For 17 years, Mani Bhavan was Gandhi's Bombay home and nerve centre of the freedom movement.
Key Points
- Gandhi lived in Mani Bhavan during his frequent visits to Bombay.
- He launched two important satyagraha movements from here.
- Dr Martin Luther King slept in Gandhi's room when he visited India in 1959.
On a rain-washed day in the week of India's Independence Day, I went to Mani Bhavan, an elegant two-storied house which was the nerve-centre of Mahatma Gandhi's work in Bombay for 17 years.
The house lies at the beginning of a tree-lined avenue where you have to quickly get off because the narrow road with cars parked on one side leaves just about space for only one vehicle to pass by.
The road is named after its trees -- Laburnum or Amaltash, the tree whose cascade of yellow flowers can lift up the dullest of days.
A few years ago, some netas wanted to rename the road because of its colonial sounding name. Rightfully, the demand was rejected and the politicians informed that the road was not named after some Britisher who ruled India, but trees that can be seen in many parts of India!
Laburnum Road got to keep its name drawing its fame from a home built in the early 1900s owned by Revashankar Jhaveri. It is here that Gandhi lived and worked whenever he was in Bombay between 1917 and 1934.
A house with the best collection of Gandhi pictures
A classic stone plaque on the front wall gives a crisp description in neat, elegant lettering -- a far cry from the gold and granite fixation that now defines all government and official plaques, from new airports to train stations, inaugurations and museums.
On that road Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and many stalwarts of the freedom movement walked, climbed up and down those wooden steps leading to the room where Gandhi worked and lived.
The walls of Mani Bhavan have perhaps some of the best collection of photographs of Gandhi with other leaders of the freedom movement.
Among them is a photograph of Gandhi and Kasturba sitting in a horse drawn carriage surrounded by a large crowd of people after disembarking at Apollo Bunder in 1915 off the Gateway of India on their arrival in India after spending 21 years in South Africa.
The Englishman who championed India's freedom
With the people who boarded a launch to meet Gandhi's steamer when he arrived in Bombay were J B Petit, Revashankar Jhaveri and B G Horniman, an Englishman.
Horniman after whom Horniman Circle in Fort, south Mumbai, is named was a great supporter of India's freedom movement and the first editor of the Bombay Chronicle, an anti-British paper founded by Pherozeshah Mehta.
Gandhi started his satyagraha against the Rowlatt Act from Mani Bhavan in 1919. The Act suppressed press freedom and Horniman joined the campaign alongside Gandhi.
He published a searing criticism of the Jallianwala massacre, a carnage whose repercussions shook the British empire. So enraged was the British government with his act of defiance despite press censorship that they deported him to England.
But Horniman returned in 1926 and continued to champion the cause of India's freedom. He started the Bombay Sentinel and co-founded Blitz. He made India his home and died in Bombay in 1948, nine months after Gandhiji's assassination.
Gandhi's spartan room lined by charkhas
During two of the most famous national movements against the British launched by Gandhi -- the Rowlatt Act and the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1932 -- Gandhi steered the campaigns from Mani Bhavan.
His sparse room on the second floor can be seen behind a glass screen. A small white mattress covered in white khadi on the floor, a wooden writing desk, hand fan, wooden slippers, a stand to keep an open book, hand-woven thread tied in a knot.
Gandhi would begin his day before dawn. He read the holy books, prayed, meditated and then sat down to answer his correspondence.
Books he read; letters to Tolstoy and Hitler
The ground floor has cupboards labeled 'Books read by Gandhi' with the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Ramcharitramanas and books by Leo Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, John Ruskin, Edward Gibbon, Y S Emerson and others.
In the museum are preserved correspondence between Gandhi and Tolstoy. The two never met, but Gandhi was deeply influenced by Tolstoy and had named the ashram in South Africa after him.
There is a letter to Adolf Hitler appealing to him to 'prevent a war that will reduce humanity to the savage state' and Gandhi's passport application as a 'British protected subject' applied in Bombay for his travel to London for the Round Table Conference.
Khadi, the coarse cloth that united a country
Two sides of the beautiful flower designed tiled room are lined by charkhas. Throughout his life Gandhi spent a minimum half hour everyday spinning khadi, the cloth worn by leaders, foot soldiers and ordinary people during the freedom movement.
The coarse cloth which was an article of faith and defiance against British textile mills that bought Indian cotton at cheap prices, shipped it to England and then sold the finished material in the Indian market for profit.
From every picture on the walls of Mani Bhavan, khadi can be seen as the cloth that wove and bound the leaders and the ordinary citizens alike. As light comes streaming in from the large windows, a door from Gandhi's room leads to a long balcony covered by leafy branches.
Another picture in the museum shows Gandhi, Nehru and other leaders of the freedom movement looking down from the same balcony. Visitors can literally stand in the footsteps of the men and women who brought us freedom here.
=
The early morning arrest
Gandhi was arrested from a tent pitched on the terrace of Mani Bhavan at 3 am on January 4, 1932. It was a day of silence. Miraben gave him his prison kit -- a portable charkha, a mattress, two handbags, a fruit basket, a pair of sandals and a bottle for milk.
Soon after the morning prayers, Gandhi was taken by car to Yerwada prison in Poona.
After his release, he returned to Bombay and worked on activities of the Congress Working Committee and devoted himself to working for the so-called untouchables.
In 1959, Dr Martin Luther King, the civil rights icon and a great admirer of Gandhi, slept in a cot next to Gandhi's mattress in the same room during his month-long visit to India.
'To other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim,' Dr King said at a press conference.
Then US President Barack Obama visited Mani Bhavan in 2010, and called Gandhi a hero of the world.
Einstein on Gandhi
As one enters or leaves Mani Bhavan, one has to go through a door above which hangs Albert Einstein's famous quote on Gandhi's 70th birthday: 'Generations to come may scarce believe that such a person in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.'
The words by arguably the most famous man of science have stood the test of time because nearly 80 years since his assassination, Gandhi remains inarguably the most famous Indian.
Photographs curated by Manisha Kotian/Rediff
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff
