In Calcutta, Rajagopalachari said:
Bharat Mata is writhing in anguish and pain over the loss. No man loved Bharat Mata and Indians more than Mahatma Gandhi…
No one could die a more glorious death than Mahatma Gandhi. He was going to the seat of his prayer to speak to his Rama. He did not die in bed calling for hot water, doctors or nurses. He did not die after mumbling incoherent words… He died standing, not even sitting down.
Patel’s hunch that the assassination would advance Gandhi’s goals proved correct. On 31 January vast numbers of mourning Indians followed Gandhi’s body to Rajghat, where it was cremated. As the pyre was about to be lit, Manu placed her ‘face in the Sardar’s lap and wept and wept’. Looking up, she noticed that Patel had suddenly aged.5
A special train carrying Gandhi’s ashes from Delhi to Allahabad was mobbed by tens of thousands at every station en route. On 12 February, Allahabad’s river banks were packed by a concourse of humanity witnessing the immersion of the ashes. All across the land Indians expressed their grief, and it became clear that Gandhi’s killers had discredited themselves, their associates and the idea of Hindu supremacy.
India’s sorrow led to bans on the RSS and the arrests of many of its functionaries. One of Gandhi’s worst fears, the communalization of the Congress—a fear contributing to his proposal for the body’s dissolution—was averted. Nehru’s position in the Congress was strengthened, as was the body’s commitment to protect minorities. India’s Hindu extremists would remain marginalized for the next forty years.
Speaking to Congress MPs on 4 February 1948, Vallabhbhai for the first time referred to Nehru as ‘my leader’, and added:
I am one with the Prime Minister on all national issues. For over a quarter of a century, both of us sat at the feet of our master and struggled together for the freedom of India. It is unthinkable today, when the Mahatma is no more, that we would quarrel.6
Though Patel rejected a charge (levelled by Jayaprakash among others) that as home minister he had failed to protect Gandhi, he was not free from self-reproach. On 5 March he suffered a heart attack. After three hours of drug-induced sleep, his first words were, ‘I had to go with Bapu. He has gone alone.’7 Patel was recalling his 1932 compact with Gandhi.
But he recovered, and he and Nehru governed India as a duumvirate until Patel’s death in December 1950. Unbroken though not friction-free, the bond between the two assisted India’s democratic governance at the start of independence, and aided renewal after the upheaval of August and September 1947.
Ten weeks before his death, Vallabhbhai spoke of Gandhi, Kasturba and Nehru:
Today I see before me the whole picture of life ever since I joined Bapu’s army. The love which Ba bore me I never experienced from my own mother. Whatever parental love fell to my lot, I got from Bapu and Ba…
We were all soldiers in their camp. I have been referred to as the Deputy Prime Minister. I never think of myself in those terms. Jawaharlal Nehru is our leader. Bapu appointed him as his successor…
It is the duty of all Bapu’s soldiers to carry out his bequest. Whoever does not do so from the heart… will be a sinner before God. I am not a disloyal soldier. I never think of the place that I am occupying. I know only this much, and am satisfied, that I still am where Bapu posted me.8
As for Jawaharlal, he led the Congress, which was not dissolved, to victory in elections in 1952, 1957 and 1962, and he continued as India’s Prime Minister until his death in 1964. Shortly before his death he authorized Kashmir’s leader, Sheikh Abdullah, to visit Pakistan to explore an India-Pakistan rapprochement and a settlement of the Kashmir dispute. Talks between Abdullah and General Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s military ruler, went well, but Nehru’s death in May 1964 cut short the reconciliation effort.
Eighteen months later, after a brief India-Pakistan war, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and General Ayub Khan signed an agreement in Tashkent, then part of the Soviet Union. Remembering Gandhi and believing that ‘peace and good relations with Pakistan were essential if India was to preserve her soul’,9 Shastri accepted Ayub’s invitation to visit Pakistan before returning to India, but he died of heart failure while still in Tashkent.
In 1971-72 India and Pakistan fought a third war that resulted in East Pakistan emerging as the independent nation of Bangladesh. The year 1999 saw a fourth conflict, in Kargil in Kashmir, but on 1 January 2001 Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said: ‘In our search for a lasting solution to the Kashmir problem… we shall not traverse solely on the beaten track of the past. Rather, we shall be bold and innovative designers of a future architecture of peace and prosperity for the entire South Asian region.’10
The sentiment has been repeated since by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and by Pakistan’s President, General Pervez Musharraf, but the subcontinent still awaits the peace that Gandhi wanted to secure by visiting Pakistan in February 1948, an exercise prevented by the assassination.
And after the suicide attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, and the American attacks that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq, the whole world awaits the reconciliation between Muslims and non-Muslims for which Gandhi gave his life.
The sons. When, in Bombay, he heard of the assassination, Harilal said: ‘I will not spare the man who killed a saint, the Mahatma of the world, who was my father.’11 Three or four days afterwards, he turned up at Devadas’s home in New Delhi, wanting to share his grief with his youngest brother. Less than six months later, on 18 June 1948, Harilal died in a Bombay hospital, in the presence of his daughters Rami Parikh and Manu Mashruwala. He was sixty.
Editing Indian Opinion, Manilal challenged South Africa’s racism, inviting imprisonment. He fought, too, for nonviolence in the South African struggle. Under his care, Phoenix and its gardens grew and its multiracial character was strengthened. He died there in 1956, at the age of sixty-four.
The youngest, Devadas, the only son living in Delhi, had reached Birla House within minutes of the killing and pleaded into his father’s ear, ‘Speak, Bapu, speak.’ He continued to edit and look after the Hindustan Times until 1957 when, at the age of fifty-seven, he succumbed to a heart attack in Bombay.
The third son, Ramdas, was the one to light his father’s pyre in Rajghat. Until 1951, he managed a branch office of Tata Oil Mills in Nagpur, the big city closest to Sevagram/Wardha; his home provided hospitality to visitors from the ashram. Outliving his brothers, Ramdas died in Bombay in 1969, when he was seventy-one.
Two of the sons, Manilal and Ramdas, pleaded for commuting the death sentence awarded to Godse and Apte, as did the parents of Godse. However, Nehru, Patel and the Governor-General, Rajagopalachari, turned down the requests, and the sentences were carried out in 1949.
We may note here what happened to some others featuring in our story. Winston Churchill regained Britain’s Premiership in 1951, left it in 1955, and died in 1965. Linlithgow, the Viceroy who faced Quit India, died in 1952, and Viceroy Wavell in 1950. The Viceroy who signed the pact with Gandhi, Lord Irwin, later known as Lord Halifax, lived until 1959.
Fulfilling his ambition, Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, became Britain’s First Sea Lord in 1955. He lived until 1979, when he was killed in Ireland by a bomb planted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army, its wrath possibly invited by Mountbatten’s kinship with the British royal family.
Seven months after Gandhi’s assassination, Jinnah, founder of Pakistan and its first Governor-General, died of illness in Karachi. He was seventy-two.
A prisoner of the British for twelve years, Abdul Ghaffar Khan spent another fifteen years, in different spells, in Pakistani jails. Never swerving from his faith in Muslim-Hindu friendship, in nonviolence, in a reconciling Islam, and in Pakhtun autonomy, he died in 1988, at the age of ninety-eight.
After chairing the Constituent Assembly that produced India’s Constitution, Rajendra Prasad served until 1962 as India’s President. He died in 1963.
Succeeding Mountbatten as Governo
r-General in the summer of 1948, C. Rajagopalachari became home minister after Patel’s death in 1950. Parting company with Nehru in the late Fifties, C.R. launched the Swatantra party to oppose the state’s increasing role in the economy. He died in 1972, when he was ninety-four.
Until his death in 1958, Abul Kalam Azad served as India’s education minister, interpreter of Islam, and a symbol and defender of India’s pluralism.
The principal craftsman of the Constitution, Bhimrao Ambedkar, resigned from Nehru’s Cabinet in 1951 after complaining about the slow pace of legislation for reforming Hindu personal laws. In 1956 he renounced Hinduism and embraced Buddhism, along with hundreds of thousands of his Dalit followers in Maharashtra. He died in December of that year.
Accused of complicity in the assassination and taken into custody, Vinayak D. Savarkar denied the charge but offered to refrain from political activity ‘for any period the Government may require’ if he was released.12 His offer was turned down but for want of corroborative evidence Savarkar was acquitted by the courts. He lived until 1966. In 2003, when the Bharatiya Janata Party led the government in New Delhi, Savarkar’s portrait was installed in the Central Hall of Parliament House.
Jayaprakash Narayan led nationwide if controversial campaigns for Gandhian and democratic values in the 1960s and 1970s. The struggle against India’s 1975-77 Emergency was waged under his banner, but he was ill when, in 1977, India seemed to turn to him. He died in 1979, six years after the death from cancer of his wife Prabhavati.
Of the ‘Gandhian’ team of political leaders, Jivatram Kripalani survived the longest. He died in 1982, at the age of ninety-four. Uncomfortable with the Nehru-Patel duumvirate, he opposed the Congress from the early Fifties.
The non-political ‘Gandhians’ accepted Vinoba Bhave as their leader after Gandhi’s death. Covering all of India on foot, Bhave persuaded land-owners to give hundreds of thousands of acres for the landless. He died in his ashram in Paunar near Wardha in 1982, leaving behind a large corpus of writings and talks.
Continuing to innovate for the common Indian, Satis Dasgupta helped farmers conserve water and produced a popular writing ink, among other services. Living to the age of ninety-nine, he died in 1979.
Kishorelal Mashruwala edited Harijan after Gandhi’s death, helped with the publication of Manu Gandhi’s diaries and wrote a valuable little book, Gandhi vs. Marx. He died in 1952.
His writings on literary, religious and political topics attracting a wide readership, Dattatreya or ‘Kaka’ Kalelkar lived until 1981, when he was ninety-six.
After spending some time in Noakhali, Pyarelal wrote a multi-volume biography of Gandhi and other books, including a study of Ghaffar Khan, whom he had gone to meet in Kabul. He died in 1982.
Mira (Madeleine Slade) worked in the Himalayan foothills until the late Fifties, when she went to Austria to be close to the spirit of Beethoven. Her book about her association with Gandhi, Spirit’s Pilgrimage, was published in 1960. She was ninety at her death in 1982.
Though critical of Quit India, Henry Polak helped interpret Gandhi in Britain, where he died in 1959.
Sushila Nayar assisted refugees, obtained advanced medical degrees in the USA, served as India’s health minister, ran a medical college in Wardha in Gandhi’s name, filled gaps left in her brother’s massive biography of Gandhi and died in 2001 at the age of eighty-six.
Amtus Salaam helped recover abducted Hindu and Sikh women from West Punjab, bringing many of them to Rajpura, her town in the former princely state of Patiala, where she raised several institutions, including one named after Kasturba. She died in 1985.
Manu, who remained single, wrote accounts of Gandhi’s final months in Noakhali, Bihar and Delhi. A radiant disseminator of Gandhi’s message to different parts of India, she was not yet forty when illness ended her life in New Delhi in 1969, the centenary of Gandhi’s birth.13
Abha and her husband Kanu Gandhi directed for years a rural centre (in Kasturba’s name) in Tramba near Rajkot. Abha was sixty-eight when she died in 1995. Kanu had died in 1986.
Nirmal Kumar Bose published an account of his months at Gandhi’s side and other studies, lectured on Gandhi in the USA and Japan, and served as director of the Anthropological Survey of India and India’s commissioner of Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes. He was the president of the Asiatic Society when, at the age of seventy-one, he died of cancer in 1972.
Mahadev Desai’s son Narayan, eighty-one in 2006, works from Vedchhi in Gujarat for peace and justice, and narrates Gandhi-Katha (the Gandhi story). His works include a four-volume biography of Gandhi.
Because of their efforts for freedom without violence, or for reconciliation after violence, or for empowering the weak, individuals from different countries would later get linked to Gandhi, including a man in the American south named Martin Luther King Jr, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, Nelson Mandela of South Africa, a woman in Burma called Aung San Suu Kyi, Benigno Aquino of the Philippines, and Ibrahim Rugova of Kosovo, and numerous others, whether famous or not.
When great nonviolent changes occurred in east Europe in the late 1980s and in South Africa in the early 1990s, observers or participants remembered Gandhi. Persons striving in the century’s closing decades to protect the earth’s environment also thought of Gandhi.
But all that is another story.
Notes
Chapter 1. Boyhood
[pp. 1-20]
1. M.K. Gandhi, My Experiments with Truth (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1930). Edition by Dover Publications, New York, 1983, p. 28.
2. Prabhudas Gandhi, Jeevan Prabhat (Delhi: Sasta Sahitya Mandal, 1967), p. 68.
3. J.M. Upadhyaya, Mahatma Gandhi—A Teacher’s Discovery (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1969), p. 7.
4. Pyarelal Nayar, Mahatma Gandhi: The Early Phase (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1965), p. 188.
5. M.K. Gandhi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Publications Division), vol. 94, p. 111, or 94: 111. All references in this study are to volumes in the digitized edition of the Collected Works, which have appeared in more than one version.
6. A 8 & Mukul Kalarthi, Ba and Bapu (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1962), p. 108.
7. Gandhi’s remarks to Vallabhbhai Patel quoted in Chandrashanker Shukla, Gandhi’s View of Life (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1968), p. 147.
8. Martin Green, Gandhi: Voice of a New Age Revolution (New York: Continuum, 1993), p. 65.
9. See also Green, Gandhi, p. 66.
10. Green, Gandhi, p. 65.
11. Prabhudas Gandhi, Jeevan Prabhat, p. 62.
12. D.B. ‘Kaka’ Kalelkar, Bapu ki Jhankian (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1948), p. 99.
13. Interview (in May or June 1891) to The Vegetarian of London, 13 June 1891; 1: 42.
14. Letter of 21 May 1943 from detention to Reginald Maxwell, Home Secretary, 83: 311.
15. Interview (in May or June 1891) to The Vegetarian of London, 13 June 1891; 1: 44.
16. Quoted in Ainslee Embree, India’s Search for National Identity (Delhi: Chanakya, 1988), p. 1.
[pp. 23-66]
17. Interviews in The Vegetarian, London, March & April 1891; 1: 30-9.
18. Mazmudar actually called it ‘divine strength’.
19. Letter quoting Mazmudar from Narhari Parikh to Mahadev Desai, 1919, Gandhi Sangrahalaya, New Delhi.
Chapter 2. London and Identity
1. Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Early Phase (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1965), p. 232.
2. See article by A.J. Parel in B.R. Nanda (ed.), Mahatma Gandhi: 125 Years (New Delhi: Indian Council for Cultural Relations, 1995), p. 238.
3. James D. Hunt, Gandhi in London (Delhi: Promilla, 1978), p. 10.
4. Pyarelal, Early Phase, p. 211.
5. B.R. Nanda, Mahatma Gandhi: A Biography (New Delhi: Allied, 1968), p. 28.
6. M.K. Gandhi, Guide to London, 1: 105; Hunt, Gandhi in London, p. 17.
7. Guide to London, 1: 106.
8. Hunt, Gandhi in London, p. 18.
9. D.B. Kale
lkar, Bapu Ki Jhankian (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1948), p. 22.
10. Hunt, Gandhi in London, p. 232.
11. Hunt, Gandhi in London, p. 33.
12. Pyarelal, Early Phase, p. 232.
13. Hunt, Gandhi in London, p. 27.
14. Hunt, Gandhi in London, p. 27.
15. ‘My Friend Gandhi,’ by Josiah Oldfield in Chandrashanker Shukla (ed.), Reminiscences of Gandhiji, Bombay: Vora, p. 188.
16. Pyarelal, Early Phase, p. 258.
17. Hunt, Gandhi in London, p. 13.
18. D.G. Tendulkar, Gandhi in Champaran, (New Delhi: Publications Division), 1994 (first edition 1957), p. 27.
19. ‘I had evidence of [Pan-Islamism] even while I was a student in England many years ago.’ Remark to Muslim leaders in Bengal in May 1947, 87:442-3.
20. Martin Green, Gandhi, p. 95.
21. ‘My Friend Gandhi,’ by Josiah Oldfield in Chandrashanker Shukla (ed.), Reminiscences of Gandhiji (Bombay: Vora, 1951), p. 188.
22. Green, Gandhi, p. 97.
23. See, for instance, the evidence in Pyarelal, The Early Phase, vol. 1, p. 266; and The Vegetarian, 13 June 1891.
24. Hunt, Gandhi in London, p. 231.
25. Pyarelal, Early Phase, p. 268.
26. Quoted in Green, Gandhi, p. 113.
Chapter 3. South Africa and a Purpose
1. M.K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1928, 1993 edition), p. 37.
2. Autobiography, p. 93.
3. See also Martin Green, Gandhi, p. 122, citing 48: 171 (first Collected Works version).
[pp. 67-119]
4. P. Mani, The Secret of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Arnold, 1989), p. 35.
5. Green, Gandhi, p. 123.
6. James D. Hunt, Gandhi and the Nonconformists: Encounters in South Africa (Columbia, Missouri: South Asia Books, 1986), p. 32.
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 90
