Many of M.K. Gandhi’s associates penned memoirs and autobiographies that bring us closer to the Mahatma. Yet, Prabhudas Gandhi’s memoir, with his childlike innocence, has long enjoyed an exalted status among Gandhian literature in Gujarati. What makes it stand apart?

Prabhudas Gandhi’s memoir was the earliest account of Gandhi’s years in South Africa. The autobiographical account, though the author was wary about calling it so, was first serialised in 1922 in a hand-written bi-monthly journal called Madhpudo (The Beehive) that Prabhudas edited at the Sabaramati ashram. This was at a time when Gandhi’s Satyagraha in South Africa had not yet been published, and his autobiography hadn’t even been written. So, barring Gandhi’s own account of satyagraha in South Africa—the essay titled “The Last Satyagraha Campaign: My Experience”, that appeared in the Golden Number of the Indian Opinion in December 1914—Prabhudas’ reminiscences remain the first ever systematic account of the life of the Gandhi family in South Africa.

The circumstances under which the essays were written and serialised are also interesting. At the height of the non-cooperation movement in 1922, as all the elders and teachers either went to jail or were claimed by the Gujarat Vidyapith and the Navjivan, it fell to Prabhudas to keep the journal going. To solve the editorial crisis, he hit upon the idea of contributing narratives of ashramite life at Phoenix in small instalments, in issue after issue of the journal. The column became a hit with readers. This genesis story imparts a certain honesty, immediacy, and truthfulness to the narrative and enhances its plausibility quotient substantially. The fact that the narrative voice is that of an innocent child also contributes to the believability and truthfulness of the account. This might have attracted readers to the book in the first place.

I can personally vouch for the familiar ring that Jeevan nu Parodh has for the middle-class Gujarati— their hopes, aspirations, dreams, struggles, religiosity, and so on are reflected in the book. While reading and translating it, I had a sense of déjà vu more than once. I thought this was, in some ways, my story.

Prabhudas Gandhi (1901-1995) was a son of Gandhi’s nephew, Chhaganlal Gandhi. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

What new facets of Gandhi are revealed by The Dawn of Life?

The book has archival importance. It might become an important resource for researchers, scholars, and biographers, complicating their views of Gandhi on questions of race, caste, gender, religion, language, and so on. Recent scholarship around Gandhi tends to brand him as a racist while a large part of Dalit discourse often paints him as a casteist, upper-caste Hindu. On the question of gender too, Gandhi has come under the scanner for his treatment of Kasturba, Manu Gandhi, and so on. The translation would, for the first time, bring before the English readership how Gandhi wanted to subvert the binaries of caste, religion, gender, etc., by subjecting the self to the experience of the other.

The memoir superbly acquits Gandhi of the charge of not being caste conscious in his South African years. In the chapter “Toilet Cleaning” and in other places, we see how central the caste question was to the consciousness of the Gandhi family at Phoenix. The reader encounters Gandhi as the chief chef of the ashram—this, for Gandhi, was a conscious strategy to subvert gender roles. His love for Kasturba, his concern for his daughters-in-law and other women in the settlement betray the feminist dimension of Gandhi’s personality. The memoir is replete with rigorous self-interrogation, be it in the context of Ms Schlesin, a white woman who had “committed her life to the service of Indians”, or in the comparative depiction of the superior humanity of the Zulus, who lived around the settlement.

Finally, Gandhi’s signature multi-faith prayer has its roots in these early years. We hear the Gandhi family sing Gujarati bhajans and Christian hymns at the daily prayer meetings; these hymns are redone to make them accommodative of all religious beliefs. I strongly recommend the book to young readers who wish to cut the clutter and know Gandhi firsthand.

The Dawn of Life: MK Gandhi in South Africa isa translation of the Gujarati memoir, Jeevan nu Parodh. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

You open the translator’s introduction by zeroing in on the parodh (dawn) of the title, and invoke Sneharashmi’s beloved Gujarati poem. Prabhudas Gandhi at the settlement was at the dawn of his life. Gandhi’s satyagraha project was also at a nascent stage. Nearly eight decades after Independence, how does a reader today relate to that dawn?

In the era of post-truth and alternative facts, the greatest casualty is truth. For Prabhudas, as for us today, the dawn of life is when satyagraha, i.e., holding on to the truth, becomes the order of the day. That truth propounds the unity of life, the virtue of voluntary suffering, non-violence, renunciation and unconditional love. Prabhudas’ dawn, unfortunately, was lost at the time of Independence, driving Faiz Ahmed Faiz to proclaim, “This is not that Dawn”.

Gandhi’s term of choice for “freedom” was “swarajya”, which encompasses not just the political concept of self-rule but also the philosophical idea of rule over oneself, bringing all the senses in harmony, and leading a life of self-realisation, steeped in moral ethos and spirituality. Caught in the vice-like grip of consumerism, dogmatism, chauvinism, and intolerance, we have not yet attained that dawn. We resort to violence at the slightest provocation. We are trapped in the cages of our certitudes and stale sentiments. Prabhudas’ dawn will stare us hard in the face until we attain it.

Prabhudas Gandhi, unlike many of Gandhi’s associates such as Kakasaheb Kalelkar, was not a man of letters, much less at the age of 22, when he wrote this book. Yet, he has a felicity with language that even veteran authors might find difficult to achieve. As translation is the unparalleled act of close reading, you are best placed to comment on his language.

The trick, I think, lay in the Gandhian gospel of education, which eventually came to be known as nai talim. The book has an elaborate account of how kids at the settlement were taught in a small, makeshift school. Subjects like mathematics, Gita, grammar, Gujarati, and a bit of English were taught at the school, which functioned between 9 am and 11 am; the brief classroom teaching was done alongside rigorous physical labour in fields, kitchen, the printing press, and the running of errands to the railway station. At one point in the book, Prabhudas pointedly notes, “Had the education I received at the age of eleven under bapuji’s headmastership continued for a decade or so, I would have attained a sizable measure of scholarship, no doubt about it. But the objective of the school, you’d do well to remember, was not to produce scholars but satyagrahis.”

The linguistic prowess of Prabhudas is due in large part to the quality of the education he got. Prabhudas provides a gripping account of how education at Phoenix was free from stress, cut-throat competition, one-upmanship, examination blues, and lust for success. Today, when I see my students struggle even to indulge in small talk, let alone construct a sustained discourse, I feel that we have inflicted enormous psychological violence on young minds. Language is a delicate thing: once language is lost, the way of looking at the world is lost. Today, we see and interpret the world with a language outsourced to us on our touchscreens. 

A young Gandhi with his colleagues, Sonja Schlesin and Hermann Kallenbach, in South Africa. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives

You translated Dalit fiction from Gujarati to English and poems from English to Gujarati. What prompted you to pick Prabhudas Gandhi’s memoir for translation?

M.K. Gandhi is an overarching presence in Gujarati households. Most Gujarati children begin their journey of extra-academic reading with Satyana Prayogo (My Experiments with Truth). Gandhi and Gandhian values circulate in Gujarati homes through anecdotes and stories, however apocryphal. Social media, the Internet, and OTT platforms have been trying to replace the man but not with much success. So, that’s it. Gandhi came to me first and later, all the writers and poets I have translated.

Gandhi and Kasturba with fellow settlers at Phoenix, near Durban, in South Africa. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives

The Dawn of Life, published in 1948 by Navajivan, remained untranslated for 70-plus years (except for a summarised translation in the 1950s). This reminds us of the fact that many significant works on Gandhi in Gujarati remain unavailable in English or other languages. What would you say about the current trends in translation?

We live in translation, and we are translated beings, but translation as an activity in India is on the back burner. State and institutional support is nearly absent. Another problem is the diminishing bilingual and multilingual competence in India today.

Then there is the aversion to translation among writers and academics, who consider the activity to be secondary and second-class. A translation doesn’t count as a publication in academic circles. Truth be told, many of the ivory-tower authors and pedagogues don’t have the bilingual competence to undertake the challenge of translation. Where does that leave us? In the space where self-motivated translators keep doing the work without expectation of returns or of meaningful rewards. To me, they are the real satyagrahi humans of letters.

Did this project involve extensive research, a sometimes necessary requirement in translating Gandhi-themed works of his contemporaries?

A very good question. People think that translation is merely an act of transferring words across languages, an exercise in hydraulics. Nothing could be further from the truth. I read multiple books around Gandhi’s South Africa years before setting out and while working on this project. The first volume of Ramachandra Guha’s biography of Gandhi is an exhaustive documentation of this phase of Gandhi’s life. But there are others by Louis Fischer, Rajmohan Gandhi, etc. Then there are the writings of Gandhi’s associates in South Africa, like Henry Polak, Millie Polak, Ravjibhai Patel. Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie’s books on Manilal Gandhi and the Phoenix settlement, Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed’s controversial book on Gandhi, etc. 

Translating The Dawn of Life was part of the fellowship programme at the New India Foundation (NIF) fellowship. Can you describe the working arrangement—things like encouragement or editorial support?

NIF is the best thing to have happened to the world of scholarship and translation in India. The organisation is exceptionally professional, rigorous, and also generous when it comes to the selection of projects for the award. It has a team of approachable and keen language editors to guide and handhold the fellows. NIF also has an in-house copyeditor who meticulously and critically reads the manuscripts before sending them to publishers. The organisation knows how critical knowledge production is to the creation of collective futures. Unfortunately, there aren’t many such forward-looking and committed organisations in India today.