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The significance of Mani Bhavan, Mahatma Gandhi’s Mumbai residence from 1917 to 1934, became clear to me on my first day in India. On a work trip with only half a day free to explore, I took the advice of an Indian friend in London and hired a guide with a car. “We’ll go to Mani Bhavan,” he announced, as he steered his dusty saloon from my hotel’s forecourt into the sun-dazzled traffic of the ever-expanding metropolis.
Gandhi’s advocacy of nonviolent resistance led to India’s 1947 independence from British rule and inspired generations of activists and leaders, including Martin Luther King. As Usha Thakkar, a political scientist and the museum’s president, wrote in Gandhi in Bombay, a book co-authored with Sandhya Mehta: “Gandhi’s important nationwide movements were intertwined with the life of this city and its people. Gandhi was full of energy and the city brimming with vibrancy.”
Mani Bhavan stands at 19 Laburnum Road in Gamdevi, a pedestrian-friendly district of south Mumbai. The house, sheltered by ashoka and mango trees and besieged by a spirited chorus of parrots and cuckoos, stands about 500 metres from Mumbai’s glitzy seafront. It was probably built in 1915-16, according to Thakkar, by Revashankar Jagjeevan Jhaveri, a diamond merchant — Mani Bhavan translates as Jewel House — who was the elder brother of Dr Pranjivan Mehta, a close friend of Gandhi’s. Jhaveri offered Gandhi a room and hospitality at Mani Bhavan, which became the Mumbai base for his activism.
After entering through the museum’s heavy teak doors, I was fascinated by the ground-floor collection of stamps honouring Gandhi from such countries as Hungary, the US and the Soviet Union, as well as by the 40,000-volume research library where travellers are invited to read and rest while ceiling fans gently circulate the comforting smell of old books.
Over his lifetime Gandhi wrote more than 31,000 letters, many seeking support for India’s struggle for freedom. Framed examples on the first floor include missives to Leo Tolstoy and Franklin D Roosevelt. Thakkar’s favourite exhibit is Gandhi’s letter to Rabindranath Tagore, the poet who became the first non-European winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, written on January 3 1932, one day before Gandhi’s arrest at Mani Bhavan by the colonial authorities.
I was struck by the warmth of his words — “I am just stretching my tired limbs on the mattress and as I try to steal a wink of sleep I think of you” — despite the two men’s disagreements about the path to independence.
The heart of Mani Bhavan is “Gandhi’s room” on the second floor, on your left as you mount the stairs. A glassed-off doorway reveals a mattress on the floor and other basic furnishings. Only the telephone is original; among the evocative replicas are several charkhas, the cotton-spinning mechanisms that became an icon of India’s independence movement. It was from a visitor to Mani Bhavan that Gandhi first learnt to card, or prepare cotton for spinning.
A white-and-blue tiled balcony, accessed via the hall, offers a different view into Gandhi’s room, and an opportunity for visitors to close their eyes and imagine the crowds that once gathered below to glimpse him.
Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, the year after India’s independence.
When Martin Luther King visited Mumbai in 1959, he slept at Mani Bhavan. Thakkar’s responsibilities today include welcoming a steady stream of dignitaries, including Barack and Michelle Obama in 2010, who brought a stone from King’s Washington memorial.
But it’s the littlest visitors who particularly sustain her enthusiasm. “The young children ask me if Gandhi was also a naughty boy,” she told me. “Or they stand before his cut-out here and say ‘Hi, Gandhiji!’ They bring their own questions, and their own laughter.”
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