‘To Bihar’. Reports that Bihar’s Congress ministers had been indifferent or worse in the face of the killings angered Gandhi and figured in an open letter from him that was published in the press and dropped by air in pockets that had seen the violence:
‘To Bihar’, 6 Nov. 1946: You should not rest till every Muslim refugee has come back to his home which you should undertake to rebuild and ask your Ministers to help you to do so. You do not know what critics have said to me about your Ministers.
What you have done is to degrade yourselves and drag down India… I regard myself as a part of you. Your affection has compelled that loyalty in me… I cannot rest till I have done some measure of penance…
I had put myself on the lowest diet possible soon after my reaching Calcutta. That diet now continues as a penance after the knowledge of the Bihar tragedy. The low diet will become a fast unto death, if the erring Biharis have not turned over a new leaf…
No friend should run to me for assistance or to show sympathy. I am surrounded by loving friends… Let no one be anxious for me, I am like all of us in God’s keeping (92: 451-2).
The letter and its threat of a fast had an effect, as did the exertions of the central ministers camping in Bihar, and the killings ceased, but at least 7,000 Muslims had perished in Bihar.3
Noakhali. On 6 November a special train arranged by Suhrawardy took Gandhi and his party to Goalando in eastern Bengal. Also on the train were Shamsuddin, Bengal’s minister for commerce, and Nasrullah Khan, the premier’s parliamentary secretary. At Goalando Gandhi and his party boarded the steamship Kiwi for an eighty-mile river journey that brought them to Chandpur, a town at the western edge of the Tippera/Noakhali region.
Crisscrossed by waterways, Noakhali’s green countryside was lush from recent rains. Trees, mostly palms of coconut and areca-nut, shaded its winding paths, and the November weather was pleasant. However, London, New Delhi and Meerut, cities where India’s independence was being designed, were far from Noakhali and seemed out of reach, as did even Calcutta; and the charming landscape was stained with violence.
Noakhali district had 18,00,000 Muslims and 4,00,000 Hindus. The latter were much better off, owning land and predominating in the professions but unmindful of grievances nursed around them. Anti-Hindu sentiment acquired a sharp edge in 1946, and when tales of violence against Calcutta’s Muslims landed in Noakhali, groups of local Muslims exploded in cruel attacks on the minority. They were encouraged by a few religious leaders in a region that seemed to specialize in Islamic theology: Noakhali sent out hundreds of teachers of Islam to all parts of the subcontinent.
Gandhi saw this part of Bengal (he called the province India’s ‘nerve centre’4) as the right place for grappling afresh with a question dogging him right from boyhood: Hindu-Muslim relations at ground-level. For Swaraj he had crafted a sequence of brilliant if not always lasting political alliances between Hindus and Muslims, and more than once he had fasted for reconciliation in India’s countless villages and towns. Yet Swaraj’s compulsions had often pushed the latter goal to one side.
Now, with Swaraj almost achieved but Hindus and Muslims trapped in mistrust, nothing was more vital than restoring relations on the ground. If this could be done in a province claimed for Pakistan, Indian unity too might be saved.
Muslims meeting Gandhi on the Kiwi in Chandpur told him that killings and forced conversions in Noakhali and Tippera did not add up to a large number and that only a small minority of the Muslim population had joined in the violence. Gandhi replied that a fence-sitting majority was as guilty as actual attackers, and even a single case of abduction, forcible conversion or forcible marriage was bad enough.
When Hindus talking separately to him on the boat complained that Muslims had not condemned the violence, Gandhi countered by asking if Hindu males had been manly enough:
I have heard nothing but condemnation of these acts from Shaheed Suhrawardy downwards since I have come here. Words of condemnation may tickle your ears, but they are no consolation to the unfortunate women whose houses have been laid desolate or who have been abducted, forcibly converted and forcibly married. What a shame for Hindus, what a disgrace for Islam!
No, I am not going to leave you in peace. Presently you will say to yourselves, ‘When will this man leave us and go?’ But this man will not go. He did not come on your invitation and he will go only on his own, but with your blessings, when his mission in East Bengal is fulfilled (93: 2).
So courage was going to be as much his contribution as solace. After a night on the boat at Chandpur, Gandhi and his party took a train for Chaumuhani, where, led by Charu Chowdhury, a team from the Sodepur ashram had arrived earlier to prepare the ground. Though the town of Chaumuhani had remained peaceful, villages around it had seen violence in October.
Frankness. Eighty per cent of the 15,000 or so attending Gandhi’s prayer-meeting in Chaumuhani on 7 November were Muslims. Gandhi’s words to them were friendly but frank:
I have not come to excite the Hindus to fight the Muslims. I have no enemies. I have fought the British all my life. Yet they are my friends. I have never wished them ill.
I have heard of forcible conversions, forcible feeding of beef, abductions and forcible marriages, not to talk about murders, arson and loot. People have broken idols.
Muslims do not worship idols. Neither do I. But why should they interfere with those who wished to worship them? These incidents are a blot on the name of Islam.
I have studied the Qur’an. The very word Islam means peace. The Muslim greeting ‘Salam Alaikum’ is the same for all, whether Hindus or Muslims or any other. Nowhere does Islam allow such things as had happened in Noakhali and Tippera.
Shaheed Saheb and all the Ministers and League leaders who met me in Calcutta have condemned such acts unequivocally. The Muslims are in such overwhelming majority in East Bengal that I expect them to constitute themselves the guardians of the small Hindu minority. They should tell Hindu women that as long as they are there, no one dare cast an evil eye on them (93: 9-10).
At the start of the Noakhali exercise Gandhi’s party included, among others, Pyarelal, Sushila, Sucheta Kripalani, Amtus Salaam, Sushila Pai, Amritlal Thakkar, Kanu Gandhi, Abha, Nirmal Kumar Bose, an anthropology professor from Calcutta who translated for Gandhi, Parasuram from Kerala, who served as Gandhi’s stenographer, and Prabhudas, an office assistant. Salaam was the only Muslim in the group.
After three nights in Chaumuhani, Gandhi shifted his camp to the village of Dattapara, where 6,000 Hindu refugees had taken shelter. It was a shame, he said there, that some human beings had caused fear, and others had given way to it. But he could not ask Hindus to return to their homes until at least one good Muslim and one good Hindu accompanied them and stood surety for them. To a prayer-meeting audience of Muslims and Hindus he said (10 Nov.):
I want you to forgive and forget what had happened. That does not mean that you should become cowards. But it serves no useful purpose to keep on recalling the unpleasant past.
I have not come here to fight Pakistan. If India is destined to be partitioned, I cannot prevent it. But I wish to tell you that Pakistan can’t be established by force.5
Walking to the nearby village of Noakhala (11 Nov.), he saw victims’ skulls and charred remains. The next day, in Nandigram, he looked at a desecrated temple, the ruins of hundreds of burnt-down homes, and the ashes of what had been the village school, a hostel and a hospital.
But he knew that Bihar was witnessing similar or worse inhumanities. To Rajendra Prasad he wrote (12 Nov.), ‘If the Bihar fury does not abate, I do not wish to remain alive because my life would then be meaningless’ (93: 23). And in a letter written the same day to Jayaprakash, who had toiled valiantly on behalf of Bihar’s Muslims, he said, ‘Will Bihar really become calm?.. Write to me frankly what is likely to happen now. Give me your unreserved opinion’ (93: 22).
On 13 November Gandhi’s party moved to Kazirkhil village, where Dasgupta’s ti
reless workers had turned a devastated house into a habitable base. From here the party visited the village of Dasgharia, where Gandhi was met by Hindu women who had returned to their faith after being forced to become Muslims. To Gandhi’s relief, the district magistrate, a Scot called McInerney, had ruled that forced conversions were illegal, but not all had the courage to return to their faith and families.
To Muslim audiences Gandhi quoted with appreciation a recent statement by Jinnah. Vengeance and retaliation, Jinnah had said, were against Islam and inimical to the hope of Pakistan. ‘In the Pakistan areas,’ Jinnah added, ‘minorities will have fullest security of life, property, and honour just as the Muslims, nay even greater’.6 But by now Muslims were being warned to stay away from Gandhi’s meetings and prayers.
On Suhrawardy’s instructions, guards from Bengal’s police force accompanied Gandhi as he moved about—the premier did not want to risk an attack on his uninvited guest. Gandhi was unhappy about this security but helpless. Fear was at the root of Bengal’s tragedy, he said. Even the greed of the attacker sprang from fear; and the best revenge was to do good to the one who harmed you.
Ekla Chalo Re. At Kazirkhil Gandhi announced a plan for giving courage to local Hindus. He would split up his group and send each of the party to a different village, to live there amidst a Muslim majority. If the person feared or disliked Muslims, he or she could go back, Gandhi said. The companions thus took on a village each, assisted where needed by a Bengali-speaking worker from Sodepur.
Pyarelal took on Bhatialpur, his sister Sushila set up a clinic in Changirgaon, Amtus Salaam based herself in Sirandi, Sushila Pai in Karpara. Kanu went to Ramdevpur, his Bengali wife Abha, supported by Thakkar Bapa, to Haimchar. Prabhudas settled in Parkote. Accompanied by Bose and Parasuram, Gandhi himself would go to Srirampur.
Since most of the adopted villages were close to one another and covered by the same police station (Ramganj), the dispersed workers could quite easily walk to one another and between them hope to impact an integrated block of twenty or so square miles.
After seven nights in Kazirkhil, Gandhi, Bose and Parasuram left (20 November) for the village of Srirampur, a two-hour boat trip. They and their associates in the other villages would aim to impart fearlessness to the Hindus of Noakhali and remorse to its Muslims.
‘If you want to know yourself, go forth alone.’ This, Gandhi said, was his message to himself and his companions.7 Cutting himself off from intimate companions was for him a hard step: we know that their company was Gandhi’s security and delight.
But the victims’ suffering called for the break-up; separation and isolation would throw him and his companions more fully into God’s arms. East Bengal would now be the isolated Gandhi’s home and workplace. He had become, he said, a Bengali. Even Harijan should not now expect regular articles from him or Pyarelal. Mashruwala, Vinoba, Kalelkar and Narhari Parikh were asked to edit the journal between them.
Srirampur. A cottage near palm trees had been found for Gandhi and his two aides in Srirampur, a village that had seen destruction. After making his bed on a wooden bedstead and arranging his books beside it, Gandhi held an evening prayer on open ground in which Hindus and Muslims joined. Within days Hindus from Srirampur and nearby villages began to move about freely, to chant their sacred words, even to sound their drums and cymbals.
Dead souls were returning to life.
Thirty Hindus and Muslims of the Ramganj thana met in Srirampur with Gandhi and Shamsuddin, the commerce minister, and drew up a plan for restoring harmony that included peace committees in every village. On 23 November the plan was approved at a public meeting in Chandipur village at which Gandhi asked the Hindus to give the League ministry a chance to repair its image.
Every day Bose, whose aid Gandhi had specially solicited, gave Bengali lessons to the old man in Srirampur, his latest ‘ashram’. Gandhi rose at or before four, read and wrote (on the bedstead) by the light of a kerosene lamp, did his spinning, conducted two prayer-meetings a day, walked on dew-soaked paths to take his message to adjacent villages, added coconut to his diet, and practised nature cure (mud packs on the forehead and abdomen, sunbaths) on himself and the villagers—Doctor Gandhi was once more enthusiastic about his practice.
But he also kept a steady if remote eye on the larger political picture, and pondered the next step in the Noakhali exercise.
This was soon clarified. Once the rice-fields were dry, Gandhi decided, he would walk from village to village across Noakhali and Tippera. Meanwhile, he said to Mira in a long letter (4 Dec. 1946), his work in Noakhali felt ‘new, very pleasant, [and] equally taxing’ (93: 98).
CHASTITY TEST
Another step, a personal one, had also clarified for him. Having heard from Manu and her father that she would be joining him, Gandhi resolved on a brahmacharya test in Noakhali, with Manu as his partner. He had discussed the idea with some (Pyarelal, Bose, Devadas, C.R. and possibly others) and would later discuss it with several more, but more to inform than to consult. Most thought the plan dangerous or crazy; all felt he was giving himself an avoidable burden; and many believed that valuable reputations were at risk: his own and his associates’, and the reputations of their common undertakings.
Gandhi himself had no doubts. To address the violence around him he had to summon his chastity. This time it would be not an experiment but a ‘yagna’ (or ‘yajna’), a sacrificial offering of his sexuality to God. He would feel equal to the Noakhali challenge, which was the challenge of violence in independence-eve India, if neither he nor Manu felt the sexual urge despite sharing the same bed. Rather than prove a distraction—a waste of time, thought and energy—the ‘yagna’, he claimed, would purify him, oblige him to pray more ardently, help him focus with all his being on the Noakhali task.
On 19 December, after he had been a month in Srirampur, Manu arrived. He asked her about the test he had in mind; she agreed to take part, adding that she was willing also to face death in Noakhali. The ‘yagna’ started right away, after midnight. A few hours later he wrote a note to her:
Stick to your word. Don’t hide even a single thought from me. Give a true answer to whatever I ask. The step that I took today was taken after careful thinking. Give me in writing what effect it had on your mind. I shall certainly reveal all my thoughts to you (93:165).
Yet a chastity test was not the sole reason for wanting Manu near him. In letters to associates written on 26 December and 1 January, Gandhi admitted that it was ‘attachment’—‘ignorant attachment’ he called it in one of the letters—that kept Manu near him.8 Though he wanted to face Noakhali (and himself) absolutely alone, though he had asked his associates to remain each on their own, he on his part not only had the support of Bose (to translate and teach Bengali) and Parasuram (to type), he also now had Manu, to cook and serve him and assist him in all his chores. (She also took down his remarks at interviews or meetings.)
He felt guilty about this attachment or dependence but did not shed it. The brave old man needed young Manu’s company, touch and warmth, apart from the assistance she provided. With her, as before with other ‘sisters’, he relaxed, teased, allowed himself to be teased, laughed, and forgot his crushing load.
But as his partner in brahmacharya Manu also strengthened him to carry that load. So Gandhi claimed at any rate, and it is of some interest that the claim was endorsed by Pyarelal and Bose, who watched him constantly—Bose more than Pyarelal, who at this juncture seemed to divide his time between Bhatialpur and Srirampur.
Pyarelal would later write extensively about Gandhi’s brahmacharya in his biography, and Bose wrote frankly and critically of it in My Days with Gandhi (first published in 1953). Although Bose remained uneasy about the impact of Gandhi’s experiments on the women who participated in it, he accepted Gandhi’s linkage of brahmacharya with his battle for peace.
And while not convinced of the soundness of Gandhi’s step, Bose seemed satisfied as to its integrity. If it was a mask for lust, Bose wo
uld have been the first to know and the first to unmask Gandhi. Fortunately for Gandhi, it was the critical forty-six-year-old professor often disagreeing with him who recorded and analyzed the old man’s unusual doings in Noakhali.
Though based now in different villages, Gandhi’s ‘party’ knew of what was happening. The thin ‘door’ to his cottage-room was always open. On most nights, moreover, Gandhi’s bedstead was used by a third person as well. Thus he wrote to Vallabhbhai on 25 December that his bedstead was large enough for three: Sucheta Kripalani, Gandhi added, lay asleep on one portion of it; he himself was lying down on another part but also dictating in a low voice; and Manu, presumably sitting on the bed, was taking down the letter (93: 186-7).
His close friends across the country also knew of his ‘yagna’; Gandhi spoke of it to several of his callers and wrote about it in many of his letters. The journalists covering him in Noakhali came to know, and we must assume that Suhrawardy and his police, as well as the British, now in the Empire’s endgame, also knew.
There was an early casualty. Parasuram, whose efficient, silent service as a stenographer Gandhi had repeatedly praised, felt he could not continue his work unless Gandhi ceased the practice. We do not have the text of Parasuram’s evidently long letter of protest, but after reading it between 3 and 4 a.m. on 2 January, Gandhi wrote to him:
I cannot concede your demands… Since such is my opinion and there is a conflict of ideals and you yourself wish to be relieved, you are at liberty to leave me today… I like your frankness and boldness…
I shall always be interested in your future and shall be glad to hear from you when you feel like writing to me. Finally let me tell you that you are at liberty to publish whatever wrong you have noticed in me and my surroundings. Needless to say you can take what money you need to cover your expenses (93: 224-5).
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 75