Remembering Pyarelal: Mahatma Gandhi's Secretary and Biographer

D C Jha

Thirty-Four years after Mahatma Gandhi's martyrdom in January 1948, his life-long Secretary and Biographer Pyarelal passed away in October 1982. In an editorial obituary, one of the national newspapers of India recorded the sad event as “passing away of Gandhi's Boswell".

This volume is the collection of tributes that were paid to Pyarelal by friends, colleagues and admirers soon after he passed away in 1982. These were planned to be published, along with a short biography of Pyarelal by his sister Dr. Sushila Nayar, in the form of a memorial volume.

Due to unforeseen circumstances however the planned memorial volume remained unpublished for all these long and many years. At the initiative of D.C. Jha, the compiler and the editor of this book, it was published in 2012 by the National Gandhi Museum.

D C Jha D.C. Jha, the compiler and editor of this volume, was brought up in one of the Gandhi Ashrams near Kolkata where Mahatma Gandhi used to stay during his visits to Bengal and Assam. For almost a decade D.C. Jha worked with Pyarelal on his project of multi-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi. Later he worked with his sister Dr. Sushila Nayar for another decade, first as her Secreatry in the Health Ministry and later as the Project Administrator of Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, which Dr. Sushila Nayar was establishing at Sevagram.

After retirement in 1990, D.C. Jha published his book 'Mahatma Gandhi: the Congress and the Partition of India' in 1995, which was translated and published in Hindi, Marathi, Bengali and Gujarati edition as well.