Kasturba 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.