Harilal Gandhi: A Life, Chandulal Bhagubhai Dalal
Ed and translated by Tridip Suhrud
Orient Longman, Rs 295

His private life was the most public. His days were neatly catalogued; his writings rigorously annotated; his experiments tested in political laboratories; even his diet was dissected. And he let them be, as he appeared in a loincloth, literally baring his self. Yet, there was an archival black hole about Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a point where most research seemed to vanish. That was the strange story of how the man who easily became Bapu to a nation was a stranger to his eldest son Harilal.

It was March 31, 1915. Gandhi was at Santiniketan when he received a 32-page booklet, My Open Letter to My Father M.K. Gandhi (Bar-at-Law), copies of which had already reached his associates. It read, “You have oppressed us in a civilized way... The environment around you has become such that even a person who differs from you innocently and conscientiously is as good as dead… You have instilled fear in us, of you, even while we are walking, ambling, eating or drinking, sleeping or sitting, reading or writing, and working. Your heart is like vajra. Your love… I have never seen.” That was 27-year-old Harilal making public his differences with his father.

While Gandhi destroyed most of the letters Harilal wrote to him, this one survives — and appears in Chandulal Bhagubhai Dalal’s Gujarati biography of Harilal, which has been translated into English by Tridip Suhrud. Harilal Gandhi: A Life is a slim volume, the biography running into 120-odd pages, the language sparse, almost Gandhian, as it sticks to facts and skips adjectives. In the age of flamboyant biographies and embellished histories, Dalal’s is a pleasant anachronism. Sample the opening paragraph: “Harilal Mohandas Gandhi was the eldest son of Gandhiji. He had three younger brothers — Manilal, Ramdas and Devdas. He did not have a sister.” The simplicity, however, is only in the syntax. Dalal’s book, published 30 years ago, could be called the original provocateur, beginning the intense humanisation of the Mahatma, recently attempted in the biography Mohandas by Rajmohan Gandhi and the film Gandhi My Father, which was loosely based on the book under review.

... contd.