Prized Possession

Diplomatic pressure forced Christie’s to cancel the auction of Gandhi’s last letter and hand it over to the Indian Government

The letter, an impassioned plea for tolerance towards Muslims, has been on the auction circuit for years but seemed to have escaped notice until London’s biggest auction house announced the lineup for its July 3 sale of the Albin Schram collection of autographed letters. Schram, the most well known collector of autographed letters, had acquired this segment of Indian history at a Christie’s auction in 2002. The letter, estimated between £9,000 (Rs 7.3 lakh approximately) and £12,000 (Rs 9.7 lakh) had previously been sold at a London auction in 1994.

HIS LAST

JUNE 4: Christie’s puts up the letter, a 472-word document written on seven small pages, as one of the 570 rare documents from the collection of Albin Schram to be auctioned on July 3. The letter was expected to fetch between £9,000 and £12,000. JUNE 27: With barely a week to go until the auction, the Indian Government wakes up, with the Culture Ministry informing the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library to take necessary steps to bring back the letter, with the high commission in London being asked to facilitate the operation. JUNE 29: India ponders slapping Christie’s with a legal notice, on the grounds that the copyright for all of Gandhi’s writings lay with the Navjivan Trust in Ahmedabad, and thus Schram’s ownership of the letter was illegal. JULY 2: The letter is withdrawn from the auction so that India may acquire it. The letter now rests with the Indian High Commission in London

It was only in June 2007 that the Indian Government was forced into action following a national outcry to reclaim this important manuscript. The Government initially declared that it would not interfere with the sale. An Indian High Commission spokesperson in London had earlier said if an NRI would like to purchase it for India that was probably the best way to get it back to the country of its origin. But on July 2, just a day before it was to go under the hammer, Christie’s confirmed that the executors of Albin Schram had agreed to withdraw the Gandhi manuscript from the auction so that it may be acquired by the Indian Government. External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee indicated that some money could have been paid for acquiring the manuscript. “That is part of negotiation,” he said in Delhi.

The high commission spokesperson confirmed: “The letter is now in the custody of the Government of India. The terms of negotiation require us to keep the details confidential.” Amin Jaffer, international director of Asian art at Christie’s, added: “We are pleased to have facilitated the negotiations which have resulted in an important historical record returning to India.” The letter is likely to go to the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, an autonomous body under the Ministry of Culture.

The manuscript, signed M.K. Gandhi, is a draft of an article titled Urdu Harijan with a number of emendations and cancellations on versos of paper bearing a typed memorandum addressed to Gandhi on the subject of food distribution. In the letter dated January 11, 1948, Gandhi announces his regret at having to discontinue the publication of his mouthpiece, Harijan, in the Urdu script, though he sees it as inevitable because of the dwindling demand. The manuscript records Gandhi as writing: “The dwindle was to me a sign of resentment against its publication... My view remains unalterable especially at this critical juncture in our history. It is wrong to ruffle Muslim or any other person’s feeling when there is no question of ethics.” He urges Indians to learn Urdu script. “The limitations of this script in terms of perfection are many. But for elegance and grace, it will equal any script in the world,” Gandhi writes. He says that any suggestion of a boycott of the Urdu script is a “wanton affront upon Muslims of the Union who in the eyes of many Hindus have become aliens in their own land. This is copying the bad manners of Pakistan with a vengeance”.

The other 569 lots of the Christie’s auction were also made up of rare gems linked with figures of European history from the 13th to the 20th centuries and sold for a record £3,832,488.

-By Aditi Khanna

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