SHORTLY after my retirement from the United Nations in 1985, I began to edit the speeches and writings of Yusuf Dadoo, a respected leader of the South African liberation movement. Shafiur Rahman, a friend from the anti-apartheid movement, told me that there was much additional correspondence between Gandhi and Dadoo at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London. It was in a restricted collection of Frene Ginwala, and was not in the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG). I met Ginwala who told me that Pyarelal had given her access to the correspondence when she was in India researching for her doctoral dissertation at Oxford University.

A few years later, I obtained a copy of her dissertation through the Yale University Library and found that she had given as the source, ‘Documents received from Shri Pyarelal’ at the National Archives of India (File No. 5-52/69). At my request, T.G. Ramamurthi went to the National Archives and informed me that there were three microfilm reels in the collection. One of them was the correspondence of Gandhi with South Africans from 1939 to 1941 and had 150 pages. Gopalkrishna Gandhi, then at the President’s Office, was kind enough to get me printouts. These letters were important for South African Indian history and explain why Gandhi advised Indian militants to postpone passive resistance in 1939.¹ I informed the office of CWMG so that they could obtain copies of Gandhi’s letters contained in the three reels.

I then learnt that when Gandhi was assassinated, Pyarelal had taken the files away, instead of depositing them in the archives or handing them over to Navajivan or to the Gandhi family for use in his own research on the biography of Gandhi. Treating them as his property, he gave only a few items to the Office of CWMG and allowed the National Archives to microfilm a fraction of the papers. The National Archives indexed them under Pyarelal rather than Gandhi, so that hardly any scholars knew about it.

 

When Pyarelal passed away, Haridev Sharma persuaded Sushila Nayyar to deposit the files in the Nehru Memorial Museum: they filled six shelves and were kept in a restricted collection in the library under the name of Pyarelal rather than Gandhi. Fortunately, he arranged to allow access to the office of CWMG and Gandhi’s letters were published in supplementary volumes of CWMG with credit to the ‘Pyarelal Papers. Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Courtesy Beladevi Nayyar and Dr. Sushila Nayyar.’ The collection, which also included numerous letters to Gandhi, remained restricted.

I wrote to the Prime Minister, Narasimha Rao and to K.R. Narayanan, then Vice President, suggesting that they take action to make the collection public. Nothing happened until some years after Sushila Nayyar and Beladevi passed away. The Nehru Museum found that their heir was a resident in the United States. N. Balakrishnan, then Acting Director of the Nehru Museum, was able to get the restriction removed. For fifty years, these papers of Gandhi were kept away from the public, including descendants of Gandhi.

It was during consultations at this time that I developed a passion to find Gandhi’s writings and correspondence which were not in the CWMG. I was only trying to obtain copies of the documents. The archives or the individuals who received letters from Gandhi have the legal right to keep them. But the texts of those documents are essential for research on the life and thought of Gandhi.

 

The office of CWMG, established by Prime Minister Nehru in 1954, undertook the monumental task of collecting, authenticating, editing and publishing all the writings and speeches of Gandhi. Nehru wrote in the foreword to the first volume of CWMG: ‘It is most necessary that a full and authentic record of what he has written and said should be prepared… this is a duty we owe to ourselves and to future generations.’ Nothing was censored, not even his statements in early years which are used by his detractors to condemn Gandhi. There is hardly any parallel for this undertaking.² 

The resources of the office were, however, limited. Outside India, it could employ researchers only in Britain and South Africa and only for short periods. It had no researcher in the United States, though Gandhi had extensive correspondence with Americans.

The two researchers did what they could and numerous items found by them appear in CWMG. But many other items appeared in archives and publications in later years and were not available in India.

 

Many people who had received letters from Gandhi donated the originals or sent copies to the archives in India. But even Pyarelal, a member of the Advisory Board of CWMG, and Henry Polak, a consultant, did not provide all the precious documents they had. I am not aware that the office tried to contact Hannah Lazar, the niece of Hermann Kallenbach, who had emigrated to Israel with hundreds of documents which Gandhi entrusted to Kallenbach. If such letters could not be incorporated in the CWMG’s 90 volumes, there was clearly a need for a renewed effort to trace all available documents.

Amrit Modi at Harijan Ashram and Haridev Sharma at Nehru Memorial Museum were able to find numerous documents, mainly within India. I was perhaps the only person searching abroad, especially in the United States and South Africa, and sending copies to the Indian archives. I benefited from the help rendered by the library staff at Yale University, the Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, the Documentation Centre in Durban, and the Nehru Museum in New Delhi to whom I had donated my extensive collection of books and papers on the freedom struggle in South Africa.

I obtained access to the library stacks of Yale and Harvard Universities and looked into all books on Gandhi or memoirs of persons who had met Gandhi which, I thought, may have correspondence or records of interviews with him. I scanned the indexes of periodicals and referred to articles on Gandhi. I went through the annual indexes of The New York Times and other newspapers. I searched the volumes of National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, published since 1955, which indexes documents acquired by archives in the United States.

I found a number of letters to and by Gandhi, and accounts of many interviews with Gandhi. During the research for the books I edited on Gandhi’s letters to America, his correspondence with Nordic countries and Sarojini Naidu, and Gandhi and South Africa, 1914-48, my collaborators and I found several more documents. Some of the items were of little significance, but I felt that every statement by Gandhi deserved to be preserved and made available in India.

J.M. (Moore) Crossey, the Curator for Africa at Yale, showed me the correspondence they had some years earlier with Hannah Lazar and her lawyer. She wanted to sell the Kallenbach papers to Yale for perhaps $10,000. But she changed her mind and decided that they should go to South Africa. He also informed me that Sotheby had sold a collection of 105 letters of Gandhi in the 1970s to an anonymous purchaser, long before India bought letters from the Kallenbach and Polak families in the 1980s.

 

Some years later, I learnt from James Hunt, an eminent scholar, that the Local History Museum in Durban had 57 letters from Gandhi to Kallenbach. I wrote to them for photocopies but they declined and published the letters in a pamphlet. When I visited the museum in 1995, they told me that they had obtained the letters at a modest price from a seller in Johannesburg.

After India established diplomatic relations with Israel, I suggested to Prime Minister Narasimha Rao that India contact the family of Hannah Lazar in Haifa to get copies of papers of Gandhi and Kallenbach in their possession. I felt that the Kallenbach papers were also important for research on Gandhi. The Prime Minister sent my letter to the Indian mission in Israel, but I did not hear of any action. Many years later, Ramachandra Guha was able to visit the family in Haifa and found that they still had some letters of Gandhi. He urged the Indian government to acquire them.

 

Meanwhile, I learnt from Moore Crossey that the catalogues of South African libraries and archives were digitised and that he had a composite catalogue. I noted the items related to Gandhi, and Anne Cunningham at the Wits Library helped get me copies, especially from the University of Cape Town. Among these was a letter by Harilal soon after he had left his father in Johannesburg, and other important letters of Elizabeth Molteno and Emily Hobhouse, which had information on how these women helped Gandhi to secure the settlement in South Africa in 1914. On my visit to South Africa in 1991, I obtained from the South African Library in Cape Town copies of the correspondence between Olive Schreiner and Kallenbach in London. It contained a letter by Olive Schreiner to Gandhi.

The search for documents has now become easier as libraries, archives and newspapers have digitised their indexes, making documents easier to access in databases. The National Archives of South Africa has set up a feature on its website³ to search for documents at the old Natal and Transvaal Archives and at the South African archives, as well as in major South African libraries. The Natal, Transvaal and South African Archives have more than three hundred documents of Gandhi. Most of them are routine petitions on behalf of his clients, but some are of wider interest. The National Archives, however, does not mail copies. I had to employ a researcher to obtain photocopies of documents from the Natal Archives in Pietermaritzburg, and donated them to the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. I suggested to the Indian government to obtain copies of the documents in the Transvaal and South African archives in Pretoria through the Indian High Commission, but I am not aware if any action has been initiated.

The government departments, unfortunately, are not proactive unless an auction of documents or memorabilia gets publicity and provokes public agitation. I believe that it is not necessary to bring all original documents to India. Gandhi belongs to the world, not only India.⁴ India, however, should try to get digital copies of the documents even if they are housed in archives abroad.

 

I have briefly described my efforts to search for documents in the United States where I live and in South Africa and Nordic countries.⁵ I hope this will encourage scholars in other countries, especially academics, to undertake such a task as a labour of love and send copies to archives in India.

I would also suggest that the government prepare a comprehensive index of the correspondence and writings of Gandhi as these are dispersed and many documents found after the publication of CWMG are not indexed.

 

* Since his retirement in 1985, E.S. Reddy has written extensively on the history of the South African freedom movement and on Gandhi.

Footnotes:

1. The letters were published in the book I edited, Yusuf Mohamed Dadoo, South Africa’s Freedom Struggle: Statements, Speeches and Articles, Including Correspondence With Mahatma Gandhi. Volume 95 of CWMG contains letters by Gandhi to Dr. Dadoo on pages 100, 102-4, 106, 110 and 130.

2. So far as I know, the only parallel outside India is The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, published in 1953, in eight volumes by the Abraham Lincoln Society. It can be searched at quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln.

3. http://www.national.archives.gov.za/

4. It is, of course, necessary to discourage sale of documents relating to Gandhi as a commodity and encourage their placement in archives in India or abroad. The auctions have become corrupted and inflated prices are demanded whenever the government shows interest.

5. I donated copies of all documents I found to the office of CWMG until it was closed in 1994. All those documents, as well as articles on Gandhi in American periodicals and books, are in my collection at the Nehru Memorial Museum. I have sent copies of most of the documents to the National Archives of India, National Gandhi Museum in New Delhi and the Gandhi archives at the Harijan Ashram in Ahmedabad.