Jigna mehta biography of mahatma

The previously untold story of one of Mahatma Gandhi’s closest friends and early influences, Dr Pranjivan Mehta, has been brought to light by a former international visiting academic at St John’s College.

The Mahatma and the Doctor, written by Indian historian Sri Ram Mehrotra, is a newly-published book based on a collection of letters exchanged between Gandhi and Mehta that Professor Mehrotra spent over ten years researching and translating from the original Gujarati.

The letters reveal that Gandhi’s book Hind Swaraj was an almost exact account of the conversations he had with Mehta in while staying at the Westminster Palace Hotel in London.

Professor Mehrotra’s research also indicates that Mehta, rather than Tagore, was the first to credit Gandhi with the title of ‘Mahatma’, in a letter of Mehta also encouraged and assisted Gandhi in his return to India and his quest for Indian independence.

Despite Mehta’s prodigious influence on Gandhi’s life and work, very little had be