Handwritten speech by Gandhi goes on sale

WASHINGTON: A US collector and seller of historical documents has announced the sale of what it is saying could be the last publicly available piece of writing by Mahatma Gandhi in hand.

It’s a transcript of a speech he delivered at a prayer meeting on January 22, 1948, his first after breaking his famous fast to forge Hindu-muslim comity in the aftermath of the partition and the riots that had followed on either side of the border. Gandhi was assassinated 8 days later.

Raab Collection, the seller is a well recognised entity that has sold Gandhi documents before, said in the announcement made on Thursday, “Our research cannot find any example in Gandhi’s hand, whether letter, manuscript, or document, dated after this one having reached the public market. This may well be the last thing Gandhi ever wrote in private hands.”

It’s going for $110,000.

The note was described as a manuscript of his January 22 speech with edits by him made before its publication. It’s not, however, the whole speech, but a fragment of it and is written on “scrap paper”. It is undated but Raab Collection said it if from after January 22, when the speech was delivered, “so in the last 8 days of his life”.

In the manuscript, Gandhi wrote that a friend had written to him that although “Pandit Nehru and other ministers and the officials might lodge some refugees in their houses, that would not even touch the fringe of the refugee problem”.