Great Soul_ Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India Part 12

Gandhi antic.i.p.ates his impending death so many times in his final days that he almost seems a party to the conspiracy. In the ten days following the bungled bombing in the garden, the subject of his demise crops up in his conversation, correspondence, and prayer meeting talks at least fourteen times. "If somebody fired at me point blank and I faced his bullet with a smile, repeating the name of Rama in my heart, I should indeed be worthy of congratulations," he said on the first day. "I am waiting for such good luck," he said on the second. "I wish I might face the a.s.sa.s.sin's bullets while lying on your lap and repeating the name of Rama with a smile on my face," he told Manu Gandhi, his grandniece and bedmate, on the third. And so it goes until the evening of January 29, when, with less than twenty-four hours to go in his life's journey, he again tells Manu: "If an explosion took place, as it did last week, or someone shot at me and I received his bullet on my bare chest, without a sigh and with Rama's name on my lips, only then you should say that I was a true mahatma."

So he can't be accused of being blind to the threat. If anything, he imagines it as being just over the horizon, about to come into view at any instant. Meanwhile, his daily spinning goes on, his basic work goes on. He even continues his Bengali lessons, in preparation for the return to Noakhali he still intends to make. And all the old themes continue to run through his talks. At the prayer meeting on January 28, he brings up a renewal of Indian nonviolent resistance in South Africa, having just had some articles on the subject read to him during his bath. The segregation of blacks in the country, he says, is like the segregation of untouchables in India.

"I have seen it with my own eyes," he says. "That is the reason our countrymen there are fighting for their just rights." Hindus and Muslims, in his portrayal, are fighting together against white oppression there. He seems to be offering the Indians of South Africa as exemplars of "unity" to India and Pakistan, just as he did when he returned to India in 1915. "I have lived for twenty years in South Africa," he now says. "Therefore I regard it as my own country like India."

The next evening, in his final prayer meeting talk, he again finds a way back to South Africa. His theme is the self-reliance of South Indians. He's applying it to a food shortage currently being suffered in Madras, now Tamil Nadu, and that pitches him retrospectively back more than three decades to his march with indentured Tamils into the Transvaal in 1913, his first major exercise in leading a ma.s.s movement. They had only a small daily ration of bread and sugar, he recalls, but they managed to forage for food in the wild. So they were an example to the poorest Indians today. "Our salvation and the satisfaction of our needs lies in working honestly," he concludes. Surveying the course of his life from the Transvaal in white-ruled South Africa in 1913 to the capital of independent India in 1948, he settles on that as a core value.

Immediately after that meeting, Gandhi focuses on a memorandum he's drafting on the future of the Indian National Congress, from which he formally resigned nearly fourteen years earlier. Under Nehru, the Congress is effectively now the government of India. "Working honestly" is the memorandum's central theme. Having achieved political independence, Gandhi argues, the Congress "has outlived its use." It needs to give up power and refas.h.i.+on itself as what he names a Lok Sevak Sangh, or a People's Service League, which will subsume all the service organizations for which Gandhi had previously drafted const.i.tutions and rules: the spinners and village industries a.s.sociations, the cow-protection league, the Harijan Sevak Sangh dedicated to the uplift of the former untouchables.

On the last evening of his life, Mahatma Gandhi dreams again of the revival of the villages. "India has still to attain social, moral and economic independence in terms of its 700,000 villages as distinguished from its cities," he writes.

He dreams on. Each village will have its own village worker, a selfless teetotaler who spins his own yarn, weaves his own khadi, and rejects untouchability "in any shape or form in his own person or in his family."

He finished working on the draft in the morning and handed it to his faithful secretary, Pyarelal, for polis.h.i.+ng. Later Pyarelal would publish it as "The Last Will and Testament" of Mahatma Gandhi. Never did it make its way onto the agenda of any meeting of the Indian National Congress as a subject for serious discussion.

In the last hour of his life, however, Gandhi wasn't thinking of disbanding the movement he'd led. Now, as regularly happened throughout his political life, the practical politician takes over from the visionary. Sitting in Birla House with Vallabhbhai Patel, who suspected that he'd lost the confidence of Nehru and even the Mahatma himself, he delves into party politics one last time as a conciliator, soothing a fretful, ailing minister, telling him how important it is for him to stay in the leaders.h.i.+p at Nehru's side. This delicate negotiation, between two old comrades, runs ten minutes past the hour at which the compulsively punctual Gandhi always walked into the garden for his prayer meeting. On the way, walking even more briskly than usual, the old man mentions an adjustment he needs to make in his diet, then chides Manu and another grandniece, Abha Gandhi, on both of whom he's lightly leaning-"my walking sticks," he called them-for letting him be late. "I cannot tolerate even one minute's delay at prayer," he grumbles.

Later, when it came time to turn Birla House into a shrine, designers would have 175 cement footprints molded to simulate the vigorous long strides Gandhi took that evening, so different from the slow shuffle ch.o.r.eographed for the stage Gandhi at the end of the opera Satyagraha Satyagraha. The footprints run out just beyond four steps he had to mount to reach the prayer ground. They run out at the point at which Nathuram G.o.dse stepped forward, his two hands pressed together in the Indian greeting of namaste namaste. According to G.o.dse's own testimony, the black Beretta was concealed between his palms, but Tushar Gandhi, a great-grandson of the Mahatma's who has compiled a sourcebook on the a.s.sa.s.sination, writes that after handling the weapon, he's convinced it was too large to be hidden in that way. So he has the Beretta concealed under G.o.dse's khaki bush jacket. "There is no way a person could hide the pistol in folded palms," he wrote. "It is too big and too heavy."

Wherever it came from, Manu never saw it. Stepping between Gandhi and the seemingly reverential man with the folded palms, whom she imagines to be reaching out to touch the Mahatma's feet, she's suddenly knocked to the ground. While she's scrambling to retrieve the rosary, notebook, and spittoon she'd been carrying, three shots ring out. Then she hears what for weeks she'd been trained to expect: "Hei Ra...ma! Hei Ra..." She writes, "The sound of bullets had deafened my ears," but also says that she distinctly heard the prayer that Gandhi said would validate his mahatmas.h.i.+p.

The killer G.o.dse and Vishnu Karkare, one of his cohorts stationed nearby, testified that all they heard from their victim was a cry of pain, something like, "Aaah!" Pyarelal, after interviewing witnesses, revised Manu's account. He said the last words were "Rama, Rama." Gurbachan Singh, a Sikh businessman walking just behind Gandhi, also claimed to have heard the stifled sound of a prayer. Whether a seventy-eight-year-old man who has taken two slugs fired at point-blank range in the abdomen and one in the chest could conceivably have uttered four or five prayerful syllables as he fell is a forensic question not easily answered at a distance of more than six decades. If he could, it might qualify as something of a miracle, of a sort not infrequently ascribed to saints. On that basis, it can be noted that most of Gandhi's many biographers have been content to end the story of his life on this hagiographic note. The belief that he fulfilled his ambition of dying with the name of G.o.d on his lips has seldom been challenged, except by Hindu nationalists willing to rationalize, if not defend, the murder of Gandhi. In that sense, the victim succeeded in controlling his narrative until the end by forecasting his a.s.sa.s.sination as the final test of his mahatmas.h.i.+p.

Some bystanders dug up clumps of bloodstained earth from the garden to keep as holy relics. Manubehn Gandhi saved fingernail clippings. His ashes were scattered at various points across India. The process goes on. Tushar Gandhi recovered some from a vault of the State Bank of India in 1996 and immersed them at the confluence of the Ganges and Jamuna rivers. As recently as 2010, another small cache of this latter-day saint's ashes was strewn off the coast of South Africa, in Durban's harbor, into which Gandhi first sailed more than a century earlier.

Estimates of the crowds that lined the route of his funeral procession ranged from one to two million. The mood was one of remorse as well as grief. Among historians there's general agreement that the murderous hatreds that had lashed the subcontinent for a year and a half finally burned themselves out with the a.s.sa.s.sination, or at least lapsed into a period of latency. An Indian academic argues that the country was permanently altered for the better by "a certain kind of bodily sacrifice in the public sphere-and a refusal by one outstanding leader to give his consent to the particular conception of the political community that was emerging." That conception-that Muslims had no place in the new India-was rendered illegitimate by the murder of the leading exponent of unity across communal lines. Hindu-Muslim violence continued to flare intermittently and locally thereafter, but there wasn't anything on the scale of the part.i.tion-era killing for more than half a century, until 2002, when pogroms against Muslims in Gandhi's home state of Gujarat led to an estimated two thousand deaths in a little more than three months, during which some 200,000 Muslims were driven from their homes. The killings were tacitly sanctioned, even encouraged, by a right-wing Hindu party lineally descended from extremist movements that were banned for a time following Gandhi's a.s.sa.s.sination on suspicion that they'd been complicit in the murder. That party has held power ever since in the Gujarati state capital named Gandhinagar, after the favorite son who deplored its brand of chauvinism, expressed in a doctrine of national ident.i.ty called Hindutva Hindutva, usually translated as "Hinduness." As often noted, it's diametrically opposed to the doctrine of Gandhi, who repeated in the last weeks of his struggle against communal violence what he'd started saying a half century earlier in South Africa: that members of the community should see one another neither as Hindus nor as Muslims but as Indians; their religions were a personal-not a public-concern.

"Today we must forget that we are Hindus or Sikhs or Muslims or Parsis," he said on the eve of his final fast. "If we want to conduct the affairs of India properly we must be only Indians. It is of no consequence by what name we call G.o.d in our homes. In the work of the nation, all Indians of all faiths are one...We are Indians and we must lay down our lives in protecting Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs and all others." That view is alive in India, even if it remains partially eclipsed in Gandhinagar.

When it comes to the Father of the Nation, contradictions not surprisingly abound. They start with the decision in the immediate aftermath of the a.s.sa.s.sination to put the military, still under the command of a British general, in charge of his funeral arrangements. Thus the era's prophet of nonviolence was transported to the cremation ground on an army weapons carrier pulled by two hundred uniformed troops, preceded by armored cars, mounted lancers, and a police regiment. Air force planes dipped their wings and showered rose petals on the mourners. Later a naval vessel would be used for the immersion in the Ganges, near where it flows into the Jamuna, of bones picked from the cremation site. If (as Gandhi had written in his rudimentary Bengali on leaving Calcutta five months earlier) his life was his message, his death was a message that the Indian state now had license to reinterpret its meaning to suit its immediate requirements.

Weeks after his cremation on a tower of sandalwood, his political and spiritual heirs gathered at Sevagram, his last ashram, in a meeting that was supposed to consider how they would now go forward without him. The security forces, fearful of another a.s.sa.s.sination, insisted that the ashram be ringed with barbed wire to protect Prime Minister Nehru, who was due to attend. Uniformed police stood guard with fixed bayonets. Vin.o.ba Bhave, widely considered Gandhi's spiritual heir, noted that he was meeting Jawaharlal Nehru, his political heir, for the first time. This showed the degree to which the Mahatma had kept the activities of his ashrams and his political initiatives in separate spheres.

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Cremation by the Jamuna, January 31, 1948 (photo credit i12.2) (photo credit i12.2)

Nehru acknowledged as much. In a speech that was both touching and revealing, he admitted that he often found it hard to understand Hindustani, the demotic amalgam of Hindi and Urdu that Gandhi promoted as a lingua franca, and that, anyway, he was illiterate in both Hindi and Urdu. He also confessed that he hadn't bothered to keep track of his master's cherished "constructive" programs, didn't "know much about them in any detail," and didn't understand how Gandhi could have proposed to take the Indian National Congress out of politics now that it was responsible for running things. "Congress has now to govern, not to oppose government," the prime minister said firmly. "So it will have to function in a new way, staying within politics."

A little forlornly but without apologies, the prime minister then ticked off other large points of difference between Gandhi's newly empowered political disciples and the man they all called Bapu: on the need for a modern military, for instance, or for rapid industrialization. Yet, he said, these differences were not fundamental. They were all still committed to Gandhi's ideas, meaning presumably his broad goals of binding the nation and tackling poverty. "What we need to consider," he said, "is why the ideas that had so much pull in Bapu's hands do not have that same power in ours."

Gandhi's followers went their various directions, pursued their various programs, some of which continue to this day on their own small islands of Gandhian endeavor scattered around the vastness of India. In Wardha, I met Dr. U. N. Jajoo, a professor of medicine at the Mahatma Gandhi Inst.i.tute of Medical Science, affiliated with the Kasturba Gandhi Hospital, who starts the training of his students by requiring them to spend fifteen days in nearby villages where the inst.i.tute has organized health insurance plans and sanitary latrines for each household, along with clean piped water, resulting in a steep drop in infant and childhood mortality rates. The students are expected to survey the health issues in each household, including the poorest, and return at least monthly for the five years of their training. The medicine is modern, the goals Gandhian, and maybe thirty villages have been covered so far. Dr. Jajoo spins the yarn for his own clothes.

In Ahmedabad, I spent a day with the Self Employed Women's a.s.sociation, known as SEWA, the largest movement in the country that might be called Gandhian, which brings primary health care, midwives, banking services, and training to impoverished, typically illiterate women-many of them Dalits, many Muslims-traditionally condemned to lives of unrelieved menial labor. Ela Bhatt, the movement's founder, told me she's more convinced of Gandhi's relevance than she was when she first started organizing female "headloaders"-women tasked with hauling goods to market on their heads-nearly four decades ago. "He's a measuring rod," she said.

Gandhi lives in Dr. Jajoo, Ela Bhatt, and others, but they've had to find their own ways on the fringe of India's rowdy, often corrupt power politics. No national movement survived him, an outcome he seems, on occasion, to have foreseen. "Let no one say he is a follower of Gandhi," he said. Protean and infinitely quotable, Gandhi bequeathed an example of constant striving, a set of social values, and a method of resistance, one not easily applied to an India ruled by Indians, with a population nearly triple what it was when he perished.

One of the most widely known of his enduring exhortations is for sale as a printed sampler, ready for framing if not embroidering, at the gift shop of his first Indian ashram near Ahmedabad. It's offered to schoolchildren and other tourists there for a few rupees as "Gandhiji's Talisman."

"Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test," Gandhi urged in this undated note typed out in English just before or after independence, possibly to Pyarelal; possibly to D. G. Tendulkar, an even earlier biographer, the first to publish the note, which the Mahatma signed twice, in Hindi and Bengali; possibly to Manu, or to himself. "Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubt and your self melting away."

Causing doubt and self to melt away is a traditional aim of Indian religious disciplines involving diet, meditation, and prayer. It's causing them to melt away by means of social and political action that stands out as distinctively Gandhian. As leader and model, Gandhi himself mostly pa.s.sed his "test." But the hungry and spiritually starving millions in large measure remained.

Trying to build a nation, he couldn't easily admit that their interests-those of Hindu and Muslim, of high caste and untouchable-often clashed. He struggled with doubt and self until his last days but made the predicament of the millions his own, whatever the tensions among them, as no other leader of modern times has. And so his flawed efforts as a social visionary and reformer can be more moving in hindsight than his moments of success as a national leader, if only because the independence struggle long ago reached its untidy end.

In India today, the term "Gandhian" is ultimately synonymous with social conscience; his example-of courage, persistence, identification with the poorest, striving for selflessness-still has a power to inspire, more so even than his doctrines of nonviolence and techniques of resistance, certainly more than his a.s.sorted dogmas and p.r.o.nouncements on subjects like spinning, diet, and s.e.x. It may not happen often, but the inspiration is still there to be imbibed; and when it is, the results can still be called Gandhian, even though the man himself, that great soul, never liked or accepted the word.

GLOSSARY.

ahimsa: nonviolence. nonviolence.

Allah-o-akbar: "G.o.d is great," an Arabic expression heard in Indian mosques. "G.o.d is great," an Arabic expression heard in Indian mosques.

Arya Samaj: Hindu reform movement. Hindu reform movement.

Balmikis, Valmikis: name taken by untouchable sweepers, after Hindu saint. name taken by untouchable sweepers, after Hindu saint.

Bapu: father, used affectionately for Gandhi. father, used affectionately for Gandhi.

Bhagavad Gita: portion of Hindu epic portion of Hindu epic Mahabharata Mahabharata, embracing teachings of Krishna.

bhai: brother. brother.

Bhangis: sweepers, viewed traditionally as untouchable. sweepers, viewed traditionally as untouchable.

bidi: small cigarette. small cigarette.

brahmacharya, brahmachari: celibacy, a person who vows celibacy. celibacy, a person who vows celibacy.

Brahman: priestly caste. priestly caste.

bustee: shanty, shack. shanty, shack.

Chamars: traditionally leather workers, tanners, seen as untouchable. traditionally leather workers, tanners, seen as untouchable.

charkha: spinning wheel. spinning wheel.

charpoy: rope bed. rope bed.

chetti: moneylender. moneylender.

Dalit: preferred name, nowadays, for untouchables. preferred name, nowadays, for untouchables.

darshan: gaining or giving merit by viewing someone or something deemed holy. gaining or giving merit by viewing someone or something deemed holy.

dharma: duty, true code or teaching, religion. duty, true code or teaching, religion.

dharma yudha: holy struggle, war. holy struggle, war.

dhoti: wraparound loincloth, usually a single long strip of hand-loomed fabric. wraparound loincloth, usually a single long strip of hand-loomed fabric.

diwan: chief minister, under a rajah, of an Indian princely state. chief minister, under a rajah, of an Indian princely state.

doba: Bengali word for pond. Bengali word for pond.

Dwarkanath: another name for the G.o.d Krishna. another name for the G.o.d Krishna.

Ezhavas: an upwardly mobile South Indian subcaste, once considered untouchable. an upwardly mobile South Indian subcaste, once considered untouchable.

Harijans: name Gandhi attempted to give untouchables, stands for "children of G.o.d." name Gandhi attempted to give untouchables, stands for "children of G.o.d."

hijrat: exodus by Muslims from a land deemed unholy. exodus by Muslims from a land deemed unholy.

Hind Swaraj: t.i.tle of 1909 Gandhi tract, meaning Indian self-rule. t.i.tle of 1909 Gandhi tract, meaning Indian self-rule.

Hindu Mahasabha: nationalist movement of orthodox Hindus. nationalist movement of orthodox Hindus.

Hindutva: "Hinduness," doctrine of Hindu supremacy. "Hinduness," doctrine of Hindu supremacy.

jati: an endogamous social grouping, not necessarily synonymous with caste. an endogamous social grouping, not necessarily synonymous with caste.

jihad: Muslim striving for sanctified goals by means nonviolent or otherwise. Muslim striving for sanctified goals by means nonviolent or otherwise.

kala pani: "the Black Water," standing mainly for the Indian Ocean as a buffer against Western ways. "the Black Water," standing mainly for the Indian Ocean as a buffer against Western ways.

karma: individual's destiny, shaped by conduct in previous life. individual's destiny, shaped by conduct in previous life.

khadi, khaddar: hand-loomed cloth. hand-loomed cloth.

Khilafat: caliphate, position in Sunni Islam involving supervision of holy places; Indian movement to preserve Ottoman Caliph. caliphate, position in Sunni Islam involving supervision of holy places; Indian movement to preserve Ottoman Caliph.

ki jai!: cry or slogan meaning "glory to," or "Long Live," as in " cry or slogan meaning "glory to," or "Long Live," as in "Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!"

Kolis: a loosely defined subcaste in western India with a reputation for lawlessness; possible root of "coolie." a loosely defined subcaste in western India with a reputation for lawlessness; possible root of "coolie."

kurta: a loose-fitting tunic. a loose-fitting tunic.

mahajans: caste elders. caste elders.

Mahars: an upwardly mobile group in Maharashtra in western India, traditionally deemed untouchable. an upwardly mobile group in Maharashtra in western India, traditionally deemed untouchable.

mahatma: great soul, a spiritual honorific. great soul, a spiritual honorific.

Ma.n.u.smriti: ancient legal texts governing caste. ancient legal texts governing caste.

maulana: a Muslim religious scholar. a Muslim religious scholar.

Modh Banias: the merchant subcaste into which Gandhi was born. the merchant subcaste into which Gandhi was born.

Panchama: an outcaste, or untouchable. an outcaste, or untouchable.

Pariah: an untouchable group in South India. an untouchable group in South India.

poorna swaraj: complete self-rule; as used by Gandhi, applied to social uplift as well as political independence. complete self-rule; as used by Gandhi, applied to social uplift as well as political independence.

Pulayas: group deemed untouchable in what's now the state of Kerala. group deemed untouchable in what's now the state of Kerala.

Ramchandra: another name for the G.o.d Ram or Rama. another name for the G.o.d Ram or Rama.

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS): militant Hindu group banned after Gandhi's a.s.sa.s.sination, backbone today of right-wing party; name means National Volunteer a.s.sociation. militant Hindu group banned after Gandhi's a.s.sa.s.sination, backbone today of right-wing party; name means National Volunteer a.s.sociation.

ris.h.i.+: wise man or sage. wise man or sage.

ryot: Indian peasant. Indian peasant.

sadhu: an ascetic or holy man, often a mendicant. an ascetic or holy man, often a mendicant.

sanatan, sanatanists: orthodox; orthodox Hindus. orthodox; orthodox Hindus.

sannyasi: a Hindu who has renounced the world. a Hindu who has renounced the world.

satyagraha, satyagrahis: literally, "firmness in truth," the name for Gandhi's doctrine of nonviolent resistance; those who take part in such campaigns. literally, "firmness in truth," the name for Gandhi's doctrine of nonviolent resistance; those who take part in such campaigns.

shamiana: a colorful, sometimes embroidered tent, used in celebrations. a colorful, sometimes embroidered tent, used in celebrations.

shastras: Hindu scriptures, holy texts. Hindu scriptures, holy texts.

sherwani: a long coat worn by Muslims. a long coat worn by Muslims.

shuddi: purification ritual used in religious conversions by Hindus; offered by reformist sects to untouchables. purification ritual used in religious conversions by Hindus; offered by reformist sects to untouchables.

Shudras: lowest order of caste, mostly peasant laborers, traditionally ranks above untouchables. lowest order of caste, mostly peasant laborers, traditionally ranks above untouchables.

sjambok: whips made of rhino or hippo hide in South Africa. whips made of rhino or hippo hide in South Africa.