Nov 25 2025 to Nov 25 2025 6:30 p.m.

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

The Dawn of Life, Prabhudas Gandhi’s newly translated memoir, takes us into Gandhi’s earliest ashram circles in South Africa, spaces where the foundations of satyagraha, self-reliance, and moral discipline were first being tested and shaped. Written by his young grandnephew who lived alongside him at Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm, the memoir restores an intimate and often overlooked chapter of Gandhian history.

Translated into English for the first time by Hemang Ashwinkumar, who was awarded the 2024–25 New India Foundation Translation Fellowship, this edition brings back into public view the Gandhi family’s formative influence on the man who would go on to reshape a nation.

This session brings together translator Hemang Ashwinkumar and Nandini Nair of the New India Foundation for a conversation on recovering lost histories, the craft of translation, and the contemporary relevance of Prabhudas’s voice. The panel delves into the human side of Gandhi’s formative years, shared labour and domestic routines, debates on diet and brahmacharya, experiments in simplicity, and the quiet discipline that shaped a philosophy. Through Prabhudas’s affectionate, humorous, and sharply observed recollections, we encounter a Gandhi who is exacting yet tender, fallible yet searching, always in the process of becoming.

The discussion will explore the journey of transforming a handwritten ashram chronicle, first serialized in Madhpudo (The Beehive) and later published as Jeevan nu Parodh, into a contemporary English edition. Hemang reflects on the challenge and responsibility of reviving a family archive that is at once literary, historical, intimate, and political.

This event offers a rare opportunity to meet Gandhi before the mythology, through the eyes of someone who knew him long before the world did. It reminds us that great philosophies often begin in the smallest details of daily life, shaped quietly, persistently, and with deep conviction.

The session will conclude with a Q&A session with the audience.

In collaboration with:

Speakers

Hemang Ashwinkumar
Bilingual Poet, Translator & Editor
Hemang Ashwinkumar is a bilingual poet, translator, editor and cultural critic working with Gujarati and English. His Gujarati translation of Marathi poetry and English translation of contemporary Gujarati poetry are collected in Anuvidhan (2010) and Poetic Refractions…(2013). His Gujarati reworkings of Arun Kolatkar’s English poetry collections Kala Ghoda Kavyo (2020), Sarpa Satra (2021) and Jejuri (2024) have been critically acclaimed. Penguin Random House published his translations of Gujarati Dalit writer Dalpat Chauhan’s novel Vultures (2022) and collection of his short stories titled Fear and Other Stories (2023). Hemang received New India Foundation’s Translation Fellowship to translate The Dawn of Life (2025), the memoir of Prabhudas Gandhi, M. K. Gandhi’s grandnephew. His forthcoming books include a scholarly monograph Translating the Translated: Poetics and Politics of Literary Translation in India and memoirs of Gujarati poet-painter Gulammohammed Sheikh and Dalit writer-activist Chandu Maheria, titled On the Way Home and The Mayor’s Bungalow respectively. Hemang is a Writer-in-Residence at The Sangam House, Bangalore in 2025.

Nandini Nair
Associate Director, New India Foundation & Literary Journalist
Nandini Nair is with the New India Foundation, a unique non-profit organisation that supports nonfiction books and authors. She has worked as a literary journalist and culture editor for two decades with leading publications such as Open Magazine, The Indian Express and The Hindu.