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E.S. Reddy, the Gandhi-Reservoir

This essay is reprinted, with permission, from a volume of essays in tribute to E.S. Reddy, edited by Jairam Reddy and Selvan Naidoo, and published by MicroMega in Durban.

A future biographer of E.S. Reddy would demarcate three phases of his life; his childhood and youth in south India, growing up amidst the fervour of the freedom struggle led by Gandhi and the Indian National Congress; his professional work with the United Nations in New York, when he did so much to co-ordinate and direct the international campaign against apartheid, while befriending many South African freedom-fighters in exile, among them the great Oliver Tambo; and his life after retirement from the UN, when, in his 70s and 80s, he was acknowledged as perhaps the most learned (as well as certainly the most selfless) of Gandhi scholars.

These three phases, were, of course, overlapping; with the Indian patriot influencing his work as an anti-apartheid campaigner and both deeply informing the research he did and the books he wrote on Gandhi and his legacy.

I myself got to know Mr Reddy some years after he had retired from the UN, and was now devoting himself more or less full-time to Gandhi. In the late 1990s I visited New York,

— source thewire.in | Ramachandra Guha | 14/May/2022

Nullius in verba