Mahatma Gandhi had four sons. He bullied the two oldest children, Harilal and Manilal, and condescended to the third, who was named Ramdas. But by the time his youngest son, Devadas, was born, Gandhi had become a more indulgent and caring parent. Little Devo was also a particular favourite of his mother, Kasturba. Gentle, with a helpful nature, he seamlessly blended into the life of the ashram. As he grew older, he devotedly did what his father told him to do, whether spinning yarn or teaching Hindi to South Indians.
The one occasion on which Devadas defied his father was when he fell in love with Lakshmi, the daughter of Gandhi’s close associate, C. Rajagopalachari, popularly known as ‘Rajaji’. It was a match opposed by both Gandhi and Rajaji. Devadas and Lakshmi were asked by their parents to test their love by not speaking or writing to each other for five years. They waited out this period, heroically, and after it ended got married. Devadas was offered a job with the Hindustan Times newspaper, and moved with Lakshmi to Delhi. It was in this city that their four children were born: Tara, in 1934; Rajmohan, in 1935; Ramchandra, in 1937; Gopalkrishna, in 1945.
The story of how Gandhi’s son married Rajaji’s daughter was lodged in my mind from an early age. The Devadas-Lakshmi romance was widely celebrated in middle-class
circles in India. It had inspired my own parents, who, too, had fallen in love, and had to wait for five years before their families consented to their getting married.
One of the great privileges of my own life is to have known, befriended, and been influenced by all the four children of Devadas and Lakshmi Gandhi. The first of the siblings that I both heard of and met was the philosopher, Ramchandra (Ramu), who had studied at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi with two of my maternal uncles. The sibling I have known best is the youngest, the public servant and writer, Gopalkrishna. Our friendship was forged in the late 1980s, when both of us worked in Delhi. It was in the home of Gopal Gandhi that I first met his sister, Tara, an authority on khadi who is formidably fluent in, among other tongues, Hindi, Bengali, Italian, and English. It was also Gopal who introduced me to his other brother, Rajmohan, whose ninetieth birthday, which fell on August 7, is the happy excuse for this appreciation.
When I first met Rajmohan Gandhi, in 1990, he had just fought and lost a parliamentary election. The previous year, he had been chosen as the joint Opposition candidate to fight the sitting prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, in the Lok Sabha elections in Amethi. This was billed as a fight of the asli Gandhi versus the nakli Gandhi, between an authentic descendant of the Mahatma and one who accidentally bore his surname (Rajiv’s father, a Parsi, had originally spelt his surname ‘Ghandy’). Rajmohan had the morals but not the money, and was soundly defeated in what was then the Nehru family’s pocket borough. However, Rajiv Gandhi’s party lost its overall majority, and V.P. Singh became prime minister. As a reward to Rajmohan for fighting the good fight, Singh made him a member of the Rajya Sabha.
Tall, erect, with thick spectacles and hair swept back, Rajmohan Gandhi exuded distinction and gravitas. He spoke carefully, and slowly. He lacked Ramu’s eloquent spontaneity and mischievous sense of humour (but then so did everyone else I knew). Yet it was evident, even on that first meeting, that Rajmohan was a person of enormous substance. Not long after first meeting him, I read, and was deeply impressed by, his biographies of Rajaji and Vallabhbhai Patel. (Both remain, decades after they were first published, the standard works on their respective subjects.) And I knew from older friends about the weekly magazine, Himmat, espousing liberal values, that he had once founded and edited. It bravely withstood the censors during the Emergency, but later closed down for lack of funds. At Himmat, Rajmohan had groomed some of the country’s best journalists, who went on to excel in the mainstream press as writers and editors.
After being introduced to Rajmohan via his brother, Gopal, I soon began meeting him separately as well, every encounter providing me insights about the history of the country we both belonged to and about whose democratic and pluralistic future we both worried about. Over the years, I have had extended conversations with him in Delhi, Bengaluru, Panchgani, and East Lansing, Michigan. And I have continued to read and be stimulated by his books and essays. In all these years, Rajmohan and I have
had but one disagreement, in print, about a matter that now seems too trifling to recall.
I grew up in a family that admired Jawaharlal Nehru even more than Mahatma Gandhi. As a young scholar, doing research on Indian environmentalism, I developed a more critical attitude towards Nehru, because of the resource-intensive, energy-intensive model of economic growth that his government had aggressively pursued, regardless of its negative consequences for environmental sustainability. It was Rajmohan Gandhi who saved me from going all the way to the other extreme, from demonising Nehru as my environmentalist friends were then doing. In his book, The Good Boatman, Rajmohan had persuasively argued that, notwithstanding their differences on economic policy, Nehru was Gandhi’s legitimate political heir. For, among all of the Mahatma’s followers, it was Nehru who came closest to understanding, and enacting in practice, the Mahatma’s inclusive vision. Like his mentor, India’s first prime minister was a Hindu who was trusted by Muslims, a man who fought for equal rights for women, and a North Indian admired in South India. No one else from Gandhi’s inner circle — not C. Rajagopalachari, not Maulana Azad, not Rajendra Prasad, not J.B. Kripalani, not Vallabhbhai Patel — had this distinctive and very rare combination of moral and political attributes. Rajmohan had also explained to me, as well as to many other readers, how, setting aside their own personal and philosophical differences, Nehru and Patel had worked together to unite India and Indians in the wake of Gandhi’s assassination.
Rajmohan and Ramchandra Gandhi were both scholars of Gandhi as well as descendants of Gandhi. Listening to Ramu, one-on-one or as part of a large audience, was a riveting experience. Like a good Indian sage, he worked best in the oral tradition. On the other hand, there were absolutely no witticisms in Rajmohan’s writings. However, there was plenty of empirical detail, garnered from the archives, as well as nuanced judgment. Individually and together, these brothers taught me a great deal about Gandhi, and about India.
Having learnt so much from Rajmohan about our country, let me end this piece with a nugget from the archives that it is unlikely he has seen before. I found it in the papers of Verrier Elwin, an Englishman-turned-Indian who became the foremost scholar of India’s tribal peoples, and who knew both Gandhi and Nehru quite well. As I have related, it took an unconscionably long time for Rajmohan’s parents to persuade their parents to allow them to get married. Devadas and Lakshmi were finally allowed to tie the knot in Poona in June 1933. Soon afterwards, there was talk of Gandhi and the Congress starting another countrywide satyagraha campaign, to follow in the wake of the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920-22 and the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930-32. Meeting a group of the Mahatma’s followers in Poona, Verrier Elwin found them sullen, unwilling to go to jail once more. “The only really happy people,” wrote Elwin to a friend, “were Devadas and his lovely bride Lakshmi, who were bubbling over with joy and quite determined not to go to prison.”
In the event, the satyagraha did not take place. Devadas Gandhi was not commanded by his father to go to jail. He and his wife, Lakshmi, moved to Delhi, where they raised what may be the most variously gifted quartet of siblings in the history of independent India.
ramachandraguha@yahoo.in