In 1944, as the world marked Mahatma Gandhi’s 75th birthday on October 2, a group of illustrious public figures gathered at the Town Hall in Manhattan for a celebration organised by the India League of America. Among the list of speakers at the function were Chinese-American painter and writer Mai-mai Sze, Indian poet and playwright Krishnalal Sridharani and William L Shirer, a well-known American foreign correspondent. Shirer had long been an admirer of the Mahatma.
Almost a decade and a half before that October celebration in New York, he had first set foot on Indian soil to work as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune . “For years, ever since I read of his first imprisonment in India in 1922 and had been overwhelmed by the eloquence of his words in his own defence at that famous trial, and then more recently read his autobiography and followed as best as I could in the Western press his efforts to free India, I had a feeling that perhaps he was the greatest living man on our planet,” Shirer wrote in his book Gandhi: A Memoir (1979). One of Shirer’s goals in coming to India in 1930 was to interview Gandhi, but that never happened.
The Mahatma was locked up in Yerwada Jail and, although Shirer stayed on in the country for months, he was not allowed to meet Gandhi. “It had been a frustrating assignment,” Shirer wrote. “With his arrest and that of the other leaders of the Indian National Congress, and of tens of thousands of his most active followers, the mome.