Mahadev Desai was born on New Year’s Day in 1892 in the village of Saras in Surat District of Gujarat to Haribhai Desai a school teacher and his wife Jamnabehan. Jamnabehan died when Desai was only seven years of age. In 1905, aged 13, Mahadev was married to Durgabehan. He was educated at the Surat High School and the Elphinstone College, Mumbai. Graduated with a B.A. degree, he went on to do an L.L.B.
Mahadev Desai first met Gandhi in 1915 when he went to meet him to seek his advice on how best to get John Morley’s On Compromise, a book he had translated into Gujarati, published. Desai joined Gandhi’s Ashram in 1917 and with Durgabehan accompanied him to Champaran that year. He maintained a diary from 13 November 1917 to 14 August 1942, the day before his death, chronicling his life with Gandhi. In 1919 when the colonial government arrested Gandhi in Punjab, he named Desai his heir. In 1920, Motilal Nehru requisitioned the services of Mahadev Desai from Gandhi to run his newspaper, the Independent, from Allahabad.
He was Gandhi’s personal secretary for 25 years, but as Verrier Elwin wrote of him, “he was much more than that. He was in fact Home and Foreign Secretary combined. He managed everything. He made all the arrangements. He was equally at home in the office, the guest-house and the kitchen. He looked after many guests and must have saved 10 years of Gandhi’s life by diverting from him unwanted visitors.” Desai created a sensation by bringing out a hand-written cyclostyled newspaper after the Independent’s printing press was confiscated by the British government. Desai was sentenced to a year’s rigorous imprisonment for his writings in 1921.
Mahadev Desai was an outstanding writer, at ease with Gujarati, Bengali and English. He is highly regarded as a translator and writer in Gujarati. He wrote several biographies such as Sant Francis (1934), Vir Vallabhbhai (1928). From Bengali, Mahadev Desai translated the short stories of Sharatchandra Chattopadhyaya (1923), the novel Viraj Bahu (1924) and some of Tagore’s poems into Gujarati. He also translated into Gujarati from English, Nehru’s Autobiography in 1936. The English translation of Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, from its Gujarati original was also done by Desai.
Mahadev Desai died of a heart attack in the morning of 15 August 1942
Vocabulary
Managed—regulated
Hand-written—written by hand
