by Robert Payne
Open thy mind and speak out alone.
If they turn away and desert you when crossing the wilderness,
O thou of evil luck,
Trample the thorns under thy tread,
And along the blood-soaked track travel alone.
If they do not hold up the light
When the night is troubled with storm,
O thou of evil luck,
With the thunder-flame of pain ignite thine own heart
And let it bum alone.
The song reflected the mood of the pilgrim, who was traveling from village to village for the first time in his life. He had never taken part in such a pilgrimage before, but had always dreamed of it. The scenery enchanted him. There were tall palms beside narrow winding footpaths, little streams with slippery bamboo bridges, and everywhere there were villages nestling in the palm groves. The journey was an arduous one, and sometimes his feet bled. When he came to villages where massacres had taken place, he had the drawn look of a very old man, but during the journey he looked young and sang lustily. When he was tired, he would sometimes say sharp grimage through the villages, he spoke very sharply to Manubehn. She had forgotten to bring from the last village, which they left early in the morning, the rough stone once given to him by Mirabehn and ever since used for scraping his feet It was a substitute for soap, and after every journey he liked to sit down and have his feet scraped with the stone. He liked his small possessions, and was unhappy without them. “I want you to go back and find it,” he told Manubehn. “Nirmal Bose can prepare my meals. Go alone and find the stone!”
Manubehn was terrified. The last village was an hour’s journey away through a dark forest of coconut and betel-nut trees. They had followed a small winding path, and it would be easy to lose one’s way. She asked whether someone could accompany her, because there was still a good deal of communal trouble, and most of the houses in the neighborhood belonged to Muslims.
He saw no reason why she should have an escort. She had committed a crime, and now she must take her punishment. In desperation she ran back through the dark forest, sometimes losing her way. At last she reached the weaver’s hut where they had spent the night. Only an old woman was in the hut, and she remembered throwing the stone away. They searched and found the stone, and then the terror-stricken girl made her way again through the forests where, in her imagination, goondas lurked and death was not far away. Gently she placed the stone at Gandhi’s feet. She was weeping. Gandhi burst out laughing and congratulated her for having passed the test. Then he told her to rest rather than to take any food, and in the evening he said: “If some ruffian had carried you off and you had met your death courageously, my heart would have danced with joy.”
In Gandhi’s presence few were ever completely comfortable, for he made great demands on people. Sometimes he spoke of himself as a man who spent his time hammering people into shape. “Have you ever seen a blacksmith at work? He takes a crude piece of iron, beats it on the anvil with vigorous hammer blows and turns it into a beautiful article of use. I can be as heartless as that blacksmith.” So he could, but people sometimes wondered why it was necessary.
Manubehn quickly recovered from her experience, and the pilgrimage continued uneventfully. In some villages Gandhi would be welcomed with the ceremony of arati, the women coming forward with lamps, encircling his face with lights, and they would often find green archways erected for them. But these displays of affection left him curiously unmoved. The stakes were too high, there were too many dead bodies in the villages, and peace was still far away. He thought of asking Harilal to join him, and in one of these small villages toward the end of January he wrote one of his last letters to the son whom he had long ago disowned: “How delighted I shall be to find that you have turned over a new leaf! Just think of the affection I have lavished on you! Mine is an arduous pilgrimage. I invite you to join in it if you can.” Harilal did not reply.
In February the pilgrimage entered a more menacing phase. Few Muslims attended his prayer meetings, and it was obvious that they had been ordered to keep away from him. Now, when he traveled from village to village, he would sometimes find human excrement left on the narrow pathways. Seeing it, he would pluck a leaf and bend down and scoop it up. He knew why it had been placed there. Once a Muslim spat in his face. For a few moments he stood gazing at the man in shock and horror, remembering that from his earliest childhood he had been a friend to Muslims, and then he slowly brushed the spit away and went on as though nothing had happened. There were moments of pure terror, when it seemed that death hung in the air haunting the forests and the villages. He half-expected to be assassinated, and said he would welcome such a death. “But I should love, above all, to fade out doing my duty with my last breath,” he wrote to a friend during the last stages of the pilgrimage. At night he suffered from shivering fits, and during the day there was a drumming in his ears. Exhaustion had brought on high blood pressure.
Just as the Muslims in Noakhali had massacred the Hindus, so a little later the Hindus in Bihar massacred the Muslims. By the end of February Gandhi was under strong pressure to visit Bihar. The Biharis, who live in the shadow of the Himalayas, are a notably mild and gentle people, and the sudden upsurge of violence seemed inexplicable. Gandhi went to Patna, the provincial capital. Once more he journeyed from village to village, trying to discover the causes of the massacre. In his journeys he was sometimes accompanied by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, “the frontier Gandhi.” A giant of a man, with the features of a warrior-saint, in love with non-violence, he added his immense prestige to the pilgrimage of mercy. “I am in utter darkness,” he said. “All India is being destroyed.” He was a Muslim fiercely devoted to his religion, but he could see no reason why Hindus and Muslims should kill one another.
There were villages which had been razed to the ground, corpses lay in the dense thickets of bamboos, the vultures were feeding on them. The guilt of the Hindus was as great as the guilt of the Muslims, and so he asked them to accept their guilt, to give him letters admitting their crimes, and to promise never again to raise their hands against unoffending persons.
The time for a settlement was drawing near. Lord Wavell, the Viceroy, vanished from the scene: a cold, rather precise man, he had failed to understand the forces at work and was therefore all the more incapable of bringing a satisfactory conclusion to the affair. In his place there was a new and unexpected Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the former supreme commander in Southeast Asia, a naval officer related to the Royal family. Lord Mountbatten arrived in Delhi on March 22, 1947, and within a few hours Gandhi was being summoned from Patna to Delhi. The viceregal airplane was placed at his disposal. Gandhi had never flown, and was terrified of airplanes. He answered that he would not travel on a conveyance never used by the Indian poor, and came by train.
Manubehn, always careful of his comforts, ordered a double compartment on the train. It was a sensible decision, for he was in need of rest. Gandhi was furious. How dared she put the government to this expense? He went on and on, reminding her of her many faults until she was reduced to tears; and at the first railroad station Gandhi called the station-master and ordered his luggage removed from the second compartment into the first. The stationmaster pleaded, but to no avail. Once more Gandhi was teaching his countrymen a lesson in voluntary poverty.
His nerves were fraying; he was exhausted by his long journeys through Noakhali and Bihar; and the future seemed as dark as the immediate past. Jinnah was being adamant. He demanded the partition of India, with himself as the Governor General of the new state of Pakistan to be carved out of the living body of India. The princely states were claiming independence. India seemed to be about to split into its component parts. Mountbatten had shown himself to be a resourceful naval commander, but the problems of India were so complex, so barren of reasonable solution, that there were very few who dared to hope that he would succeed in his mission. Clement Attlee, the British Prime Minister, had decided to cut the Gordi
an knot. By August 15 India, and perhaps Pakistan, would be independent. In four and a half months all the tangled problems of sovereignty and power would be solved, and the British would leave.
Gandhi entered the Viceroy’s office with the air of a man long accustomed to Viceroys. He had seen them come and go, and he had little affection for any of them except Lord Hardinge and Lord Irwin. But Lord Louis Mountbatten had one distinction denied to his predecessors—he was the last of a long line, and there would be no more. This was the final flowering of the British Raj, then the flower would wither and turn into dust.
The new Viceroy had the reputation of being a playboy, but it was ill-founded. Strong-willed, logical, precise, he had the naval officer’s flair for making sound judgments even when there was insufficient evidence for making even a putative judgment. He could, and did, seek daring solutions. They were not so daring as the solutions proposed by Gandhi, who suggested very early in their discussions that Jinnah should be empowered to form a Muslim government to rule over the whole of India. Nehru and the Congress opposed the plan, and when the Congress gave its assent to the partition Gandhi said: “Support your leaders.” He regarded partition as a disaster, but it was beyond his power to change it. Even his most powerful weapon—a fast unto death—would not have succeeded in turning Jinnah away from his determination to father a new nation. Reluctantly, sadly, knowing that the dreams of a lifetime had been in vain, Gandhi quietly accepted a solution which had now become inevitable.
The cold and immaculate Jinnah had triumphed over Gandhi, but the triumph was a costly one, and the payment had still to be made. Gandhi had come from regions given over to massacre; and soon there would be massacres on a scale more terrible than any in the memory of India. Jinnah demanded a quick solution, saying: “There must be a surgical operation.” And Mountbatten, baffled by the cold intensity of his voice, replied: “An anesthetic is required before the operation.” But no anesthetics were available. With some difficulty Mountbatten was able to extract from Gandhi and Jinnah a joint proclamation in favor of a peaceful rending of the flesh.
For some reason Jinnah signed only in English, while Gandhi signed in Devanagari and Urdu scripts, adding “i.e. M. K. Gandhi” in a failing hand with the pen seeming to bite into the page.
The settlement had been made, but Gandhi had no intention of presiding over the ceremonies of divorce and independence. There were long intervals when he turned his back on the world in despair. In June, while the empire was tottering, Gandhi wrote a series of remarkable articles in Harijan. Once more he was concerned with brahmacharya, the taming of the flesh to make it more wholesome to God. In these articles he spoke of his desire to renounce the flesh and all its temptations; it should be possible for a man dedicated to God to lie in bed with the most beautiful woman on earth and feel not the slightest desire for her. So he wrote at great length about his own preoccupations, but always there were hesitancies, sudden shifts of emphasis, which betrayed that he was still uncertain of himself. The people of India were less interested in the problems of brahmacharya and ahimsa than in knowing whether they would live or die.
Already there were massacres in the Punjab; in Kashmir, largely inhabited by Muslims, the reigning maharajah had arrested the Muslim leader Sheikh Abdullah; in Bihar and Noakhali there were more riots, and more dead. Gandhi knew what was demanded of him: he must proclaim the doctrine of peace and help to bind up the wounds. He returned to Bihar, where the danger seemed greatest, and then with his two grandnieces, Manubehn and Abhabehn, he went to Kashmir.
His last wanderings had begun.
A House in Calcutta
AT THE BEGINNING of August 1947 Gandhi drove from Rawalpindi to Srinagar in Kashmir. It was his first and only visit to Kashmir, and Manubehn observed with some amusement that for once Gandhi laid aside his reading and writing, spellbound by the beauty of the mountains. Since the maharajah was a Hindu and the majority of the people were Muslims, and the dispute between India and Pakistan was already growing in violence, there was little he could do except to observe the scene carefully, talk to as many people as possible, and bring comfort to the refugees. When he reached Srinagar there were crowds shouting “Long live Sheikh Abdullah” and “Long live Gandhiji,” while here and there could be seen men waving black flags, shouting “Long live Pakistan.”
Kashmir was disputed territory where violent nationalist emotions were aroused. He was a stranger there, lost among the warring tribes, with no hope of bringing the complex political problem to a solution. A few days later, visiting a women’s hospital in the refugee camp at Jammu, he was appalled by the sight of women lying there with festering knife wounds. He went to each cot in turn, saying over and over again: “Repeat the name of Rama. That alone will help you.” He waved away the flies that covered their wounds, and when he left their cots the flies settled again. “You must not expect much of me,” he said, and he seemed to be in the grip of forces over which he had no control. At Noakhali he could at least give his companions duties to perform. Here there was almost nothing he could do. He caught a cold, spoke briefly with the maharajah, took tea with the Begum Abdullah, and pondered the future of Kashmir. To a deputation of workers from Jammu who asked him what would happen to Kashmir after India became independent on August 15, he answered: “That should be decided by the will of the Kashmiris.” But the Kashmiris, too, were caught in the grip of uncontrollable forces.
Over him there hung like a thundercloud the threatened partition, only a few days away. It was beyond his comprehension, and he would never reconcile himelf to it. Already he was speaking of spending the rest of his days in Pakistan, perhaps in East Bengal, perhaps in the Punjab or the Frontier Province. At such times he could see no place for himself in India, and he was quite certain that there would be no place for him in Delhi during the official celebrations on Independence Day.
He knew there would be more violence, but he no longer recoiled from it. At Lahore, which the Hindus were already evacuating, he shook his head sadly from side to side and wondered why people preferred flight to the risk of staying behind. “If the people in the Punjab were all to die, not as cowards but as brave men, I for one would not shed a tear,” he said, and that theme, so terrible in its simplicity, was to be repeated again and again during the following weeks while the map of India was being tom asunder and the pent-up emotions of hundreds of thousands of people were being expressed in acts of casual violence. There would be some joy on Independence Day, and much grief. No one doubted that rivers of blood would flow.
Gandhi’s intention was to reach Noakhali as soon as possible, for he expected the greatest bloodshed to be there. He was in a somber mood during the train journey to Patna by way of Benares, where he refused to show himself to the crowds on the platform because they were chanting slogans. At Patna he spoke against any celebrations on Independence Day. On the contrary it should be a day for fasting, spinning and praying, for on that day India would be subjected to its supreme test. How could people express their joy when there was not enough grain, cloth, ghee or oil for the needs of the poor? And when the train reached the village of Bakhatiarpur late one evening, and once more there were crowds on the platform chanting slogans and waiting to receive his darshan, he went to the window and shouted: “Why are you harassing an old man?” He was almost at the end of his resources, and slapped one of the men who came hurrying up to see him.
He was old and tired, exhausted by his long journeys. He seemed to be lost within himself, striving for sanity in a country which seemed to have gone insane. Sometimes the old Gandhi with the tart tongue and the simple faith in human decency would emerge. Rain had been leaking through the roof of the compartment, and the guard came to say that the passengers in another compartment would be moved and he could go into theirs. “I will not make myself comfortable by causing discomfort to others,” Gandhi said, and the guard, bowing to the inevitable, asked politely whether there was anything he could do. “Do not harass people and do not
accept bribes,” Gandhi replied. “You will serve me best by practicing these two requests of mine.” He had a long experience of railroad guards, and he saw no harm in some non-violent chastisement.
Since “Direct Action” day in August 1946 Calcutta had seen continual riots, and when Gandhi reached the city he learned that they were likely, to increase in violence. East and West Bengal would soon belong to different countries; both the Muslims and the Hindus were in an inflammatory mood; and the city fathers begged him to pour water on the spreading flames. He protested that he was needed in Noakhali. They answered that there was an even greater need in Calcutta, which was about to explode into a murderous civil war. The Muslims were especially anxious that he should stay, since they were in a minority in Calcutta.
When he decided to stay for two extra days in Calcutta before proceeding to Noakhali he had no thought that he would be spending Independence Day in a broken-down house in a Hindu quarter of Calcutta, amid filth and broken glass, with Shaheed Suhrawardy, the archenemy of Hinduism, as his companion, nor that he would stay in Calcutta for nearly a month. There were many other things that were strange and unexpected, for the great port was living through a nightmare and nothing appeared to happen according to the normal laws of nature. Government had broken down; the goondas were in control; and there were signs that the war between the Hindus and the Muslims would become increasingly savage. Most of the Muslim officials were already in East Bengal, but the ordinary householders and shopkeepers were trapped in the city.
