Narayan Desai, son of Mahatma Gandhi’s personal secretary and biographer Mahadevbhai Desai and former chancellor of prestigious Gandhi institute, Gujarat Vidyapith, passed away on Sunday. The nonagenarian was known for ‘Gandhi Katha’ that he had started in 2004 with an aim to spread the message of Mahatma Gandhi. The content of ‘Katha’ has also been complied in form of a book.
Desai was brought up in Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram and Sevagram near Wardha. He had dropped out of school to be educated and trained by his father and other residents of the Ashram. He had specialised in basic education, spinning and weaving Khadi.
After his marriage to Uttara Chaudhury, daughter of freedom fighter parents Nabakrushna Chaudhury and Malatidevi Chaudhury, the young couple moved to Vedchhi, a tribal village 60 km from Surat in Gujarat, to work as teachers in a Nai Taleem school. Following the Bhoodan (land gift) movement launched by Vinoba Bhave, he traversed walking across Gujarat in order to provide land to landless farmers. He also started the mouthpiece of Bhoodan movement, Bhoomiputra (Son of the Soil) and edited it till 1959.
He joined the Akhil Bharatiya Shanti Sena Mandal (Indian Peace Brigade), founded by Vinoba and headed by veteran socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan and also became general secretary of the Shanti Sena. Desai was involved in the setting up of Peace Brigades International and was elected as the chairman of the War Resisters’ International. He along with a Pakistani peace group was awarded the UNESCO prize for International Peace.
Narayanbhai was active in the campaign against the imposition of emergency in India and brought out a magazine defying the censorship laws. As a close associate of JP, he played an important role in helping the newly-formed Janata Party, a conglomeration of major non-Congress political parties in India.