Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  Also upset following Manu’s arrival in Noakhali was Sushila, who was shuttling between Changirgaon and Srirampur; in turn, as in the late 1930s, Gandhi became unhappy at Sushila’s sadness. Early one morning Bose was startled to hear the sound of a slap coming from Gandhi’s room. Running, he found that Gandhi had hit himself during an argument with Sushila.

  But the distress of the two was short-lived, for Sushila had to focus on what she had taken on. To Gandhi’s joy, her work won the confidence of Hindus and Muslims alike in Changirgaon and around, and some of the property looted from Changirgaon’s Hindus was returned.

  For all his keenness to ‘understand’ the ‘yagna’, Bose found himself unwilling to translate Gandhi’s words into Bengali when, for the first time, he spoke publicly of it. This was at a prayer-meeting on 1 February 1947 in the village of Amishapara. Referring to ‘small-talks, whispers and innuendos’ going round, Gandhi said that he did not want his ‘most innocent acts to be misunderstood and misrepresented’. Added Gandhi:

  I have my granddaughter with me. She shares the same bed with me. The Prophet had discounted eunuchs who became such by an operation. But he welcomed eunuchs made such through prayer by God. This is my aspiration…

  I know that my action has excited criticism even among friends. But a duty cannot be shirked even for the sake of the most intimate friends (93: 356).

  Bose did not translate these sentences. Far away in Ahmedabad, Mashruwala and Narhari Parikh removed them from Harijan’s report of the speech. They were among the ‘intimate friends’ who hoped to persuade Gandhi to abandon the ‘test’. Meanwhile they would put a lid on it.

  In an indirect reference to his ‘yagna’, Gandhi recalled (27 Dec.) the ancient Hindu view, spelt out in one of Patanjali’s sutras, that ‘when ahimsa had been fully established, it would completely liquidate the forces of enmity and evil in the neighbourhood’. He said he had first come across this thought long ago, when he did not know Sanskrit, through a friend ‘who used to carry Patanjali’s Yogasutra constantly in his pocket’.

  Though Gandhi did not name the friend, it was probably Rajchandra. Since, added Gandhi, his ahimsa had not dispelled the violence around him, he had to examine himself (93: 203). Bose one day overheard Gandhi saying to an associate about brahmacharya, ‘If I can master this, I can still beat Jinnah.’9

  In her diary Manu entered Gandhi’s remarks in Noakhali about chastity. He told her that the life of one who kept his body as ‘a holy temple for God’ would speak as ‘a poem of exquisite spiritual beauty’, and ‘a full-blown flower of perfection’ would banish communal hate.10 Interestingly enough, the ascetic employs metaphors of poem, flower and beauty.

  Here we must mark a resemblance between Gandhi’s Noakhali trek and his march forty years earlier in the Zulu country. Both occurred amidst memorable scenes, with Noakhali’s web of rivers matching Zululand’s hills and glens. Both brought Gandhi face to face with wounded humanity. As in the Zulu country, people in Noakhali turned to him with appealing eyes. He saw himself as a soldier in both terrains; and both exercises involved brahmacharya, embraced in Zululand and now daringly tested in East Bengal.

  Mothering and being mothered. In February 1947 he said to Manu: ‘Here I want to be tested to the fullest extent possible. If I fail the examination it will be under God. I want no testimony apart from God’s. If there is any deceit, even if hidden from us, the world will come to know of it.’11 The phrase ‘fullest extent possible’ hints at the drastic nature of the Noakhali ‘yagna’ where the two participants were at times naked together.12

  But the man hoping with Manu’s help to summon the power to reshape his surroundings was also (as both Pyarelal and Bose observe) a mother to her, helping with her study, food, rest and work. Strikingly, young Manu was in turn a mother to him. We see this clearly in her account of a short boat journey on 18 February, when Gandhi agreed to go from his camp in Aloonia village in Tippera district to the home of ‘a very old man, not a leader or a prominent person but an ordinary man,’ who was ‘desperately eager for Gandhi’s darshan but unable to cross the river’:

  After the evening prayer we crossed the Dakaria river… The beautiful river flowed amid lush greenery. The sky was clear, it wasn’t too cold, and the sun wasn’t too strong. It was a journey of five to seven minutes. During those minutes Bapuji placed his head in my lap, closed his eyes, and took a nap…

  Both banks were lined with human throngs and dense trees… Right in the middle, the world’s great figure lay asleep in my lap, while the boatman rowed his boat. My hand was on Bapuji’s forehead…Those moments of my life were blessed.13

  So the nation’s old father found warmth in the lap of a young ‘mother’.

  Disapproval and protest. We have noted that most of Gandhi’s associates disagreed with the yagna. Shaken by it, Mashruwala and Parikh excused themselves from their Harijan duties. Swami Anand had a similar reaction. Devadas wrote to his father that he was on the wrong track. Vallabhbhai commented that Gandhi had left the path of dharma. Vinoba, however, refrained from offering an opinion. Prasad suggested that Kanu, Gandhi’s grand-nephew, replace Manu as an aide. We do not know what Nehru or C.R. thought; it is unlikely that they approved.

  Gandhi himself raised the subject with these and other friends, and also with Manilal and Ramdas. ‘One day he wrote as many as twelve letters,’ Pyarelal informs us.14 He thought, for example, that Birla, who had helped Gandhi with funds, had the right to know and react. Likewise Kripalani, president of the Congress. He would not be hurt, Gandhi said, if associates responded by severing their links with him. They should follow their conscience, even as he claimed to be following his.

  We do not have a record of Birla’s reply but Kripalani gently recalled the Gita’s stress on conserving a society’s values, equally gently asked whether Gandhi was not treating his female associates ‘as means rather than as ends in themselves’, but added that he knew that Gandhi had never exploited women. Continued Kripalani:

  I can only say that I have the fullest faith in you. No sinful man can go about his business the way you are doing… I can never be disillusioned about you unless I find the marks of insanity and depravity in you. I do not find any such marks.15

  A British Quaker, Horace Alexander, who called at Noakhali, was asked by Gandhi to give his reaction as a Christian even as Andrews would have done. Alexander said he thought the step was too extreme.16 Nonetheless, Alexander noticed that Gandhi was working away

  undaunted, showing the same courtesy, gentleness, firmness and sweetness to his endless visitors, helping all who came to him day by day to find things to laugh at, even when the world around was grim and overpowering.17

  Another Christian caller was Stuart Nelson, the African-American dean of Howard University in Washington, who came with three others to meet Gandhi in his Srirampur cottage-room (1 or 2 January). The situation of African-Americans, not the yagna, was the topic discussed at this meeting—there is no evidence that Nelson had even heard of the yagna.

  Nelson’s record suggests that the yagna had not weakened Gandhi’s capacities. His meeting with Gandhi, Nelson would write,

  has proved one of my very great moments in India. The two hours in his retreat were packed with an inspiration which will abide with me… The impression which I bore away… derived from the extraordinary spiritual and intellectual qualities which he revealed even in so short a time… Mr Gandhi has a complete mastery over the material demands upon his life… The room could scarcely have been plainer. His mind met our problems most directly and constructively…18

  Pyarelal, who in the end married not Manu but a Hindu woman from Noakhali, would assert that Gandhi’s expectation of Manu’s growth in Noakhali ‘was amply rewarded’. Pyarelal thought that in Gandhi’s company Manu slept calmly, overcame fidgetiness and absent-mindedness, became clearer in thinking and firmer in speech, and seemed free from possessiveness.19

  While holding that Gandhi did not fully consider t
he impact of his practice on Manu, Bose thought nonetheless that there was something noble about the Gandhi whom he watched and worked with in Noakhali during ‘the greatest phase of Gandhi’s great life’, to use Bose’s words.20 Indeed, Gandhi’s ‘party’ in Noakhali seemed a lot less troubled than associates far removed from him. Writing to Vinoba (10 Feb.) of his awareness that colleagues in ‘Sevagram and elsewhere must be suffering’ because of the ‘yagna’, Gandhi added, ‘Here, on the contrary, everybody knows what is happening but I see no sign of its having any effect’ (93:391).

  On 25 February one of his closest and oldest associates, Amritlal Thakkar—or Thakkar Bapa, as he was better known, and called ‘my conscience-keeper’ by Gandhi—talked to him on behalf of dissenting colleagues, stressing the risk of unscrupulous imitation. Gandhi answered that society would not allow it. In any case he had to give all of himself in Noakhali, and this included the yagna.

  A few days later Thakkar—like Gandhi and his grand-niece a native of Kathiawar—told Manu that he was satisfied. He had watched her and Gandhi, he said, ‘from day to day’ and was persuaded by ‘the sight of their perfectly innocent and undisturbed sleep’ and by her ‘single-minded and tireless’ work. But he asked Manu for something in return for the change in his thinking: would she please ask Gandhi to suspend the yagna? Manu said she would, and Gandhi in turn agreed to the suspension—for the time being.21

  VILLAGE TO VILLAGE ON FOOT

  On 2 January, after spending six weeks in Srirampur, Gandhi, carrying a long bamboo staff, had left on foot to cover ‘a village a day’. He had given up his latest ashram even as he had earlier renounced many of his companions. However, Manu, Bose, Parasuram (who would soon leave) and Ramachandran (also a stenographer) joined Gandhi on his latest journey.

  Not far from Gandhi and his companions walked eight armed guards from the Bengal Police. Despite Gandhi pleading with them not to do so, about 100 villagers also trekked behind, and more, Hindus and Muslims, lined both sides of the narrow path on which he walked.

  The ingenious Satis Dasgupta (who had carefully drawn up the itinerary, ensuring that Gandhi would not walk more than four miles on any one day) constructed a mobile hut and brought it before Gandhi. The hut was simple to take apart, carry, and put together. Gandhi was deeply touched but he declined the ‘palace’, as he called it.

  Over the next two months he and his companions would halt overnight in forty-seven different villages in Noakhali and Tippera; their hosts were Hindus and Muslims, and included washermen, fishermen, cobblers and weavers.

  He did not find as many Muslim hosts as he had hoped but warmly thanked those that lodged him, including Maulvi Ibrahim, the host in Fatehpur village (8 January) and Habibullah Patwari in Muraim (24 January).

  ‘They bathe us with love,’ Manu wrote in her diary, referring to the weavers, cobblers and fisherfolk who welcomed Gandhi and his party.22

  A washerman, Rai Mohan Mali, hosted Gandhi in village Dalta (23 January), and in Palla (27 January) Gandhi lived in a weaver’s home. He said in Palla: ‘The cottages of Bengal have become dearer to me than the prison-like solid walls of palaces. A house full of love, such as this one, is superior to a place where love does not reign.’23

  Much of his time was spent with Hindu women stricken with fear. Bose noticed what he described as Gandhi’s ‘daily ministrations on behalf of love’ and ‘the extreme tenderness with which he regarded each individual’ who related woes to him.24 Sick children in the villages, Muslim and Hindu, also commanded Gandhi’s attention.

  He sought to heal and to wipe tears but said that courage rather than consolation was what he hoped to transmit. Thus Bose recorded that in the course of one meeting with bereaved women ‘Gandhiji’s face hardened, and he said that they must recover their courage.’25

  With the caste Hindu women Gandhi was also frank about untouchability. Finding that the Namashudra ‘untouchables’ of east Bengal had been braver than caste Hindus in responding to attacks, he insisted that village peace committees should have Namashudra representation; and he warned caste Hindu women that if they continued to disown the ‘untouchables’, more sorrow would be in store. To women in Chandipur he proposed (3 Jan.) a radical step:

  Invite a Harijan every day to dine with you. Or at least ask the Harijan to touch the food or the water before you consume it. Do penance for your sins.26

  In Srirampur he had tried to prepare himself for the trek with exercise and a planned diet, but walking on East Bengal’s slender bridges was not always easy. Gandhi provided both entertainment and anxiety when he negotiated these, but Bose or someone else was usually close enough to prevent a fall.

  The poet and the poem. Renouncing his chappals, Gandhi walked barefoot. When Manu saw cuts on his soles and protested, Gandhi replied: ‘We don’t go to our temples, mosques or churches with shoes on… We tread on holy ground where people have lost their loved ones… How can I wear chappals there?’27 But with a little exaggeration he also claimed (6 Feb., in Dharampur) that Noakhali’s footpaths were friendly:

  The earth of Noakhali is like velvet and the green grass is a magnificent carpet to walk on. It reminds me of the soft grass I had noticed in England (93: 378).

  In some villages Hindus would sing their welcome to him or walk with him to the next village, singing and beating their drums: their confidence was returning. Often the walk would commence with a prayer-song, Vaishnava Jana or Tagore’s Ekla Chalo Re—‘Walk Alone’.

  Gandhi sang himself. ‘The pitch of his voice was low, but the tune was correct,’ thought D.G. Tendulkar,28 a future biographer of Gandhi drawn from Bombay to Noakhali by the old man’s venture. Tagore was the author of the song but Gandhi, his purpose stronger than his feet, his message stronger than his voice, had become the song.

  Half a dozen journalists, more at times, were also on the scene, capturing Gandhi’s doings and what he said at his prayer-meetings. Like Gandhi and his companions, the journalists stayed with the villagers, paying for their food.

  Muslim response. The Muslim reaction varied from day to day, depending in part on how Gandhi’s visit was portrayed at the local mosque. An evening prayer-meeting attended by thousands of Muslims could be followed by another drawing fewer than a dozen.

  But he evoked wide admiration among educated Muslims across East Bengal, as was found on trains near Dhaka by a visiting Hindu from western India, Ramnarayan Chaudhary, who to prove to himself his fearlessness wore (not without trepidation) the white ‘Gandhi’ cap and found (to his relief) that the attention he received was usually of a welcoming kind. A Bengali Hindu told Chaudhary that as a result of Gandhi’s stay ‘the Hindus of Noakhali were slowly regaining the confidence they had lost, and the Muslims were undergoing a change of heart’.29

  Noakhali’s Muslims often asked Gandhi why he was not in Bihar; his answer was that his mention of a possible fast and the efforts of Nehru and others had brought that province under control. All in all, curiosity and warmth were the Muslims’ strongest instincts towards Gandhi, and they noticed his regard for their sensitivities.

  Thus he asked his followers not to carry the Congress flag; he asked local Hindus to cooperate in the League ministry’s peace plan; he encouraged Manu to partake of vegetarian food offered to her by Muslim women; and at times he asked her and others singing of ‘the good Vaishnava’ to switch to ‘the good Muslim’ or ‘the good Christian’.

  However, some Muslims objected to a self-confessed Hindu like him reciting verses from the Qur’an or speaking of what their faith required of Muslims. One of them was Fazlul Huq (1873-1962), the mover in 1940 of the Muslim League’s Pakistan resolution and Suhrawardy’s rival in Bengal. He said he would push Gandhi into the water if he came to his district, Barisal. But when the visit occurred, in Haimchar, Huq called on Gandhi (27 Feb.) and said the remark was only a joke. Later, Huq said that spreading goodwill the way ‘Mahatma Gandhi was doing’ was his wish too.30

  Yet the earlier remark was indicative
of the hostility towards Gandhi’s visit in sections of East Bengal’s Muslims.

  At the prayers in Paniala village on 22 January 1947, Manu for the first time used a verse that would become familiar to millions of Hindus and Muslims in the years to come: ‘Ishwar Allah Tere Naam’—‘Ishwar and Allah (both) are Your Names.’

  Manu told Gandhi that she had first heard the verse in a temple in Porbandar. Observing that Paniala’s Muslims, who had gathered in huge numbers, liked the verse, Gandhi asked Manu to sing the line ‘daily from now on’. ‘God Himself breathed it into your mind,’ he added.31

  On 31 January the Muslims of Navagram defended Gandhi’s right to cite from the Qur’an, and in the village of Sadhurkhil, an influential Muslim, Salimulla Saheb, asked Gandhi (4 Feb.) to hold prayers on his grounds—in his badi—adding that he would not mind if the Hindu verse about Rama was chanted to the clapping of hands.32

  ‘The Rama whom I adore,’ Gandhi explained in Sadhurkhil, as he had done elsewhere, ‘is God Himself’, different from any historical Rama. ‘He always was, is now and will be for ever,’ a God who was ‘Unborn and Uncreated’ (93: 365).

  His discourse. Two big-built Sikhs who had served with Subhas Bose’s Indian National Army, Niranjan Singh Gill and Jivan Singh, joined Gandhi on his Noakhali trek, without carrying their kirpans. One of them occasioned a hearty laugh from Gandhi by slipping and falling on the treacherous ground. There was banter again when a group of British and Australian soldiers caught up with Gandhi, who teased an Australian about his country’s White Australia policy.

  But grimness and sadness were the more frequent notes. In Jagatpur (10 Jan.) Gandhi firmly told bereaved Hindu women weeping before him that ‘tears won’t bring back the dead’. However, after the women left he said to Manu that their faces would haunt him; all he could eat for dinner that evening was a lump of jaggery.33