India, Jan. 24 -- 1How would you introduce Prabhudas Gandhi to readers who are unfamiliar with his work? Prabhudas Gandhi was a freedom fighter, satyagrahi, writer, translator and social activist. As a young man, he participated in the Non-Cooperation Movement, Bardoli Satyagraha, Quit India Movement, and courted arrest. In addition, he worked with Mamasaheb Phalke in Godhra for the uplift of scavengers in 1921, and with Gulzarilal Nanda in the great strike of the mill workers in Ahmedabad in 1923. He is known for having invented the Magan Charkha, a spinning wheel, named after his uncle Maganlal Gandhi, that could be operated with the legs as the user spun cotton with both hands. But his reputation in Gujarat is primarily based on his book Jivannu Parodh, a fascinating memoir of his years at the Phoenix Settlement in South Africa where, as a child, he witnessed and participated in the Mahatma Gandhi's civil disobedience movement against a colonial, apartheid state. 2What led you to translate this book from Gujarati to English? I think the decision was a result of the convergence of multiple factors and contexts, some immediate and others building up over years. The immediate context was the Long Walk Home of the migrant workers following the national lockdown imposed in 2020 at four hours' notice, by invoking the provisions of a colonial-era act. The visuals of the enormous hardships they underwent, and the response of the state, broke my heart. Hopeless and distraught, I was looking for narratives of pain and suffering of migrant workers through history, to understand what was going on in my country. A friend suggested Giriraj Kishore's Pehla Girmitiya and Prabhudas Gandhi's Jivannu Parodh. I managed to my hands on the latter first. Reading the book helped me find answers to certain issues on which Gandhi had come under scathing criticism from scholars and trolls over the years; in particular, there was the charge that he was a casteist, racist, patriarch in the South Africa years. The book, however, seemed to be complicating my understanding of the early Gandhi's views on caste, race and gender. I needed to see it as part of a larger debate. On the other hand, it was distressing to see the pandemic of rising intolerance, mindless consumption, the dreadful condition of education and degradation of public discourse grip India. Much to my satisfaction, the book contained answers to many of these pathologies too. 3How did the process of translating this book affect you? A book like Jivannu Parodh sucks you in. One doesn't just translate it. One is led, in the process, to read and re-read other books it is in conversation with. The outcome is extremely humanising. Apart from the enriching intellectual stimulation, the translator undergoes an emotional makeover, and begins to weave the "self" afresh. One is doubly blessed for one not only confronts another's experience but creates powerful pictures of those experiences in a different language. All this makes one a more sorted human being....