Once in a while comes a book that manages to recreate a time and place that do not exist anymore in such sumptuous glory that you come away feeling a sense of longing and nostalgia for an era that you never experienced first-hand. The Prince of Gujarat by Rajmohan Gandhi is one such. It may very well pass off as an extremely detailed historic fiction bestseller.
The book starts with a general summary of Darbar Gopaldas Desai’s life and the necessity for recounting his nearly forgotten story, after which the author recounts the feudal climate of late 19th century Khatiawad and Saurashtra, now Gujarat.
Reconstructing a forgotten hero’s life is an extremely hard task. While national figures like Nehru and Gandhi have left a lot of their memories and thoughts in written documentation, a comparatively regional figure like Darbar, especially one who shunned personal glory and put the progress of the collective ahead of himself at almost every turn possible, is hard to research and write about. Especially when very little of his correspondence and writing remain.
Placed in this precarious position, the author has put in considerable effort to stitch a cohesive narrative together from whatever letters, personal memories, historical records or even plays and novels that remain, while always being clear and making distinctions on which are the facts, what are the sources and what his assumptions are.
When reading some incidents and anecdotes in the book—such as the time Darbar brings money lenders and indebted farmers together or the time when freedom fighter Gopaldas chooses to step away from power and like the charioteer Krishna, mentors men who go on to become great leaders—one cannot help but rue the fact that the moral vision that Gopaldas and many of his freedom fighter contemporaries had seems to have been wiped out in our present political system populated by clannish, thuggish leaders.
It is a sad thing indeed that more men like the noble, strong and honest Darbar Gopaldas Desai are not around to think ahead of the times and lead us to a better and more egalitarian future. The author admires his subject just a tiny-little-bit too much in a handful of places, and though there are quite a few forced and thinly veiled attempts to compare Gopaldas Desai with our controversial Prime Minister, these digressions hardly matter.
The book is a delight to read, entirely accessible to those completely unacquainted with its subject and setting, and stands apart for the vast amount of research and passion that has gone into its creation.