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

by Robert Payne

  The Government of India published a memorial volume consisting of a collection of tributes remarkable only for their general dullness and predictability. There were occasional exceptions, as when the usually staid Asaf Ali, Governor of Orissa, pronounced that “like Jesus Christ, the prince of peace, Mahatma Gandhi has died on the flaming Cross.” Such hysterical outbursts were rare. Two tributes stood out, one by a poet, the other by a mathematician. Albert Einstein wrote with deep feeling: “Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.” Sarojini Naidu had no sympathy with those who prayed that Gandhi would rest in peace. “O my father, do not rest!” she pleaded. “Do not rest in peace! Give us the strength to fulfill our promise!”

  In India grief assumed the dimensions of a collective nightmare. It was as though a great city had perished or an empire had perished. During the days following the murder millions of people went about in a stupor; they did not cook their food, did not eat, could not sleep, did no work. Stunned, too grief-stricken to weep, with the look of exhaustion, as though they had survived a dreadful calamity but did not know how they had survived, they went about their dazed and haggard lives like ghosts in a world they no longer recognized. It was not only that Gandhi had been the revered Mahatma, or that he had become a legend with all the strange powers of legends, or that he was the man who had wrested power from the British and was the acknowledged father of his country; it was simply that over the years they had come to depend on him, and with his death there was no one they could turn to. He had held the stage as long as most of the people of India could remember. Now there was only the empty stage, silence and darkness descending over India.

  For long weeks and months the Indians were caught up in that strange stupor. They knew well enough that his successors would never occupy his place. He was the mountain; Nehru was a blade of grass. Men had affection and admiration for Nehru, but he was never loved as Gandhi was loved; and when they remembered Gandhi there was an ache in their hearts. Life went on; the harvests were gathered; the religious festivals followed one another; and always there was the knowledge that Gandhi was no longer present to watch and to warn, to admonish and to applaud. Then gradually the man who had been a living legend went through all those transmutations that follow on the deaths of legends. He changed shape and form; things he had never done, words he had never said, were credited to him; a vast hagiography appeared; he became a government institution, with his portrait on the walls of Indian embassies and all government offices; the Congress Party, which he had wanted to dissolve, celebrated him and spoke in his name; his memory was riddled with accumulated ironies. Grief and time added new colors to him until at last the man seemed to vanish in the glow of history.

  Memorials were raised for him, and prizes were offered for the most suitable designs. Since there could be no tomb and no mausoleum, it was decided that the cremation ground on the banks of the Jumna River offered the most appropriate site for a monument in his honor. Instead of the brick platform on which his body had been burned, there would be a black marble platform of the same size, some twelve feet by twelve feet square, and two feet deep, surrounded by a white marble fence. This was to be his cenotaph, his empty tomb. Accordingly during the following years the black marble cenotaph was erected and the shores were landscaped. Around the cenotaph were built earthworks to protect it from the flooding Jumna, and these high protective walls have the effect of transforming an open space into an enclosed garden. The walls are so broad that a carriage could drive around them. Trees were planted in the enclosure, and little square plots of white stones were added for decoration. Usually the black marble cenotaph was heaped with flowers, and the marble was polished so brilliantly that it reflected the passing clouds.

  So many compromises were involved in the design, so much money was spent on landscaping, and so little regard was paid to the essential spirit of Gandhi, that this formal garden took on the aspect of an official tribute devoid of any artistic necessity. It was ugly, empty and sterile. It said nothing which could not be said much more simply. Gandhi would have been incensed by the cost, just as he would have been incensed by the thought that the place where his body was cremated would become a place of pilgrimage. On the anniversary of his death the President of India with all his retinue would stand before the slab of black marble while two volleys of gunfire would echo across the plains, and the last post and reveille would be sounded by twelve buglers drawn up with military precision. These ceremonies were meaningless and had no relation to the real Gandhi, who had lived and breathed with a healthy detestation of military ceremonial.

  What was missing was the sense of his personality, the quick and vivid spirit, the urgent voice, the enchanting smile. He did not deserve to be commemorated with a slab of black marble, or with military parades, or with ceremonial greetings. A children’s playground or a park would have been better. At the Rajghat no fountains played, no children ran among the trees, no one laughed, and the least solemn of men was remembered with official solemnity. Gandhi had vanished. In his place there was the museum piece, the official father of the country, the benefactor in whose name the Congress Party had seized power.

  A stone’s throw away from the Rajghat there stands the small Gandhi Memorial Museum nestling in a grove of trees. It is an unpretentious building of yellow stone housing a vast library and a museum, which contains most of the few possessions he left behind him. There are laige photographs of Gandhi on the walls, admirably chosen to suggest the whole course of his long life, and in an alcove under a glass case there can be seen the neatly folded dhoti and the shawl of Australian wool he was wearing at the time of his death. The bloodstains have turned pale with age. In a little wooden cup there is one of the bullets that killed him. It is about the size of a child’s fingernail.

  The museum is light and airy, and there is no feeling of solemnity. His small possessions could be placed comfortably in a shoebox. A pair of sandals, a cheap watch, a sixpenny electric torch, some wooden bowls, two medals, a rosary of wooden beads, a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, a bamboo fan, a nailcutter, a cleaning stone, and the little statue of the three monkeys which he called “my masters,” his straw hats, and his cooking utensils—this is all, and it is enough. Mysteriously the museum conveys the essence of the man in his simplicity and frailty, and his great strength.

  At the heart of the mystery there was always the man who wanted, as he said, to be “more naked than naked.” He feared and distrusted possessions, knowing that in the strict sense no one possesses anything at all. When people spoke to him about the vast possessions of the maharajahs with their slaves, their gilded elephants and their fantastic treasuries of jewels, he would shake his head in bewilderment, wondering why anyone should take pride in such things. He knew only too well where the power and wealth of the maharajahs came from, and in due course he was able to destroy them as easily as a man breaks some dry faggots across his knee. In his picture of the new India the maharajahs had no place.

  He spoke often about “the India of my dreams,” and he had a very clear conception of the India he wanted to leave behind him. He wanted a government devoid of the bureaucracy India had inherited from colonial rule. He especially wanted a government responsible to the villagers, capable of bringing the full weight of its influence to bear on rural development, for he remembered that the vast proportion of the Indians lived in villages and had been forgotten for too long. He wanted only a skeleton army, a small police force, a government of experts with no powerful political party at the helm. He wanted the Congress Party to dissolve itself because it had outlived its usefulness, and he was especially anxious that it should not perpetuate itself in the manner of political parties all over the world by the use of patronage and naked political power. He wanted to integrate the untouchables into the fabric of Indian society, to put an end to child marriage, and to ensure that there were no great inequalities of wealth. He wanted women t
o have the same rights as men. He wanted simple things which were long overdue, but it was one of the supreme ironies of his life that those simple things were not given to him. He had shattered British power in India and humbled the maharajahs, making them pensioners of the state, but he could not change the nature of the bureaucracy. The government of Nehru was not disposed to make the changes he wanted, and the nation which came into being largely as a result of his efforts bore very little resemblance to the nation he desired.

  In the pages of Harijan and Young India he described “the India of my dreams” in minute detail. From time time there would be subtle changes, sudden alterations of emphasis, a shift of focus. He was like a painter who returns again and again to the canvas, adding some color here, changing an outline there, never quite satisfied with his portrayal of the beloved. But these improvisations were merely the inevitable consequence of long pondering, for the essential design remained unchanged. He wrote in Young India in September 1931 on the steamer taking him to Marseilles when he was on his way to the Round Table Conference:

  I shall work for an India in which the poorest shall feel it is their country in whose making they have an effective voice; an India in which there will be no high class or low class of people; an India in which all communities shall live in perfect harmony. There can be no room in such an India for the curse of untouchability or the curse of the intoxicating drinks and drugs. Women will enjoy the same rights as men. Since we shall be at peace with all the rest of the world, neither exploiting, nor being exploited, we should have the smallest army imaginable. All interests not in conflict with the interests of the dumb millions will be scrupulously respected, whether foreign or indigenous. This is the India of my dreams.

  But the India of his dreams was never within his reach. He had hoped above all for a more egalitarian society, but the poor remained as poor as they had ever been, and sarvodaya, the welfare of all, to which he had bent his hopes and his energies, was as far away as ever.

  Among the heirs of Gandhi there was only one who appeared to possess the authentic flame. This was Vinoba Bhave, the thin spindly scholar who had first encountered Gandhi at the time of the famous speech in Benares in 1916. He joined Gandhi’s ashram in Sabarmati, where he distinguished himself by his sweet temper, his austerities and complete selflessness, and no one was surprised when Gandhi sent him to Wardha in 1921 to open a new ashram. At the beginning of the civil-disobedience campaign in 1940 he was chosen to be the first Satyagrahi to court arrest. In prison he set himself to learn Arabic and four of the Dravidian languages of South India; he was already a master of Sanskrit and a magnificent speaker of English.

  In April 1951 he was wandering through the village of Panchampalli in Hyderabad when it occurred to him that there must be some way to put an end to the terrorizing and looting of the estates of wealthy landlords. Their houses were being burned, their livestock were being killed, and most of the state was given over to violence. He had little sympathy for the landlords, and just as little for the Communists who were inciting the poor peasants to riot. He realized that nothing would be gained by preaching non-violence. It was an economic problem: How much land could support a landless peasant? He called a meeting and asked the villagers whether there was not someone who would give land to his brethren to prevent them from dying of starvation. A small landowner called Ram Chandra Reddi stepped forward and offered a hundred acres. At that moment the Boodan Yagna (Land-gift) movement was born. On the next day Vinoba Bhave marched to another small village, where breakfast had been prepared for him. “I do not want breakfast,” he said. “I want land.” Another landowner gave him twenty-five acres.

  In the following years the movement kept growing. Vinoba Bhave marched across India like a sweet-tempered fury, demanding land from every landlord, saying: “I have to loot you with love.” Suddenly out of nowhere there would come a small procession consisting of Vinoba Bhave, a Japanese drummer, two elderly women who acted as secretaries, and a group of young disciples. It was an invasion of gypsies, the old man with the goat beard striding ahead, lean and sinewy, wearing tennis shoes and carrying a staff. The villagers always knew when he was about to descend on them, and they waited eagerly to receive his darshan.

  He had calculated that he would need fifty million acres of land to support all the landless peasants of India. He is far from reaching his goal, for he has received in all his wanderings only six million acres, and only half of this was fit for cultivation. The land given to him was put to use in collective farms, with the profits shared between the farmers and the cooperative. With this new distribution of land a new hope came to the landless peasants. All over India these collective farms were carrying out the ideas of Gandhi, but they were no more than small pockets in the immensity of the subcontinent. The landlords were still in power, poverty was still widespread, and the poor had no effective voice in the making of their country.

  The legacy of Gandhi to India was the example of his life and his belief in non-violence, the new dignity he gave to the villages, the simple assertion of human rights. He fought for elemental things, for truth and justice above all, and he was able to give weight and meaning to these words which were otherwise weightless and meaningless. He thought of himself as a social reformer ushering in a new age of human equality and brotherhood, and in this he failed. Future historians will probably regard him as one of those rare men who come at the end of historical epochs and by their very presence announce the beginning of a new dispensation, though they are not themselves permitted to see the promised land. He was one with Buddha and the ancient sages, and drew his ideas from ancient wells. He came at a time when religious feeling was already decaying, and he drew his strength from the ancient gods.

  On the Rajpath, “the royal road,” the great avenue which stretches for two miles through Delhi, there used to be an imposing marble statue of the King-Emperor George V, standing on a high plinth with a stone canopy to shade him from the sun. An ornamental lake lay at his feet, and in front of him, stretching away into the far distance beyond the sweeping plain were the red sandstone government buildings designed with imperial splendor. It was a breathtaking and appropriate site for a statue of a King-Emperor.

  In July 1968 the statue of King George V came down, and in its place there was erected a statue of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

  The Murderers

  My respect for the Mahatma was

  deep and deathless.

  NATHURAM GODSE

  The Hatching of the Plot

  IN THE WEEKS before the murder of Gandhi there was mounting evidence that his life was being threatened by a small band of determined conspirators. At first there were only those scarcely visible signs, like the flurries of whirling dust which announce a coming storm: reports of speeches made against him, an increased traffic in arms, pamphlets denouncing him, and a growing number of visitors to Birla House who complained against him, saying openly that he had lost touch with the people and should resign from politics. Danger seemed to come from all directions, from Muslims and Hindus alike. The evidence was substantial, but it had no clear outlines. Some of those who were around Gandhi said later that they could smell it and almost touch it. They said they could feel the menace taking shape before their eyes.

  A man who occupies a great position in public life is always in danger, and Gandhi was well aware that he was living dangerously. The greatest danger might be expected to come from people who had suffered during the months of anarchy following the partition, when Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims all committed atrocities. An uncounted number of people—some said four million—had been murdered, and many of the survivors had been driven to madness and were thirsting for revenge. As it happened, only one of the conspirators had witnessed scenes of violence. This was Madanlal Pahwa, the youth who ignited the guncotton slab on January 20. The rest had lived quietly through the communal disorders, going about their daily affairs in comparatively safe areas like Poona and Bombay. Only one of the peopl
e arrested for complicity in the murder had a long history of terrorist activity behind him. This was Vinayak Savarkar, the retired president of the Hindu Mahasabha, a political party which had perhaps a million adherents, dedicated to militant Hinduism in opposition to the non-violence of Gandhi.

  The men who were rounded up by the police in the weeks following the murder did not, except for Savarkar, look like conspirators. One was a doctor, another owned a bookshop, a third was a restaurant proprietor and municipal councilor, a fourth was an illiterate servant, a fifth was a storekeeper in the arms depot at Kirkee, a military establishment in the outskirts of Poona. Nathuram Godse was the editor of the Poona newspaper, Hindu Rashtra, and Narayan Apte, his principal accomplice, was the manager of the newspaper. Although Godse and Apte had known Savarkar for many years, the minor conspirators arrived late on the scene and were unknown to one another until a few weeks before the murder. There was something strangely anonymous about them, as though they had been picked up at random.

  Nathuram Godse was arrested a few moments after shooting Gandhi Taken to the nearby Tughlak Road police station, he said his name was Nathuram, that he lived in Poona, and he gave his age as twenty-five. The first two statements were correct, but he was in fact thirty-seven. A reporter who was able to see him briefly in a darkened cell at the police station asked him whether he had anything to say. “For the present I only want to say that I am not at all sorry for what I have done,” he replied. “The rest I will explain in court.” The police then forbade him to say anything more, and thereafter he remained invisible to the public until his appearance in court Later that night he was removed to the Parliament Street police station, where a stronger security guard could be placed around him.