Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  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.

  (photo credit i11.9)

  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.

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  DO OR DIE

  EVERYWHERE HE WENT he was urged to go somewhere else. In East Bengal’s Noakhali district, where Hindus had been slaughtered, Muslim Leaguers pressed Gandhi to take his pilgrimage off to Bihar and prove there that he was willing to confront a Hindu majority with blood on its hands. Once he finally reached Bihar, Hindu nationalists tried to divert him to the Punjab, where Hindus and Sikhs were being terrorized out of Muslim-majority portions of the province, soon to be sliced off and stitched into a gestating Pakistan. Eventually, with less than two weeks to go to partition and independence, an overstretched and agitated Mahatma popped up in the Punjab and, speaking in Lahore on August 6, 1947, offered perhaps the most surprising of his absolute, flat-out vows. Having said he’d “do or die” in Noakhali, then in Bihar, the man who’d ever after be called “Father of the Nation” now promised: “The rest of my life is going to be spent in Pakistan.”

  He’d been yearning to come to the Punjab, he explained, but now had to rush clear across the subcontinent, all the way back to Noakhali, for he’d committed himself to marking India’s independence there on August 15. That’s to say, on the day of independent India’s birth, he meant to awaken in Pakistan. “I would go there even if I have to die,” he said. “But as soon as I am free from Noakhali, I will come to the Punjab.”

  His head was evidently spinning as, careering bravely from Hindu pillar to Muslim post, he contemplated the impending “vivisection.” The only way he could cling to the dream of a united India he’d spun decades earlier on the other side of the Indian Ocean, in Durban and Johannesburg, was to declare that henceforth he’d have two homelands. Perhaps one day they’d be reunited, but for now, obviously, he couldn’t be everywhere. This was precisely the point the Congress president, Kripalani, had mournfully made back on June 15, the day Gandhi’s movement had put its final seal of approval on the partition plan over his muted objections. He’d followed the Mahatma for thirty years, Kripalani said, but couldn’t go any further. He still felt “that he, with his supreme fearlessness, is correct, and my stand [in favor of partition] is defective,” but simply didn’t see how Gandhi’s noble efforts in Bihar could save the Punjab. “Today he himself is groping in the dark … Unfortunately for us today though he can enunciate policies, they have in the main to be carried out by others, and these others are not converted to his way of thinking.”

  That said it all, but Gandhi carried on. His pledge to return to the Punjab and spend the rest of his life in Pakistan had to be diluted two days later in Patna when he promised to return to Bihar after a few weeks in Noakhali. In fact, none of these promises would be kept. Gandhi was now in the final half year of his life. He would never reach Noakhali, never return to Bihar or the Punjab, never set foot in independent Pakistan. In these final months, his view took in the whole subcontinent, but his field of endeavor was limited to two cities. First in Calcutta, then in Delhi, he managed almost single-handedly to roll back tides of violence by embarking on his final fasts “unto death.” He was never more heroic, never more a miracle worker, but the Punjab, acting out Kripalani’s anxious premonition, still burned with horrendous mass violence: Sikhs and Hindus slaughtering Muslims in the eastern portion of the province, now India; Muslims butchering Hindus and Sikhs, seizing their women, sacking their temples, in West Punjab, now Pakistan. Gandhi’s theory that inspired peacemaking in one place could prove contagious, dousing explosions of extreme violence in others, would not be borne out until an exhausted subcontinent had to contemplate the fact of his death. By then, hundreds of thousands had been slain, millions displaced.

  “The country was partitioned in order to avoid Hindu-Muslim rioting,” Rammanohar Lohia, a Socialist leader, would later write. “Partition produced that which it was intended to avoid in such abundance that one may forever despair of man’s intelligence or integrity.”

  The Mahatma had no elixir other than his presence, his example. Wherever he traveled, his basic strategy was to revive the courage of besieged and vulnerable minorities while shaming and coaxing marauding majorities back to some elementary level of reason, if not compassion. If he’d lived to go to Pakist
an, he’d have extended his protection, such as it was, over the Hindu minority. Since his last months came to be spent in what would remain India, it was the Muslim minority that cried out for his moral shield. Circumstances thus cast him as pro-Muslim in the eyes of dispossessed and enraged Hindu and Sikh refugees pouring in from what was becoming Pakistan, in the eyes of Hindu chauvinists generally. Playing the part for which his whole life had prepared him, Gandhi now helped frame the death warrant under which he’d long felt himself to be laboring.

  To those charged with the main business of extracting the British and establishing the new states, the Mahatma’s successive, overlapping pilgrimages registered mainly as a sideshow. An impatient Nehru said he was “going round with ointment trying to heal one sore spot after another on the body of India.” When the partition plan came up for final Congress approval, Nehru was so concerned that Gandhi might break ranks that he had his right-hand man, Krishna Menon, seek the help of Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy. The Mahatma was in an emotional, unpredictable frame of mind, Menon warned in the first week of June.