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411. Rediscovery of a Lost Gandhi
Hemang Ashwinkumar with Nandini Nair
Speakers
Meet Mohandas: experimenting, debating, and testing the ideas that would later define him as Mahatma.
This conversation around The Dawn of Life, Prabhudas Gandhi’s newly translated memoir, returns us to the ashram circles of South Africa, where Gandhi was still shaping the ideals that would one day define him.
Translated into English for the first time by Hemang Ashwinkumar, recipient of the 2024–25 New India Foundation Translation Fellowship, the book revives a family archive both historical and deeply personal. Written by his young grandnephew who lived alongside him at Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm, the memoir offers an intimate portrait of shared labour and domestic routines, debates on diet and brahmacharya, experiments in simplicity, and the quiet discipline that shaped a philosophy. Here, Gandhi appears exacting yet tender, fallible yet searching, and alive in the small routines that forged his philosophy.
In conversation with Nandini Nair of the New India Foundation, Hemang reflects on recovering overlooked histories and carrying a handwritten chronicle into the present; opening a rare window onto Gandhi in the making. The session will conclude with an audience Q&A.
In collaboration with:
In this episode of BIC Talks, Hemang Ashwinkumar is in a conversation with Nandini Nair. This is an excerpt from a conversation that took place in the BIC premises in Nov 2025.
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Speakers
Hemang Ashwinkumar
Hemang Ashwinkumar is a bilingual poet, translator, editor, and cultural critic working in Gujarati and English. His translations include Anuvidhan (2010), Poetic Refractions (2013), and acclaimed Gujarati reworkings of Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Kavyo (2020), Sarpa Satra (2021), and Jejuri (2024). Penguin Random House has published his translations of Dalpat Chauhan’s Vultures (2022) and Fear and Other Stories (2023). A New India Foundation Translation Fellow for The Dawn of Life (2025), he also has forthcoming works including Translating the Translated and memoirs of Gulammohammed Sheikh and Chandu Maheria. He is Writer-in-Residence at Sangam House in 2025.
Nandini Nair
Nandini Nair works with the New India Foundation, a distinctive non-profit supporting nonfiction books and authors. A literary journalist and culture editor for two decades, she has shaped conversations around writing, publishing, and contemporary culture through her work at Open Magazine, The Indian Express, and The Hindu. Her extensive experience across reportage, criticism, and editorial leadership continues to inform her engagement with emerging and established nonfiction voices in India.
