A letter written by Mahatma Gandhi, 19 days before his assassination, will be auctioned by Christie’s in London on July 3.
   The letter was written for the Harijan on January 11, 1948. It will come under the hammer as part of the most comprehensive collection of handwritten letters to be seen on the market for a generation.
  The collection is titled The Albin Schram Collection of Autograph Letters, a personal and private collection assembled over a period of 30 years by late Albin Schram. In the historic letter, the Mahatma expresses regret for discontinuing the Urdu edition of his paper Harijan, owing to dwindling readership.
   “The dwindle was to me a sign of resentment against its publication... My view remains unalterable especially at this critical juncture in our history. It is wrong to ruffle Muslim or any other person’s feeling when there is no question of ethics,” he wrote.
   Advocating the importance of Urdu, Gandhiji asserted that the language has multiple uses including, shorthand and transcription of Sanskrit verses.
   Warning against any boycott of the language, against a backdrop of communal tensions, the Mahatma wrote: “Any suggestion of a boycott on Urdu script is a wanton affront upon the Muslims of the Union, who in the eyes of many Hindus, have become aliens in their own land. This is copying the bad manners of Pakistan with a vengeance”.
   The letter ends with a ringing call to “Muslim friends” not only to support the Urdu edition but to learn the Nagari script and thus “enrich their intellectual capital”.