist. Has India shifted to experiments with historical and political untruths, orthodoxy, and fundamentalism being violence to religions?

Which is why the anonymity of Mahadev is so useful to those who would most steadfastly deny their hands in blurring Gandhi and ignoring Mahadev.

Nachiketa says, “We have criminally neglected the preservation of archives.” I will begin with some notes toward an indictment. The crimes are those of omission as well as commission, though we would not know the difference until archives are examined or oral histories collected. That is the first charge on Indian and Gujarati society. The omission is evident, and the intent is not difficult to speculate.

As Mahadev Desai had written “My Mouth is Gagged”, it is only too clear that many mouths have been gagged, if only voluntarily. In these times, when Gandhi himself is dishonoured, it is probably too much to hope that Mahadev will be honoured.

I have given some references to English language news in part to highlight the global context of Indian independence history regarding these two men – who arguably fell in the shadows and possibly because there was deliberate neglect that has served some interests of higher powers.

Gandhi has survived in English, but on bare foundations of Gandhi’s works translated in English. It is the duty of Gujarat and Gujaratis to expand the archival base. Those in the coming generation have much more to do before Mohandas and Mahadev become mere footnotes in India, while the rest of the world will keep asking, “What would Gandhi do?”