Tushar Gandhi
Author & the Great-Grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and Kasturba Gandhi
CMG Speaks presents Tushar Gandhi
Tushar Gandhi
Author & the Great-Grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and Kasturba Gandhi
"The humility that Shrimadji instilled in Bapu, raised an ordinary man to the level of a Mahatma."
- Tushar Gandhi
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About Tushar Gandhi
Tushar Arun Gandhi (born 17 January 1960) is the son of journalist Arun Manilal Gandhi, grandson of Manilal Gandhi and great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi.
Born on a train between Mumbai and Kolkata, Tushar Gandhi was raised in Mumbai. He studied at Adarsh Vinay Mandir, a local Gujarati-medium school. He holds a diploma in printing from the Government Institute of Printing Technology, Mumbai. He is best known for having established in 1998 in Vadodara, Gujarat the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation. It is now located in Mumbai (and he is still its President). Since 1996, he has served as the President of the Lok Seva Trust, an NGO established by Dr. Kanti Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi in central Bombay in the mid-1950s for the welfare to textile-mill labourers. In 2000, Tushar Gandhi portrayed himself in a fictional Bollywood movie directed by Kamal Hassan, “Hey Ram,” and in 2009 he did likewise in a semi-fictional movie, “Road to Sangam,” based on an episode in his own life. A nonfiction book by him, Let’s Kill Gandhi, was published in 2007 and became for a few weeks a best seller in India. In 2008 he was appointed Chairman of the Australian Indian Rural Development Foundation (AIRDF). In March 2005, he led the 75th-anniversary re-enactment of the Dandi March. From 2007 to 2012, he was the Goodwill Ambassador of the CISRI-ISP Intergovernmental Institution for the use of Micro algae Spirulina Against Malnutrition. In 2018 he played a significant role in petitioning successfully the Supreme Court of India to direct the states and Union Territories to comply with its orders to curb cow-vigilante lynch mobs. In 2019 Tushar Gandhi became a Director of the Gandhi Research Foundation in Jalgaon, Maharashtra. And in 2023, Tushar Gandhi was appointed as the Ambassador for “Return to Palestine”.
He is the author of “Let’s Kill Gandhi” (Rupa Books; 2007) and “The Lost Diary of Kastur, My Ba” (HarperCollins India; 2022). Gandhi lives in Mumbai with his wife, Sonal Desai and two children, a son Vivan Gandhi and daughter Kasturi Gandhi. Kasturi was so named after Kasturba Gandhi.
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Works by Tushar Gandhi
"The Lost Diary of Kastur, My Ba" (2022)
A couple of years ago, the staff of Gandhi Research Foundation of Jalgaon found a deteriorating and damaged diary at Kasturba Ashram, Indore. It turned out to be a 135-page diary written by Kasturba Gandhi, from January to September 1933. Somewhat like Kasturba, her diary lay forgotten and neglected. This book is a reproduction of the diary, accompanied by a transcription of what she has written in Gujarati, along with an English translation by her great-grandson, Tushar Gandhi. All her life, Kasturba was considered uneducated and unlettered. Initially, when Tushar Gandhi spoke about the diary to family members, they refused to believe that there could be such a thing: ‘She was illiterate. She could not write.’ As Tushar read Kasturba’s diary, this assumption was dispelled. It provided a glimpse into who she was-an individual, a companion, and a satyagrahi in her own right, unlettered but astute.
In The Lost Diary of Kastur, My Ba, the reader gets to hear from Kasturba, in her own words, for the first time. Through day-to-day activities, it provides a peek into what it was like to be married to the ‘Mahatma’. Here was a woman who was witnessing history being made, observing and understanding the process, and participating in it, too. It also tells of her two imprisonments that year, not because she was Bapu’s spouse but because she was offering satyagraha herself. A century and a half after her birth, this book finally presents Kasturba as her own person, a woman of substance.
"Let's Kill Gandhi" (2007)
On 30 January 1948, Mahatma Gandhi, father of a newly liberated Indian Nation, was murdered by a Hindu extremist. Since then, many lies have been passed off as truths; half-truths have been mixed with true incidents and passed off as whole truths. ‘Gandhi was responsible for the Partition’; ‘Gandhi favoured Muslims and abandoned Hindus’; ‘Killing Gandhi was the only way to save Hindu India’; ‘Murdering Gandhi was an act of Patriotism’; ‘Gandhi gifted ₹55 Crores (₹550 Million) to Pakistan’—these were, and even today are, some of the statements propagated by Hindu extremist organizations and worshippers of Godse, the murderer.
This book is written to put the facts straight. Written by Gandhi’s great-grandson Tushar Gandhi, Let’s Kill Gandhi! deals with facts gleaned from a lot of verbal history, books, archival material, the records of the murder trial and investigations, books are written by the defence lawyers and judges, newspaper reports, the report of the JL Kapur Commission of Inquiry, and what Tushar grew up hearing in the family. Never in the history of political murders has such a nexus of human errors, procedural foul-ups, and sheer apathy colluded to allow a bunch of bungling amateurs to succeed so easily. This book is a chronicle of the conspiracy that goes beyond Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s murderer.
Works by Tushar Gandhi
