Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  Writing some years later of how he felt at the time, Brij Krishna remarked:

  Bapu’s body now lay on the plank. I filled a tumbler with cold water from the tub and stretched out my hand to pour it on Bapu’s body, but almost automatically my hand was arrested. Bapu never took a cold bath. It was 2 a.m. At this late hour, in the month of January,—a terribly cold January too—how could I pour this icy water on his body?…A cry burst forth from my despairing heart, and I could not control it.

  Brij Krishna composed himself once more, and bathed Gandhi with the cold water he had never used when alive. He dried the body, and then dressed it in a loincloth he had spun himself for Gandhi on his last birthday, 2 October 1947. Around Gandhi’s neck, Brij Krishna placed a garland, once more of yarn spun by himself, as well as the rosary that Gandhi used when chanting the name of Ram. A vermilion tilak was placed on the forehead, and rose petals around the hands, chest and feet. Now the body, bathed, dressed and decorated, could proceed on its final journey.23

  Gandhi had written several times in the past that he expected to die a violent death. And so, albeit in private, had his old comrade Henry Polak. On hearing in April 1934 that Gandhi was planning a fresh fast, Polak had written to a friend: ‘He [Gandhi] has a chronic tendency to offer himself up as a public sacrifice, and I can never feel any sense of certainty that he will in the normal course of events pass away in any but the most dramatic circumstances.’24

  VII

  On 30 January, Sushila Nayar was in Multan, in West Pakistan, carrying on her work for refugee rehabilitation. At 4 p.m. that day she met the deputy commissioner of Multan. His wife asked, ‘When is Gandhiji coming to us?’ For Sushila, ‘it was gratifying to see the erstwhile “Enemy No.1 of Islam”, looked upon as the friend of the Muslims both in India and Pakistan. In my mind I rehearsed, how pleased Bapu would be when he heard my report.’

  Two hours later, the deputy commissioner’s wife rushed in with the news that Gandhi had been killed. Sushila motored through the night to Lahore, from where she took a morning flight to Delhi. Also on the plane was Mian Iftikharuddin, a lifelong Congressman who, shortly before Partition, had opportunistically joined the Muslim League. On seeing Dr Nayar, Iftikharuddin said, with tears in his eyes, ‘Every one of us is responsible for Gandhiji’s death.’

  Sushila Nayar reached Birla House at 11.30, just in time to join the procession carrying Gandhi’s body for the cremation. She climbed into the open car in which the body lay, a Dodge belonging to the Eighth Company of the army’s electrical and mechanical engineers, and driven by one Ram Chand. In the vehicle she saw ‘the Sardar sitting near the feet of his dead master, sad and serene….Pandit Nehru stood near the head with his grief-stricken face.’ Also in the car were two other long-time devotees of the Mahatma, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur and J.B. Kripalani.25

  The Dodge began its journey at 11.45 a.m. Its destination lay four miles to the north-east, by the banks of the river Jamuna. On a normal day, the drive would have taken fifteen to twenty minutes. On this day, however, the car had to crawl through the streets, through the great crowds that milled in and around them.

  From Birla House, the car turned left and then right, towards the War Memorial at India Gate. The entire ‘central vista was one mass of seething humanity. Wherever there were trees, the branches hung with the burden of people. People were seen perched on the top of the 150-foot War Memorial and on lamp-posts along the route.’

  There were some people watching from even higher up. Mountbatten’s staff had climbed up to the great dome of the Durbar Hall, from where they saw the procession carrying Gandhi’s body go down Kingsway, the massively broad avenue that ran from India Gate to the Viceregal Palace. Now, remarked Mountbatten’s private secretary,

  the man who more than anyone else had helped to supersede the Raj was receiving in death homage beyond the dreams of any Viceroy. Gandhi died one evening and is taken for cremation the following morning. Here is no long-heralded State funeral; all the same, the people have flocked within the hour and by the hundred thousand to have one last glimpse of him. Who, in the face of the overwhelming tribute, can honestly assert now that Gandhi had no genuine mass following?26

  From Kingsway, the Dodge turned left, making its way northwards towards the Jamuna. As the procession proceeded, it was met with a continuous shower of flowers and shouts of ‘Mahatma Gandhi Amar Rahe’. When it approached Delhi Gate, three Dakotas flying overhead dipped in salute.

  The cortège was now coming closer to its destination. At Delhi Gate, it turned right and approached the river. ‘The banks of the sacred Jumna were packed with multitudes as far as the eye could see. People who had been silent so far were shouting “Mahatma Gandhi Zindabad”.’

  Reporters on the spot, faced with these ‘unbelievably colossal crowds’, found it ‘impossible to form even the roughest estimate of the number’. The general in charge of managing the arrangements later provided an estimate. The funeral procession was more than two miles long, with an estimated 1.5 million mourners.27

  Starting out before noon, the procession finally reached its destination at 4.20 p.m. The body was placed on an elevated wooden platform built overnight by the public works department. For the cremation itself, some fifteen maunds of sandalwood, four maunds of ghee and one maund of coconut had been procured. With Gandhi’s eldest son estranged and his second son in South Africa, the pyre was lit by his third son, Ramdas Gandhi. Afterwards, as the body was being consumed by the flames, ‘the great mass of people gathered on the Jumna bank rose en masse and observed a minute’s silence and garlands and flowers poured in all the while’. As ‘the red flames rose against the evening sun, the multitude with one voice raised the cry, “The Mahatma has become eternal”’.28

  VIII

  Speaking on All India Radio on the evening of the 30th, Jawaharlal Nehru said ‘the light has gone out of our lives’, and then immediately corrected himself, saying, ‘No, the light shines and will continue to shine thousands of years hence.’

  Another prompt tribute was offered by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who said: ‘I was shocked to learn of the most dastardly attack on the life of Mr. Gandhi resulting in his death. There can be no controversy in the face of death.’

  Jinnah went on to create a controversy nonetheless. ‘Whatever our political differences,’ he remarked, Gandhi ‘was one of the greatest men produced by the Hindu community and a leader who commanded their universal confidence and respect’. Jinnah continued: ‘I wish to express my deep sorrow and sincerely sympathize with the great Hindu community and his family in their bereavement at this momentous, historical and critical juncture so soon after the birth of freedom for Hindustan and Pakistan.’29

  For all its apparent generosity, this appreciation was damaged by its one moment of churlishness. Even in death, even after his last, heroic fasts for inter-religious harmony, Gandhi would be seen by Jinnah as merely a ‘Hindu’ leader.

  Other Pakistani politicians rose to the occasion. Jinnah’s second in command, Liaquat Ali Khan, called Gandhi ‘the great figure of our times’, whose ‘recent efforts for communal harmony will be remembered by all lovers of peace’. Gandhi’s ‘removal from the stage of Indian politics at this juncture’, remarked Khan, ‘is an irreparable loss’.

  Another leading Muslim League politician, Muhammad Saadulla, a former prime minister of Assam, said that ‘the fact that Mahatma Gandhi in his prayer meetings used to have recitations from the Koran, clearly demonstrated the breadth of his outlook and his sincere endeavour to bring into one whole different religious-minded people of the sub-continent—India’.

  The Muslim League’s newspaper, Dawn, published out of Karachi, said ‘all Muslims in Pakistan are bowed with grief at the ghastly ending of so great a life’, adding: ‘Should the Mahatma’s supreme self-sacrifice in the cause of peace and amity lead to a genuine stirring of the conscience of Hindus of
India, the Muslims on this side of the frontier will not fail to respond with all sincerity.’ This was somewhat grudging, although Dawn did (so far as I know for the first time) call Gandhi a ‘Mahatma’.30

  A more generous assessment of Gandhi’s life and legacy came from the Pakistan Times, published in Lahore. This said that in Gandhi’s death, ‘the world has been deprived of the sight and sound of his frail body and aged voice—a body and voice that in the last few months have almost lost for a large section of mankind their personal and ephemeral character and become tireless symbols of compassionate love and fearless rectitude’. The newspaper hoped that Gandhi’s sacrifice would ‘yet save the lives of millions for which this life was given. Once Hindus and Muslims of undivided India mingled their blood to fight for freedom under Gandhiji’s banner during the Khilafat days: let us hope that they will now mingle their tears on his glorious dust to retain their peaceful freedom under the independent flags of India and Pakistan.’31

  The Pakistan Times called Gandhi (in a direct refutation of Jinnah’s claim) ‘the best-loved and most venerated political leader’ of the subcontinent. ‘There have been great heroes in history,’ it remarked, ‘who lived and fought and died to preserve their own people from dangers that threatened and from enemies lying in wait. It would be hard to name any who has fallen fighting his own people to preserve the honour of a people not his own. No greater sacrifice could be rendered by a member of one people to another and no greater tribute could be paid to the supremacy of fundamental human values as opposed to passing factional squabbles.’

  Published as an unsigned editorial, this piece was written by the newspaper’s owner, Mian Iftikharuddin, who had spent more time in the Congress than in the Muslim League, and was now struck by remorse at abandoning an inclusive form of nationalism for a sectarian one. Meanwhile, a less emotional, but nonetheless handsome, tribute was penned by the newspaper’s editor, the poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz. This emphasized that ‘the passing of Gandhiji is as grievous a blow to Pakistan as it is to India. We have observed distressed looks, seen moistened eyes and heard faltering voices in this vast sprawling city of Lahore to a degree to be seen to be believed. We have also seen spontaneous manifestations of grief on the part of our fellow citizens in the shape of observance of a holiday and a hartal.’32

  Gandhi’s death evoked much grief in East Pakistan too, especially in the district of Noakhali, where he had started his peace mission in the last months of 1946. Young activists of the Pakistan movement, who had opposed him at the time, were consumed by guilt for not heeding his message of Hindu–Muslim harmony while he was alive. ‘I will suffer and my conscience will bite me for the rest of my life,’ confided one activist to his diary. On 2 February, Dacca observed a complete hartal in the Mahatma’s memory. Shops, offices, schools and colleges were all closed. In the afternoon, ‘a mile long procession of the Hindus and the Muslims with a life-size portrait of Gandhi’ walked silently through the city, ending with a prayer meeting where verses from the Bible, the Koran and the Gita were read.33

  There were tributes from Britain, the country where Gandhi had lived and studied, and against whose policies he had long fought, while befriending many of its people. The British prime minister Clement Attlee, while praising in glowing terms Gandhi’s idealism and courage, then added: ‘He represented, it is true, the opposition of the Indians to being ruled by another race but also expressed the revulsion of the east against the west. He himself was in revolt against western materialism and sought for a return to a simpler state of society.’

  Later, at a memorial service in Westminster Abbey, Stafford Cripps said Gandhi ‘stood out head and shoulders above all his contemporaries as one who believed and who fearlessly put his beliefs into practice’. Cripps praised Gandhi’s ‘supreme effort’ for religious harmony, and continued: ‘His attitude to the British as individuals was always one of friendliness and even so far as that somewhat impersonal entity the British people he had no wishes except for their happiness. Many people will remember his visit to Lancashire at a time when there was bitter feeling against the Indians over the affairs of the cotton industry. He walked as was his custom among the workers and by his personality and sympathy met with their almost universal acclaim.’34

  The reactions of a viceroy who had dealt with Gandhi were more ambivalent. Writing in his journal, Wavell remarked that while Gandhi did not have ‘much of the saint in his composition’, he was nonetheless ‘an extremely astute politician’, who ‘certainly hastened the departure of the British, which was his life’s aim’. Then he added: ‘I always thought he had more of malevolence than benevolence in him, but who I am to judge, and how can an Englishman estimate a Hindu? Our standards are poles apart; and by Hindu standards Gandhi may have been a saint; by any standards he was a very remarkable man’ (this last a verdict he would not have offered while dealing with him as viceroy).35

  There were, of course, plenty of tributes in the popular press, a particularly fine one appearing in the News Chronicle. ‘The hand that killed the Mahatma,’ said this newspaper, ‘is the same hand that nailed the Cross; it is the hand that fired the faggots; it is the hand that through the ages has been growing ever more mightily in war and less sure in the pursuit of peace. It is your hand and mine.’36

  Gandhi’s first English friends were the vegetarians of London, whose meetings he had attended as a law student and in whose journal he had published his first articles on social affairs. The Vegetarian News now devoted a special issue to Gandhi, its lead editorial spelling out his significance to their movement and to the world at large. ‘By any standard of judgment,’ wrote this organ of the London vegetarians who had once been proud to claim him as a member, ‘Mahatma Gandhi was one of the greatest men of modern times; by ours, the greatest.’ If ‘any public man in our time can be said to have outlived the vanity of personal praise’, remarked the journal, ‘it was Gandhi; he wanted only to carry conviction’. Beyond what he did for India and the world, for his old flesh-eschewing comrades in England, Gandhi’s significance was that ‘he saw, and tried to communicate, the significance of the impulse towards universal non-violence that moves all of us in our better moments, which gives meaning to the vegetarian ethic as it explains the source of the benefit that we derive from it—an integration of imaginative and physical nutrition, a gesture towards harmony in the individual personality’.37

  The tribute by a European that most stood out came from the veteran French socialist Léon Blum. ‘I never saw Gandhi,’ said Blum. ‘I do not know his language. I never set foot in his country, and yet I feel the same sorrow as if I had lost someone near and dear.’ Unlike many others, prone to seeing Gandhi as the Sage of the East, Blum seemed to glimpse the fact that Gandhi was also a symbol of what was best in the West.

  From Cape Town, Gandhi’s old political sparring partner Jan Christian Smuts sent this message: ‘Gandhi was one of the great men of our time and my acquaintance with him over a period of more than 30 years has only deepened my high respect for him however much we differed in our views and methods. A prince among men has passed away and we grieve with India in her irreparable loss.’38

  Among the tributes by Americans, perhaps the most insightful came from the widely travelled journalist Edgar Snow. Snow first met Gandhi in 1931, and had several long conversations with him over the years. He saw Gandhi as both a saint and socialist, who ‘against 3000 years of prejudice raised a crusade for the human rights of 50,000,000 untouchables’, who ‘never ceased to unite his countrymen and indeed the whole world under the homely injunctions common to all faiths; individual perfection, tolerance, humility, love of nature (God), equality, brotherhood and co-operation’. Of his own relationship with Gandhi, Snow wrote:

  I don’t pretend to have understood Gandhi or to have moved upon the stage where I could take in the metaphysics of his philosophy or his personal dialogues with God. I am an agnostic and pragmatist, an ex-Catholic
turned Taoist, a Hegelian fallen among materialists, and one who chastised the Mahatma for denying the righteous battle in 1942 and for leading his open rebellion against our allies, the British. For years I had felt out of sympathy with him. Yet even in this dull clod, the avatar had finally struck a spark before he died, when in my last visit, I became conscious of my size in the mirror of him, and I saw him as a giant.39

  On 1 February 1948, a memorial service was held for Gandhi at the Community Church of New York, with his old admirer John Haynes Holmes in the chair. Among the speakers was the Jewish thinker-activist Hayim Greenberg, who had criticized Gandhi in the late 1930s for not supporting Zionism. Now, seeing Gandhi’s life in the round, he praised him for departing from the saintly tradition of withdrawal, and instead engaging actively with the world. Gandhi, he remarked, ‘did not ignore Caesar. He did not seek to “bribe” him or pay him a “ransom”. His passionate aim was to destroy tyranny, to unseat Caesar from his throne—but with Gandhi’s own, “un-Caesarian” weapons. Instead of becoming a sadhu, he became a social crusader.’40

  Meanwhile, the New York journal Politics, edited by the cultural critic Dwight Macdonald, assembled a special issue of essays on Gandhi by some well-regarded writers, a collection all the more remarkable for the fact that none of the contributors had met the man. Comparing the Mahatma’s murder to the Crucifixion, the novelist Mary McCarthy thought Gandhi was killed because ‘what he stood for in his life—simplicity, good humour, steadfastness—affronted his killer’s sense of human probability’. The Italian writer Nicola Chiaromonte said that compared to his mentor Tolstoy, Gandhi was far less hypocritical—indeed, ‘it is difficult to think of another man in all known history, for whom Thought and Deed were so utterly inseparable as Gandhi’. The magazine’s editor, in his own piece, marvelled that the Indian leader could practise ‘tolerance and love to such an extent that he seems to have regarded the capitalist as well as the garbage-man as his social equal’. Gandhi, wrote Dwight Macdonald,