Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  Two days later, in the village of Karpara (‘adopted’ by Sushila Pai), he stayed in what had been the home of Rai Saheb Rajendralal Chowdhury, who along with twenty-nine relatives had perished in October.

  His discourse was often a back-to-back mix of the religious and the secular. Hindus and Muslims, he said on 10 December, ‘were nourished by food grown from the same soil, quenched their thirst from the waters of the same river and finally laid themselves to rest in the same earth. If they feared God they would fear no one else’ (93: 127).

  Insisting on the precise truth, and the removal of all exaggeration, in what complaining Hindus told him, he refused to congratulate Muslims who claimed that attacks on Hindus had been limited. ‘If more mischief was not done’ he said in Paniala (22 Jan.), ‘God alone was to be thanked, not man’. However, he would concede that, ‘be it said to their honour, there were Muslims who afforded protection to Hindus’ (93: 313).

  He felt outraged when others were not outraged at the coercion of the weak. A maulvi remarking that those willing to convert had at least saved their lives was told by him: ‘I am amazed that God has allowed someone with your views to become a scholar of Islam.’34

  Asked about state schools and religious instruction after independence, Gandhi replied (21 Feb.) that he did not believe in a state religion even when the whole community followed one faith. ‘State interference probably would always be unwelcome,’ he said. Religion was a personal matter; he would be opposed even to partial state aid to religious bodies. But, he added, state schools could teach ethics, which were common to all religions.35

  Four young Muslims in Sadhurkhil challenged Gandhi (4 Feb.) to say publicly that the number of deaths was smaller in Noakhali than in Bihar. Doing so, Gandhi announced his estimate that less than a thousand had died in Noakhali, and that ‘the murders and brutalities in Bihar eclipsed those in Noakhali’.36

  As during the salt march, he sought information about each village he visited, and got Manu to record its numbers, broken down by religion and caste. On occasion he talked rural economics. In Chandipur, close to the village that Sushila had taken on, Changirgaon, Gandhi said (4 Jan.):

  Bengal is a land full of verdure, with plenty of water and fertile soil. But through ignorance people are suffering from poverty and disease. You are content with betel-nut and coconut and a little agriculture. But with more knowledge you can increase productivity many times and convert villages into clean abodes of peace and prosperity (93: 238).

  No matter how ascetic his own life-style, Gandhi wanted East Bengal’s productivity multiplied ‘many times’; he wished to see abodes of ‘prosperity’ and health. Two days later, still in Chandipur, he returned to the theme:

  I want to teach you… how to get pure water in the villages, how to keep ourselves clean, how best to utilize the soil from which we have sprung, how to breathe in life’s energy from the infinite sky above our head, how to draw fresh life from our surroundings and how best to use the sun’s rays.

  Our country has become impoverished. I shall try and teach you so that you may, by making proper use of these resources, convert this [land] into a land of gold (93: 244).

  To the American scholar and activist for peace, A.J. Muste, who had asked about a free India’s likely policies, Gandhi wrote (28 Feb.):

  I wish too that I could give you the assurance that India, when she has come to her own completely, will not join the race for the increase of armaments. I can only say that whatever I can do to prevent any such misfortune will not be left undone (94: 55).

  Long hours, basic chores. Walking, spinning, writing, treating the sick and, most of all, listening until late in the evening or early in the morning, Gandhi did not usually sleep more than four hours at night. To Manu he said on 10 January:

  Just observe how God sustains me. Though I sleep at 10 or 11 p.m., rise at 2 or 2.30 a.m., do my work at high pressure and get no rest at all, I carry on somehow! That itself is a wonder.37

  To Vallabhbhai, home member in the interim government, who was anxious about Gandhi’s security in the East Bengal countryside, he wrote:

  There is the One… above all of us who will look after me, and He is able enough.38

  Manu cooked for Gandhi, washed his sore feet after stretches of barefoot walking, gave him an oil massage, and kept notes of his conversations and talks. But there were times in Noakhali when Gandhi did chores that for years others had performed, like cooking for himself, giving himself a rub and darning his clothes.

  It was getting colder. One evening, burning some dry sticks, Manu heated water for Gandhi to wash his hands and face with before retiring. He was not pleased. ‘Where people don’t have twigs for baking their rotis,’ he said, ‘you want me to wash my face with warm water? I can understand heating water for bathing, but not for this.’39

  A harder lesson had been given a few days earlier when Manu left behind Gandhi’s scrubbing stone—given to him by Mira—in the village of Bhatialpur. Discovering the loss later in the day (15 Jan.) in Narayanpur, Gandhi asked Manu to walk back alone to Bhatialpur and retrieve the pumice stone. Though an old woman had thrown the stone away, Manu located it and hurried back.

  Saying, ‘Take your stone,’ she threw the object before Gandhi, who laughed and said that Manu had passed a test. He added:

  If scoundrels had seized and killed you I would have danced with joy, but I would not have liked it a bit if you had run back out of fear… I said to myself, ‘This girl sings Ekla Chalo Re with enthusiasm but has she digested the message?’… You can see how hard I can be… I also realized it.40

  The last two sentences suggest Gandhi’s unease about his direction to Manu, which had been produced by a mix of reactions. Firstly, something he was used to had gone. As he admitted the next day to Manu, ‘My nature dislikes any change in my routine.’41 Secondly, Manu had discarded a gift from someone he loved, Mira. Finally, there was a chance to test Manu.

  The Gandhi ordering Manu to fetch the stone was hardly serene, but we can recognize his need to test her. She (and he) had to be willing to face what he was asking Noakhali’s weak Hindus to face. The ‘dancing with joy’ phrase only means, as we have seen before, that though wanting a loved one to prefer death to surrender, he was praying every moment for her safety. Manu, who recorded the incident, also noted that Gandhi was anxious about her rest and nourishment after her return.

  Earlier (10 Jan.), Gandhi had apologized to her after discovering that he had wrongly blamed her—we do not know for what. Manu recorded what he said:

  I was absolutely wrong… I am so much older than you. I am your grandfather. What pardon can I seek from you? Still there is nothing wrong in asking for it.

  Gandhi added that while it was a wonder that God had kept him going, his end could come at any time; he wanted to make his confession before it came.42

  Harilal & Kasturba. On 22 January he sent a letter to one he had sorrowed over for decades. Someone who had met Harilal had written to Gandhi that his fifty-eight-year-old son looked much older than his years. A pained father who had sent most aides away wished nevertheless to have the son with him in Noakhali, and sent Harilal a letter via the person who had met him.

  It was only rarely that Gandhi knew how his son could be reached. However, in this letter of invitation Gandhi could not resist underlining Harilal’s need to reform himself:

  How delighted I shall be to find that you have turned over a new leaf!.. Mine is an arduous pilgrimage. I invite you to join in it if you can… If you purify yourself, no matter where you are, you will have fully shared it… [Y]ou will then also cease to look prematurely old… (93: 307)

  A month later, when he heard about Harilal from a correspondent who was seeing him in Madras, Gandhi wrote once more to his son, but what he said is nor recorded (94: 20). We know that Harilal did not join the father.

  February was the month of Kasturba’s death, which had occurred on Shiva Ratri day. In 1947 Shiva Ratri fell on 19 February. At 7.35 p.
m. that evening, in Birampur village, Gandhi wrote in his diary: ‘On this day, and exactly at this time Ba quitted her mortal frame three years ago’ (94: 13). Then he wrote to one of Manu’s sisters informing her that earlier in the day Manu had recited the whole of the Gita in Kasturba’s memory. Added Gandhi:

  When, therefore, after the Eighth Chapter I stretched myself and dozed off a little, I felt as if Ba was lying with her head on my lap (94: 13).

  Stars and dust. Observing him from close quarters, Bose concluded that it was Gandhi’s ‘questioning attitude towards his own perfection’ that brought him close to ordinary men and women. It was a factor, Bose thought, in Gandhi’s ‘tenderness’ which ‘soothed’ men and women and ‘lifted them above their sorrows’.43

  In Noakhali Gandhi once asked Bose (who among other things was compiling quotations from Gandhi) not to be misled by his sentences, which (said Gandhi) ‘showed him at his best’ and ‘presented a picture of his aspirations, and not of his achievements’.

  Bose answered by quoting Tagore, who had said that a man should be judged ‘by the best moments of his life, by his loftiest creations, rather than by the smallnesses of everyday life’. To this Gandhi’s response was quite stunning:

  Yes, that is true of the Poet, for he has to bring down the light of the stars upon the earth. But for men like me, you have to measure them not by the moments of greatness in their lives, but by the amount of dust they collect on their feet in the course of life’s journey.44

  Yet Gandhi could be poetic himself. On 18 December he said: ‘Truth is greater than the sun; some day or the other it will come to light’ (93:159). And in a letter to Mira on 6 February (93: 375), he compressed several layers of meaning into a sentence of fourteen short words, twelve of which needed only a single syllable:

  The way to truth is paved with skeletons over which we dare to walk.

  The sentence is, firstly, a terse description of the Noakhali trek. Next it confesses a hurried, even insensitive, walk over or past grief. Thirdly, it accuses the living of concealing the full truth: only the skeletons know what really happened. Finally, Gandhi hints that India’s path to freedom was paved with death and yet could not be abandoned.

  ‘Adopted’ villages. In their different villages Gandhi’s associates achieved results that at times seemed ‘astounding’, to quote Pyarelal, who had taken on Bhatialpur. ‘We were all of us men and women of ordinary clay,’ Pyarelal would write, but with the strengths, he would add, of awareness ‘of our shortcomings’ and ‘soldierly obedience’ to Gandhi’s instructions.45

  Though full confession by perpetrators of violence in these villages was not forthcoming, remorse was ample, and Muslim elders were quick to punish anyone committing fresh acts of harassment or looting against Hindu neighbours. Hindus who had fled returned; chants and prayer-songs were heard again; conches were blown; Hindu women wore vermillion and bangles once more.

  In Bhatialpur a committee of Muslims pledged that they would risk their lives to protect Hindus and do their utmost to get looted properties and abducted women restored. In the presence of Muslims who had earlier broken it, an idol was restored in a Bhatialpur temple. Walking alongside Gandhi in Bhatialpur, ‘a number of Muslim youths’ assured him, according to the Amrita Bazar Patrika (19 Jan.), that ‘they would stand guarantee’ against a recurrence of attacks on Hindus (93: 278).

  Sushila’s ability to offer medical aid added to her effectiveness in Changirgaon. Looted goods were returned to Hindu homes there and in adjacent villages. In Karpara, where Sushila Pai was living, the local school was back on its feet, the weekly bazaar reopened, and Muslims ‘even asked her to mediate in their disputes’.46

  Kanu Gandhi organized group activities to lower barriers between Hindus and Muslims in Ramdevpur; in Haimchar his wife Abha used her artistic talent to the same end. Thakkar Bapa too was in Haimchar, staying in a Dalit home. In some adopted villages residents joined in tidying up common areas and digging trench-latrines. Elsewhere in Noakhali, Sucheta Kripalani helped locals fight destitution, and other ‘elite’ Bengali women like Renuka Roy, Ashoka Gupta and Sneharani Kanjilal also joined the relief effort, taking up residence in the affected countryside.

  Amtus Salaam, who never missed a Ramzan fast and always slept with the Qur’an at her side, went on a fast in Sirandi when her call for a surrender of a sword used in attacks against Hindus was not heeded. While she fasted Gandhi wrote her a letter a day, sometimes two letters daily. After twenty-five days, though the sword was not returned, Gandhi persuaded her to end her fast (20 Jan.) and helped her sip some orange juice.

  Eleven Muslims of Sirandi took the pledge, ‘with God as witness’, that they would defend the right of Hindus to practise their faith and continue to search for the missing sword. (The wording was drafted by Gandhi and bore some resemblance to the 1906 satyagraha pledge in Johannesburg.) Though the weapon was never found, ‘things were altogether different in and around Sirandi after that fast’, Pyarelal would write, adding that the fast ‘blew away like a whiff of fresh air the musty charnel-house odours that had hung over the place since the riots’.47

  In the village of Jayag (29 Jan.), the local zamindar, Barrister Hemanta Kumar Ghosh, donated his lands to Gandhi for setting up a charitable trust. Gandhi gave power of attorney to the Sodepur ashram’s Charu Chowdhury, who established on Ghosh’s lands a centre for Hindu-Muslim harmony and development that continues to this day, despite post-Partition trials that included Chowdhury’s imprisonment.

  Implementing advice given by Gandhi when they called on him in December, several women from Calcutta’s elite families had based themselves in Noakhali villages. One of them, Ashoka Gupta, who camped in Tumchar, would later write, referring to end-February 1947: ‘At that time the work in Noakhali to rehabilitate hundreds of families had gained momentum and was in full swing.’48

  Politics. In the ‘wilderness’ of Noakhali Gandhi’s political antenna remained in good repair. The preparation of a free India’s Constitution mattered to Gandhi: in a letter to Ghanshyamdas Birla (26 Nov.), he conveyed clear advice regarding the Constituent Assembly:

  I am not going into the Constituent Assembly; it is not quite necessary either. Jawaharlal, Sardar, Rajendra Babu, Rajaji, Maulana—any of these or all five can go—or Kripalani. Send them the message (93: 70).

  That Gandhi had considered entering the Assembly himself before rejecting the idea is of some interest. On 11 December he wrote to Kripalani, the new Congress president, urging him to maintain good relations with Nehru, and added a comment on the question of questions:

  He (Nehru) is right also in his reflections on the Hindu-Muslim question. It is a terrible problem and a great responsibility rests upon the Congress now—therefore the greatest on you (93: 130-1).

  At the end of December Gandhi once more offered clear political advice, after HMG had finally resolved—in the Muslim League’s favour—the ambiguity in the Cabinet Mission Plan of 16 May. Following talks held in London in which Nehru (on behalf of the Congress), Jinnah and Liaqat Ali (for the League), and Wavell had taken part, HMG announced that Assam and the NWFP would have to join the Muslim Groups.

  While Cripps and Pethick-Lawrence had argued in London for the Congress’s interpretation, Wavell and Alexander defended that of the League. Prime Minister Attlee tipped the scale in the League’s favour. The Congress was given the option of appealing to the Federal Court in New Delhi, but nobody expected this British-led court to defy HMG.

  Patel wrote Cripps an angry letter, charging betrayal. HMG’s verdict meant, Patel said, that ‘Bengal Muslims can draw up the constitution of Assam.’ ‘Do you think,’ he added, ‘that such a monstrous proposition can be accepted by the Hindus of Assam?’49 But Patel’s indignation was also linked to his arguments with Gandhi over 16 May. Gandhi had expressed misgivings, but Patel had asked him not to be fussy.

  In December 1946 Patel was in fact resigning himself to India’s division and to a Pakistan that did not absorb Eas
t Punjab, West Bengal or Assam.50 His experience of the interim government, where League ministers and several officials saw themselves as future Pakistanis rather than as Indians, had disillusioned Patel about trying to govern all of India alongside the League.

  Once Pakistan was conceded, he reckoned, the League would lose its capacity to obstruct the Congress in the rest of India. For one thing, the Congress would feel free to abolish the separate Muslim electorate. And a strong central government, to Patel an imperative, seemed possible only in an India shorn of its Muslim-majority regions.

  By now some others too were ready to concede Pakistan. On 18 December Birla told Colville, who was acting as Viceroy while Wavell was in London, that ‘he thought that some sort of Pakistan would come about’. On his part Jinnah at last seemed willing to accept Small Pakistan. He had told Wavell on 19 November that the Muslims had to have ‘their own bit of country’, adding, ‘Let it be as small as you like. But it must be our own.’51

  On 11 December the India Committee of the British Cabinet noted the ‘pressure of events’ that were ‘leading to the establishment of some form of Pakistan,’52 and in a letter to Attlee on 1 January Ernest Bevin, Britain’s foreign secretary, referred to ‘handing over to established governments in India’.53 (Italics added.) As Premier and subsequently as the leader of the opposition, Churchill had favoured India’s partition. Now it had become Britain’s official if as yet private solution for India. From a longer perspective, it was also an almost inevitable outcome of Britain’s unwillingness to let power flow to India’s majority party, the Congress.

  But conceding Pakistan was not yet Congress policy. Patel withheld his view from Nehru, Gandhi or Wavell, and he refrained from advocating rejection of the HMG verdict by the Congress, which would mean the exit of its ministers, himself included, from the interim government.