A biographer’s journey: In search of the Mahatma
Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru spinning, Delhi. Searching for materials previous biographers had not bothered to look for, I found one key file in the Uttar Pradesh State Archives in Lucknow, a dozen key files in the Maharashtra State Archives in Mumbai, and about 50 key files in the National Archives of India in New Delhi — some in the private papers of Gandhi’s mentor, Gopal Krishna Gokhale; some in the Foreign and Political series dealing with princely states; but the majority in the Home series, these containing rich information on Gandhi’s three major all-India campaigns: the Non Cooperation, Civil Disobedience and Quit India movements. Years later, it was also Hari Dev Sharma who persuaded Gandhi’s last secretary, Pyarelal, to donate the vast collection of papers in his custody to the NMML. However, what these newly opened Gandhi Papers gave me most of all was the sense that the second most important person in India’s freedom movement was not Patel, or Nehru, or Rajaji. Revelatory in this regard was a file 400 pages thick in the Gandhi Papers in the NMML, containing telegrams and letters of condolence sent after Mahadev Desai’s death.
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