Scorching Love: Letters from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to His Son Devadas

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This book addresses for the most part, for the first time, Gandhi's letters to his youngest son, Devadas from 1914, when father and son were both in South Africa to 1948, when they were both in Delhi, the capital of free India where within days of the last letter Gandhi was assassinated. Gandhi wrote these letters by day, he wrote them by night, he wrote them from aboard trains, steamers, both right and left hands being pressed into service to rest one when tired out. The letters span three decades during which the writer grew from being a fighter for the rights of Indians in South Africa to being hailed as Father of the Nation by millions in India and opposed by many as well including the man who felled him by three bullets fired at point blank range on 30 January. 1948. The letters hold his aspirations for his son and for his nation. They bear great love and they also scorch. And we see Devadas, the recipient of the letters, move in them from compliant childhood and youth, to adulthood, questioning and remonstrating with his father and being just the independent son his father wants him to be.

The birth in Durban on 22 May 1900 of Devadas, the last of their children, was not without some drama for Kasturba and Mohandas. The husband had, typically, read up a Gujarati self-instructor on childbirth so as to be prepared to 'do it himself should the need arise. And, again typically with him, the need did arise for his self-taught, self-propelled expertise to be put to deft and timely use. The doctor and the midwife failed to show up. The father-to-be became an obstetrician and successfully so. Kastur, who had been through four childbirths earlier, was not unfamiliar with labour. But she must have been hugely relieved when, that day, it was all over and done with. Perhaps she said 'never again' and thanked the Devas-Gods of home confinements.

The newborn was named Devadas, servant of God.

Only the previous day, with Kastur heavily gravid, Mohandas had been busy, drafting a felicitatory cable to Queen Victoria on the Monarch's 81st birthday and asking the Natal government to forward it to London. He did not forget to remit Pound 1 as transmission charges.

The big picture and the small detail, public work and home duties moved in concert with him, though not always in harmony. Kastur, more than anyone else, knew both the jarring and the blending notes. Unusual and unexpected turns, inter-laced with her husband's public commitments, back to back, were standard in her life, her home, her world-which was wrapped around by his.

'Home' and 'the world' were not different spheres for him. They stayed and moved together across continents, climes, and conditions many of them largely if not entirely of his making. These conditions included, very particularly, the fading away, in rapidly growing degrees, of the distinction between home and society, between his family and other families, between the future of his descendants and the future of others, persons, causes, and country.

He was surrounded by and soaked in 'family matters' throughout his life of nearly eight decades. Except, that is, for the three years that he spent in London-1888-1891-diligently studying Law and Latin, 'alone, no wife no parents... no children....master of his time'. And a similar spell in South Africa shortly thereafter-1893-1896-practicing his law learning and finding his Latin helpful in tackling the Colony's Dutch Roman law to defend his clients, almost all of Indian origin, in court and then through arguments and petitions for their political rights, addressed to the authorities, British and Boer.