Mahatma Gandhi | Wikimedia Commons
The American writer, Louis Fischer, is best known for his book,
The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, which Richard Attenborough drew upon while making his award-winning film of 1982. Fischer’s book was published in 1950, two years after Gandhi’s assassination. Eight years previously, he had written a much slimmer (and now far less well known) volume titled
A Week with Gandhi. This was based on a visit Fischer made to India in the summer of 1942, in the course of which he had conversations with Ambedkar, Savarkar and Jinnah in the great city of Bombay, before travelling to Sevagram to speak with that village’s most famous resident.
A peek into Mahatma Gandhi’s mailbox
Most Gandhian scholars are aware of the exhaustive Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG) running into 97 volumes and published between 1958 and 1994. They consist of letters, articles, and speeches written or made by Bapu during his lifetime.
But in the quite preserve of the Sabarmati Ashram Conservation and Preservation Trust, there are some 8,500 letters that Bapu had retained during his lifetime. These were the letters he had received. The Navajivan Trust, a publication set up by Bapu, has published the second volume of ‘Letters to Gandhi’ consisting of 281letters written to him between 1901 and 1910. The first volume published in 2017 consisted of 312 letters (1890 to 1900) that were written to him while he was corresponding with a staggering range of public figures in South Africa.