New Delhi: ‘The Lost Diary of Kastur, My Ba’, is a reproduction of a rare diary by Mahatma Gandhi’s wife Kasturba Gandhi found rather fortuitously at an Indore ashram a few years ago.
It is being published as a book, by her great-grandson Tushar Gandhi, and has her original thoughts in Gujarati, accompanied by an English translation.
Published by HarperCollins India, the book will be released on 24 June on Softcover, ThePrint’s online venue to launch non-fiction books.
The old and damaged diary was found by the staff of Jalgaon’s Gandhi Research Foundation in the Kasturba Ashram in Indore a couple of years ago. On carefully studying it, and to everyone’s surprise, it was discovered to be Kasturba’s diary, written by her.
The foundation restored and preserved it, apart from digitising the pages before handing over the original diary to the Kasturba Ashram.
Tushar Gandhi seized upon the idea to bring it out as a book “to dispel many myths” about his Ba, though some in his family told him the diary must have been authored by someone else since Kasturba was “unlettered”.
The book is an almost day-to-day account of an extremely tumultuous nine-month period of Kasturba Gandhi’s life, from January to September 1933.
In 1930 — before leaving on the Dandi March — Mahatma declared he was leaving Sabarmati Ashram and would return only after achieving complete freedom for India. Kasturba became homeless and led the life of a nomad for the next few years.
This was also the time when most of Kasturba’s immediate family members, and she herself, were continuously in and out of jail. Among them was her husband, their three sons, Manilal, Ramdas and Devadas and also other relatives, apart from members of the Ashram family. Kasturba and Mahatma Gandhi rarely saw or met each other during this time.
“When I first informed my family about the discovery of the diary, some dismissed it as a myth; ‘Ba could not write,’ they said. When I insisted that the diary was authentic, I was told, ‘Someone else must have written what she said. Ba could not write; she was unlettered.’ But I am certain this diary has definitely been written by Ba. The reason I reproduce it in book form is to dispel many myths about Kastur Kapadia Gandhi, my Ba,” the author writes.
“This is a diary written by a person who has limitations regarding the written language, and who utilises the colloquial, spoken dialect of Kathiyavad, even while writing. This is how someone who was not conventionally educated, who was not a trained or dedicated diarist, who had a limited vocabulary, could write. It is very repetitive, but its importance lies in the fact that it provides a tiny but intimate glimpse of a person time has ignored. What is more important is that the glimpse is not someone else’s interpretation of Kastur — woman, wife, mother, courageous individual — it is in her own words. It displays her rustic wisdom, her remarkable simplicity and her voluntary invisibility. For the first time, Kastur reveals herself. That is the importance of this gem of a discovery by those at Gandhi Research Foundation,” Tushar adds.
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