Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  “What is all this?” he demanded. “Kill me, kill me, I say. Why don’t you kill me?”

  He was speaking Hindi. Even after his words were translated into Bengali, they’d no effect. A chunk of brick was thrown at a man mistaken for a Muslim who’d been standing near the Mahatma. “Is this the reality of the peace that was established on August 15th?” a distraught but undaunted Gandhi then asked. “I offer myself for attack.”

  Again, there had to be a pause for translation. Slowly his words sank in, but as he himself wrote the next day after gathering reports of violent outbreaks around the city, “The Calcutta bubble seems to have burst … What was regarded as a miracle has proved a short-lived, nine-day wonder.” Within hours, having scrubbed the trip to Noakhali yet again, he’d resolved to stay in place and fast. It was, he’d said, his “fiery weapon,” or sometimes, his “infallible weapon.” Perhaps this time it would touch hearts in the Punjab as well as Calcutta. “If I lack even the power to pacify the people,” he wrote to Patel, “what else is left for me to do?”

  The day after the attack on the Hydari mansion, about fifty persons were reported to have been killed and three hundred injured in uncontrolled rioting in Calcutta. Troops were called out, but there weren’t nearly enough to handle the situation; the local garrison had been depleted by reassignment of units to crisis areas in North India and the Punjab. The city seemed to be slipping back, heading for a reenactment of the previous year’s “great killing,” when Gandhi began his fast on September 2.

  Two days later it was quiet. Large peace marches, propelled by an urgent sense of necessity, headed for Beliaghata to assure the Mahatma that this time the truce would hold. Militant Hindu groups and known gangsters came and laid at least some of their weapons at his feet. Untold thousands fasted in sympathy, including members of the police. Two Hindus, striving as Gandhian peace workers to protect Muslims under assault, were themselves cut down, thus fulfilling, with the sacrifice of their lives, his most severe definition of satyagraha. All accounts point to one conclusion, that the city was gripped by a sense of how unthinkable, how disgraceful, it would be to let the saintly old man who’d led the independence struggle die within its precincts at what was supposed to be the dawn of India’s freedom.

  On the evening of the third day, a remarkable gathering, representing virtually the entire religious and political spectrum, crowded into Gandhi’s room to urge that he break the fast. There were leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League, of the Sikhs who’d been aroused by reports of the massacres in the Punjab, of the militant Hindu Mahasabha; and there was Shaheed Suhrawardy, the former chief minister, publicly atoning for his failure at the time of the Great Calcutta Killing by orchestrating the proceedings. Living up to the stereotype of his Bania caste, Gandhi bargained before settling.

  The delegation would have to meet two conditions to satisfy him. First, they’d have to sign an open-ended pledge that communal violence would never recur in Calcutta; that was the easy part. Second, the pledge would have to include a promise that if it did break out again, each would personally lay down his life to restore peace. The leaders withdrew to another room, then returned with the document he’d demanded. The same Bengali song Tagore had sung at the end of the fast in Yeravda prison fourteen years earlier was sung again as Suhrawardy did the honors, handing Gandhi a small glass of sweet lime juice: “When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy.”

  Calcutta rejoiced. His old comrade Rajagopalachari, West Bengal’s new governor, said nothing Gandhi had achieved, “not even independence,” had been “so truly wonderful as his victory over evil in Calcutta.” Gandhi’s own depiction of his role sounds humble enough but, on a careful reading, reflects his mounting conviction that he’d been chosen to serve as peacemaker. “This sudden upheaval is not the work of one or two men,” he wrote on first hearing talk of a Calcutta miracle, before either the renewed violence or the fast that ended it. “We are toys in the hands of God. He makes us dance to His tune.”

  Three days later, on September 7, he left by train for Delhi, on what would prove to be the final stage in his long life as wanderer and seeker, a perpetual pilgrim, leaving unfulfilled his pledges to return to Noakhali or start a sojourn in Pakistan’s portion of the Punjabi killing fields. What kept him in Delhi was the spread of the wildfire of communal violence to the city, which was really in those days two cities that hadn’t yet grown together: old Delhi, former Mughal capital, scene of a rebellion against British control nearly a century earlier in which Hindu as well as Muslim troops had fought in the previous century to restore a Muslim dynasty; and New Delhi, proud seat of the foreign imperium, completed as it was losing its grip on the subcontinent, newer in 1947 than such later twentieth-century creations as Brasília or Islamabad are today. Delhi is actually as close to Lahore as Washington is to New York. Suddenly, now, they were worlds apart as traumatized Hindu refugees streamed across the border telling of family members and homes they’d lost, the devastation they’d witnessed. With seeming inevitability, a furious spirit of revenge and sheer human need combined to extend the chain reaction that the Great Calcutta Killing had ignited thirteen months earlier: Hindus driven from their homes in the Punjab now joined forces with local extremists to drive Muslims from their homes in Delhi.

  It was still the first month of Indian independence. Soon one in four of the capital’s residents would be classed as refugees. By the time Gandhi arrived in Delhi on the morning of September 9, mosques were under attack, mob looting and killing were only beginning to taper off after rolling unchecked for several days, bodies were still being picked up from the streets, and a military curfew had been imposed. Fresh from his “miracle,” an understandably shaken but calm Mahatma followed his own drill, doing what he’d done successively over those months in Noakhali, Bihar, and Calcutta: promising to stay in the capital until it was entirely peaceful, to “do or die.” This time his favorite shibboleth would burn like a fuse.

  So thick were the insecurity and fear gripping the capital that Patel told Gandhi, in no uncertain terms, that he couldn’t possibly return to the quarter of the most despised untouchables, the Bhangis, or sweepers, which he’d been pointedly using as his Delhi base for the better part of two years. In his own mind, making Indians and foreigners who wanted to call on him come to the Bhangi colony was simply a logical extension of the struggle against untouchability that he regularly traced to his experiences in South Africa.

  Without his knowing it, the Bhangi colony had been partially turned into a stage set before he took up residence there in 1946 by minions of the industrialist G. D. Birla, his chief financial backer. Mr. Gandhi, meet Mr. Potemkin. Margaret Bourke-White, the American photojournalist, has a wonderfully dry description of how they’d razed an authentically miserable shantytown and, banishing half its population, had thrown up, for those allowed to remain, rows of tidy little mud houses with casements and doorways providing decent ventilation, all arrayed on a regular grid of widened paths edged in brick, watered daily to keep down dust. Electricity, electric fans, and phones were part of this new deal, according to her account. There in the somewhat larger but still modest structure that had been put up for Gandhi, near a small freshly whitewashed temple, he conferred with Congress leaders and British cabinet ministers. When he had to leave what was now the most presentable, least malodorous slum in India, for conferences at the palatial Viceregal Lodge, he’d been chauffeured in the industrialist’s “milk-white Packard car.”

  But now the Bhangi colony and its environs had been swamped by refugees, many of them disposed to blame Gandhi for their fate, so it was considered only prudent for him to be reinstalled in Birla House, the industrialist’s spacious, high-ceilinged mansion on one of New Delhi’s broad new boulevards, with its deep, carefully tended garden. He was no stranger to the challenge of maintaining his regime of austerity in surroundings of luxury. Birla House had been his Delhi base for most of the two decades before he
was inspired to move in with the Bhangis. On September 16, a week after he arrived in Delhi, he returned to the neighborhood of the Bhangi colony for a meeting with a right-wing extremist group that drilled on the banks of the Jamuna nearby. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, had been blamed for much of the violence; it later would be banned in the crackdown on Hindu extremists following Gandhi’s assassination. But instead of condemning them on this last encounter, the Mahatma tried to find common ground as one Indian patriot speaking to others in the cause of civil peace. His session that day with the RSS—which has taken in recent decades to mentioning his name in its daily roll call of Hindu heroes—was supposed to be followed by a prayer meeting. But rowdy Hindu hecklers made prayers impossible. “Gandhi murdabad!”—“Death to Gandhi!”—they cried, after an attempt was made to read verses from the Koran, a standard part of his ecumenical ritual. Thereafter, for the next four and a half months, his prayer meetings were held in the presumed security of Mr. Birla’s walled garden, where finite crowds could be infiltrated and closely watched by plainclothesmen. Today mansion and garden are preserved as the Gandhi Smriti, the scene of the Mahatma’s martyrdom.

  At ease on a frilly Birla House pillow, 1942 (photo credit i12.1)

  The Bhangi colony also has its Gandhi shrine today. Bhangis don’t go by that disparaged name anymore. They prefer to call themselves Balmikis (sometimes, in Roman letters, spelled Valmikis) after an ancient saint, Rishi Balmiki (or Valmiki), the mythical author of the Ramayana, the Hindu epic, whom they claim as an ancestor and now semideify; or so the figure of the holy man in the small temple hard by the reconstructed Gandhi house seems to suggest. To approach the temple, visitors must remove any footwear. To enter the Gandhi house—or, for that matter, approach the point in the Birla garden where he fell—they must do the same. Perhaps, despite his clearly expressed wishes, his status as something more than a human may still be evolving. Birla House is a major tourist stop. The former Bhangi colony is seldom visited, except at election time when Congress politicians call. But Gandhi’s portrait is freshly garlanded there on a regular basis as it is in few other Dalit quarters, if any, across the subcontinent today. Meanwhile, the Balmikis live in four-story cream and maroon concrete apartment houses put up by the state, with cute little balconies attached to each apartment.

  When Gandhi stayed there, the quarter was isolated; now its residents have ready access to one of the stations of Delhi’s new metro. Mostly, they’re still sweepers, drawing something better than starvation wages from the New Delhi Municipal Corporation. But only former Balmikis, the renamed Bhangis, seem to live in these unofficially segregated quarters. The best that can be said is that while their circumstances have obviously improved, their status seems to be evolving in an Indian way with glacial slowness, more than six decades after Gandhi lived among them.

  Despite his displacement from the Bhangi colony, Gandhi continued to preach against untouchability in the final four months of his life, a theme second only in his discourse in this time to his harping on the need for Hindus to give up their retaliation against Muslims. “Anger is short madness,” he told them, imploring them “to stay their hands.” A tour of Hindu and Muslim refugee camps in which no latrines had been dug and the stench of human excrement was unavoidable instantly reignited the revulsion he’d felt in Calcutta in 1901, in Hardwar in 1915, only this was now 1947 and India was supposed to be free. “Why do [the authorities] tolerate such stink and stench?” he demanded to know. They should insist that the refugees clean up after themselves. “We must tell them that we would give them food and water but not sweepers,” he said. “I am a very hard-hearted man.”

  His prayer meetings, broadcast nightly on the radio for fifteen minutes, became a diurnal part of life in the still-seething capital. A whole lifetime later, it’s not easy to gauge the impact of these broadcasts. They didn’t attract huge numbers to the prayer meetings in the Birla garden, where the actual crowds, usually in the hundreds, were small compared with the massive throngs of Hindus and Muslims that had turned out to hear him weeks earlier in Calcutta. Jawaharlal Nehru, installed as India’s first prime minister, came to sit with him every evening in the relatively small chamber Gandhi occupied on the ground floor, just off a stone patio where he sunned himself after his baths, wearing a broad-brimmed straw peasant’s hat that had been given to him in Noakhali. The routine of Nehru’s visits left an impression that the old man was being consulted on urgent problems. Left unclear was how much guidance he offered, how likely it was to be heeded.

  “They are all mine and also not mine,” he said of his old colleagues, now in power, who were sending troops to Kashmir, a measure he couldn’t approve but wouldn’t deplore. A spinning wheel, a small writing desk, and a thin mattress that folded up during the day were his only possessions of any size in that room. An exhibit case now displays smaller items he kept there, which were notable for their paltriness: wire-frame eyeglasses and their case, a metal fork and spoon, a wood fork and spoon, a knife, a pocket watch, and his walking stick.

  He stuck to his causes—discoursing on peace and the desirability of Hindustani as a national language, even the best way to handle compost—and stuck to his daily schedule, rising hours before daybreak for prayers, his walk, meal, bath, enema, and massage. As always, that was the time for him to start in on his correspondence before receiving visitors, Muslim and Hindu, who brought him their sense of Delhi’s mood, how near to the surface violence still lurked. What he heard was seldom encouraging. Muslims were still fleeing, and few Hindus were willing to lift a finger, despite his pleas, to make them feel wanted, let alone safe. His own mood reverted to the intermittent uncertainty darkening to despair that had weighed on him in Srirampur. “These days, who listens to me?” he said in his third week back in Delhi. “Mine is a lone voice … I have come here and am doing something but I feel I have become useless now.”

  On October 2, 1947, the last birthday of his life, turning seventy-eight, he said he didn’t look forward to another one. “Ever since I came to India,” he said, “I have made it my profession to work for communal harmony … Today we seem to have become enemies. We assert that there can never be an honest Muslim. A Muslim always remains a worthless fellow. In such a situation, what place do I have in India and what is the point of my being here?” He doesn’t know whether to blame himself or the Hindus of Delhi. At one moment he says the citizens of Delhi must have gone mad; at another he wonders aloud, “What sin must I have committed that [God] kept me alive to witness all these horrors?”

  As the weeks wear on, his mood, if anything, becomes steadily more lugubrious, even though the level of outright violence, in Delhi at least, falls off. “On the surface things are sufficiently nice,” he writes to Rajagopalachari in Calcutta, “but the under-current leaves little hope.” Two weeks later he informs a prayer meeting that 137 mosques have been grievously damaged or destroyed in Delhi alone, some of them turned into Hindu temples. This is sheer irreligion, he scolds, not in the least excused by the fact that Hindu temples have been converted into mosques in Pakistan. Three weeks after that, he’s still on a tear. “Misdeeds of the Hindus in [India] have to be proclaimed by the Hindus from the roof-tops,” he says, “if those of the Muslims in Pakistan are to be arrested or stopped.” The dispossessed Hindu refugees and Hindu chauvinists show little sign of being shamed by this fierce Jeremiah in their midst. On the contrary, some of them are easily roused against him, as Gandhi has seen.

  India has now been free and independent for about four months. And the leading shaper of that independence remains unsettled and despairing. In the early days of 1948 he broods on the thought that since he’d obviously failed to meet the first half of his injunction to himself to “do or die” in Delhi, it’s time for him to test the second. No single catastrophe served as catalyst for his decision to start his seventeenth and final fast on January 13. In the days running up to the fast, he’d been forcefully struck by several indications that matter
s were on a downward slide. First he received a detailed account of rampant corruption at all levels of the newly empowered Congress movement in the Andhra region of southeastern India. Then some nationalist Muslims asked him to help them emigrate from India to Britain now that it had become clear that they could find no secure place in either India or Pakistan. What a destination for nationalists at the end of their struggle, Gandhi remarks. Finally, Shaheed Suhrawardy, who’d been attempting informal mediation with Jinnah in consultation with Gandhi and who, until that point, had left the Mahatma with the impression that he still considered himself an Indian, now told him that he didn’t feel safe moving around Delhi, even by car.

  Suhrawardy, who’d been told by Jinnah that he was turning into Gandhi’s stooge, returned from Karachi with a request on Pakistan’s behalf. He asked Gandhi to intercede to unfreeze Pakistan’s share of British India’s assets that the new Indian government was bound by treaty to pay, a considerable sum by the standards of the time (500 million rupees, about $145 million at prevailing exchange rates). Gandhi’s increasingly disgruntled follower Patel—who was least inclined to follow him on issues touching Muslims—had convinced the cabinet that the money should be withheld pending a settlement on questions such as Kashmir; otherwise, he argued, the assets might be used to buy arms and ammunition. Mountbatten, now the governor-general, had also brought the issue to Gandhi’s attention, thereby infuriating Patel, who said the Englishman had no right to lobby against a cabinet decision. Neither the former viceroy nor the former chief minister had any way of imagining that Gandhi’s interest in the issue of the assets, which they had stoked, could prove fatal.