by Robert Payne
Today when the Gita was being recited in honour of the anniversary of Ba’s death, I was absorbed in deep thought about certain people. Gradually God will expose to me the real character of one person after another. Therefore the explosion was brought about by Him. There is a great mystery behind this explosion, which nobody can know. But now I don’t see any advantage in discussing this matter with you. I am greatly depressed and so you should keep up my courage. You have acquitted yourself well. As I said yesterday at the prayer-meeting, I wish I might face the assassin’s bullets while lying on your lap and repeating the name of Rama with a smile on my face. But whether the world says it or not—for the world has a double face—I tell you that you should regard me as your true mother. I am a true mahatma.
The last words were breathtaking, but Manubehn was so accustomed to regarding him as a Mahatma that she paid no further attention to them. He had said these things before and would say them again. When he spoke of himself as her “true mother,” he was saying that he was her protector, her guardian, the person who loved her most in the world. When he spoke of dying in her lap with the assassin standing over him, he was perhaps remembering the words he had spoken earlier: “If I were your true and holy mother, I would fall asleep in your lap, repeating the name of Rama and talking to you in a natural manner.” Many interpretations could be given to these words, but what is certain is that he saw his beloved grand-niece present at his death, comforting him and blessing him. He did not want it otherwise. When he was killed, it happened exactly as he had known it would happen.
Meanwhile it was necessary to go on living. Health was coming back to him, though it was noticed that when he walked to the prayer ground his steps were slow and faltering. He complained of the cold, and two electric heaters were set up beside him when he was working at his correspondence in the early morning. He was still taking liquid food, and there was no improvement in his liver and kidneys.
On January 23, someone reminded him that it was the birthday of Subhas Chandra Bose, the Indian nationalist leader who had traveled by submarine from Germany to Japan during the war and led the Indian National Army to defeat. After Bose’s death in an airplane accident on Formosa at the end of the war, he became a national hero, legends had been woven around him, and he was usually depicted as a humble, self-sacrificing and devoted nationalist when in fact he was hoping to establish an iron dictatorship over India with the help of the Japanese. Gandhi believed the legends, and said of him:
He gambled away his own life for the sake of his country. What a huge army he raised, making no distinction of caste or creed! His army was also free from provincialism and colour prejudice. Being the commander of this army, he did not seek comforts for himself while denying them to others. Subhas Chandra Bose was tolerant of all religions, and consequently he won the hearts of all men and women of his country. He accomplished what he had set his heart on. We should call to mind his virtues and practice them in our lives.
Gandhi’s speech on Subhas Chandra Bose was the last he ever delivered about any man. It was ironical that he should have spoken about a man of violence, and still more ironical that he should have praised him for virtues he never possessed.
On January 27 Gandhi made his long-delayed journey to the Khwaja Qutab-ul-din mausoleum, a Muslim shrine of great sanctity which had been looted by Hindus. The shrine was sacred to a Muslim saint and a Muslim emperor. Now, although much damage could still be seen, and the marble screens especially showed the marks of vandalism, the mausoleum was once more in the possession of its original owners. One of the conditions Gandhi laid down for ending the fast was that the annual fair at the mausoleum should be permitted to take place in peace. The fair was now being held, and Gandhi attended with a small retinue of women disciples. Since women were not usually permitted to enter the inner shrine, Gandhi asked the maulvis to tell him at what point the women should stop. They smiled, offered him sweetmeats, and said: “They do not enter as women but as the daughters of the Mahatma, and therefore they can enter the inner shrine.”
In this way, walking very slowly as befitted the solemnity of the occasion, the women entered the shrine and saw the damaged screens and sang a passage from the Koran, and then Gandhi went on to address the thousands who had congregated for the fair. Hindus who attended the fair were warned to live in brotherhood with the Muslims, for “we are all leaves of the same tree,” and Muslims were told to write to their brothers in Pakistan, urging them to put hatred out of their hearts and not to massacre the Hindus. The Khwaja Qutab-ul-din mausoleum stands in the small town of Mehrauli, once the capital of an empire, nine miles from Delhi, and soon they were driving back through the countryside to Birla House. This was Gandhi’s last journey outside Delhi.
Earlier in the morning he had written a draft resolution virtually calling upon the Congress to dissolve itself. What he feared most of all had come to pass: it had become a party of special privilege, perpetuating itself by means of rigged elections. Corruption was widespread; the Congress officials were giving themselves handsome salaries, while half of India starved. It was a party of city-dwellers, who had forgotten the 700,000 villages. He wanted a complete overhaul of the party, an end to the struggle for privilege and power. “Let the Congress now proclaim to itself and the world that it is only God’s servant—nothing more, nothing less. If it engages in the ungainly skirmish for power, it will find one fine morning that it is no more.”
The Congress did not proclaim itself to be God’s servant, and the ungainly skirmish for power within the bureaucracy continued unabated.
In the evening after the prayer meeting Gandhi was interviewed by the American author and traveler Vincent Sheean, who wanted to discuss non-violence. He had made a careful study of Gandhi’s beliefs and like nearly everyone else who interrogated Gandhi’s writings he was perplexed by them. Gandhi talked in riddles, and sometimes he gave the impression of a man who answers one riddle by another. After a long and exhausting day, Gandhi was delighted to improvise more riddles. He said: “Suppose I have typhoid fever. Doctors are sent for and by means of injections of sulfa drugs or something of the kind they save my life. This, however, proves nothing. It might be that it would be more valuable to humanity for me to die.”
Gandhi’s riddles were usually intimately connected with his preoccupations, and once more he seemed to be pondering his own death. He was walking up and down the blue carpet in his living-room as he spoke, and Vincent Sheean, who was three or four heads taller than Gandhi, was having some difficulty in walking beside him. According to Gandhi the sulfa drugs were bad means to bad ends. “But what if the end is good?” Sheean asked, and Gandhi answered predictably: “Evil means, even for a good end, produce evil results.”
It was a philosophy which could be embraced only with skill and daring. Only a few days before Gandhi had pointed out that Madanlal Pahwa was perhaps an agent of good, for the explosion of the guncotton was almost certainly a sign from God. The problem, being insoluble, was soon abandoned and Gandhi found himself speaking about renunciation, which dissolves many problems. He said: “Renunciation of the fruits of action does not mean that there can be no fruits. Fruits are not forbidden. But no action must be undertaken for the sake of its fruits.”
Vincent Sheean was more puzzled than ever, and wondered how such a doctrine affected the conduct of the Allies during the war. Gandhi answered that power was the enemy; the Allies had attempted to destroy Germany, but Germany was indestructible. To renounce power is to find peace. Renunciation was the law, and there was no other. He quoted some verses from the Isha Upanishad: “The whole world is the garment of God. Renounce it, then, and receive it back as a gift of God.”
It had been an inconclusive conversation with no questions answered, no riddles explained, but they had achieved an understanding. Gandhi genuinely liked the American and invited him to continue the discussion the following day.
The next day Gandhi was in a subdued and reminiscent mood, talking about
Kasturbhai and the vow he had made long ago against drinking cow’s milk and about King Harishchandra, the legendary king in the play which had delighted him in his youth. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur sat listening on the floor. Later, after the prayer meeting, the princess asked him whether there had been any disturbance. “No,” he answered. “But that question means that you are worrying about me. If I am to die by the bullet of a madman, I must do so smilingly. There must be no anger within me. God must be in my heart and on my lips. And if anything happens, you are not to shed a single tear.”
A little while later he had his feet washed and went to bed.
The days were becoming one day. There were meetings, discussions, reports, visits by high officials, baths, massages, enemas, long siestas in the sun, and he was aware that nothing was being accomplished. He was waiting for a sign from Pakistan, but none came, and he had finally decided to leave for his ashram at Wardha as soon as he was strong enough. The exact date would depend to some extent on his doctors, but it also depended on his own free will, and he had decided tentatively to leave for Wardha on January 31.
On the morning of January 29 Jayaprakash Narayan came to visit him early. The handsome Socialist leader knew that Gandhi was at odds with the Congress and wanted to discuss the fortunes of the Socialist party. Often in the past Gandhi had given his guarded approval to Socialist ideas: the time had come, according to Jayaprakash Narayan, for an abrupt turn to the left, away from the corrupt bureaucratic rule of the Congress to the cleaner rule of the young Socialists. Was Gandhi prepared to declare his allegiance to a Socialist state? Were the inequalities of wealth to continue? Was there to be no relief from rule by the rich and the powerful? As they spoke Jayaprakash Narayan realized that Gandhi had no intention of coming out openly in favor of Socialism. He still regarded the rich as trustees of their wealth, and thought it no sin to be poor. Nehru, once a Socialist, had disavowed his earlier Socialist beliefs. Jayaprakash Narayan left the meeting with the feeling that Gandhi was the captive of the government.
Later in the morning, while he was sunning himself in the garden, he received Indira Gandhi and her four-year-old son Rajiv. With them came Krishna Hutheesing, who was Nehru’s sister, and Padmaja Naidu, the daughter of Sarojini Naidu. Seeing these women in their colored saris, Gandhi exclaimed: “So the princesses have come to see me!” He was sitting cross-legged in a chaise longue, wearing his Noakhali hat, chest and legs bare. Indira Gandhi placed a spray of jasmine on the table beside him. Soon it vanished, for Rajiv began to twine the petals around Gandhi’s ankles and to suspend them from his big toe. Gandhi was annoyed. He called the boy to him, pulled at his ear, and said: ‘You must not do that. One only puts flowers round dead people’s feet.”
But he was in a relaxed mood, pleased to have the princesses around him, warm in the sun. His skin was so smooth and silken that Padmaja Naidu wondered whether it was the result of fasting. “Bapu, tell me your secret, and I will go on a fast, too.” He laughed, and for a little while longer they gossiped, and then Dr. Sushila Nayyar said it was time to go.
More visitors came, an endless procession of visitors. In the afternoon a group of blind people came, and they were followed by some refugees from Bannu, survivors of a massacre on the train at Gujrat railroad station on the eve of his fast. Reports of the massacre had sent a chill of horror through India. They told Gandhi what had happened in mounting excitement and anger, and at last one of them, an old man, said angrily: “Why do you not take a rest? You have done enough harm! You have ruined us utterly! You ought to leave us now and take up your abode in the Himalayas!”
“My Himalayas are here,” Gandhi replied in a harsh voice. “To remove your sufferings and to die in your service is for me like going to the Himalayas.”
He had rarely been attacked so vehemently, and was taken aback.
“You may be a great Mahatma, but what is it to us?” the old man went on. “Leave us alone! Forget us! Go away!”
He was a powerfully built man and spoke in commanding tones. His vigor and anger compelled attention. There were about forty of these survivors, men and women, some of them with wounds, all bearing marks of great suffering. For a moment it crossed Gandhi’s mind that the old man who spoke so violently was not a refugee but someone who was using the refugees for his own purpose; it was an unworthy thought, he quickly dismissed it, and talked to them quietly and simply.
“Shall I go away at your bidding?” he asked. “Whom shall I listen to? Some ask me to stay, others tell me to go away. Some reprove and revile me, others extol me. What am I to do? I do what God commands me to do.”
The old man said: “It is God who is speaking to you through us. We are beside ourselves with grief.”
“My grief is no less than yours,” Gandhi replied, and gradually he was able to pacify them.
The incident disturbed him and he described it at length at his prayer meeting, saying that he would like nothing better than to go to the Himalayas, but that was not where he expected to find his peace. “I seek my peace amid disorders,” he said, as years before he had said: “I seek my peace in the storm.”
That evening he had a violent fit of coughing, and refused the penicillin pills which Dr. Sushila Nayyar had left for him. He looked wan and tired. He was oppressed by the mounting evidence of corruption in the Congress. “How can we look the world in the face?” he said. “The honour of the whole nation hinges on those who have participated in the freedom struggle. If they too misuse their powers we are sure to lose our footing. Where do I stand and what am I doing?”
Then very sadly he repeated the words of the Urdu poet Nazir:
Short-lived is the Spring in the garden of the world,
Enjoy the brave spectacle while it lasts.
To Manubehn, who was massaging his head with oil, he spoke once more about death, which had been haunting him for many weeks. At the moment of death they would know whether he was a real Mahatma or not; then, at last, there would be revealed the secret which had always escaped him. Sometimes he would laugh at the people who called him Mahatma, but in his heart he had always reveled in the knowledge that mysterious powers had been given to him. He said, speaking very seriously: “If I were to die of a lingering disease, or even from a pimple, then you must shout from the housetops to the whole world that I was a false Mahatma. Then my soul, wherever it might be, will rest in peace. If I die of an illness, you must declare me to be a false or hypocritical Mahatma, even at the risk of people cursing you. And if an explosion takes place, as it did last week, or if someone shot at me and I received his bullet in my bare chest without a sigh and with Rama’s name on my lips, only then should you say that I was a true Mahatma.”
It was about ten o’clock in the evening when he said these words. An hour later he was asleep.
Triumph and Defeat
The world will be dark and you
shall shed light on it,
And you shall dispel all the
darkness around.
O man, though life deserts you,
do not rest.
A Walk in the Garden
ON THE LAST DAY of his life Gandhi woke up at his usual hour, 3:30 A.M., and according to his practice he tweaked the ear of Manubehn to make her wake up, for she slept heavily.
One of the women who usually attended prayers overslept, and it pained him that she was absent. While cleaning his teeth with a twig, he confided his annoyance to Manubehn, saying that prayer was a broom for cleansing the soul and the fact that she was not sharing his prayers showed only that his influence on her was waning. If she found no need to pray with him, then it would be better if she left his roof, and it would be better for both of them. He was still coughing a good deal, and he had not yet recovered from the effects of his fast His mind dwelling on the woman’s absence, he said: “I do not like these signs. I hope God does not keep me here very long to witness these things.”
The final morning began in a mood of fret and impatience, and a lingering despair.
There were strange signs and portents: Pyarelal too was absent from his accustomed place. A long and heavy day lay in front of him: there was the Congress Constitution to be completed, there would be an important conference with Patel in the afternoon, and in addition there were the multitudinous interviews to be granted throughout the day. He seemed oppressed by nameless fears; and when Manubehn asked him what prayer she should chant for him, he asked her to chant an old Gujarati hymn which reflected his own restlessness and brooding anxiety:
Whether weary or unweary, O Man, do not rest,
Do not cease your single-handed struggle.
Go on, and do not rest.
You will follow confused and tangled pathways,
And you will save only a few sorrowful lives.
O Man, do not lose faith, do not rest.
Your own life will be exhausting and crippling,
And there will be growing dangers on the journey.
O Man, bear all these burdens, do not rest.
Leap over your troubles though they are high as mountains,
And though there are only dry and barren fields beyond.
O Man, till those fields, do not rest.
The world will be dark and you shall shed light on it,
And you shall dispel all the darkness around.
O Man, though life deserts you, do not rest.
O Man, take no rest for thyself,