Mahadev Desai (1 January 1892 – 15 August 1942) was an Indian independence activist and writer best remembered as Mahatma Gandhi’s personal secretary. He has variously been described as “Gandhi’s Boswell, a Plato to Gandhi’s Socrates, as well as an Ananda to Gandhi’s Buddha”.
Mahadev Desai was born on 1 January 1892 in the village of Saras in Surat District of Gujarat to Haribhai Desai a school teacher and his wife Jamnabehn. Jamnabehn died when Desai was only seven years of age. In 1905, aged 13, Mahadev was married to Durgabehn. He was educated at the Surat High School and the Elphinstone College, Mumbai. Graduated with a BA Degree, he passed his L.L.B in 1913 and took job as inspector in central co-operative bank in Bombay.
Mahadev Desai died of a heart attack on the morning of 15 August 1942 at the Aga Khan Palace where he was interned with Gandhi. When Desai stopped breathing, Gandhi called out to him in agitation: “Mahadev! Mahadev!” When he was later asked why he had done so, Gandhi answered: “I felt that if Mahadev opened his eyes and looked at me, I would tell him to get up. He had never disobeyed me in his life. I was confident that had he heard those words, he would have defied even death and got up”.Gandhi himself washed Desai’s body and he was cremated on the Palace’s grounds, where his samadhi lies today.
The Indian Department of Posts published a commemorative stamp in his honour in 1983.His son Narayan Desai was also a noted Gandhian activist and writer who wrote Mahadev Desai’s biography The Fire and the Rose.The Mahadev Desai Samajseva Mahavidyalaya, Gujarat Vidyapith’s faculty of social sciences, arts and humanities was named in Mahadev Desai’s honour.
(Ref : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahadev_Desai & The Hindu)