Arun Manilal Gandhi

Born in 1934 in Durban, South Africa, Arun Gandhi is the fifth grandson of India’s late spiritual leader Mohandas Karamchand “Mahatma” Gandhi. In 1946, just before India gained independence from Britain, Arun’s parents took him to live with his grandfather for eighteen months. At twenty-three, Arun returned to India, worked as a reporter for The Times of India, and cofounded India’s Center for Social Unity, whose mission is to alleviate poverty and caste discrimination. Arun and his wife, Sunanda, came to the United States in 1987 and in 1991 founded the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence in Memphis, Tennessee.