Bombay Governor’s interview

MR Benarsi Das Chaturvedi has rendered public service of no mean value by unearthing and placing before the people of India the account published in an Australian newspaper of an interview which an Australian journalist had with retiring Governor of Bombay a year and a half after Mahatma Gandhi’s imprisonment. It is a document of great human interest, and its publication is particularly opportune at the present time, when a section of the community in western India is greatly exercised over the question of the present address to Sir George Lloyd. The journalist himself did not disclose the name of the official whom he had interviewed, but it is impossible to think of anyone in India who, after reading the account, will have a moment’s doubt as to the official’s identity. The very description of the official as “the man who more than anyone else in India was responsible for the Mahatma’s arrest” would be all but decisive to most people, while the words attributed respectively to the official and Mahatmaji remove the last lingering doubt. Let it be said at once that the interview gives a faithful picture of the Mahatma, as his countrymen know him. Of the two interviews which took place between him and Sir Lloyd and of which the interviewer gives an account in the words of the latter, the public in India knew nothing till now, but it has no difficulty in believing that the report of what transpired at the interviews is substantially correct. As for Sir Lloyd, no one, of course, could have painted him better than himself, and there is no reason to imagine that his picture of himself has lost any part of its beauty in the process of reproduction by an obviously disinterested writer.  

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#Mahatma Gandhi