Former visiting Fellow sheds new light on Gandhi

The previously untold story of one of Mahatma Gandhi’s closest friends and early influences, Dr Pranjivan Mehta, has been brought to light by a former international visiting academic at St John’s College.

The Mahatma and the Doctor, written by Indian historian Sri Ram Mehrotra, is a newly-published book based on a collection of letters exchanged between Gandhi and Mehta that Professor Mehrotra spent over ten years researching and translating from the original Gujarati. The letters reveal that Gandhi’s book Hind Swaraj was an almost exact account of the conversations he had with Mehta in 1909 while staying at the Westminster Palace Hotel in London.

Professor Mehrotra’s research also indicates that Mehta, rather than Tagore, was the first to credit Gandhi with the title of ‘Mahatma’, in a letter of 1909. Mehta also encouraged and assisted Gandhi in his return to India and his quest for Indian independence. Despite Mehta’s prodigious influence on Gandhi’s life and work, very little had been written about him until this point.

Professor Mehrotra said: “Not even a two-page article had been written about Dr Mehta in the last hundred years. I thought I owed it to him and to history to write a biography of him. After struggling for ten years, I have been able to tell his hitherto-untold story. Mehta was the first to recognise Gandhi as the future liberator of India.”

“Besides telling the story of Dr Pranjivan Mehta, this book also opens a small window on the life of Gandhi which had remained closed so far.”

Sri Ram Mehrotra first came to Cambridge from India in 1960, to present a paper at a seminar held by Professor Nicholas Mansergh, then Fellow and later Master of St John’s College. This connection led to Professor Mehrotra becoming a Visiting Fellow at St John’s in 1983, before returning to India to take up teaching positions at various universities.

Recalling his time at St John’s, Professor Mehrotra said: “The year that I spent at Cambridge was very fruitful, and the University is superb. I would not have been able to write my History of the Indian National Congress had I not gone to Cambridge.”

The Mahatma and the Doctor is published by Vakils, Feffer and Simons. A copy is available in the College Library, housed in the Johnian Collection.