The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (The Robert Payne Library)

by Robert Payne

  All his life Gandhi had been reckless of his own safety, and in Delhi he found abundant opportunities to place his life in danger. He was constantly visiting the Muslim camps and refugee centers. At the Purana Qila Fort some seventy-five thousand Muslims were waiting to be evacuated to Pakistan. They were living in squalor, the fort was rapidly becoming a ghetto, the distribution of clothing and blankets had broken down, and there were known to be hidden supplies of ammunition. The Emergency Committee was having difficulty finding a loudspeaker, the only effective method of communicating with those disorderly crowds, and Patel was wondering whether he would not have to send soldiers to take the fort by storm, so seriously did he regard the danger rising from the massive supplies of ammunition known to be there. The Purana Qila Fort was an abscess about to burst.

  As Gandhi drove into the fort, accompanied by Dr. Sushila Nayyar, Abhabehn and Manubehn, his automobile was surrounded by a wildly shrieking mob. The chauffeur took fright, and tried to make for the nearest gate, until Gandhi told him to stop. Then he walked out into the mob and began to address them, saying that Hindus and Muslims alike were children of one God, and therefore they should be calm and not angry. It was a sermon he had delivered many times before, but rarely in such threatening circumstances, for all round him the Muslims were making menacing gestures, and there could be heard the cry, now heard more frequently, of “Gandhi mordabad!”(Death to Gandhi). He spoke in a hoarse whisper, and his words had to be repeated by one of his companions.

  Gradually he was able to subdue their frenzy, speaking to them of his hopes and fears, inviting them to sit on the lawn and listen peacefully to his peaceful words. He listened while they spoke about the sufferings they had endured and promised to do everything possible for them, and later they escorted him respectfully to the automobile. They had good reason to show some regard for him, since he alone among the Hindus showed an understanding of Islam.

  Patel thought all the Muslims on Indian territory were potential traitors. If war broke out between Pakistan and India—and already people were talking about the coming war—he believed the Muslims would rise up in their hundreds of thousands and destroy India. Gandhi was convinced that if the Muslims in India were well-treated, they would be loyal servants of India. He maintained this belief to the very end.

  At his prayer meetings he still read out passages from the Koran, thus antagonizing many Hindus. When he heard that mosques had been burned and desecrated, or converted into Hindu temples, he was furious, and when someone showed him a half-burned Koran he wept. All over India there were Hindus who regarded him as a traitor; and it was not only the Muslims who cried: “Gandhi mordabad.”

  When he visited the refugee centers he would listen sympathetically to complaints, but he was often blunt. When they asked for houses, he asked what was wrong with the sky above their heads. He was incensed when he was told that Hindus had a perfect right to the houses abandoned by the Muslims; on the contrary everything belonging to the Muslims who had left Delhi must be kept in custody for them. Once he was asked: “If you are a Mahatma, perform a miracle and save India.” He answered sadly: “I am not a Mahatma. I am an ordinary person like everyone else, except that I am much frailer.”

  He was indeed much frailer than he appeared to be. He suffered from a persistent and annoying cough, a high temperature, occasional bouts of giddiness. Dr. Sushila Nayyar told him the cough would vanish in a day if he took penicillin, but he reminded her that he had long ago set his heart against modern medicines and he would cure himself by reciting the Ramayana. His prayer meetings were broadcast by All-India Radio, but the result was to leave people in a state of perplexity, for only one word in four or five could be understood, the rest being drowned in the loud coughing. Lord Mountbatten sent his press secretary to ask him to deliver his broadcast addresses from the broadcasting station, where at least there were better technical facilities than in the open air. At first Gandhi objected, saying: “I need to express myself through a living audience.” He wanted to be able to speak spontaneously, freely, without notes. He asked for a few days to think over the matter, and finally agreed to make one or two speeches from Broadcasting House, while his addresses at prayer meetings continued to be broadcast.

  Althpugh the government and even the newspapers deliberately avoided any discussion about a war with Pakistan, everyone was talking about it. One day Gandhi mentioned the possibility of war during a prayer meeting. Immediately there was an uproar, for it was felt that simply by mentioning the word, he was giving his sanction to it On the following day he went to some pains to explain that he had been dedicated to peace all his life; he would never countenance war; he had spoken about war only because it was in people’s minds; but the damage was done. In future he would be a little more cautious when discussing great affairs of state.

  His presence in Delhi had helped to quieten the storm, but he realized that much remained to be done. The city had become a vast refugee camp, the largest camp of all being at Kurukshetra, sacred as the site of the battle recorded in the Mahabharata. Here came the thousands of Hindu refugees from the West Punjab. They were in scarcely better shape than the Muslims at the Purana Qila Fort. The refugee camps were breeding grounds for despair, and the government sometimes wondered how long they would remain quiet. There were rumors that the Muslims would attempt to seize the administration by a coup d’état. Gandhi spoke about the strange “death dance” of Hindus and Muslims, and prayed that out of the “perhaps inevitable butchery” a strong and robust India would emerge.

  Gandhi’s old enemy, Winston Churchill, took some comfort from the knowledge that he had always been right. In his view all the tragedies of India stemmed from her premature desire to sever her connection with the Crown. In a speech remarkable for its eighteenth-century style he prophesied more tragedies to come:

  The fearful massacres, which are occurring in India, are no surprise to me. We are, of course, only at the beginning of these horrors and butcheries, perpetrated upon one another with the ferocity of cannibals by the races gifted with the capacities for the highest culture and who had for generations dwelt side by side in general peace under the broad, tolerant and impartial rule of the British Crown and Parliament. I cannot but doubt that the future will witness a vast abridgement of the population throughout what has for sixty or seventy years been the most peaceful part of the world and that, at the same time, will come a retrogression of civilization throughout these enormous regions, constituting one of the most melancholy tragedies which Asia has ever known.

  Gandhi quoted the speech at his prayer meeting, praising Churchill for his leadership during the war, then castigating the British for granting independence only on condition that India was partitioned, but he spent more time praising Churchill than in castigating Britain. There was little to be gained by discussing how independence had come about and all were equally responsible for the tragedy.

  Many of his sermons ended on this inconclusive note: the problems were so vast, and there were no easy solutions. He wondered sometimes at the irony of a man dedicated to peace living in a time of murder and terror. When his seventy-eighth birthday came round on October 2, he said: “Would it not be better to offer condolences?” And when Sardar Patel came to visit him, he said: “What sin have I committed that He should have kept me alive to witness all these horrors?”

  Sometimes deep lines of anguish could be seen on his face, but more often he seemed strangely youthful, the skin smooth and shining. He was as alert as ever. The fits of coughing came to an end, and he was in better health than during the summer. One strange new malady was oppressing him. He had rarely had nightmares; now they came with increasing frequency, and in his nightmares he saw himself at the center of a crowd of wildly threatening youths, and sometimes they were Muslims, sometimes Hindus. And once in his dreams he saw Kasturbhai standing and gazing at him in his room.

  The birthday celebrations tired him: there were mountains of letters and telegrams, and all
day long the visitors streamed into the white room at Birla House. Lady Mountbatten came; Nehru came; everybody came; and at the end of the day he was asking himself what they had come to see—an old man who had worked for peace only to see his work shattered in his lifetime. “I was good enough to represent a weak nation, not a strong one,” he said. “May it not be that a man purer, more courageous, more farseeing, is wanted for the final purpose?” He wanted peace for India and peace of mind, but neither was attainable. Ram Raj, the kingdom of heaven on earth, was as far away as ever.

  His position became increasingly ambiguous; more and more his functions became ceremonial. He saw himself as the mediator between the Hindus and the Muslims, but few Muslims visited him and none attended his prayer meetings. He was a potentate without power, the symbol of Indian independence immaculately preserved, a voice crying in the wilderness. He had come to put an end to communal disturbances, and he was frittering his life away in endless irrelevancies. In Calcutta he had thrown all his energies into a single overwhelming idea; in Delhi he found himself talking about every subject under the sun. He had always enjoyed talking, and sometimes he talked when he had nothing to say.

  In October he held a prayer meeting in Delhi Jail, addressing the prisoners as one who had a fairly intimate knowledge of prisons. He said that present-day prisons were outmoded; all prisoners were sick and should be regarded as patients in need of hospital treatment; the jailers should be physicians and nurses. In his opinion everyone committed crimes; only the unlucky ones were caught. As for the explanation of their crimes, this was a matter deserving the attention of doctors, who should investigate the causes of crime. Prisoners should do their utmost to observe prison discipline, putting their hearts and souls into whatever work was demanded of them. When they prepared the rice for cooking, they should take care that there were no stones, grit or weevils in it, and they should behave in a becoming manner when they addressed their complaints to the prison officers. He hoped that the poison of communalism had not infected them and that they would be better men when they left the prison.

  Those lofty exhortations resembled parodies of earlier speeches. He was emphatically on the side of good behavior. Visitors to Birla House were told that they must not pick the flowers without first asking permission of the gardener, the refugees must not take trains unless they could afford tickets, Sikhs must know that they had been given kirpans in order to defend the innocent, not to hack down Muslims in cold blood.

  When Kashmir was invaded by tribal levies commanded by Pakistani officers formerly in the Indian National Army, Mountbatten and Nehru ordered Indian troops to be flown into Kashmir and there was fierce fighting near Srinagar. Gandhi spent ninety minutes discussing the military situation with Mountbatten and then reported at the prayer meeting that the issue was in the hands of God and he would not shed a tear if all the Indian soldiers were wiped out, for they were sacrificing themselves for India. The inconclusive war went on, and he seemed to have no ideas about bringing it to an end.

  On December 4 U Nu, the Prime Minister of Burma, came to visit him. The young Prime Minister, who smiled frequently and possessed a boyish charm, presented him with a straw hat made in Burma. Gandhi was delighted with the hat, but not with some of U Nu’s opinions. The Prime Minister was reminded that Burma owed its freedom to India, and that Burmese Buddhism was merely a heretical form of the original Buddhism practiced in India. U Nu smiled, bowed gravely, and went to see Nehru, who had no illusions about the heresies of Buddhism and was well aware that the Burmese had fought for their independence.

  When the New Year came, Gandhi was showing increasing signs of restlessness. He spoke of wandering like a pilgrim across India, staying in the villages and avoiding the towns; his home was in the villages, not in the great imperial capital. The next day he spoke of going to Rajkot, and a few days later he spoke of abandoning Birla House and living alone with Manubehn in a Muslim house somewhere in the suburbs of Delhi. There would be no secretaries, no interviews, no prayer meetings. He would abandon all those undefined powers which he still possessed and spend his last days with Manubehn. It was a strange relationship and he was aware of its strangeness, but he could not change it. He had grown dependent upon her and could not imagine life without her. She bathed him, shaved him, massaged his head and feet with oil, supported him when he walked, and sat with him at meals. She watched over him as though he were a child, and he in turn watched over her with the fondness of a mother, never letting her out of his sight, alarmed when she ran a temperature or lost weight, and angry when she fell asleep when she should have been working.

  She had changed considerably since the days when they had walked together through Noakhali. She was thinner, and her eyes seemed to have grown larger, and she behaved with more assurance, knowing that she was secure in his affections. Once he said to her: “If I were your true and holy mother, I would fall asleep in your lap, repeating the name of Rama and talking with you in a natural manner.”

  What was strange was not that he should desire to fall asleep in her lap, but that after falling asleep he believed he would be able to repeat the name of Rama and talk with her in a natural manner. It was as though he believed that all the boundaries of time and flesh and spirit would fall away; and she would be there always beside him, and Rama would be there, and he would be her mother and her child. In the mysterious regions of divinity all the ordinary laws of human relationship are held in abeyance. So Dante, dreaming of Beatrice and identifying her with the Virgin, speaks of “the Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son.”

  For Gandhi, Manubehn was the daughter he had always wanted, for Kasturbhai had given him only sons. He believed he was training her to become the inheritor of his spiritual estate, and the affection he lavished on her was therefore the affection of a guru for his most perfect disciple. He believed she was simple, frank and innocent, but in fact she was complicated, subtle, moved by obscure impulses. She was now more mature than she had been in Noakhali, no longer a schoolgirl but a mature woman. He made her keep a diary in which she recorded their conversations. The diary, which she later published, reveals the strains of an intense devotion. She rejoiced in her servitude and was proud of her special place in his affections.

  One day early in January, while he was taking a bath, he told her that he was contemplating an abrupt change in his life and that she alone would be permitted to share it: this change in his life was somehow connected with the coming of peace and a terrible trial. “If some peace is established, I will begin life anew,” he said. “The next trial will be more terrible. I am all ears to hear my inner voice. I am waiting for its call.” A few days later, on January 9, he spoke about his own responsibility for the massacres in Delhi, Punjab and elsewhere. “I am responsible for all this,” he said, adding that perhaps God had deliberately blinded him, but now at the very end of his life God had awakened him to his mistake. “I pray to God that I may die bravely. If I am able to do so, it will be my victory.” He appeared to be contemplating a final and irrevocable act, but she could not guess what it was or where it would lead him.

  On the afternoon of January 12, his day of silence, Gandhi composed a long statement on the reasons that brought him to begin a new fast. The glory of India was departing, no Muslims were safe, the peace of Delhi had been the peace of the sword, with the police and the army in command, and now at last the time had come to redeem the heart of man. For a long time, ever since he reached Delhi in September, he had been overwhelmed by an excruciating sense of impotence. Now once more he had decided upon a fast unto death. “The decision flashed across my mind like lightning, and now I am happy. No human being who is pure of heart can sacrifice anything of greater value than his own life.” If the Hindus and Muslims really wanted peace, if they would freely and without pressure from the police or the army devote themselves to peace, then he would break the fast. He looked toward death as a glorious deliverance because it would save him from witnessing the destruction of India.
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  During the afternoon Manubehn left Birla House to attend a music lesson. When she returned the discourse, which would be read at the evening prayer meeting, was already completed. His mind was made up; no one, not even Devadas Gandhi, who came later in the evening, could make him change it. Devadas asked him whether the fast was directed against Pakistan.

  “No,” he answered, “it is directed against everybody.”

  The Last Fast

  GANDHI’S CONCEPT of fasting changed subtly throughout his life. Each fast was different, and from the experiences of one fast he would learn how to organize the next. Every fast was a trial to be endured, but it was also an educative process, a method of teaching him about himself, and of reaching out into the absolute where the ordinary values of life were no longer applicable. It was not simply a question of lying down in bed and going without food: it was necessary to devise an entire scenario, to develop complex and subtle maneuvers, and to gain precarious insights into a world which was not otherwise knowable. The first fasts were undertaken as acts of penance for the homosexual activities of some boys in South Africa, but this was only the beginning. They were very simple fasts, like music played on a single violin. Later, as he increased in knowledge, the fasts were fully orchestrated.

  At the heart of the mystery was the belief that by purifying himself and subjugating the flesh he would increase the powers of the soul and thus acquire the strength to dominate events. The strength of the soul grew in proportion as the flesh was subdued, and from the absolutely pure soul there flowed out in ever-widening circles a power that was ultimately invincible. He was perfectly serious in this belief, which he shared with the yogis, and he was not in the least dismayed by the thought that there was no logical foundation for it, for he was not dealing with logic. He was dealing with life and death at their sharpest points, with dreams and visions. With his body cleansed of food, wholly detached from the world, adoring God and constantly repeating the holy name, immune from all the temptations of the flesh and with no consciousness of self, he entered into the divine essence. Then, when he returned to the world, he brought with him the commands of the divinity.