Simultaneously, Jinnah was saying, “I cannot believe that any Muslim Leaguer would have taken part in using any violence.”30 No leader or party would accept any responsibility. “There is no indication that the Calcutta riots have induced a calmer frame of mind,” wrote The Times of London correspondent; rather, “recriminatory and, indeed, vitriolic” comments prevail among all circles in India.31 Liaqat Ali Khan, then general secretary of the Muslim League, attributed the killing solely to “the Hindu elements whose actions plunged Calcutta into these orgies of violence and slaughter.” Liaqat agreed that a “bitterness” now “sweeps India as never before, and the inevitable bloodshed…will continue to be caused.” But for him the exclusive cause was “the communal arrogance and the spirit of violence fostered by the Congress.” The Congress want another “Hindu raj” but “a hundred million Muslims will resist it.”32 The Statesman pressed the “leader of the Muslim League” for an “apology.” From Mr. Jinnah came word that the main “responsibility” for Calcutta must rest with “the Viceroy, Mr. Gandhi, and the Congress”; for “it was an organized plot to discredit the Muslim League on the part of the Hindus.”33 The Statesman did not press further.
In this atmosphere, the question of which side had started the riots on that morning of August 16 could hardly be judged impartially by the parties involved. However, this did not deter the Congress and the League from pursuing their respective “investigations” into the matter. The Congress working committee discovered that first blood was drawn by Muslims carrying “big bamboo sticks, swords, spears, daggers and axes which they brandished” before unarmed Hindus.34 The working committee of the Bengal Muslim League, however, found that “peaceful Muslim processions almost everywhere had to face a barrage of brickbats, stones, and missiles.”35 The Modern Review (Calcutta) replied with “photographic evidence” of the Muslim aggressors on that morning, and concluded that the riots started when “their Fuehrer had declared a Jehad, and thousands of gangsters had been imported to reinforce them.”36 On this hysterical exchange, the most acute comment came from Arthur Moore: “For any given man-made catastrophe, all participating parties bear some responsibility. In party politics the procedure considered correct and honorable is for each component to blame the others and entirely exonerate himself…. We have produced a situation in which civil war is an obvious possibility …. I have a deep sense of terrible disasters impending.”37
As early as April 1946, Gandhi had criticized “loose talk of civil war,” but by late August such talk was widely accepted. In the press commentary on the killing, no term was more often applied than “civil war.” “What befell India’s largest city last week,” summed up The Statesman, “was no mere communal riot …. It was three days of concentrated, unprecedented Indian civil war.”38 Ten days after the killing, The Times of London correspondent reported: “To put it bluntly, far too many thinking Indians are resigned to the prospect of civil war in the near future…. Was Calcutta the first battle of a civil war, and is this country threatened with massacres carried out with ruthless fanaticism by the baser elements of the communities?”39 Such were the doubts and fears emanating from Calcutta, and Arthur Moore’s “deep sense of terrible disasters impending” was widely shared. For Gandhi, the killing was an “ocular demonstration” of the fruits of direct action; for many other Indians, it was an ocular demonstration of the reality of the abyss beyond. “One principal lesson of the tragedy,” editorialized The Times immediately after the killing, “lies in its illustration of the perilously narrow margin which today divides order from anarchy in India.”40 After August 16, anarchy and civil war of the worst form were no longer abstractions in India; they had become specters that overshadowed all else by the end of the year. It is above all in terms of a “psychosis of fear” that the Great Calcutta Killing marks the watershed of events in a study of India’s quest for swaraj. Freedom meant nothing if not freedom from fear. “Would that the violence of Calcutta were sterilized,” exclaimed Gandhi, when he heard of the killing, “and did not become a signal for its spread all over.”41 But this was not to be. The grim chain reaction immediately began in which India was soon convulsed: Dacca, Noakhali, Bihar, and the Punjab. Percival Griffiths observed,
By the end of 1946 India was drifting rapidly to chaos. The real power had passed from British hands; senior officials, anxious about their future, were conscious that they were caretakers under notice and were disheartened; Ministers, paralyzed by the communal situation, seemed unable to come to grips with the problems of administration; and the unparalleled communal riots in Calcutta, together with serious disorder in many parts of India, made it clear that nobody was in effective control.42
Of this situation, Calcutta was an inextricable part, acting from within India upon it, and in turn reacting to the violence from without.
The agony that Calcutta experienced in the year after the Great Killing is indescribable. Fear and violence pervaded the city. Many sought to escape, either fleeing from the city or withdrawing into armed communal camps within it. The first major riot of the year occurred in late March. A series of stray incidents quickly escalated into large-scale mob violence and troops were called in to restore order.43 After March 1947, rioting became chronic, persisting, in Governor Burrows’ words, in “a stream,…now ebbing, now flowing, but never completely ceasing for more than a few days.”44 The government had clearly lost control; while Suhrawardy now took maximum precautions,45 “so far has the position now deteriorated that the public has come to realize that its only protection is, in the last resort, India’s armed force.”46 The once effective Calcutta police department had itself become undermined and demoralized by communalism,47 and the Hindu majority regarded the League ministry with intense suspicion. “We have come to a stage,” Suhrawardy admitted, “when nobody, not even the Government, can guarantee that there will not be arson, stabbing or looting.”48
Gandhi s Response to Communalism: His “Experiment” and Fast
At the national level, Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, had induced Gandhi and Jinnah to sign, on April 15, a joint appeal for peace, deploring the recent acts of “lawlessness and violence.” All communities were urged “to refrain from violence in any form.”49 This appeal had little affect on India and certainly no influence on Calcutta. Gandhi sensed this, and on a visit to the city in early May, threatened a “fast unto death.”50 On the prospect of Gandhi fasting, The Statesman editorialized:
It is with regret that many will learn that Mr. Gandhi has again spoken of a fast…. We think, however, that all those who are close to him should do their best to dissuade him…. The contemplated fast could not be expected to influence Muslims generally, whether aggressors or (as both communities tend to believe of themselves when involved) acting on the defensive. In such circumstances, if Mr. Gandhi started a fast, he would presumably continue to the end. As Hindus saw his life ebbing away, their own bitterness would greatly increase and the outcome would be in every way disastrous.
Like many others, we have never been able fully to understand these Gandhian fasts. The appeal they make is primarily to the emotions, to the heart. But also, perhaps, they are intended to appeal to the head. If one man greatly admired is so strongly convinced of the Tightness of the cause he advocates that he is prepared to sacrifice his life for it, then, his opponents may come to think there must be more to be said for it than they concede; and so they start to consider their own position afresh although, we think, under compulsion. But with communal [religious] disputes it is different. That they are primarily emotional is true; but once feelings are aroused to fever-pitch, there is no more possibility of subduing them by appeal to some other nobler emotion than of curing a rabid dog of his madness by talking gently. As for the intellectual factor, that is wholly absent. It should be plain, we think, that fasts, by whoever undertaken, can have little effect in such conditions. We trust that Mr. Gandhi will see that his duty is not to use this last weapon…. 51
Gandhi arrived in Calcutta on August 9. It would be his last and most momentous visit. The previous month had seen the city’s worst Hindu-Muslim violence of 1947. The most notable feature of these riots was the flash panic that had instantly consumed the population. “Lurking in the back of most minds is the possibility of a sudden new conflagration on last August’s scale. Monday’s events started panic which may not be quickly allayed.”52 Many urged the enactment of martial law. No longer, moreover, could Suhrawardy serve as scapegoat: on July 3, a West Bengal cabinet had been formed of which Dr. P. C. Ghosh of the Congress became chief minister. Now he, with Suhrawardy (who would remain de jure chief minister of Bengal until August 14), bore responsibility for the violence. When, therefore, it became obvious that the Congress, like the Muslim League, was unable to curb the riots, the open attacks by the press and others on the Muslim League ministry were superseded by more sweeping indictments of the very process of democratic government itself.53
This breakdown in civil authority meant in fact an almost total reliance on the military. In early August, the announcement came that “the military forces in Calcutta will soon be strengthened considerably.”54 This increase of troops was immediately reinforced by the governor’s application of the “Disturbed Areas Ordinance” to the whole of Bengal. The ordinance gave utmost powers to magistrates and the police in their enforcement of a prohibition on public assemblies or the carrying of weapons.55 The civil government, therefore, had gone about as far as it could go, short of acquiescence to martial law. Yet, only a week before independence, severe Hindu-Muslim rioting again broke out, when, on the day before Gandhi arrived in Calcutta, a crowd of more than three hundred had stopped a train, selected twelve of its passengers, and wantonly slaughtered them in full public view. This incident, which ignited many others, is a prime example of the impotence of government when the citizenry, in fear or vengeance, acquiesce before forces of violence.
Gandhi had announced that he would spend independence day in the Noakhali district of Bengal, but after a day spent in Calcutta, “listening to the woes of the city,” his departure was postponed. At his prayer meeting, on the evening of August 10, Gandhi told a vast crowd that his “head hung in shame at this recital of man’s barbarism” in Calcutta. This was madness, and his aim was to effect a return to sanity. He refused to write off Calcutta’s riots as simply a manifestation of goondaism. All citizens of Calcutta were responsible for the mob violence, all must “turn the searchlight inwards” and see that “wide open goondaism was a reflection of the subtle goondaism they were harboring within.” He had decided to delay his departure, and work here for peace, because (as he pointedly said) “the argument of his Muslim friends had gone home.” Then he promised that he would make an extensive tour of the riot areas, and this brought huge crowds the next day, “Hindus and Muslims, including women, who told him their grievances.”56 Two weeks before, The Statesman had commented, “The need now is not so much of political reassurance as of psycho-therapy, could that be practiced on a mass scale.”57 The therapist had arrived, and his genius was such that he, above all Indian leaders, knew intuitively how it could be practiced on a mass scale.
On August 11, Suhrawardy returned to Calcutta from Karachi, and went immediately to see Gandhi at his Sodepur ashram. He implored Gandhi to stay in Calcutta, at least until after independence. Suhrawardy had made a similar plea three months earlier, when Gandhi last visited the city. Gandhi had then replied that he would remain if Suhrawardy would enlist him as “his private secretary”; they could work together as a Hindu-Muslim team against religious conflict, a suggestion the chief minister had then dismissed as “madness.”58 Now, however, Gandhi made an even more extraordinary proposal. He suggested to Suhrawardy that as an “experiment,” they both move into a deserted Muslim bustee, in one of the worst-affected localities of the city, and live there together, for whatever period was required, until peace was restored to Calcutta. “It would be best,” Gandhi thought, “to live unprotected by the police or the military.” “In brotherly fashion” they would approach the people, reason with them, and foster a return to sanity. Suhrawardy considered the proposal, and after twenty-four hours gave his unqualified acceptance. “In view of the fact,” he told the press, “that an insensate orgy of violence has started and the feeling of revenge, instead of subsiding, is increasing, I have decided to accept Mr. Gandhi’s offer.”59
The year since the killing had humbled Suhrawardy. The irrepressible Calcutta riots had blackened his ministry; and the League itself had partly withdrawn its favor, as suggested by his defeat by Nazimuddin, the week before, in the election for party leader of East Bengal. Gandhi, however, was not concerned with Suhrawardy’s political status in the League, but rather with what the chief minister meant to the Muslims and Hindus of Calcutta. When Gandhi wrote to Patel of his Calcutta “experiment,” the Sardar, with characteristic humor replied, “So you have got detained in Calcutta and that too in a quarter which is a veritable shambles and a notorious den of gangsters and hooligans. And in what choice company too!”60 For Gandhi’s purpose, Suhrawardy was indeed “choice company.” No individual could have better disarmed Muslim suspicion and also attracted the hostilities of the Hindus, drawing them into the “experiment” where they could be neutralized nonviolently.
Hostile Hindu elements were present in full force when Gandhi and Suhrawardy arrived at the deserted “Hydari mansion” in Belliaghatta, the afternoon of August 13. The original crowd of two hundred swelled in size, and eventually broke into the house, hurling stones, smashing doors and windows. Gandhi confronted them. They wanted to know why had he now “come to the rescue of the Muslims” when it was the Hindus who had suffered? How could he, a Hindu, associate himself with Suhrawardy, the Muslim who had been responsible, as chief minister, for the slaughter of countless Hindus a year ago? Gandhi replied with the simple argument that he had used, as a reformer, all his public life: “How can I, who am a Hindu by birth, a Hindu by creed and a Hindu of Hindus in my way of living be an ‘enemy’ of Hindus?”61 This reasoning had the desired effect and the crowd eventually dispersed. For almost three weeks after this initial outburst, Calcutta not only remained calm, but on independence day became the scene of unprecedented Hindu-Muslim fraternization. All India was astounded at the sudden transformation.62
How far Gandhi’s experiment and personal example influenced the independence day metamorphosis in Calcutta is impossible to determine precisely. At the least, Gandhi was “a lightning conductor for unpleasant verbal storms,” whose experiment offered “an object lesson in the neighborliness which is the only true answer to communal fury.”63 At most, he was, in the words of the new Governor of West Bengal, C. Rajagopalachari, “the magician” who performed the “Calcutta miracle.”64 Perhaps the truth lies somewhere between these two points. Gandhi’s experiment in Belliaghatta did provide, on the eve of independence, “a place of pilgrimage for thousands of Calcutta’s citizens. Both Hindus and Muslims came in a constant stream [on August 14]…and placed their grievances before Mr. Gandhi and sought his advice.”65 The experiment, therefore, acted as a remarkable catharsis at the critical moment of independence, and its effect continued in the days immediately after. Throughout August, unprecedented crowds gathered at Gandhi’s evening prayer meetings, and rejoiced together in an astounding upsurge of Hindu-Muslim harmony. Gandhi did not, it should be noted, suppress or eliminate the atmosphere of extreme tension present in the city since the killing; indeed, he watched as it burst into a form of social hysteria. What Gandhi did was to act, at this point, as one of several forces66 that served to release desirable social energies, and thereby precipitate an explosion of goodwill rather than of violence. When, however, the city’s tensions and anxieties once again sought violent expression, Gandhi abandoned his milder cathartic techniques and applied instead an extreme form of social control. For the fast was the ultimate weapon of satyagraha, employed only when all other means had failed. As it was then used by G
andhi in Calcutta, the fast marked the final and climactic stage of his satyagraha, an intense method of conflict-resolution through nonviolent action. In this sense, the fast may be seen as an “escalation” of nonviolent conflict, the culmination of a process in which power is increasingly applied to achieve swaraj.
As the end of August approached, Calcutta’s political leaders and its press enthused over “the miracle of communal harmony in India’s largest city.”67 The announcement of the “boundary award,” which marked the lines dividing India and Pakistan, had not caused further disturbances; and the Id festivities had witnessed still more scenes of “unforgettable communal friendliness.”68 Glowing tributes to Gandhi flowed in from the highest political sources, including India’s new governor general, Lord Mountbatten,69 and the Muslim League.70 Gandhi’s prayer meetings held on the Calcutta maidan (especially the one held for the celebration of Id) seemed to demonstrate the complete success of his “experiment.” Congress leaders urged him to leave for the Punjab and plans for his departure on September 2 were accordingly made. Nehru had referred to the riots among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs in the Punjab, which were now being reported daily in Calcutta, as constituting a “grave crisis,” and General Rees warned in Lahore that “the spirit of retaliation is abroad in the land.”71 On September 1, the Calcutta press described the Punjab as being in the throes of “primitive blind vengeance” and torn by a “veritable civil war.”72 Hideous tales of mutual violence caused by Sikhs and Muslims there proliferated throughout Bengal. Reports of restiveness, especially among the Sikhs of Calcutta, now appeared. As the old fears once more emerged in the city, it seemed to many inevitable that, despite the recent “miracle,” the urge to retaliate would again prevail.
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