by Robert Payne
The war in Europe was coming to a close, and soon India would be thrown into the turmoil of the inevitable postwar recession. Indian troops had fought on the battlefronts of Malaya, Burma, North Africa and Italy; and under Subhas Chandra Bose, the commander of the Indian National Army, a very small number had fought against the Allies as pawns of the Japanese. The Indian Army had swelled to 2,250,000 men, and there would be serious problems when they returned to India to be demobilized. The transition from war to peace would be slow, painful, and perhaps bloody.
Meanwhile Gandhi convalesced at Panchgani, a hill station near Poona, strangely withdrawn from events, speaking rarely, deliberately following the example of Charlie Andrews who severed his connection with the Church in order to serve religion, India and humanity better. And when the Viceroy summoned a meeting of the Congress and Muslim League leaders to Simla in June 1945, Gandhi refused to attend except as a private person and afterward regretted that he had attended at all. At the meeting Jinnah demanded that the Muslims, a quarter of the population, should have political parity with the Hindus. Pakistan was rarely mentioned, but it could be felt like a huge and obsessive presence brooding over the conference table. There was no room for debate or compromise: the issues were multiplied, and the disagreements magnified. The Congress members spoke darkly of a British plot. Wherever they turned, they thought they saw the evidence of British partiality for the Muslims. Confused, outmaneuvered by Jinnah, with no uncompromising program of their own and without Gandhi to lead them, the Congress members found themselves at a disadvantage. Gandhi vanished into the seclusion of a nature-cure clinic at Poona, taking Vallabhbhai Patel with him. He stayed there for three months, having virtually removed himself from the conflict. At the age of seventy-six he promptly embarked on a new career. He decided to transform the Poona Clinic into a place where the poor could have equal treatment with the rich, and proceeded to establish new rules and regulations. There would be no luxuries, the rich would have to live in exactly the same space as the poor and they would receive exactly the same attention. Absolute cleanliness would have to be maintained; and so he went round the clinic, examining every comer, finding dirt where the attendants thought there was none. “I will let it go this time,” he said, “but after I have taken charge I shall certainly not excuse myself for any shortcomings in respect of cleanliness here.” He had embarked on many careers, and no one was particularly surprised when he became the director of a nature clinic for the poor.
In India the air was electric with despair. It was as though men knew the storm was coming. Lightning would strike the great tree, the quiet fields would run with blood, a new age of folk wanderings would begin. The British, the Muslims, the Hindus, the maharajahs and princes had all taken up positions which made the surrender of power nearly impossible without bloodshed. The nightmarish miscalculations had all been made; the sum total of these miscalculations would soon be known.
By the beginning of March 1946 Gandhi had come regretfully to the conclusion that his plans for his nature-cure clinic at Poona were unworkable. He did not know whether to laugh or weep over his folly, and suddenly he abandoned Poona altogether and settled in an obscure village called Uruli Kanchan, on the Poona-Sholapur line, where he established himself as the village doctor, meeting patients every morning and prescribing his usual medicines: hip baths, sunbaths, fruit juices, the recitation of God’s name. He soon had a large practice, but it was obvious that he would not be allowed to continue to live in an obscure village. The Congress wanted him in Delhi. Even if he maintained his role of a private citizen, he was still needed for consultations.
There was, of course, another reason why he soon abandoned his nature-cure clinics. The outside world could not be shut out. The Royal Indian Navy mutinied in February, and there were serious disturbances in Karachi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. The first large cracks in the structure were beginning to appear. Almost simultaneously the British cabinet was beginning to make serious efforts to solve the problem which threatened to be insoluble by sending three cabinet members to India; and it was understood that their decisions would have the full backing of the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. The three cabinet members were Sir Stafford Cripps, the President of the Board of Trade, a long-time friend of Gandhi; Lord Pethwick-Lawrence, the Secretary of State for India, also a friend of Gandhi of long standing; and A. V. Alexander, the First Lord of the Admiralty. Lord Pethwick-Lawrence was especially close to Gandhi, and his wife, Mrs. Emmeline Pethwick-Lawrence (she refused to be known as a woman of title) was even closer, for she had known Gandhi when she was a militant suffragette long ago. The British Cabinet Mission could be expected to regard Gandhi’s ideas with favor.
Gandhi went to Delhi and took up his living quarters in a colony of untouchables on the outskirts of the city. Only a low wall separated his hut from the slums occupied by the municipal sweepers. A narrow, crooked lane led up to the hut. Nearby, there was a patch of ground where he held his prayer meetings in the evenings. During the rest of the day that patch of ground was occupied by youths of the militant Hindu organization known as the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, or R.S.S.S. They paraded with lathis, took part in mock combats, and swore an oath to liberate India by force of arms; they represented an India over which Gandhi despaired.
The hut in the slums became the focal point for the long debates that settled the fate of India. Here Gandhi received the British Cabinet Mission in splendid poverty; Nehru and Patel attended his prayer meetings; Sarojini Naidu and a hundred other members of the Congress came to visit him. From here he set out to the Red Fort, where soldiers and officers of the Indian National Army were being placed on trial for having fought beside the Japanese. Their leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, had died in a mysterious airplane crash on the island of Formosa. Gandhi was concerned to see that these soldiers were pardoned, for the British had nothing to gain by shooting them as traitors.
The cabinet members spent two and a half weeks in a constant round of interviews, seeing nearly five hundred representative Indians. Their task was to find a consensus. They rejected Pakistan, but held out the prospect of Muslim “zones.” They were prepared to offer the maharajahs and princes the powers they had possessed before the British conquest. In attempting to please all, they pleased none. By the beginning of June they had reached an agreement with Jinnah for the formation of a coalition interim government without reference to parity; the best minds would rule. But Jinnah was merely biding his time. He had no intention of permitting the Hindus to rule the Muslims, or of being a member of a cabinet in which the majority were Hindus.
On August 15 an English journalist who met Jinnah in Bombay found him seething with rage. In an immaculate white suit, his eyeglass swinging on a black ribbon, he attacked the Hindus for all the crimes they had committed and would continue to commit. He found no extenuating circumstance anywhere. They were treacherous, weak-willed, dirty, slovenly, incapable of governing themselves and still less of governing others. The bewildered journalist asked why he was so vehemently opposed to the Hindus. Surely there were some good ones among them? “There are none!” Jinnah replied. When he was asked whether there was any message he cared to give to the West, he answered: “There is only one message to give to the West—that is, that they pay the least possible attention to Indian affairs, and let us settle the issues ourselves.”
He had spoken menacingly of “Direct Action” for many weeks. On the following day “Direct Action” began in Calcutta. On that day, and for three more days, the streets of Calcutta ran with blood.
The cracks were growing wider. India seemed to be on the verge of civil war. Gandhi half-welcomed it, as an alternative to the endless frustrations of forming a workable government. Woodrow Wyatt, a young member of the Cabinet Mission staff, asked him what would happen when the British left India. “There might be a bloodbath,” he answered. He seemed to feel that anything, even a bloodbath, would be better than British rule. Like Jinnah, he wanted the Indians to solve
their own problems without foreign interference.
Yet the British were still in power, still attempting to mediate between the rival claims, which were beyond the wit of any man to resolve. What was needed was a genuine spirit of compromise or a bold, clear-cut plan which would capture the imaginations of millions. Instead, there was a continual wrangling over the finer points of every half-agreement that remained unsigned. Jinnah would agree on a course of action; a few days later he would disagree; every momentary consensus was followed by a falling out In Calcutta the communal riots brought about the deaths of five thousand men, women and children, and perhaps four times as many were seriously wounded. Most of the dead were Hindus.
The battle would be fought out with knives, daggers and spears, which would speak with more authority than the plenipotentiaries at the conference table. Those who thought the murders in Calcutta were unplanned were to be proved wrong. All over India the goondas, or hooligans, were sharpening their knives, preparing to make a mockery of Gandhi’s doctrine of ahimsa. The Hindu extremists were no less violent than the Muslims, and just as fanatical. In this poisonous atmosphere Cripps, Pethwick-Lawrence and Alexander, all men of goodwill, were at a hopeless disadvantage. They did not know the names of the forces which had been unleashed; they could not imagine how many rivers of blood would flow.
After the terror in Calcutta there was a lull. It was as though all India were waiting in fear and trembling for the next bloodbath. When the terror flared up again, it was in Noakhali in East Bengal, a vast area of well-watered fields and gardens, luxuriant plantations, jungles and widely scattered hamlets. Here the Muslims were in the majority, and on October 10, 1946, they rose against the Hindus.
Journey into Terror
O thou of evil luck,
Trample the thorns under thy tread,
And along the blood-soaked
track travel alone.
The Roads of Noakhali
ALL HIS LIFE Gandhi had dreamed of an India at peace, bringing peace to the world by her example. He had found in the writings of the ancients abundant evidence that Indians were by nature peaceful, tolerant and gentle, more concerned with spiritual matters than with the flesh. He had dreamed of bringing into existence a new India free of foreign domination and dedicated to ahimsa, the Muslims and Hindus living quietly side by side, as they did in the small principality where he was born. Now, at the very moment when freedom was being wrested from the British, the dream of a peaceful India was shattered.
The savagery of the murders in East Bengal was on a vast, unprecedented scale. Quite suddenly, as though emerging from the earth, there appeared a new and hitherto unknown plague of murderers, banded together, possessing their own secret language, traveling silently from village to village. Their task was to kill Hindus, to humiliate, dispossess and torture any survivors. Men were murdered in cold blood and their houses set on fire, their women raped or mutilated or thrown into wells, their children hacked to pieces. This was deliberate massacre, carefully planned and well executed by men who knew what they were doing. The massacres began on October 10, 1946, and continued uninterruptedly for about a week. During all that time no news of the events in Noakhali reached the outside world. By October 20 some survivors fled to Calcutta, and then the news spread all over India. The Hindus now realized that the civil war, begun tentatively with the four days of “Direct Action,” had been resumed.
Like all civil wars this one seemed to exist in an atmosphere of unreality. In Delhi the great dignitaries were still meeting around the conference table, the interim government was in session, Lord Wavell still believed that the orderly processes of constitutional government could be maintained. Gandhi, who had an instinct for these things, knew that Noakhali was a plague that might destroy all India unless it was stopped. Soon after hearing the news, he told his closest friends that he would go there in the spirit of “do or die.” This was the supreme test, and he thought it very likely that he would be killed.
He spent a few days in Calcutta, discussing the situation with the local officials, and left for Noakhali on the morning of November 6 in a special train provided by the Bengal government. It is a densely populated region, ferociously hot in summer, warm in winter, lying in the water-logged region where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra meet. The train goes to the river port of Goalando, and from there it is necessary to take the steamer downriver to Chandipur eighty miles to the south, a whole day’s journey. When he reached Chandipur, Gandhi immediately drove out to a village where the Hindus had been massacred. The burned bodies lay in a courtyard, there were still bloodstains on the doorsteps, and the floors had been dug up in search of hidden jewels. He heard stories of forcible conversions, abductions and forced marriages of Hindu women with Muslims. The Muslims peered silently from their houses, and the palms waved against clear blue skies.
On his return he came to a village where about six thousand Hindu refugees were in a camp, guarded by soldiers and in terror for their lives. Characteristically, Gandhi told them they should be ashamed of running away; they should have fought off their persecutors or submitted non-violently to their fate. “Men should fear only God,” he said, and he called for a system of mutual hostages: in every village there should be one Muslim and one Hindu standing surety for the safety of the villagers. In theory, it was a good system; in fact, it broke down, for sometimes in a large village there might be fifty Muslims to one Hindu. In Noakhali the Hindus were usually the landowners and the middle class, while the Muslims were often laborers.
He was still uncertain of his plans. He had no solution, no decisions had been reached, and he regarded himself as an investigator charged with the holy duty of bringing peace to a desolate land. He had no illusions about the Hindus in the area, often decadent and lazy, accustomed to letting their palm trees and areca trees do their work for them, and he had no illusions about the murders and how they were organized. He came to the conclusion that it would be better to place his own dedicated followers in the villages, one to each village: they would act as centers of moral force, vigilant watchmen of peace, pledged to protect the villagers with their lives, if necessary. He did not command them; he merely insisted that this was a worthy task for a Satyagrahi. One by one his followers took up residence in predominantly Muslim villages, while he set up his own lonely headquarters in the village of Srirampur with a secretary and a Bengali who acted as interpreter.
The interpreter was a tough, resilient, uncommonly generous man, with a mind like a knife. He was not one of those who had fallen under the spell of Gandhi. As a scientist—he was a professor of science at Calcutta University—he was chiefly interested in the study of the mechanics of nonviolent action, and he had taken leave from his university to study the phenomenon at first hand. He had known Gandhi for some years, and genuinely liked and admired him while preserving a certain detachment, differentiating between the hard core of Gandhi’s mind and the legends that surrounded him. Gandhi was not altogether comfortable in his presence, and from time to time he would express impatience. The name of the interpreter was Nirmal Kumar Bose.
Inevitably Professor Bose became more than an interpreter. He helped to write letters, to arrange interviews, even to cook. Sometimes he massaged Gandhi’s feet, which had grown very tender. He was fascinated by the movements of Gandhi’s mind, his defiance of logic, his unerring instinct for the right word. To the women of Noakhali who had seen their husbands murdered before their eyes, Gandhi would say: “I have not come to bring you consolation. I have come to bring you courage.” Women did seem to acquire courage after listening to him. When he first heard those words, Professor Bose was shocked, for they seemed unnecessarily cruel, the women surely deserved some consolation, and Gandhi was eminently qualified to give it. Nevertheless he refused to console them, was harsh with them, insisted that they should stop weeping and get down to work. He had a phenomenal understanding of feminine psychology.
In the middle of December Manubehn Gandhi came to live in
the hut at Srirampur. Gandhi liked to call her his granddaughter. In delicate; health, with very little knowledge of the world, she was completely devoted to her famous granduncle. In Gandhi’s mind this eighteen-year-old girl was associated with memories of his wife, and he had for her the special affection which a grandfather reserves for his granddaughters.
Manubehn’s arrival at Srirampur solved many problems. She could cook
to conduct his affairs as thought he had a settled homeand an office full of secretaries. He still conducted a prodigious correspondence, received
and perform menial tasks, but she could also keep records, help with his
messages from Congress leaders, held prayer meetings which were duly recorded, and drew up reports on the situation in the villages.
Invariably he would ask the villagers to keep the peace, to be sure that the water and their bodies were clean, and he would ask them to take full advantage of the gifts of the earth and the sun. Then he would speak of the problems of the village, receive their small gifts, bless them, and go on his way. Some villager would make room for him in the next village; he could not sleep out in the open because it often rained. He walked with his long bamboo staff in one hand, the other resting on Manubehn’s shoulder. In this way, every morning at seven thirty, he set out on his pilgrimage, singing the haunting song written by Rabindranath Tagore:
Walk alone.
If they answer not thy call, walk alone;
If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall,
O thou of evil luck,
