I first met Enuga Sreenivasulu Reddy in New York in 1994. I was carrying an introduction from Gopalkrishna Gandhi, who had described him to...
I first met Enuga Sreenivasulu Reddy in New York in 1994. I was carrying an introduction from Gopalkrishna Gandhi, who had described him to me as a “great Gandhi-reservoir”. For the next 25 years I was witness to the truth of that appellation, some of the evidence contained in my desktop computer in Bengaluru, which has three large folders entitled: “ES Reddy Material, Instalment I, II and III”.
These house hundreds of files, gifted to me over the years by Gopal Gandhi’s friend (now also mine), sometimes as attachments to emails, at other times through CDs sent by courier. The material my benefactor so generously shared includes newspaper and magazine articles in half-a-dozen languages, profiles of Gandhi’s associates in three countries, critical commentaries published after his death, and much more.
Before he became the world’s greatest Gandhi scholar, ES Reddy had achieved distinction in another field. Born in 1924, raised in Southern India in a family of freedom fighters, he spent his professional life working in the United Nations headquarters in New York, much of it directing the UN’s Centre against Apartheid. In this capacity, Reddy perhaps did more than anyone outside South Africa itself to undermine and eventually dismantle the racist regime...
