BY THE END of his seventh decade, Mahatma Gandhi had been forced to recognize that the great majority of his supposed followers hadn’t followed him very far when it came to what he’d listed as the four pillars of swaraj. The last and most important of these was supposed to be ahimsa, or nonviolence, which for Gandhi was both a core religious value and his set of patented techniques for militant resistance to injustice. Now, with the eruption of another world war, he was forced to recognize that “Congressmen, barring individual exceptions, do not believe in nonviolence.” It would be his lot “to plough a lonely furrow,” for it seemed he had “no co-sharer in the out-and-out belief in nonviolence.”
Here the Mahatma seems to be deliberately striving for pathos. It’s a favorite posture, that of the isolated seeker of truth, and it’s not untinged with moral and political pressure, a whiff of emotional blackmail; his closest associates are left to feel guilty over their failure to measure up to his high ideal. Increasingly, this self-portrayal comes to define his sense of his inner reality as well as his political position. He can still draw huge reverential throngs, has a loyal entourage hanging on his every word and wish, but there are intangible, evidently important ways in which he feels himself to be alone. If Gandhi the prophet is to be taken at his word here, the temple of swaraj as he’d conceived it had now collapsed with the crumbling of its last pillar.
But the prophet’s declaration of his “out-and-out belief” doesn’t remove the political leader from the scene. Gandhi is never more elusive or complex than he is in this final decade of his life and career as he strains to balance his own precepts, values, and self-imposed rules with the strategic needs of his movement. It’s a strain that only increases as power is seen to be within its grasp. From wrenching questions about the uses of nonviolence in a war against fascism (but not imperialism, as India was quick to catch on) to the just-emerging issue of what he’d term “vivisection”—the carving out and renaming of India’s Muslim-majority areas as a state called Pakistan—Gandhi would regularly manage to stand on at least two sides, distinguishing his personal position from that of his movement, before stepping forward at the last hour to offer his loyal support for the position of the movement, and then, almost as regularly, stepping back. As early as 1939, he drew a distinction between himself and his supporters who “want to be true to themselves and to the country which they represent for the time being, even as I want to be true to myself.” The idea that country and what he’d long since been used to calling “truth” could pull in opposite directions was a relatively new one, a source of profound inner conflict.
Again on tour, 1940 (photo credit i11.1)
To a bluff British general like Lord Wavell, the penultimate viceroy, it was all an act. Gandhi was a “malevolent old politician, who for all his sanctimonious talk has, I am sure, very little softness in his composition,” Wavell wrote after his first encounters with the Mahatma. Had the viceroy’s skepticism been anywhere near the mark, the climax of Gandhi’s career would amount to little more today than an extended footnote, a kind of tributary to the torrent of onrushing events he tried and largely failed to influence. Instead, Gandhi’s last act can be read as a moral saga in its own right, not unworthy of the rubric “tragic” in its fullest, deepest sense. The public issues with which he wrestled retain their importance, but what stands out after all these years is the old man himself as he goes through a series of strenuous self-imposed trials in a time of national crisis, veering at the end of his life between dark despair and irrepressible hope.
If readiness to offer up one’s own body and life—what he called “self-suffering”—were the mark of a true votary of Gandhian nonviolence, a true satyagrahi, then the Mahatma’s lonely, detached, largely ineffectual last years and months can be invested with grandeur and interpreted as fulfillment. Which was one of the ways that Gandhi, shaping his narrative as always, was inclined to see it. The premonition that he might meet an assassin’s bullets became a persistent leitmotif of his private ruminations. More than five years before his actual end in a New Delhi garden on January 30, 1948, he imagined his assailant would be a Muslim, despite all he’d done since the “glorious days” of the Khilafat movement, when, in his recollection, dignity and “nobility of spirit” reigned. “My life is entirely at their disposal,” he said. “They are free to put an end to it, whenever they wish to do so.” Perhaps he was thinking back to the slaying of his fellow mahatma Swami Shraddhanand at the hands of a Muslim extremist in 1926. His foreboding proved to be partly misplaced. It anticipated the circumstances of his death but not the motive behind the eventual plot or the identity of the plotters. It was Hindu extremists who targeted him. They saw him as pro-Muslim.
At the same time, the tragic narrative can’t be easily disentangled from the self-staged, nearly comic subplot of the Mahatma’s ins and outs—his repeated exits from leadership of the national movement and his sudden returns. In the months and years following the viceroy’s declaration of war on behalf of an India he never bothered to consult, Gandhi’s comings and goings get to be like the old stage routine of a performer holding up one end of a very long ladder while exiting stage left, only to reenter stage right an instant later, hoisting the other end.
In September 1939, in the immediate aftermath of the declaration, the Congress rejects a resolution Gandhi drafted. It’s the first time in twenty years this has happened; he views it as a “conclusive defeat.” The spurned draft promised support of the British war effort by all available nonviolent means. Instead, the Congress sets up a bargaining situation, making its promise of support conditional on a British commitment on independence. Implying the bargain it imagines, it soft-pedals Gandhi’s emphasis on nonviolence. Ten months later, in June 1940, it formally votes at Gandhi’s request “to absolve him from responsibility for the program and activity which the Congress has to pursue” in order to free him “to pursue his great ideal in his own way.” Three months later, after the viceroy has brushed off its demand for a commitment on Indian freedom, it summons Gandhi back to leadership. In December 1941 he’s out again, over disagreements about the use of force. A mere two weeks later, he’s back on his own terms, only now his terms have started to undergo a subtle shift. Eventually, he makes a reluctant concession: if India is declared independent during the war, he acknowledges, it will probably conclude it needs armed forces; he also agrees that Allied forces could continue to use its territory as a base from which to bomb Japanese positions in Burma and fly arms over the hump to China. These adjustments in his and the Congress’s position come painfully, over many months. They’ve no effect. The British still aren’t biting: Winston Churchill, the “die-hard” imperialist, would famously assert that he hadn’t become prime minister to preside over the empire’s dissolution. Having failed so far to dislodge or even budge the Raj, Gandhi and the Congress prepare for the largest campaign of noncooperation and nonviolent resistance in twelve years, since the Salt March, serving an ultimatum on the British: hand over sovereignty or face the consequences. In 1942, at the height of the Japanese advance across Asia, against the better judgment of Nehru, who took the threat of an invasion seriously, “Quit India!” becomes their cry.
Through all his ins and outs, Gandhi has now moved over three years from unconditional support for the war effort by all available nonviolent means to a threat of nonviolent resistance on a massive scale unless India is freed to make “common cause” with the Allies in ways that wouldn’t necessarily be nonviolent. On August 8, 1942, the Congress endorses the “Quit India” resolution, which promises that a free India will “resist aggression with all the armed as well as nonviolent forces at its command.” That phrase embodies Gandhi’s tacit shift on the question of armed force, his willingness to align himself with Nehru and other Congress leaders. Now he’s ready to go full tilt. The coming campaign will be, he promises, “the biggest struggle of my life.” Here we’ve a flash of the fully possessed, “do or die” Gandhi, the fervent commander, who led indentured miners into the Transvaal in 1913, who later promised “swaraj in a year,” who subsequently marched to the sea to harvest a handful of salt. But the morning after the vote on the “Quit India” resolution he’s arrested again in Bombay and taken as a prisoner to the Aga Khan Palace outside Poona, where he’s sidelined for the next twenty-one months until the British, alarmed by his high blood pressure, decide to let him go in order not to have to face an uproar over his dying in detention.
Churchill’s cabinet has discussed the idea of deporting Gandhi to Uganda but recognizes finally that its American ally, not to mention the masses of India, might find this hard to swallow. Gandhi’s last campaign hadn’t achieved anything like his standard of nonviolent discipline. “Mob violence remains rampant over large tracts of the countryside,” the viceroy reported to Churchill three weeks after his arrest. By the end of the year, nearly one thousand persons had been killed in clashes with the police; some sixty thousand arrested in the British crackdown on the Congress. Egged on by Churchill, the British searched for evidence that Gandhi, though jailed, had been complicit in this violence, perhaps conspiring with the Japanese. They never found it, but Gandhi’s own words before his arrest seemed to hint that he wouldn’t be surprised by a surge in rioting. Indian nonviolence had always been imperfect, “limited in both numbers and quality,” he coolly told an American correspondent—that is, in the availability of trained satyagrahis who could be relied on to make the requisite self-sacrifice—but “it has infused life into the people which was absent before.” He isn’t threatening or justifying violence, but assuming for the moment the position of a detached observer, a realist, he seems to be suggesting that this time it couldn’t be ruled out. This Gandhi sounds like the pre-Mahatma of 1913 who warned the South African authorities he might lose control of his movement.
Gandhi’s moral stubbornness, ascribed by the Mahatma to the dictates of his “inner voice,” seems to function in his later years like a suddenly released spring or coil, distancing him from responsibility for far-reaching political decisions. The pattern had been set by the time his last imprisonment ended on May 6, 1944. But Nehru and Patel, the whole Congress Working Committee, remained in jail; the viceroy rebuffed his request to consult them. So, for the next thirteen months, until their release, only he could act on national issues. His most significant venture in that time was an attempt to bridge the widening chasm between the Indian National Congress and the Muslims—in particular, a resurgent Muslim League under its self-styled Quaid-i-Azam, or “great leader,” Mohammed Ali Jinnah.
This was the same Jinnah who’d welcomed him to India nearly three decades earlier with a heartfelt plea for national unity; the nationalist whom Gokhale, Gandhi’s sponsor and guru, had earlier hailed as an “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity”; who in 1916 lived up to that tribute by cementing an accord between the Congress and the Muslim League that seemed a breakthrough at the time; the same Jinnah, fastidious lawyer that he was, whose belief in constitutional methods had then been so ruffled, so offended, by Gandhi’s introduction of mass agitation based on appeals to religious themes (of Muslims as well as Hindus) that he’d walked away from the Congress; the political broker who was, nevertheless, still trying as late as 1928 to find common ground between the two movements on the constitutional shape of an independent India; and who in 1937 offered to enter coalitions with new Congress governments at the provincial level, only to be rebuffed.
He was the same man but no longer the same nationalist. Returning from his four-year exile in England, he paid Gandhi the implicit compliment of imitation. Mass agitation based on religion no longer offended him; it was, he’d learned, the surest path to national leadership. Now he argued that there’d never been and never could be an Indian nation, only Hindu India (Hindustan) and Muslim India (Pakistan)—two equal nations, no matter that one outnumbered the other by better than two to one (roughly three to one if untouchables were counted as Hindus). By Jinnah’s reasoning, if Muslims were a nation, they weren’t a minority, whatever the population tables showed; any negotiations, he insisted, had to be on that basis. The Quaid’s sartorial transformation wasn’t as drastic as the Mahatma’s, but in place of his smart, custom-tailored double-breasted suits he now sometimes appeared in the long traditional, buttoned-up coat known as a sherwani and the rimless cap fashioned from sheep hide that learned Muslims called maulanas favored; henceforth it would sometimes be described as a Jinnah cap, worn in contrast to the white khadi caps donned by congressmen that were everywhere known as Gandhi caps. With skill and considerable cunning, the Quaid had set himself up to be Gandhi’s foil.
There’d never been much warmth between these two Gujarati lawyers, but Gandhi, who’d always treated Jinnah with respect and had reached out to him at times when Nehru and most other Congress leaders tended to write him off, now made a point of referring to him as Quaid-i-Azam. (In 1942, days before the launch of the “Quit India” campaign, he’d even suggested that Jinnah could form a government if the British weren’t ready to hand over power to the Congress.) For his part, Jinnah had always made a point of referring to him frostily as “Mr. Gandhi,” conspicuously shunning any use of his spiritual honorific. But now the Quaid unbent sufficiently, on one occasion at least, to call him Mahatma. “Give your blessings to me and Mahatma Gandhi so that we might arrive at a settlement,” he asked a throng of Muslim Leaguers in Lahore as the day of their summit neared. These small glimmers of regard were enough to make the British worry that the two leaders might form an anticolonial front in the midst of the war. Hindu nationalists worried as well. A mob showed up at Wardha with the intention of physically blocking Gandhi’s way when it was time for him to leave for the station to board his train for Bombay to meet Jinnah. Their idea, then as now, was to protest any move to alienate any piece of the “motherland.” Prominent in the crowd was a high-strung Brahman editor named Nathuram Godse who several years later, after India’s partition, would step forward as the gunman Gandhi had long anticipated.
When the leaders finally faced each other in the study of Jinnah’s residence on Mount Pleasant Road in the upscale Malabar Hill section of Bombay on September 9, 1944, in the first of what would be a marathon of fourteen sessions over eighteen days, Jinnah asked for Gandhi’s credentials. “I thought you had come here as a Hindu, as a representative of the Hindu Congress,” he said archly, according to Gandhi’s version of the exchange, fully aware that this formulation would grate on his guest. “No, I have come here neither as a Hindu nor as a representative of the Congress,” Gandhi replied. “I have come here as an individual.” In that case, his host wanted to know, if they reached an accord, who would “deliver the goods”?
It was a barbed but reasonable question. Setting aside his openly eclectic, nonsectarian approach to religion, not to mention his decades-long quest for “unity,” Gandhi had tacitly accepted the idea of a separate Muslim state as a basis for negotiation. Not only had the Congress already voted down the set of proposals he now advanced for discussion; it had done so with his approval. If he was reversing himself, Jinnah wanted to know, who would follow him? Was he even serious? The Pakistan Gandhi was ready to support would enjoy a certain amount of autonomy within an Indian union, which might be a relatively loose federation in which defense and foreign affairs were handled as national concerns. If Pakistan could be kept within India, he allowed himself to hope, “heart unity” might yet follow. Putting it in writing at the start of the third week of talks, Gandhi went a step further, acknowledging a right of secession for the Muslim-majority areas that could lead to a “Treaty of Separation” between “two sovereign independent states.”
That still wasn’t far enough for Jinnah. The Pakistan he had in mind had to start off as sovereign. It couldn’t trust a Hindu-dominated regime to draw its boundaries or see to the terms of its separation; only by its own free choice could it find itself inside an independent India. Thus its destiny and boundaries had to be determined before independence, not after, as Gandhi kept insisting. Immediately, it was apparent that they were discussing two different Pakistans, two different ideas, at least, of the bargaining power Jinnah would wield in any showdown. “I am amazed at my own patience,” Gandhi said after a grueling first session, which lasted three and a quarter hours.
With Jinnah at the start of Malabar Hill talks, September 1944 (photo credit i11.2)
Godse, the assassin-to-be, and his fellow Hindu chauvinists needn’t have feared that Gandhi would embrace a shrunken Hindustan. His aim, Gandhi remarked privately, while the talks were still going on, was to prove to Jinnah “from his own mouth that the whole of the Pakistan proposition is absurd.” His words here convict him of overconfidence. The Quaid-i-Azam finally became convinced that a wily Gandhi was stringing him along. “I have failed in my task of converting Mr. Gandhi,” he said. The “Mr.” could be read as a tip-off that the talks had failed.
Jinnah claimed that only the Muslim League could speak for British India’s ninety million Muslims and only he could speak for the Muslim League. Gandhi’s claim, though couched with infinitely more generosity and tact, was no less sweeping. “Though I represent nobody but myself,” he wrote to Jinnah, “I aspire to represent all the inhabitants of India. For I realize in my own person their misery and degradation, which is their common lot, irrespective of class, caste or creed.”
Jinnah was so engrossed in the tactics of the moment that he may have outmaneuvered even himself by waiting so long to define his idea of a satisfactory Pakistan, putting it forever beyond reach. (This is so, at least, if, as has sometimes been argued, his actual aim was to secure for Muslims a permanent share of power at the national level within India, rather than a separate state.) Gandhi, a master of the art of compromise, at least by his own estimate, may have been willing now to recognize a right of “self-determination” in Muslim-majority provinces and, therefore, a theoretical right of secession. But he was elusive on the central issue of power. Just as in his bargaining with Ambedkar, he couldn’t contemplate any scaling back of his movement’s claims—or his own—to represent the whole of India. That was the difficulty with “truth” as a standard for political judgment: it lacked flexibility. Neither the Quaid-i-Azam nor the Mahatma was a completely independent actor. Jinnah had to take care not to shatter the expectations he’d aroused in Muslim-minority provinces that could never be part of any conceivable Pakistan. Gandhi couldn’t ignore the rising specter of Hindu militancy. Each needed an act of faith from the other that was next to impossible now that Jinnah had given up on Indian nationalism.
“I could not make any headway with Jinnah because he is a maniac,” Gandhi told Louis Fischer. In the next breath he said, “Jinnah is incorruptible and brave.” It’s a tantalizing statement, seeming almost to imply that Jinnah had been unmoved when Gandhi dangled the possibility of high office.
Having decided he couldn’t depend on Gandhi to deliver “the goods,” the Quaid-i-Azam continued to be a prideful and elusive negotiator, counting on the British, the waning colonial power, to push a constitutional deal better than any he could hope to wrest from the Congress. Finally, with no words to his followers about such niceties as nonviolence, he gambled on what, with menacing ambiguity, he called “direct action” to force the pace. Direct action, his followers explained, meant mass struggle by nonconstitutional means.
By then, virtually ensuring that some kind of partition, some kind of Pakistan, would be the price to pay for independence, the Congress had reluctantly accepted a British proposal for the creation of an interim government and the start of a constitutional process in which the agreement of the Muslim League was to be treated as a virtual prerequisite. Gandhi, who’d negotiated on a separate Muslim state with Jinnah two years earlier, had swung around to proposing a boycott of the interim government as a way of forestalling Pakistan, keeping it from becoming an inevitability. But his stand was laced with equivocation, as if he knew it stood no chance with the movement he no longer dominated. He said it was based on an “unfounded suspicion,” an “intuition,” an “instinct.” His suspicion was that the division of the country could be cataclysmic.
If he’d pushed his case forcefully and publicly, the Congress might have found it difficult to proceed without him. But he had no appetite for such a test, and couldn’t see clearly where it would lead. Instead, on June 23, 1946, the day of decision on the intricate, multistage British plan, he asked permission to be excused. “Is there any reason to detain Bapu further?” asked Maulana Azad, a nationalist Muslim chairing the Working Committee meeting. “Everybody was silent. Everybody understood,” writes Narayan Desai, son of Gandhi’s devoted secretary, Mahadev, and author of a magisterial Gujarati-language biography of the Mahatma. Pyarelal’s version captures the bitterness Gandhi had to swallow. “In that hour of decision they had no use for Bapu,” he wrote.
“I know India is not with me,” he told Louis Fischer a few days later. “I have not convinced enough Indians of the wisdom of nonviolence.”
Jinnah had anticipated a Congress rejection of the British plan. Perhaps he’d hoped that the viceroy would then turn to the Muslim League—meaning him—to form the interim government. “Direct action” can be seen as the consequence of his disappointment. It was an adaptation—calculated, deliberately vague—of the Gandhian tactic of noncooperation, from which he’d recoiled a generation earlier. Jinnah was inevitably asked the day his new campaign was proclaimed, scarcely a month after the fateful Congress decision on the British plan, whether it would be violent. His reply, non-Gandhian in the extreme, was probably meant as psychological mood music rather than as a signal for mob violence. Nevertheless, it was chilling. “I’m not going to discuss ethics,” he said.
He’d set Direct Action Day for August 16, 1946. What happened then over four days came to be known as the Great Calcutta Killing. By August 20, some three thousand persons had been beaten, stabbed, hacked, or burned to death in the capital city of Bengal, the only province at the time with a government dominated by the Muslim League. Corpses littered the streets, pulled apart by swarming vultures and dogs. If Muslims were the initial aggressors, the Hindu response was no less organized or brutal. Both sides deployed gangs, armed in advance with swords, knives, the lead-tipped rods called lathis, gasoline and other inflammables. But Calcutta was a Hindu-majority city—Muslims accounting for barely 20 percent of its population—and numbers finally told: more Muslims were killed than Hindus. In New Delhi, Vallabhbhai Patel, one of Gandhi’s original disciples, expressed satisfaction over that result. “Sword will be answered by sword,” this old Gandhian later warned. But that wasn’t the way the story was generally understood or told at the time by caste Hindus who remained convinced that their community had endured the brunt of the attacks. Each side, having suffered grievously, felt thoroughly victimized.
For India’s prophet of unity, nonviolence, and peace, these events—the overture for a year and a half of mass mayhem, murder, forced migration, property loss on a vast scale, extensive ethnic cleansing—provided ample reason for despair, enough to bring his whole life into question. Or so he seemed to feel at his lowest ebb. But if he was shaken, he clung ever more fervently to his core value of ahimsa, on which much of India seemed to have given up. And so, after a period of uncertainty over what his role now should be—which “lonely furrow” he should plow—he made his way at the start of his seventy-eighth year to a remote, watery district of Muslim-dominant East Bengal, now Bangladesh, putting himself almost as far in an eastward direction as he could get in what was still India from the center of political decision making in Delhi, a distance of more than a thousand miles. The district, known even then for the extremism of its mullahs, was called Noakhali. It had few phone lines and was actually closer to Mandalay in central Burma than it was to Delhi. As seen from the capital, Gandhi was practically in Southeast Asia.
Noakhali qualified as a destination because it had lately been the scene of another communal mania: gruesome violence, committed mostly by Muslims, in retaliation for the Calcutta bloodletting. Here Hindus had been beheaded, burned alive, raped, forcibly converted to Islam, made to eat beef, and, in the case of at least two and possibly many more women, married off under duress to Muslim men. In an assault on a single household belonging to a Hindu landowner in a village called Karapa, twenty-one men, women, and children were slaughtered. The Calcutta papers soon put the deaths at five thousand, which turned out to be a mighty exaggeration. Two to three hundred proved to be the more likely figure. It was bad enough.
The chief minister of what was still an undivided Bengal, a smooth Muslim politician with an Oxford pedigree named Shaheed Suhrawardy, saw only problems for himself and the Muslim League if Gandhi made it to the troubled area of East Bengal. So he tried to head the Mahatma off, calling on him on October 31 at a small one-story khadi center and ashram at Sodepur, on the outskirts of Calcutta, where the Mahatma often camped. Suhrawardy, who’d reemerge in the 1950s as prime minister of Pakistan, had a reputation among Muslims as well as Hindus for opportunism. Conspiratorial theorists among Hindus could not be convinced that he was anything other than the mastermind behind the Great Calcutta Killing. But he claimed a filial relationship to Gandhi dating back to the Khilafat agitation, and the old man, who had few illusions about Suhrawardy, retained a measure of affection for him from those days. “Shaheed sahib, everyone seems to call you the chief of the goondas,” Gandhi began teasingly, using a common term for goons. “Nobody seems to have a good word to say about you!” Lounging on a bolster, the chief minister bantered back, “Mahatmaji, don’t people say things about you too?”
Barun Das Gupta, a retired correspondent of The Hindu newspaper and son of the founder of the Sodepur ashram, witnessed that exchange as a young man. The impression he retains is that the chief minister was a little tipsy. Suhrawardy did what he could to persuade Gandhi to give up his Noakhali mission, trying out an argument that Gandhi would increasingly hear over the ensuing months: that he could be of more use in Bihar, a predominantly Hindu North Indian province he’d just traversed to get to Calcutta. Six days earlier Hindus there had proclaimed a “Noakhali day,” which they’d marked and were still marking by a retaliatory slaughter of their own, including forced conversion of Muslims and razing of Muslim homes. The killing in Noakhali had all but stopped; the killing in Bihar was continuing in a widening swath, far surpassing in numbers of dead the grisly achievement of East Bengal. Before it burned out, it may have resulted in the loss of eight or nine thousand lives.
According to the old Hindu correspondent, Gandhi heard Suhrawardy out in silence. The chief minister’s argument wasn’t lacking in force, but the Mahatma wouldn’t be moved; he’d fixed his sights on East Bengal and Noakhali. His instinct and ambition went beyond making a politician’s symbolic drop-in to an area in crisis, what now might be discounted as a photo op. He’d settle down and dwell in Noakhali, he’d eventually vow, until the district presented an inspiring example of reconciliation to the rest of the subcontinent. Behind this vow was a peculiarly Gandhian mix of calculation and deep, half-articulated feeling. For his own reasons, he placed a greater emphasis on showing by his presence there that Hindus could live peacefully in the midst of a Muslim majority than on persuading Bihar’s Hindus not to massacre Muslims. Noakhali struck him as a greater challenge for himself and his doctrine than Bihar precisely because it was Muslim League territory and thus an area bound to be ceded in any likely partition. Too easily, he persuaded himself that he could calm Bihar’s Hindus from afar by going on a partial fast, which involved giving up goat’s milk and reducing his meager intake of mashed vegetables; if the killing went on, he warned, he’d take no food at all. With that powerful ultimatum hanging over their collective heads, the new Congress government in Bihar assured him that it could be relied on to restore order. Allowing himself to be detoured away from Muslim-dominated Noakhali would, in his view, be tantamount to ceding the province. He was thus making himself a hostage not only in the cause of peace but that of an undivided India.
Suhrawardy didn’t press his point. In a generous gesture, the Muslim League chieftain sportingly laid on a special train to carry the Mahatma and his party to the station nearest his destination, assigning three members of his provincial government to tag along. Gandhi, who now had fifteen months to live, stayed in the vicinity of Noakhali for the next four. He said he’d make himself a Noakhali man, a Bengali, that he might have to stay many years, possibly even be killed there. Noakhali, he said, “may be my last act.” With his usual flair for self-dramatization, he raised the stakes from day to day. “If Noakhali is lost,” he declared finally, “India is lost.” What could he have meant? What was it about this small and obscure, impoverished and virtually submerged patch of delta on the fringe of the subcontinent that so transfixed him?
In Noakhali, November 1946 (photo credit i11.3)
The answers, though Gandhi provided many, aren’t instantly obvious. It had been the suffering of Hindus—in particular, Pyarelal tells us, “the cry of outraged womanhood”—that had established Noakhali in Gandhi’s imagination as a necessary destination: the reports of rapes, forced conversions, followed by the rewarding of Hindu women to Muslim rioters as trophies, sometimes literally at sword’s point. Judging from his later preaching, Gandhi’s original concept of his mission involved persuading Hindu families to take back wives and daughters who’d been snatched from them rather than reject them as dishonored. He also wanted to persuade them to stay put in their villages where, typically in East Bengal, they were outnumbered four to one, or if they’d already fled to refugee camps, as they had by the tens of thousands, to now open their minds to the idea of returning to rebuild their charred, ruined homes. But as long as communal peace was his overriding objective, he needed a message for the area’s Muslim majority as well. For East Bengal’s Muslims, avenging Calcutta had been an occasion—it might even be called a pretext—for ousting Hindu landowners and moneylenders, thereby overturning a lopsided agrarian order that oppressed them. The defining social statistic was that the minority Hindus owned 80 percent of the land. In a sense, he’d have to balance “the cry of outraged womanhood” against the cry for a fairer division of the income that could be squeezed from Noakhali’s bountiful harvests of fish, rice, jute, coconuts, betel, and papayas.
At his first large prayer meeting, at a place called Chaumuhani on November 7, the elderly Hindu in a loincloth faced an overwhelmingly Muslim crowd of about fifteen thousand. He dwelled on the theme that the Islam he’d studied was a religion of peace. Earlier he’d vowed not to leave East Bengal until “a solitary Hindu girl” could walk safely among Muslims. The Muslim majority needed to tell the women of “the small Hindu minority,” he now said, that “while they are there, no one dare cast an evil eye on them.” Within a week, he found that two remaining Muslim Leaguers who’d been traveling with him had dropped out after finding themselves criticized in the Muslim press for “dancing attendance on Mr. Gandhi.”
Soon he was forced to recognize that Muslims were staying away from his nightly prayer meetings and that the “peace committees” he’d hoped to plant in each village, composed of one respected Muslim and one like-minded Hindu, each vowing to sacrifice his life to prevent new attacks, existed only on paper. Now if he mentioned Pakistan at all, it was only to assert that he was not its enemy. With a rhetorical flourish, the supplicating Mahatma even suggested that if all the Hindus of East Bengal departed, he himself could be the last one remaining in what would then become Pakistan. “If India is destined to be partitioned, I cannot prevent it,” he said. “But if every Hindu of East Bengal goes away, I shall still continue to live amongst the Muslims of East Bengal … [and] subsist on what they give me.” A few nights later he could be found reading out a Jinnah statement warning Muslims that they could forfeit their claim to Pakistan if they indulged in communal violence. Hindus would be safer in Pakistan than Muslims themselves, the Quaid-i-Azam had pledged.
Jinnah’s gossamer promise was the obverse of a pious hope that had been slowly forming in Gandhi’s mind, which was now not infrequently despairing. By prodding Noakhali Hindus to return to their villages and by living there peacefully himself, he still meant to prove to all the subcontinent’s Muslims and Hindus that there was no need for a Pakistan of any size or description. “If the Hindus could live side by side with the Muslims in Noakhali,” Pyarelal wrote, putting the Mahatma’s utopian vision into his own words, “the two communities could coexist in the rest of India, too, without vivisection of the Motherland. On the answer to the challenge of Noakhali thus hung the fate of India.” Having placed himself beyond the very periphery of the subcontinent, he now vowed to make isolated Noakhali central to its destiny.
Consciously or not, Gandhi was following his old impulse to turn inward and go it alone, the one that had caused him a decade earlier to attempt to strike out for the remote village of Segaon by himself in hopes of finding a way through obstructions and caste prohibitions that had blocked and defeated his co-workers: the same impulse that had led, in his South Africa years, to the short-lived experiment in communal living called Tolstoy Farm. In an analogous quest, he now vowed to bury himself in a remote village in Noakhali where he could go without his entourage and take up residence with a Muslim League family. He said that would be his “ideal.” If he failed to find willing Muslim hosts there, he’d live by himself. So he headed for an obscure village called Srirampur, not far from the epicenter of the worst Noakhali violence, bringing with him only an interpreter and a stenographer. The interpreter doubled as a Bengali teacher; he’d now be asked to function as well as masseur.
The stenographer normally handled Gandhi’s correspondence and whipped up the transcripts of his nightly talks at prayer meetings for the small retinue of journalists that trailed him. A pioneer in the art of press manipulation, Gandhi insisted the journalists file not on the words that had actually come out of his mouth but on versions he “authorized” after his own sometimes heavy editing of the transcripts. The journalists—like the armed police detachment assigned by Suhrawardy to protect him—were also instructed to keep a decent distance so that the Mahatma’s sense of his solitary mission would not be compromised.
Gandhi now drafted a statement for the colleagues he was leaving behind. “I find myself in the midst of exaggeration and falsity. I am unable to discover the truth,” it said. “Oldest friendships have snapped. Truth and ahimsa by which I swear and which have to my knowledge sustained me for sixty years, seem to fail to show the attributes I ascribed to them.” On that unhappy note, he disembarked at Srirampur, where he’d dwell for six weeks in a small wood-frame shelter with walls of corrugated metal and woven palm fronds, making a disciplined effort to push down dark premonitions and thoughts that continued to well up in his mind, waiting for inspiration.
Elderly people still living in the district retain distinct mental images of Gandhi from those days. They picture the public man, animated, soft-spoken, and smiling, his regularly oiled and massaged skin gleaming. A Hindu woman named Moranjibala Nandi, said by her son to be 105, was capable of describing the moment when the Mahatma came into the compound, where she was still living sixty-three years later, to distribute cloth to refugees. She pointed out the spot where he stood, about twenty yards from where, wrapped in a white widow’s sari, she now sat crumpled into something like a small ball with only her sunken cheeks and gnarled, expressive fingers showing. “He didn’t have a sad face,” she said. I heard descriptions of similar encounters from a half-dozen other nonagenarians and octogenarians. But four days after his arrival in Srirampur, his new interpreter and Bengali tutor, a Calcutta intellectual named Nirmal Kumar Bose, heard him muttering to himself in Hindi, “Kya karun, kya karun?” “What should I do, what should I do?” the Mahatma was asking.
If Gandhi returned to Srirampur today, he’d easily recognize the place even though the population has tripled over the decades. Where people actually reside and mingle, the bright sunlight is still largely filtered through palm canopies and foliage of other trees that yield their own modest cash crops—betel nut, papaya, mango—planted as densely as possible not for the shade but the cash. The light that seeps through takes on a greenish, seemingly subaqueous quality that’s soothing in contrast to the direct rays that then startle the eye when, following the swept dirt paths that are still the main thoroughfares, the visitor emerges on the embankments that frame the rice paddies, long vistas of a stunning electric green in the growing season that turn scrubby and dun colored after the harvests.
When Gandhi took his twice-a-day walks here, the harvest was just beginning; by the time he left, it was in. The men who lounge around the tea stalls at intersections of the paths mostly wrap themselves in lungis, the casual skirts, tied at the waist, seldom seen in North India. When it’s hot, as it mostly is in Bangladesh, they don’t bother with shirts. Cars don’t get to these hubs—even rickshaws are sparse—but buses and trucks can now reach the edge of the village as they couldn’t in Gandhi’s day, when most transport was by canals that have long since been choked by hyacinth plants and blocked by buildings on cement pilings.
In Srirampur (photo credit i11.4)
“Hardly a wheel turns … I saw no motorable road. The bullock cart, one of India’s truest symbols, does not exist here,” wrote Phillips Talbot, a young American journalist, later a diplomat, who caught up with Gandhi in Noakhali. “The civilization is amphibious.”
Viewed superficially, the place today looks timeless, beyond history, becalmed. But mention Gandhi and the short season of slaughter that made Noakhali notorious, more than six decades ago when what’s now Bangladesh was still India, and someone who was a child then steps forward to point out landmarks from his time here or, more likely, the sites from which those landmarks have now vanished. The simple cottage that was thrown up for Gandhi is long gone, as is the ruin of a Hindu landowner’s large house that was set on fire before the Mahatma came. But any villager with a little gray in his hair knows where they stood. A banyan tree under which a small Hindu shrine was smashed back then is pointed out as a place where the Mahatma once paused to shake his head over the damage. The shrine has since been restored; the village’s handful of Hindus pray there for protection against diseases. At a nearby village mosque an elderly attendant named Abdul Rashid Patwari, now ninety, gives a convincing account of Gandhi’s visit on one of his morning walks.
The story is known, but in another sense it’s prehistoric since history, as it’s taught and understood in today’s Bangladesh, generally begins with the country’s “liberation” from Pakistan in 1971. The short, twenty-four-year existence of East Pakistan, as the country was called before that sundering, is remembered, when it’s acknowledged at all, as a time of heavy-handed oppression by Muslims from the Punjab, on the other side of the subcontinent. Jinnah, never a hero among Bengalis, is lost in a deep amnesia. But Gandhi, faintly venerated as a saintly Hindu who came here on a peace mission, retains a presence. Voices become hushed. His name evokes a formal reverence, even among those who have never known the details of his time here.
Such flimsy sentiments are not without value, but the evidence of the failure of the Mahatma’s mission here is also on the surface in Srirampur. If the size of the Hindu population was on the order of one-fifth in East Bengal in 1946, it’s now closer to one-twentieth in Srirampur; in its vicinity, no more than five hundred souls. Hardly anyone mourns the long-ago partition Gandhi was hoping to ward off by raising up a compelling, shining example of nonviolence that the rest of the subcontinent would have to take into account. That dream is forgotten. What remains is the idea of peace and a lingering impression that it had something to do with good works. There are no memorials for Pakistan in Noakhali, but, amazingly, less than fifteen miles from Srirampur there’s a modest Gandhi museum near a town named Joyag, where he once spent a night, part of an underfinanced social service organization called the Gandhi Ashram Trust that traces its inspiration to his time in the district. Its top officers are Hindu, but 80 percent of its beneficiaries are Muslim. There, Bengali women are still taught to spin and weave by hand. The trust hopes it will begin earning a modest profit on its handicrafts sometime soon and thus begin to fulfill the Mahatma’s vision. It’s enough part of the landscape to maintain good relations with the chairman of the Joyag village council, an orthodox Muslim named Abdue Wahab who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and ran on the ticket of the Jamaat-i-Islami, a religious party generally classed as militant. “A man like Gandhi is needed by this society and the world,” the Jamaat man told me. Some people in his movement blame him for cooperating with the Gandhi Ashram Trust because Gandhi was a Hindu. “That’s due to lack of understanding,” Chairman Wahab said, smiling sweetly.
In a nearby village, I sipped the watery, sweet juice of a green coconut with an elderly Hindu and an even more ancient Muslim who remained neighbors as Noakhali became part of Pakistan instead of India, then Bangladesh instead of Pakistan. They now sat side by side. I couldn’t be sure whether that was out of long habit or for my benefit. “He brought peace here,” the Hindu said piously. “The sad part is no one followed him,” the Muslim said. I took that to be a comment on the standard of leadership the country has seen since. History, it seemed in that moment, had simultaneously moved on and stood still. The killings are remembered as a long-ago typhoon, another kind of natural disaster. Gandhi’s time here is sanctified or sentimentalized—depending on how the questions are put—as if his mission somehow accomplished its ends, as if the relative absence of communal violence ever since can be attributed to his influence.
That’s not how the Mahatma experienced it. Most of Srirampur’s Hindus had, in fact, fled by the time he took up residence there. According to Narayan Desai, only three out of two hundred Hindu families remained. In a letter written in his first week there, Gandhi himself boasts, “There is only one Hindu family living in the entire village, the rest are all Muslims.” No Muslim League family ever came forward to offer him the refuge he sought, so he remained in his little cabin, venturing out for his walks, which sometimes included calls on ailing children whose Muslim parents were willing to hear his advice about nature cures involving diet and mud poultices. On rare occasions, he left the village for meetings with local Muslim religious or political leaders, who then routinely would dwell on conditions in Bihar, implying not so subtly that it was time for him to move on. Regularly he met with Gandhian workers he’d stationed in nearby villages in the stricken area, drafting new instructions as they reported on the dearth of cooperation from local officials, following these up with appeals to Suhrawardy, who unfailingly responded by pressing him on the pointlessness of his mission in Bengal while Bihar was burning. Assured by Congress leaders in Bihar that peace had been restored, Gandhi resumed his consumption of goat’s milk and gradually increased his daily intake of food. (His weight, so Bose tells us, had dropped to 106½ pounds.) His intelligence on Bihar was more to be trusted than Suhrawardy’s, he insisted. But he didn’t need reminding that he was making little progress. He just had to look around. Few Hindus were returning to their burned-out homes, despite his assurances or promises of assistance in rebuilding. And Muslims were continuing to distance themselves, boycotting his prayer meetings and the small number of Hindu shopkeepers still in business in the bazaars.
“My unfitness for the task is showing at every step,” he declared in the course of his Srirampur sojourn. Once again, it was as if the intractable problem of communal strife in India was somehow internalized within himself, that his failure to work the miracle on which he was bent could be traced to some personal “imperfection” or defect. Ultimately, he’d say exactly that. “I can see there is some grave defect in me somewhere which is the cause of all this. All around me is utter darkness. When will God take me out of this darkness into his light?”
To speed that illumination, a desperate Gandhi took two vows. On December 11, just three weeks after he arrived in Srirampur, he gave up on his pledge to stay in a single place until a glorious refulgence of peace burst forth for all to see. Instead, he said he’d soon extend his mission by venturing on a Noakhali walking tour, staying in a new village every night. As if to prepare for that challenge, he privately vowed to deepen his personal yajna, his own course of self-sacrifice. What this phase of his life entailed, he convinced himself, was a further testing of his forty-year commitment to celibacy in order to discover the defect at the root of his “unfitness.”
So also on that same day, hours before announcing at his evening prayer meeting his new plan to tour the district walking through its harvested paddy fields and over its rickety bamboo bridges, he sent a telegram to a nephew, Jaisukhlal Gandhi, whose young daughter Manu had nursed the Mahatma’s wife nearly three years earlier as she faded from life in detention and finally died of heart failure. Now a shy and unaffected seventeen with an appearance that could not be called striking, the devoted Manu had become a favorite pen pal of Gandhi, who coaxed and cajoled her to rejoin his entourage, all the while insisting he only wanted what was best for her. The telegram to her father was oddly worded. It said: “IF YOU AND MANU SINCERELY ANXIOUS FOR HER TO BE WITH ME AT YOUR RISK, YOU CAN BRING HER.”
Gandhi made it sound as if he were giving way to the wishes of father and daughter. In fact, he’d planted the idea himself and cultivated it in an epistolary campaign spanning months. “Manu’s place can be nowhere else but here by my side,” he’d written. It soon became obvious that the Noakhali Gandhi was now bent on making his young relative his primary personal attendant, the person who’d monitor his daily schedule, see that he was fed exactly what he wanted, measured out precisely in ounces (eight ounces boiled vegetables, eight ounces raw vegetables, two ounces greens, sixteen ounces goat’s milk boiled down to four ounces), at exactly the desired time; not only that, the person who’d administer his daily bath and massage, which could take longer than an hour and a half. An ounce of mustard oil and an ounce of lemon juice had to be mixed for the massage, which proceeded “in exactly the same manner every day,” according to a memoir Nirmal Bose later wrote: “first one part of the body, then another … in invariable succession.”
Even that could be considered just the beginning. It turned out that Manu Gandhi would also be expected to play the female lead in the brahmacharya test the Mahatma now saw as essential to his self-purification. Starting in the late 1930s, he’d had female attendants sleep on bedrolls laid out to the side of his; if he experienced tremors or shivers, as sometimes he did, they’d be expected to embrace him until the shaking stopped. Now he planned to have Manu share the same mattress. Perfection would be achieved if the old man and the young woman wore the fewest possible garments, preferably none, and neither one felt the slightest sexual stirring. A perfect brahmachari, he later wrote in a letter, should be “capable of lying naked with naked women, however beautiful they may be, without being in any manner whatsoever sexually aroused.” Such a man would be completely free from anger and malice.
Sexlessness was the ideal for which he was striving. His relation to Manu, he told her, would be essentially that of a mother. None of this would go on in secret; other members of his entourage might share the same veranda or room.
What’s important here is less Gandhi’s belief in the spiritual power to be derived from perfect, serene celibacy than the relation of his striving for self-purification to his lonely mission in Noakhali. Where could the real motivation be located, in his gnawing sense of failure for which a ratcheting up of his brahmacharya might provide healing, or in his need for a human connection, if not the intimacy he’d long since forsworn? There’s no obvious answer, except to say the struggle was at the core of his being and that it had never been more anguishing than it was in Srirampur. The two most conspicuous elements of his life there—the mission and the spiritual striving—are usually treated as separate matters. But, here again, they were happening simultaneously, crowding in on each other: in Gandhi’s own mind, inextricably connected to the point of being one and the same.
The immediate effect of his summons to Manu was a cascading emotional crisis in his own inner circle, all taking place in the obscurity and shade of mostly Muslim Srirampur but soon seeping into public view. Plainly, the starting point was within Gandhi himself, in his sense that doctrine and mission were failing. “I don’t want to return from Bengal defeated,” he remarked to a friend a few days after the summons to Manu. “I would rather die, if need be, at the hands of an assassin. But I do not want to court it, much less wish it.”
He’d cleared the decks for her arrival by dispatching his closest associates—notably Pyarelal, his secretary, and Pyarelal’s sister, Dr. Sushila Nayar—to workstations in other villages. Sushila had previously played the part for which Manu was now being recruited. Back in 1938, Gandhi had tried out a young Jewish woman from Palestine named Hannah Lazar, a niece of Hermann Kallenbach’s, who’d trained in massage. “Of course she knows her art,” he wrote to her uncle in Johannesburg. “But she can’t all of a sudden equal the touch of Sushila who is a competent doctor and who learned massage especially for treating me.” Here Gandhi sounds more like a discriminating pasha with a harem than the ascetic he genuinely was.
Now, more than eight years after this letter and just six days after his summons to Manu, Gandhi told Sushila that it would remain her duty to stay in her village—in other words, that she’d not be included on his walking tour, because Manu would be taking care of his most personal needs. Nirmal Bose, who was standing just outside, heard “a deeply anguished cry proceeding from the main room … [followed by] two large slaps given on someone’s body. The cry then sank down into a heavy sob.” When Bose got to the doorway, both Gandhi and Sushila were “bathed in tears.” The cries and heavy sob had been the Mahatma’s, he realized. Three days later, while bathing Gandhi for what appears to have been the last time, Bose summoned the courage to ask him whether he’d slapped Sushila. “Gandhiji’s face wore a sad smile,” Bose wrote in his memoir, “and he said, ‘No, I did not beat her. I beat my own forehead.’ ” That same evening, on December 20, 1946, with Manu beside him in his bed for the first time, Gandhi began his supposed yajna, or self-sacrifice, sometimes termed an “experiment” by him.
With Manu, his “walking stick” (photo credit i11.5)
“Stick to your word,” he wrote in a note to Manu that day. “Don’t hide even a single thought from me … Have it engraved in your heart that whatever I ask or say will be solely for your good.”
Within ten days, Gandhi’s stenographer, a young South Indian named Parsuram, quit in protest over his revered leader’s nightly cuddle with Manu, which he couldn’t fail to have witnessed. Instead of questioning Gandhi’s explanation of its spiritual purpose, he registered a political complaint—that the inevitable reports and gossip would alienate public opinion. His argument didn’t impress the Mahatma. “I like your frankness and boldness,” he wrote to the young man after reading his ten-page letter of resignation. “You are at liberty to publish whatever wrong you have noticed in me and my surroundings.” Later he scolded Bose for glossing over in his Bengali interpretation his attempt at one of his prayer meetings to offer a frank public account of the latest test he’d set for himself.
Pyarelal was also drawn into this emotional maelstrom, and not simply because he was partial to his sister. He’d had a crush on Manu himself. Gandhi now promised to keep his secretary at a distance if Manu “does not want even to see him.” He could testify to his aide’s good character. “Pyarelal’s eyes are clean,” he wrote to Manu’s father a week before she was scheduled to reach Noakhali, “and he is not likely to force himself on anybody.” Gandhi then writes to Pyarelal urging him to keep his distance. “I can see that you will not be able to have Manu as a wife,” says the revered figure who is now bedding down next to her on a nightly basis. Self-purification, it was already clear, could not be attempted in this world without complications.
Nirmal Bose, the detached Calcutta intellectual serving as Gandhi’s Bengali interpreter, wasn’t initially judgmental about Gandhi’s reliance on Manu. But his allegiance was gradually strained as he observed Gandhi’s manipulative way of managing the emotional ripples that ran through his entourage at a moment of national and personal crisis. He felt the Mahatma, in his preoccupation with the feelings of Pyarelal and his sister, was allowing himself to get distracted. “After a life of prolonged brahmacharya,” Bose wrote in his diary, “he has become incapable of understanding the problems of love or sex as they exist in the common human plane.” So Bose took it upon himself, in conversation and several long letters over the next three months, to acquaint his master with the psychoanalytic concepts of the subconscious, neurosis, and repression. Gandhi jumped on a single passing reference to Freud in one of Bose’s letters. He’d read Havelock Ellis and Bertrand Russell on sex but not Freud. It was only the second time, he wrote back, that he’d heard the name. “What is Freudian philosophy?” asked the Mahatma, ever curious. “I have not read any writing of his.”
Bose’s basic point was made more bluntly in his diary and a letter to a friend than in his correspondence with the Mahatma. It was that Gandhi had allowed himself to use his bedmates as instruments in an experiment undertaken for his own sake and that he thus risked leaving “a mark of injury on personalities of others who are not of the same moral stature … and for whom sharing in Gandhiji’s experiment is no spiritual necessity.” He thought Manu might be an exception but wasn’t sure. Despite his restraint, Gandhi got the point. “I do hope you will acquit me of having any lustful designs upon women or girls who have been naked with me,” he wrote back. That was the one count on which the Freudian in Bose felt certain of Gandhi’s innocence.
Feeling himself to have been distanced by his own frankness, Bose came to doubt he could be of much further use to Gandhi. Finally he asked to be relieved of his duties. In a valedictory letter, he said he saw signs that the Mahatma had, in fact, begun to attain the level of concentrated personal force for which he’d been reaching in these months: “I saw your strength come back in flashes when you rose to heights no one else has reached in our national life.”
A week after Gandhi established his grandniece Manu in his household and bed, the urgency and weight of the constitutional crisis in New Delhi descended on the remote village of Srirampur, brought there on a visit of two and a half days by Nehru, now head of an “interim government” still subject to the British viceroy, and Nehru’s successor as Congress president, J. B. Kripalani, a follower of Gandhi’s for three decades. Given that the Congress president’s wife, Sucheta, had shared the Mahatma’s bed with him and Manu on one recent night, there was no need for Gandhi to brief his visitors on the yajna he’d just undertaken. According to one account, Nehru himself came to the doorway of the room where Gandhi and Manu slept on his first night in Srirampur; having looked in, he silently stepped away. The sketchy account does not record whether he raised his eyebrows or shook his head.
In the following month, Gandhi would seek to explain his quest to both men in letters. Neither wanted to sit in judgment on the Mahatma. “I can never be disillusioned about you unless I find the marks of insanity and depravity in you,” Kripalani replied. “I do not find such marks.” Nehru was even more reticent. “I feel a little out of my depth and I hate discussing personal and private matters,” he wrote to a mentor he revered but frequently found perplexing, even troublesome.
Gandhi had first singled Nehru out as a Congress leader in 1928 and, while acknowledging conspicuous differences in outlook, had been openly calling him “my heir and successor” since 1934 when he made a show of giving up his own Congress membership. “Jawaharlal is the only man with the drive to take my place,” he remarked five years later. For all his doting on Nehru, this was a practical political judgment based on two obvious factors—Nehru’s demonstrated mass appeal and tendency in a crisis to bend to the Mahatma’s view. He knew his heir would never score high on any checklist of Gandhian values, that the younger man, more a Fabian than a Gandhian, could be expected to promote state planning and nationalized industries over the sort of village-level reconstruction he’d always advocated, that there was little question in his mind about the need for a modern military establishment in a future Indian state. But he waved aside such contradictions, treating them as matters of emphasis. “He says what is uppermost in his mind,” Gandhi observed in 1938, in a comment as revealing of himself as it was of Nehru, “but he always does what I want. When I am gone he will do what I am doing now. Then he will speak my language.”
With his chosen “successor,” 1946 (photo credit i11.6)
Later he got closer to the truth, perhaps, when he said of Nehru: “He has made me captive of his love.”
But now—with the Noakhali Gandhi out of touch and power shifting rapidly into his hands—Nehru, by inclination as well as necessity, was speaking his own language and listening less. The ostensible point of his journey to Srirampur had been to update Gandhi on a resolution he planned to put before the party the next week, further locking it into a process that could lead to partition and Pakistan; also, Nehru said, it was to urge Gandhi to put Noakhali behind him and return to Delhi so he could be more easily consulted and—this would have gone without saying—privately implored not to stray too far from the emerging party line.
The Mahatma’s appetite for grappling with national issues was tickled, but he wasn’t tempted to return. He said there was still work to be done in Noakhali; by his own reckoning, his mission there would remain unfinished until the day he died. More compelling was his sense that he’d lost the ability to influence his erstwhile followers, as he’d recently complained in a note to the industrialist G. D. Birla. “My voice,” the note said, “carries no weight in the Working Committee … I do not like the shape that things are taking and I can’t speak out.”
Such misgivings, however, didn’t stop him from sending Nehru back with “instructions.” The document, drafted late on Nehru’s last night in Srirampur, pointed in several directions at once. Basically, it said Gandhi had been right in suggesting the Congress reject the British plan; that now that it had failed to heed his advice, it was stuck with the plan; that therefore it needed an accord with Jinnah giving him “a universally acceptable and inoffensive formula for his Pakistan,” so long as no territories were compelled to be part of it.
The phrase “acceptable and inoffensive” was telling. It pointed in more or less the same direction as Nehru’s unusually dense resolution, which all but smothered its essential acceptance of an unpalatable British formula with a blanket of technicalities, exceptions, and complaints. Between the lines, both Gandhi’s “instructions” and Nehru’s resolution pointed to the quickest deal for independence, on the best available terms, with the fewest possible concessions to the Muslim League. Obviously, Gandhi meant “acceptable” and “inoffensive” to the Congress and himself, not Jinnah and his followers; he didn’t say how that could be accomplished. On one level, he hadn’t budged from the position he’d taken when Jinnah broke off talks with him two years earlier. On another, he’d shown that he’d do nothing to delay a handover of power even if it involved two recipients instead of one.
Nehru’s resolution was adopted the next week by the All India Congress Committee by something less than acclamation, a vote of 99–52. When a member asked to know Gandhi’s advice, Kripalani snapped that it was “irrelevant at this stage,” not bothering to cite the woolly “instructions” the Mahatma had written out for Nehru, who’d flown to East Bengal, it seems likely, partly to ensure that Gandhi wouldn’t come out on the other side. Gandhi himself had been pleased to paper over his most recent breach with the leadership. “I suggest frequent consultations with an old, tried servant of the nation,” he’d written in a fond farewell note to Nehru.
Just two days later, on the second day of the new year, he pulled up stakes in Srirampur and left on his walking tour of Noakhali, with one hand clutching a bamboo staff and the other resting on Manu’s shoulder. He was barefoot and would continue without sandals every step of the way for the next two months. In the mornings, the pilgrim’s feet were sometimes numbed by cold; on one occasion at least, they bled. Nightly they were pressed and massaged with oil. Srirampur’s Muslim villagers lined the path that circled Darikanath pond, a well-stocked fishery, that first morning; a crowd of about a hundred walked in his footsteps, with a detachment of eight armed police and at least as many reporters. The next morning headlines in Calcutta’s Indian-owned, pro-Congress, English-language daily, the Amrita Bazar Patrika, heralded the launch:
GANDHIJI’S EPIC
TOUR BEGINSHISTORIC MARCH THROUGH
PADDY FIELDS AND
GREEN GROVESGANDHIJI LIKELY
TO WORK
MIRACLE
The newspaper kept the tour on its front page every day but one for the next six weeks, conveying the authorized versions of Gandhi’s nightly prayer meeting talks. Too early by a matter of decades to have made great television, it faded as a big story elsewhere. So the loneliness and vicissitudes of the trek never really registered beyond Bengal. After the first few days, the crowds dwindled, with Muslims once again conspicuous by their absence. This time there could be little doubt that elements in the Muslim League were promoting a boycott. In the second month, handbills started appearing urging Gandhi to focus on Bihar, amplifying the theme of most Muslim officials he encountered. “Remember Bihar,” one said. “We’ve warned you many times. Go back. Otherwise, you’ll be sorry.” Obviously meant for his eyes, another said: “Give up your hypocrisy and accept Pakistan.”
On some mornings, Gandhi’s companions would find that human feces had been deposited, dumped, or spread on paths he could be expected to walk. On his way to a village called Atakora, the old man himself stooped over and started scooping up excrement with dried leaves. A flustered Manu protested that he was putting her to shame. “You don’t know the joy it gives me,” the Mahatma, now seventy-seven, replied.
In fifty-seven days, he visited forty-seven villages in Noakhali and a neighboring district called Tipperah, trudging 116 miles, barefoot all the way, in order to touch Muslims’ hearts through a personal demonstration of his own openheartedness and simplicity. He called it a “pilgrimage.” Sometimes he said it was a “penance,” for the slaughter Hindus and Muslims had recently inflicted on each other, or his own failure to end it. He greeted every Muslim he passed, even where most of them stolidly refrained from responding. Only three times, in all those days and weeks, all those villages, was he invited to stay in a Muslim home. His followers prefabricated a tidy hut of bamboo panels to be disassembled on a daily basis and, with each new village, reassembled for his comfort. He complained it was “palatial.” When he learned it took seven porters to carry his collapsible shelter, he refused to sleep in it, insisting it be converted into a dispensary. If Muslims stayed away from his prayer meetings, he pursued them in their houses and huts. In each new village, Manu was dispatched to call on Muslim women in seclusion. Sometimes she managed to persuade them to meet the Mahatma, sometimes doors were slammed in her face. When young Muslim Leaguers came to his meetings to heckle, he turned back their sharp questions with calm, reasoned replies.
January 1947, bones of Noakhali victims on display for the Mahatma (photo credit i11.7)
“How did your ahimsa work in Bihar?” he was pointedly asked in a village called Paniala.
“It didn’t work at all,” he replied. “It failed miserably.”
“What in your opinion is the cause of the communal riots?” another asked.
“The idiocy of both communities,” said the Mahatma.
Twice in nine weeks, he’s brought to exposed human remains left over from the killings. The first time, on November 11, a stray dog leads him to the skeletons of the members of a single Hindu household; then, on January 11, he passes by a doba, or pond, that has finally been dragged to retrieve the bodies of Hindus killed in the earliest and ugliest of these pogroms at Karpara.
The Mahatma moved on briskly. “It is useless to think about those who are dead,” he said. His aim was less to console bereaved Hindus than to stiffen their spines while touching the hearts of Muslims who’d looked away from the carnage, or even approved it. He could only demonstrate his good intentions “by living and moving among those who do not trust me,” he said. So every morning, he trudged on, regardless of the reception he encountered. His followers sang religious songs, always including one by Tagore with a Bengali poem called “Walk Alone” as its lyric. Occasionally there was a welcome, occasionally a large crowd. In the fourth week, at a village called Muriam, a warm reception from Muslims was orchestrated by a friendly maulana named Habibullah Batari who, if Pyarelal’s account can be accepted, introduced him by saying: “Our community today suffers from the stigma of shedding the blood of our Hindu brothers. Mahatmaji has come to free us of that stain.” For Gandhi, this was proof of the possibilities before him and the country. But it was hardly an everyday occurrence. At Panchgaon, four days later, he was urged by the head of the local Muslim League to discontinue his prayer meetings because they offended Muslims and, better yet, end his Noakhali tour altogether.
In his mobile hut, November 1946 (photo credit i11.8)
At the prayer meetings, he’d size up his audiences, then draw familiar themes and messages from the repertoire of a lifetime. If seeking to make the point that he and the village workers he brought with him had come not to sit in judgment but to serve, he’d dwell on all that could be done to improve sanitation and the cleanliness of the district’s water. Speaking of lost livelihoods, he’d talk about crafts and what they could do for village uplift. On the fraught, overarching issue of land tenure, he’d say the land belonged to God and those who actually worked it, that reduction in the landlord’s share of crops was therefore only just, with the Gandhian proviso that it had to be accomplished without violence.
The value he upheld most insistently was fearlessness. To insure peace, he said, Muslims and Hindus had to be ready to die. It’s the message he’d given Czechs and European Jews in the previous decade about how to face the Nazis, the idea that a courageous satyagrahi could “melt the heart” of a tyrant. Repeatedly he asked that the police guards Suhrawardy had sent be withdrawn so as not to weaken the example he was hoping to set through his pilgrimage. (The guards never left. Suhrawardy said it was the government’s responsibility to make sure the Mahatma got out of East Bengal alive.) Early on he talked about martyrdom: “The sacrifice of myself and my companions would at least teach [Hindu women] the art of dying with self-respect. It might open the eyes of the oppressors, too.” To a refugee who asked how he could expect Hindus to return to villages where they might face attack, he replied: “I do not mind if each and every one of the five hundred families in your area is done to death.” Before arriving in Noakhali, he’d struck a similar note speaking to a trio of Gandhian workers who were planning to precede him: “There will be no tears but only joy if tomorrow I get the news that all three of you were killed.”
Not infrequently in these months, Gandhi comes across as sounding this extreme, very nearly the fanatic he’d sometimes been accused of being. We may assume it’s a figure of speech, not meant to be taken literally. But even Manu isn’t immune from his determination to teach that his kind of courage in the cause of peace could be—sometimes had to be—as fierce and selfless as any shown on a battlefield.
On reaching a village called Narayanpur in the third week of the walking tour, Gandhi couldn’t find a piece of pumice he used to scrape his feet before soaking them. He’d last used it at a weaver’s hut where he’d stopped to warm his chilled feet. Evidently, Manu had left the stone behind. This was a “major error,” Gandhi said sternly, ordering her to retrace their steps and find it, which meant following a path through thick jungle in an area where assaults on young women were not unknown. When she asked if she could take a couple of volunteers, Gandhi refused. She had to go alone. The weaver’s wife had tossed the stone out, not knowing that the Mahatma counted it as precious. When Manu finally recovered it and returned, Pyarelal tells us, she burst into tears, only to be met by Gandhi’s cackle. To him, her afternoon’s ordeal was part of their mutual “test.”
“If some ruffian had carried you off and you had met your death courageously,” he told her, “my heart would have danced with joy. But I would have felt humiliated and unhappy if you had turned back or run away from danger.”
Speaking to dispossessed caste Hindus, he was hardly more tender. They needed to understand, he evidently felt, that their privileges and vices had something to do with their present misery. Those who don’t labor but live on the toil of others are thieves, he said. It’s surprising to discover how often he harps on the evil of untouchability when talking to the Noakhali refugees. He even makes collections there for his Harijan fund. Given that he’s speaking to caste Hindus who have recently been burned out of their homesteads in strife with Muslims, it seems, at first, inappropriate, an old man’s non sequitur. But untouchability had long since become for Gandhi a metaphor for all forms of social oppression involving “high” and “low.” If caste Hindus resist dining and intermarriage with Muslims, he’s now prepared to say, they’re practicing a form of untouchability; in the back of his mind, he may have harbored the thought that many Muslims descended from untouchables who converted. “He had told us time and again,” Pyarelal later wrote, “that the Hindu-Muslim question had its roots in untouchability.”
After many years of verbal tiptoeing, it seems, he has ceased to speak in code or measure his words on issues of social equality. It’s the end of the long intellectual and political journey that began in Durban when he first had the thought that whites treated Indians the way Indians treated one another, as untouchables. Asked what it would take to heal the rift between Muslims and the mainly Hindu Congress, he replied: “Giving equality to the untouchables.” What sounds like a riddle is his way of saying what Ambedkar had been saying all along—that the disease in Hindu society starts with the practices of caste Hindus.
On the second day of his Noakhali walking tour, he addresses a gathering of Hindu women in Chandipur. Just as he once traced an earthquake to God’s displeasure over untouchability, he now ascribes the Noakhali calamity to the same transgression. According to the authorized summary of his talk that is more than likely the result of his own rewriting, he said:
If they still went on disowning the untouchables, more sorrow was in store for them. He asked the audience to invite a Harijan every day to dine with them. If they could not do so, they could call a Harijan before taking a meal and ask him to touch the drinking water or food … Unless they did penance for their sins … more calamities and more severe ones would overtake them.
The next week he twice urges the Muslim majority of the district not to treat Hindus as untouchables. A month later, still in Noakhali, he’s calling for a casteless society. In Kamalapur, he’s challenged to say how he feels about intercommunal marriages if he now condones intercaste unions. According to Bose’s paraphrase, he responds: “He has not always held this view [but] had long come to the conclusion that an inter-religious marriage was a welcome event whenever it took place.” So long, he couldn’t refrain from adding, as it wasn’t inspired by lust.
As the tour proceeds, Muslims mostly keep a distance. Those who come to the prayer meetings are typically impassive. As described by Phillips Talbot, they “listened quietly to the after-prayer talk, and then went away.” The young American wondered if he was witnessing a subtle shift from opposition to “neutral silence.” Had he stayed with Gandhi a few weeks more, he’d have had to give up that thin hope. Increasingly, with the tightening of Muslim boycotts—not only of Gandhi’s meetings but of Hindu landowners and fishmongers and merchants—the Mahatma finds himself speaking to Hindus on what might be considered Hindu themes. On February 22 he pitches up at a place called Char Krishnapur, a spit of an island in the delta where his audience is predominantly made up of untouchables, called Namasudras in Bengali. As poor as the poorest Muslim peasants, they’d suffered as much as the richest Hindu landlords during the riots. There Gandhi stayed in “a low-roof shelter improvised from charred, corrugated sheets salvaged from a burnt-down homestead.” In Haimchar, which turned out to be his last stop, he told Namasudras they needed to lift themselves up by their own efforts; for a start, they could do away with child marriage and promiscuity, so that “the higher castes so-called would be ashamed of their sin against them.”
He’d already mapped out the next stage of his village tour, but here, finally, he felt compelled to come to grips with rising criticism on two fronts, one being his own camp and the other Muslim Leaguers. Though little was said in public, Gandhi’s own circle was in turmoil over the brahmacharya test: perhaps even more than the nightly cuddle itself, his readiness to defend it openly, as he had in the first three days of February. Muslim Leaguers continued to harp on his stubborn refusal over four months to go to Hindu-dominated Bihar, where Muslims had been the victims. On the surface, the two issues seem unconnected, but it’s probably no coincidence that they come to a head in his mind at very nearly the same moment, for in his own mind they’d always been linked.
In Haimchar, Gandhi spends six days with A. V. Thakkar, called Thakkar Bapa, another aging Gujarati, who’d been his closest and most respected co-worker on issues of untouchability. The two old men debate Gandhi’s sleeping arrangements, which Thakkar closely observes on a nightly basis. Thakkar is finally persuaded that the yajna has spiritual meaning for the Mahatma but writes what Gandhi later dismisses as “a pathetic letter” to Manu urging her to withdraw from the “experiment,” presumably for Gandhi’s sake and that of the movement. According to a less than disinterested Pyarelal, Manu then tells Gandhi she sees “no harm in conceding Thakkar Bapa’s request for the time being.” Angry and unrepentant, Gandhi blames Manu’s “lack of perspicacity,” we’re told by his biographer who is also her disappointed suitor. Conceding nothing, the Mahatma agrees to let her leave his bed. The yajna is suspended, if not over, and so, simultaneously, is the Noakhali walking tour.
Almost at once, he decides to break it off. He’d said he was prepared to spend years in Noakhali and “if necessary, I will die here.” But on March 2, 1947, he donned sandals for the first time in two months, since the start of the walking tour, and began the reverse journey toward Bihar.
For four months he’d been fending off appeals from Muslims across India to prove his good faith by confronting the violence Hindus had wrought. His excuses for not going there earlier had come to sound increasingly far-fetched. He’d long since recognized that the Bihar violence had been far worse than that of Bengal. It was now early March, four months after Nehru had been so appalled by the carnage he’d witnessed in Bihar that he’d threatened to order the bombing of Hindu mobs there. Now, all of a sudden, Gandhi finally allowed himself to be moved by a letter from a nationalist Muslim saying that his Congress had done as little to address the violence there as the Muslim League had in East Bengal.
He promised he’d return to keep his commitments in Noakhali. In the months left to him, he kept that trip near the top of his ever-lengthening to-do list. But with partition looming and Hindu-Muslim slaughter spreading like an epidemic across North India—perhaps more like a wildfire, since it burned in some places and skipped over others—he faced new demands for the balm of his presence. Noakhali kept having to be put off.
At the midpoint of the tour, there’d been a foreshadowing that would later be recalled as fateful. Gandhi had run out of goat’s milk and had to take coconut milk instead. Later that evening the stressed-out old man experienced severe diarrhea, started sweating heavily, and finally fainted. That was January 30, 1947. If he died of disease, he told Manu on regaining consciousness, it would prove he’d been a hypocrite. So Manu later wrote in a memoir. She then has him saying: “But if I leave the world with the name of Rama on my lips, only then am I a true brahmachari, a real Mahatma.” So it is written in her gospel. Exactly a year later, on January 30, 1948, when he fell at her side, she’d recall these words as a prophecy fulfilled.
By any secular, this-worldly accounting of Gandhi’s months in Noakhali district, it would be hard to show a political or social gain. The rupture he hoped to forestall occurred. Pakistan happened. By June 1948, more than one million Hindu refugees had crossed the new international border into the Indian rump state of West Bengal. In the next three years, that number doubled; by 1970, the total of refugees from East Bengal resettled in India exceeded five million. “The makers of the shell bangles that were obligatory ornaments for married Hindu women, the weavers of the fine silks and cottons worn by well-to-do Hindus, the potters who fashioned idols used in Hindu festivals, and the priests and astrologers who presided over Hindu rituals of birth, marriage and death were among the earliest migrants,” according to the scholar Joya Chatterji. They’d fled in hot pursuit of the gentry and townsmen who’d employed them. The social order Gandhi had been willing to give his life to reconcile and reform had been—to use his word—“vivisected.” Yet partition, as he predicted, had resolved little. It led to a division of land, spoils, and political authority, but majorities on each side of the new Bengal had to coexist with a substantial minority. Though a military government had proclaimed contemporary Bangladesh an Islamic republic, it still contained twelve million Hindus.
And, somehow, Gandhi still seems to register there as a possible source of inspiration. A lifetime after he left Noakhali, I found myself in Dhaka, the capital of this Islamic republic, at a well-attended commemorative gathering of intellectuals and ardent social reformers marking the 140th anniversary of his birth. The minister of law lit a lamp. Verses from the Koran were read, followed by a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, then Buddhist and Christian prayers, making the event as self-consciously inclusive as Gandhi’s own prayer meetings. Five Muslims and three Hindus spoke—against religious extremism and for harmony, the rule of law, clean politics, rural development, social equality—dwelling not on the Raj and Gandhi’s time but on today’s teeming Bangladesh. A half-dozen TV crews recorded their remarks for the evening news, cameras sweeping across the audience, to pick out upturned faces that could be read as inspired. “The fact is that such a man of flesh was born on our subcontinent and we are his descendants,” said a woman introduced as a human rights advocate. “I feel his necessity every moment.” The gathering ended with one of Gandhi’s favorite devotional songs, sweetly sung by a small, evenly balanced group of Hindu and Muslim students, with most of the audience joining in.
As I said, by any secular accounting, it would be difficult to show a political or social gain from Gandhi’s four months in Noakhali district, near the end of his life in 1946 and 1947. Yet this happened in 2009.