Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

He’d cleared the decks for her arrival by dispatching his closest associates—notably Pyarelal, his secretary, and Pyarelal’s sister, Dr. Sushila Nayar—to workstations in other villages. Sushila had previously played the part for which Manu was now being recruited. Back in 1938, Gandhi had tried out a young Jewish woman from Palestine named Hannah Lazar, a niece of Hermann Kallenbach’s, who’d trained in massage. “Of course she knows her art,” he wrote to her uncle in Johannesburg. “But she can’t all of a sudden equal the touch of Sushila who is a competent doctor and who learned massage especially for treating me.” Here Gandhi sounds more like a discriminating pasha with a harem than the ascetic he genuinely was.

  Now, more than eight years after this letter and just six days after his summons to Manu, Gandhi told Sushila that it would remain her duty to stay in her village—in other words, that she’d not be included on his walking tour, because Manu would be taking care of his most personal needs. Nirmal Bose, who was standing just outside, heard “a deeply anguished cry proceeding from the main room … [followed by] two large slaps given on someone’s body. The cry then sank down into a heavy sob.” When Bose got to the doorway, both Gandhi and Sushila were “bathed in tears.” The cries and heavy sob had been the Mahatma’s, he realized. Three days later, while bathing Gandhi for what appears to have been the last time, Bose summoned the courage to ask him whether he’d slapped Sushila. “Gandhiji’s face wore a sad smile,” Bose wrote in his memoir, “and he said, ‘No, I did not beat her. I beat my own forehead.’ ” That same evening, on December 20, 1946, with Manu beside him in his bed for the first time, Gandhi began his supposed yajna, or self-sacrifice, sometimes termed an “experiment” by him.

  With Manu, his “walking stick” (photo credit i11.5)

  “Stick to your word,” he wrote in a note to Manu that day. “Don’t hide even a single thought from me … Have it engraved in your heart that whatever I ask or say will be solely for your good.”

  Within ten days, Gandhi’s stenographer, a young South Indian named Parsuram, quit in protest over his revered leader’s nightly cuddle with Manu, which he couldn’t fail to have witnessed. Instead of questioning Gandhi’s explanation of its spiritual purpose, he registered a political complaint—that the inevitable reports and gossip would alienate public opinion. His argument didn’t impress the Mahatma. “I like your frankness and boldness,” he wrote to the young man after reading his ten-page letter of resignation. “You are at liberty to publish whatever wrong you have noticed in me and my surroundings.” Later he scolded Bose for glossing over in his Bengali interpretation his attempt at one of his prayer meetings to offer a frank public account of the latest test he’d set for himself.

  Pyarelal was also drawn into this emotional maelstrom, and not simply because he was partial to his sister. He’d had a crush on Manu himself. Gandhi now promised to keep his secretary at a distance if Manu “does not want even to see him.” He could testify to his aide’s good character. “Pyarelal’s eyes are clean,” he wrote to Manu’s father a week before she was scheduled to reach Noakhali, “and he is not likely to force himself on anybody.” Gandhi then writes to Pyarelal urging him to keep his distance. “I can see that you will not be able to have Manu as a wife,” says the revered figure who is now bedding down next to her on a nightly basis. Self-purification, it was already clear, could not be attempted in this world without complications.

  Nirmal Bose, the detached Calcutta intellectual serving as Gandhi’s Bengali interpreter, wasn’t initially judgmental about Gandhi’s reliance on Manu. But his allegiance was gradually strained as he observed Gandhi’s manipulative way of managing the emotional ripples that ran through his entourage at a moment of national and personal crisis. He felt the Mahatma, in his preoccupation with the feelings of Pyarelal and his sister, was allowing himself to get distracted. “After a life of prolonged brahmacharya,” Bose wrote in his diary, “he has become incapable of understanding the problems of love or sex as they exist in the common human plane.” So Bose took it upon himself, in conversation and several long letters over the next three months, to acquaint his master with the psychoanalytic concepts of the subconscious, neurosis, and repression. Gandhi jumped on a single passing reference to Freud in one of Bose’s letters. He’d read Havelock Ellis and Bertrand Russell on sex but not Freud. It was only the second time, he wrote back, that he’d heard the name. “What is Freudian philosophy?” asked the Mahatma, ever curious. “I have not read any writing of his.”

  Bose’s basic point was made more bluntly in his diary and a letter to a friend than in his correspondence with the Mahatma. It was that Gandhi had allowed himself to use his bedmates as instruments in an experiment undertaken for his own sake and that he thus risked leaving “a mark of injury on personalities of others who are not of the same moral stature … and for whom sharing in Gandhiji’s experiment is no spiritual necessity.” He thought Manu might be an exception but wasn’t sure. Despite his restraint, Gandhi got the point. “I do hope you will acquit me of having any lustful designs upon women or girls who have been naked with me,” he wrote back. That was the one count on which the Freudian in Bose felt certain of Gandhi’s innocence.

  Feeling himself to have been distanced by his own frankness, Bose came to doubt he could be of much further use to Gandhi. Finally he asked to be relieved of his duties. In a valedictory letter, he said he saw signs that the Mahatma had, in fact, begun to attain the level of concentrated personal force for which he’d been reaching in these months: “I saw your strength come back in flashes when you rose to heights no one else has reached in our national life.”

  A week after Gandhi established his grandniece Manu in his household and bed, the urgency and weight of the constitutional crisis in New Delhi descended on the remote village of Srirampur, brought there on a visit of two and a half days by Nehru, now head of an “interim government” still subject to the British viceroy, and Nehru’s successor as Congress president, J. B. Kripalani, a follower of Gandhi’s for three decades. Given that the Congress president’s wife, Sucheta, had shared the Mahatma’s bed with him and Manu on one recent night, there was no need for Gandhi to brief his visitors on the yajna he’d just undertaken. According to one account, Nehru himself came to the doorway of the room where Gandhi and Manu slept on his first night in Srirampur; having looked in, he silently stepped away. The sketchy account does not record whether he raised his eyebrows or shook his head.

  In the following month, Gandhi would seek to explain his quest to both men in letters. Neither wanted to sit in judgment on the Mahatma. “I can never be disillusioned about you unless I find the marks of insanity and depravity in you,” Kripalani replied. “I do not find such marks.” Nehru was even more reticent. “I feel a little out of my depth and I hate discussing personal and private matters,” he wrote to a mentor he revered but frequently found perplexing, even troublesome.

  Gandhi had first singled Nehru out as a Congress leader in 1928 and, while acknowledging conspicuous differences in outlook, had been openly calling him “my heir and successor” since 1934 when he made a show of giving up his own Congress membership. “Jawaharlal is the only man with the drive to take my place,” he remarked five years later. For all his doting on Nehru, this was a practical political judgment based on two obvious factors—Nehru’s demonstrated mass appeal and tendency in a crisis to bend to the Mahatma’s view. He knew his heir would never score high on any checklist of Gandhian values, that the younger man, more a Fabian than a Gandhian, could be expected to promote state planning and nationalized industries over the sort of village-level reconstruction he’d always advocated, that there was little question in his mind about the need for a modern military establishment in a future Indian state. But he waved aside such contradictions, treating them as matters of emphasis. “He says what is uppermost in his mind,” Gandhi observed in 1938, in a comment as revealing of himself as it was of Nehru, “but he always does what I want. When I am gone he will do what I am doing now. T
hen he will speak my language.”

  With his chosen “successor,” 1946 (photo credit i11.6)

  Later he got closer to the truth, perhaps, when he said of Nehru: “He has made me captive of his love.”

  But now—with the Noakhali Gandhi out of touch and power shifting rapidly into his hands—Nehru, by inclination as well as necessity, was speaking his own language and listening less. The ostensible point of his journey to Srirampur had been to update Gandhi on a resolution he planned to put before the party the next week, further locking it into a process that could lead to partition and Pakistan; also, Nehru said, it was to urge Gandhi to put Noakhali behind him and return to Delhi so he could be more easily consulted and—this would have gone without saying—privately implored not to stray too far from the emerging party line.

  The Mahatma’s appetite for grappling with national issues was tickled, but he wasn’t tempted to return. He said there was still work to be done in Noakhali; by his own reckoning, his mission there would remain unfinished until the day he died. More compelling was his sense that he’d lost the ability to influence his erstwhile followers, as he’d recently complained in a note to the industrialist G. D. Birla. “My voice,” the note said, “carries no weight in the Working Committee … I do not like the shape that things are taking and I can’t speak out.”

  Such misgivings, however, didn’t stop him from sending Nehru back with “instructions.” The document, drafted late on Nehru’s last night in Srirampur, pointed in several directions at once. Basically, it said Gandhi had been right in suggesting the Congress reject the British plan; that now that it had failed to heed his advice, it was stuck with the plan; that therefore it needed an accord with Jinnah giving him “a universally acceptable and inoffensive formula for his Pakistan,” so long as no territories were compelled to be part of it.

  The phrase “acceptable and inoffensive” was telling. It pointed in more or less the same direction as Nehru’s unusually dense resolution, which all but smothered its essential acceptance of an unpalatable British formula with a blanket of technicalities, exceptions, and complaints. Between the lines, both Gandhi’s “instructions” and Nehru’s resolution pointed to the quickest deal for independence, on the best available terms, with the fewest possible concessions to the Muslim League. Obviously, Gandhi meant “acceptable” and “inoffensive” to the Congress and himself, not Jinnah and his followers; he didn’t say how that could be accomplished. On one level, he hadn’t budged from the position he’d taken when Jinnah broke off talks with him two years earlier. On another, he’d shown that he’d do nothing to delay a handover of power even if it involved two recipients instead of one.

  Nehru’s resolution was adopted the next week by the All India Congress Committee by something less than acclamation, a vote of 99–52. When a member asked to know Gandhi’s advice, Kripalani snapped that it was “irrelevant at this stage,” not bothering to cite the woolly “instructions” the Mahatma had written out for Nehru, who’d flown to East Bengal, it seems likely, partly to ensure that Gandhi wouldn’t come out on the other side. Gandhi himself had been pleased to paper over his most recent breach with the leadership. “I suggest frequent consultations with an old, tried servant of the nation,” he’d written in a fond farewell note to Nehru.

  Just two days later, on the second day of the new year, he pulled up stakes in Srirampur and left on his walking tour of Noakhali, with one hand clutching a bamboo staff and the other resting on Manu’s shoulder. He was barefoot and would continue without sandals every step of the way for the next two months. In the mornings, the pilgrim’s feet were sometimes numbed by cold; on one occasion at least, they bled. Nightly they were pressed and massaged with oil. Srirampur’s Muslim villagers lined the path that circled Darikanath pond, a well-stocked fishery, that first morning; a crowd of about a hundred walked in his footsteps, with a detachment of eight armed police and at least as many reporters. The next morning headlines in Calcutta’s Indian-owned, pro-Congress, English-language daily, the Amrita Bazar Patrika, heralded the launch:

  GANDHIJI’S EPIC

  TOUR BEGINS

  HISTORIC MARCH THROUGH

  PADDY FIELDS AND

  GREEN GROVES

  GANDHIJI LIKELY

  TO WORK

  MIRACLE

  The newspaper kept the tour on its front page every day but one for the next six weeks, conveying the authorized versions of Gandhi’s nightly prayer meeting talks. Too early by a matter of decades to have made great television, it faded as a big story elsewhere. So the loneliness and vicissitudes of the trek never really registered beyond Bengal. After the first few days, the crowds dwindled, with Muslims once again conspicuous by their absence. This time there could be little doubt that elements in the Muslim League were promoting a boycott. In the second month, handbills started appearing urging Gandhi to focus on Bihar, amplifying the theme of most Muslim officials he encountered. “Remember Bihar,” one said. “We’ve warned you many times. Go back. Otherwise, you’ll be sorry.” Obviously meant for his eyes, another said: “Give up your hypocrisy and accept Pakistan.”

  On some mornings, Gandhi’s companions would find that human feces had been deposited, dumped, or spread on paths he could be expected to walk. On his way to a village called Atakora, the old man himself stooped over and started scooping up excrement with dried leaves. A flustered Manu protested that he was putting her to shame. “You don’t know the joy it gives me,” the Mahatma, now seventy-seven, replied.

  In fifty-seven days, he visited forty-seven villages in Noakhali and a neighboring district called Tipperah, trudging 116 miles, barefoot all the way, in order to touch Muslims’ hearts through a personal demonstration of his own openheartedness and simplicity. He called it a “pilgrimage.” Sometimes he said it was a “penance,” for the slaughter Hindus and Muslims had recently inflicted on each other, or his own failure to end it. He greeted every Muslim he passed, even where most of them stolidly refrained from responding. Only three times, in all those days and weeks, all those villages, was he invited to stay in a Muslim home. His followers prefabricated a tidy hut of bamboo panels to be disassembled on a daily basis and, with each new village, reassembled for his comfort. He complained it was “palatial.” When he learned it took seven porters to carry his collapsible shelter, he refused to sleep in it, insisting it be converted into a dispensary. If Muslims stayed away from his prayer meetings, he pursued them in their houses and huts. In each new village, Manu was dispatched to call on Muslim women in seclusion. Sometimes she managed to persuade them to meet the Mahatma, sometimes doors were slammed in her face. When young Muslim Leaguers came to his meetings to heckle, he turned back their sharp questions with calm, reasoned replies.

  January 1947, bones of Noakhali victims on display for the Mahatma (photo credit i11.7)

  “How did your ahimsa work in Bihar?” he was pointedly asked in a village called Paniala.

  “It didn’t work at all,” he replied. “It failed miserably.”

  “What in your opinion is the cause of the communal riots?” another asked.

  “The idiocy of both communities,” said the Mahatma.

  Twice in nine weeks, he’s brought to exposed human remains left over from the killings. The first time, on November 11, a stray dog leads him to the skeletons of the members of a single Hindu household; then, on January 11, he passes by a doba, or pond, that has finally been dragged to retrieve the bodies of Hindus killed in the earliest and ugliest of these pogroms at Karpara.

  The Mahatma moved on briskly. “It is useless to think about those who are dead,” he said. His aim was less to console bereaved Hindus than to stiffen their spines while touching the hearts of Muslims who’d looked away from the carnage, or even approved it. He could only demonstrate his good intentions “by living and moving among those who do not trust me,” he said. So every morning, he trudged on, regardless of the reception he encountered. His followers sang religious songs, always including one by
Tagore with a Bengali poem called “Walk Alone” as its lyric. Occasionally there was a welcome, occasionally a large crowd. In the fourth week, at a village called Muriam, a warm reception from Muslims was orchestrated by a friendly maulana named Habibullah Batari who, if Pyarelal’s account can be accepted, introduced him by saying: “Our community today suffers from the stigma of shedding the blood of our Hindu brothers. Mahatmaji has come to free us of that stain.” For Gandhi, this was proof of the possibilities before him and the country. But it was hardly an everyday occurrence. At Panchgaon, four days later, he was urged by the head of the local Muslim League to discontinue his prayer meetings because they offended Muslims and, better yet, end his Noakhali tour altogether.

  In his mobile hut, November 1946 (photo credit i11.8)

  At the prayer meetings, he’d size up his audiences, then draw familiar themes and messages from the repertoire of a lifetime. If seeking to make the point that he and the village workers he brought with him had come not to sit in judgment but to serve, he’d dwell on all that could be done to improve sanitation and the cleanliness of the district’s water. Speaking of lost livelihoods, he’d talk about crafts and what they could do for village uplift. On the fraught, overarching issue of land tenure, he’d say the land belonged to God and those who actually worked it, that reduction in the landlord’s share of crops was therefore only just, with the Gandhian proviso that it had to be accomplished without violence.

  The value he upheld most insistently was fearlessness. To insure peace, he said, Muslims and Hindus had to be ready to die. It’s the message he’d given Czechs and European Jews in the previous decade about how to face the Nazis, the idea that a courageous satyagrahi could “melt the heart” of a tyrant. Repeatedly he asked that the police guards Suhrawardy had sent be withdrawn so as not to weaken the example he was hoping to set through his pilgrimage. (The guards never left. Suhrawardy said it was the government’s responsibility to make sure the Mahatma got out of East Bengal alive.) Early on he talked about martyrdom: “The sacrifice of myself and my companions would at least teach [Hindu women] the art of dying with self-respect. It might open the eyes of the oppressors, too.” To a refugee who asked how he could expect Hindus to return to villages where they might face attack, he replied: “I do not mind if each and every one of the five hundred families in your area is done to death.” Before arriving in Noakhali, he’d struck a similar note speaking to a trio of Gandhian workers who were planning to precede him: “There will be no tears but only joy if tomorrow I get the news that all three of you were killed.”