Rajmohan Gandhiਰਾਜਮੋਹਨ ਗਾਂਧੀ

Early life

Rajmohan Gandhi was born in New Delhi on 7 August 1935. His father, Devdas Gandhi, was the managing editor of the Hindustan Times, and his mother was Lakshmi Gandhi. His grandfathers were two of the most consequential men in modern Indian history: on his father's side, Mahatma Gandhi, and on his mother's side, C. Rajagopalachari, the last Governor-General of India. He grew up in a household where politics, journalism and public service were daily conversation.

He was educated at St Stephen's College, University of Delhi. His brothers also became public figures: Ramchandra Gandhi, the philosopher, and Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the diplomat and governor. He married Usha, and they have two children.

Journalism and public life

Gandhi began as a journalist. In 1964 he co-founded the weekly Himmat in Bombay and was its Editor-in-Chief until 1981. From 1985 to 1987 he was Resident Editor of The Indian Express in Madras. He was associated with Initiatives of Change, formerly Moral Re-Armament, from 1956, served as its president in 2009 and 2010, and helped build its Asia Plateau centre at Panchgani.

Politics followed. He was a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament, from 1990 to 1992, and in 1990 he led the Indian delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva. In 1989 he contested the Lok Sabha seat of Amethi for the Janata Dal against Rajiv Gandhi and lost. In 2014 he joined the Aam Aadmi Party and contested East Delhi, again without success. He also convened an all-party parliamentary committee on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

Historian and biographer

It is as a historian and biographer that Gandhi made his lasting reputation. He was a research professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi from 1992 to 2000, and then research professor at the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1997 to 2022. He also taught at IIT Bombay and Michigan State University, and is a scholar in residence at IIT Gandhinagar.

His books are mostly lives and histories of the people who made modern India. The Rajaji Story, in two volumes (1978 and 1984), became Rajaji: A Life in 1997. Patel: A Life (1990) is the standard biography of Vallabhbhai Patel, Mohandas (2006) is his life of his grandfather, Ghaffar Khan (2004) tells the story of the nonviolent Pakhtun leader, and A Tale of Two Revolts (2009) compares the Indian rising of 1857 with the American Civil War. Earlier books include Eight Lives (1986) and Understanding the Muslim Mind (1987), and later came Modern South India (2018).

What is his Punjab history about?

In 2013 Gandhi published Punjab: A History from Aurangzeb to Mountbatten, the first major single-volume history of undivided Punjab, from the death of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1707 to the Partition of 1947. The book follows Punjab through the collapse of Mughal authority, the rise of the Sikhs, the kingdom of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, British rule and the freedom struggle, and ends with a chapter on divided Punjab and the future of Punjabiyat. It is the book that connects him most directly to the Kosh, and it has its own entry here.

The book's starting point was personal. Gandhi was eleven when Partition happened, and he writes in the preface that his first awareness of Punjab came in 1945, when three Punjabi officers of the Indian National Army, a Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh, were tried for treason by the British. A visit to Lahore some fifty years later deepened the interest into a book.

Honours and later life

Rajaji: A Life won the Sahitya Akademi Award for writing in English. Mohandas won the Indian History Congress Biennial Award in 2007, and in 2004 the City of Champaign, Illinois, gave him its International Humanitarian Award. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Calgary, Obirin University in Tokyo, Liverpool Hope University, Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar and Michigan State University.

He has also served as a jury member for the Nuremberg International Human Rights Award and as co-chair of the Centre for Dialogue and Reconciliation in Gurgaon. He continues to write and teach from the United States and India.