Mahatma Gandhi Family Tree - The Gandhi Lineage

Gulab Gandhi, also known as Chanchal, was the wife of Harilal Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi's eldest son. Married as part of a joint wedding ceremony with her husband's family in Rajkot, she raised their children largely on her own as Harilal's life was marked by financial instability and long periods of estrangement from the wider Gandhi family. Comparatively little is recorded about her own life outside her marriage, but she is remembered within the family's history as the mother of Kantilal Gandhi and his siblings, connecting Mahatma Gandhi to his descendants through the Harilal branch of the family, including great-grandson Tushar Gandhi.

Karamchand Gandhi, known as Kaba Gandhi, was the father of Mahatma Gandhi and served as diwan (chief minister) to the princely state of Porbandar and later to Rajkot and Vankaner in the Kathiawar region of present-day Gujarat. A respected local administrator, he came from a family with a long tradition of holding ministerial posts in the small Kathiawari states. He married several times; his last wife, Putlibai, was Mohandas Gandhi's mother. Karamchand died in 1885, when Mohandas was a teenager, an event Gandhi later wrote about in his autobiography as a formative and painful memory of his youth.

Kasturba Gandhi (1869-1944), also known as Kasturba Makhanji Kapadia before marriage, was the wife of Mahatma Gandhi and an activist in her own right. Married to Mohandas in 1883 in an arranged child marriage customary at the time, she joined him in South Africa and later in India, participating in satyagraha campaigns, being jailed multiple times for civil disobedience, and organizing relief and education work among India's poor. The couple had four sons: Harilal, Manilal, Ramdas and Devdas. She died in 1944 while imprisoned with her husband at the Aga Khan Palace in Pune, during the Quit India movement. She is remembered as 'Ba', a term of affection and respect across India.

Lakshmi Gandhi was the wife of Devdas Gandhi, the youngest son of Mahatma Gandhi, and the daughter of the Indian statesman and independence leader C. Rajagopalachari, who later became independent India's first Indian-born Governor-General. Her 1933 marriage to Devdas, arranged across a caste boundary, was notable at the time and was supported by both families' patriarchs as an expression of their shared opposition to caste restrictions on marriage. She and Devdas raised four children, Rajmohan, Ramchandra, Gopalkrishna and Tara Gandhi, each of whom became prominent figures in independent India in fields ranging from history and philosophy to diplomacy and public service.

Nirmala Gandhi was the wife of Ramdas Gandhi, the third son of Mahatma Gandhi and Kasturba Gandhi. She shared her husband's life in central India, where Ramdas was engaged in business and in constructive-work activities connected to his father's movement. Comparatively little is documented about her own public life, but she is remembered as the mother of Sumitra Kulkarni, who carried the family's association with Sabarmati Ashram, Gandhi's institution in Ahmedabad, into the following generation.

Putlibai Gandhi was the mother of Mahatma Gandhi and the fourth wife of Karamchand Gandhi, diwan of Porbandar. A devout Hindu of the Pranami Vaishnava tradition, she was known for her deep religiosity, frequent fasting, and strict personal discipline, qualities that Gandhi later credited as a profound early influence on his own commitment to truth, self-restraint, and nonviolence. She raised Mohandas in Porbandar and Rajkot alongside his siblings. Putlibai died in 1891 while Gandhi was studying law in London, and he learned of her death only after returning to India, a loss he described as one of the deepest sorrows of his early life.

Sushila Gandhi (nee Mashruwala) was the wife of Manilal Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi's second son, and lived with him for decades at the Phoenix Settlement near Durban, South Africa, the community her father-in-law had founded. She helped run the settlement's press and communal life while raising their children, among them Arun Gandhi and Ela Gandhi, both of whom became public figures in their own right. Her life was closely bound to the Indian community's civil-rights struggles in South Africa during the era of racial discrimination that preceded and continued into apartheid.

Arun Gandhi (born 1934) is a peace activist and writer, a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi through his father, Manilal Gandhi, and mother, Sushila Gandhi. Raised partly in South Africa during the era of racial discrimination that preceded and continued into apartheid, he later moved to India and worked as a journalist before relocating to the United States. In 1991 he co-founded the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, through which he has written and lectured internationally on nonviolent conflict resolution, drawing on his childhood memories of his grandfather, which he recounted in books including 'The Gift of Anger' and other memoirs. He is the brother of South African politician Ela Gandhi.

Devdas Gandhi (1900-1957) was the youngest son of Mahatma Gandhi and Kasturba Gandhi. Unlike his brothers, he pursued a career in journalism, working at Young India and later becoming managing editor of the Hindustan Times, one of India's leading English-language newspapers, a post he held until his death. In 1933 he married Lakshmi, daughter of the Indian statesman C. Rajagopalachari, in a match his father supported despite the families' different castes, seeing it as consistent with his opposition to caste restrictions on marriage. Devdas and Lakshmi had four children, Rajmohan, Ramchandra, Gopalkrishna and Tara, who became, respectively, a historian and politician, a philosopher, a diplomat and governor, and a writer, each prominent in independent India's public life. Devdas died in 1957.

Ela Gandhi (born 1940) is a South African social worker and politician, a granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi through his son Manilal Gandhi and daughter-in-law Sushila Gandhi. Raised at the Phoenix Settlement near Durban that her grandfather had founded, she was active in the anti-apartheid movement and was later placed under a banning order by the South African government for her activism. Following the end of apartheid, she served as a Member of Parliament for the African National Congress from 1994 to 2004 and has continued work promoting nonviolence and restorative justice through the Gandhi Development Trust. She is the sister of peace activist Arun Gandhi.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi (born 1945) is an Indian diplomat, writer and former civil servant, a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi through his son Devdas Gandhi and daughter-in-law Lakshmi Gandhi. He had a long career in the Indian Administrative Service and Indian Foreign Service, serving as High Commissioner to South Africa and Sri Lanka and Ambassador to Norway and Iceland, before serving as Governor of West Bengal from 2004 to 2009. He was also the Vice-Presidential candidate for a coalition of opposition parties in India's 2017 election. He is the brother of Rajmohan Gandhi, Ramchandra Gandhi and Tara Gandhi Bhattacharjee.

Harilal Gandhi (1888-1948) was the eldest son of Mahatma Gandhi and Kasturba Gandhi. His relationship with his father was troubled and often publicly strained: Gandhi discouraged him from pursuing a formal legal education in England, a decision Harilal resented for the rest of his life. Harilal struggled with business failures, alcoholism, and a public conversion to Islam and later return to Hinduism, all covered extensively in the Indian press of the time. He married Gulab (Chanchal) Gandhi, with whom he had several children, including a son, Kantilal Gandhi. Estranged from his father for much of his adult life, Harilal died in Mumbai in 1948, shortly after Gandhi's own death.

Kantilal Gandhi was a son of Harilal Gandhi and Gulab (Chanchal) Gandhi, making him a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi through the Harilal branch of the family. Comparatively little is documented about his own life and career, but he is recorded within the family's history as the father of Tushar Gandhi, the author and activist who has written extensively about his great-grandfather's life and, in particular, about the events surrounding Gandhi's death.

Manilal Gandhi (1892-1956) was the second son of Mahatma Gandhi and Kasturba Gandhi. He spent most of his adult life in South Africa, where he took over editorship of Indian Opinion, the newspaper his father had founded in 1903 to serve the Indian community, and continued it for decades from the Phoenix Settlement near Durban. He was active in the Natal Indian Congress and took part in passive-resistance campaigns against discriminatory legislation in South Africa, for which he was imprisoned several times. He married Sushila Gandhi, and their children, including Arun Gandhi and Ela Gandhi, continued the family's activist tradition in both India and South Africa. Manilal died in 1956.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (2 October 1869-1948) was an Indian lawyer and political leader who led India's independence movement from British rule through nonviolent civil disobedience, a philosophy known as satyagraha. Born in Porbandar, Gujarat, to Karamchand and Putlibai Gandhi, he trained as a barrister in London, developed his methods of nonviolent resistance while working in South Africa, and returned to India in 1915 to lead campaigns such as the Salt March. He married Kasturba Gandhi in 1883 and the couple had four sons, Harilal, Manilal, Ramdas and Devdas, whose descendants carried forward his legacy in India and South Africa. Revered as the Father of the Nation in India, he is honored worldwide as Mahatma, meaning 'great soul'.

Rajmohan Gandhi (born 1935) is an Indian historian, biographer and former politician, a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi through his son Devdas Gandhi and daughter-in-law Lakshmi Gandhi. A prolific author, he has written biographies of his grandfather, including 'Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, His People and an Empire', as well as works on other major figures in Indian history. He served as a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India's Parliament, and has held academic positions at universities including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he has taught history and political science. He is the brother of Ramchandra Gandhi, Gopalkrishna Gandhi and Tara Gandhi Bhattacharjee.

Ramchandra Gandhi (1937-2007) was an Indian philosopher, a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi through his son Devdas Gandhi and daughter-in-law Lakshmi Gandhi. He taught philosophy at universities including the University of Hyderabad and Visva-Bharati, and was known for his work exploring Indian philosophy, Advaita Vedanta, and questions of nonviolence and spirituality in relation to his grandfather's legacy. He was a familiar public intellectual in Delhi's academic and cultural circles, engaging in wide-ranging writing and lecturing until his death in 2007. He was the brother of Rajmohan Gandhi, Gopalkrishna Gandhi and Tara Gandhi Bhattacharjee.

Ramdas Gandhi (1897-1969) was the third son of Mahatma Gandhi and Kasturba Gandhi. He worked in business in central India, including a period managing a printing press and other enterprises in Nagpur, while remaining closely involved in his father's constructive-work and khadi (hand-spun cloth) programs. He accompanied Gandhi during parts of the independence movement and was present at various points in his father's later life. He married Nirmala Gandhi, and their daughter, Sumitra Kulkarni, went on to be associated with the preservation of Sabarmati Ashram, the Ahmedabad institution central to Gandhi's constructive-work philosophy. Ramdas died in 1969.

Sumitra Kulkarni (nee Gandhi) was a granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi through his third son, Ramdas Gandhi, and daughter-in-law Nirmala Gandhi. She was closely associated with Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, the institution her grandfather founded in 1917 as a base for his campaigns of nonviolent resistance and constructive social work, and she took part in efforts connected to preserving its buildings and legacy for later generations. Through her, the Gandhi family's third-son branch remained connected to one of the movement's most historically significant sites in India.

Tara Gandhi Bhattacharjee (born 1934) is a writer and social worker, a granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi through his son Devdas Gandhi and daughter-in-law Lakshmi Gandhi. She has spent much of her life engaged in Gandhian constructive-work programs and institutions dedicated to preserving and interpreting her grandfather's philosophy, including serving in leadership roles connected to Gandhi Smriti and related memorial trusts in Delhi. She has written and spoken widely on nonviolence and her grandfather's legacy, and is the sister of Rajmohan Gandhi, Ramchandra Gandhi and Gopalkrishna Gandhi.

Tushar Gandhi (born 1960) is an Indian author and social activist, a great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi through the line of his eldest son, Harilal Gandhi, and Harilal's son, Kantilal Gandhi. He is best known for his book 'Let's Kill Gandhi', a detailed account of the events and conspiracy surrounding his great-grandfather's death, and he has served as president of the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting Gandhian values. He has been an outspoken public commentator on nonviolence, communal harmony and the political uses and misuses of his great-grandfather's legacy in contemporary India.