Great Soul_ Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India Part 10

At his first large prayer meeting, at a place called Chaumuhani on November 7, the elderly Hindu in a loincloth faced an overwhelmingly Muslim crowd of about fifteen thousand. He dwelled on the theme that the Islam he'd studied was a religion of peace. Earlier he'd vowed not to leave East Bengal until "a solitary Hindu girl" could walk safely among Muslims. The Muslim majority needed to tell the women of "the small Hindu minority," he now said, that "while they are there, no one dare cast an evil eye on them." Within a week, he found that two remaining Muslim Leaguers who'd been traveling with him had dropped out after finding themselves criticized in the Muslim press for "dancing attendance on Mr. Gandhi."

Soon he was forced to recognize that Muslims were staying away from his nightly prayer meetings and that the "peace committees" he'd hoped to plant in each village, composed of one respected Muslim and one like-minded Hindu, each vowing to sacrifice his life to prevent new attacks, existed only on paper. Now if he mentioned Pakistan at all, it was only to a.s.sert that he was not its enemy. With a rhetorical flourish, the supplicating Mahatma even suggested that if all the Hindus of East Bengal departed, he himself could be the last one remaining in what would then become Pakistan. "If India is destined to be part.i.tioned, I cannot prevent it," he said. "But if every Hindu of East Bengal goes away, I shall still continue to live amongst the Muslims of East Bengal...[and] subsist on what they give me." A few nights later he could be found reading out a Jinnah statement warning Muslims that they could forfeit their claim to Pakistan if they indulged in communal violence. Hindus would be safer in Pakistan than Muslims themselves, the Quaid-i-Azam had pledged.

Jinnah's gossamer promise was the obverse of a pious hope that had been slowly forming in Gandhi's mind, which was now not infrequently despairing. By prodding Noakhali Hindus to return to their villages and by living there peacefully himself, he still meant to prove to all the subcontinent's Muslims and Hindus that there was no need for a Pakistan of any size or description. "If the Hindus could live side by side with the Muslims in Noakhali," Pyarelal wrote, putting the Mahatma's utopian vision into his own words, "the two communities could coexist in the rest of India, too, without vivisection of the Motherland. On the answer to the challenge of Noakhali thus hung the fate of India." Having placed himself beyond the very periphery of the subcontinent, he now vowed to make isolated Noakhali central to its destiny.

Consciously or not, Gandhi was following his old impulse to turn inward and go it alone, the one that had caused him a decade earlier to attempt to strike out for the remote village of Segaon by himself in hopes of finding a way through obstructions and caste prohibitions that had blocked and defeated his co-workers: the same impulse that had led, in his South Africa years, to the short-lived experiment in communal living called Tolstoy Farm. In an a.n.a.logous quest, he now vowed to bury himself in a remote village in Noakhali where he could go without his entourage and take up residence with a Muslim League family. He said that would be his "ideal." If he failed to find willing Muslim hosts there, he'd live by himself. So he headed for an obscure village called Srirampur, not far from the epicenter of the worst Noakhali violence, bringing with him only an interpreter and a stenographer. The interpreter doubled as a Bengali teacher; he'd now be asked to function as well as ma.s.seur.

The stenographer normally handled Gandhi's correspondence and whipped up the transcripts of his nightly talks at prayer meetings for the small retinue of journalists that trailed him. A pioneer in the art of press manipulation, Gandhi insisted the journalists file not on the words that had actually come out of his mouth but on versions he "authorized" after his own sometimes heavy editing of the transcripts. The journalists-like the armed police detachment a.s.signed by Suhrawardy to protect him-were also instructed to keep a decent distance so that the Mahatma's sense of his solitary mission would not be compromised.

Gandhi now drafted a statement for the colleagues he was leaving behind. "I find myself in the midst of exaggeration and falsity. I am unable to discover the truth," it said. "Oldest friends.h.i.+ps have snapped. Truth and ahimsa by which I swear and which have to my knowledge sustained me for sixty years, seem to fail to show the attributes I ascribed to them." On that unhappy note, he disembarked at Srirampur, where he'd dwell for six weeks in a small wood-frame shelter with walls of corrugated metal and woven palm fronds, making a disciplined effort to push down dark premonitions and thoughts that continued to well up in his mind, waiting for inspiration.

Elderly people still living in the district retain distinct mental images of Gandhi from those days. They picture the public man, animated, soft-spoken, and smiling, his regularly oiled and ma.s.saged skin gleaming. A Hindu woman named Moranjibala Nandi, said by her son to be 105, was capable of describing the moment when the Mahatma came into the compound, where she was still living sixty-three years later, to distribute cloth to refugees. She pointed out the spot where he stood, about twenty yards from where, wrapped in a white widow's sari, she now sat crumpled into something like a small ball with only her sunken cheeks and gnarled, expressive fingers showing. "He didn't have a sad face," she said. I heard descriptions of similar encounters from a half-dozen other nonagenarians and octogenarians. But four days after his arrival in Srirampur, his new interpreter and Bengali tutor, a Calcutta intellectual named Nirmal k.u.mar Bose, heard him muttering to himself in Hindi, "Kya karun, kya karun?" "What should I do, what should I do?" the Mahatma was asking.

If Gandhi returned to Srirampur today, he'd easily recognize the place even though the population has tripled over the decades. Where people actually reside and mingle, the bright sunlight is still largely filtered through palm canopies and foliage of other trees that yield their own modest cash crops-betel nut, papaya, mango-planted as densely as possible not for the shade but the cash. The light that seeps through takes on a greenish, seemingly subaqueous quality that's soothing in contrast to the direct rays that then startle the eye when, following the swept dirt paths that are still the main thoroughfares, the visitor emerges on the embankments that frame the rice paddies, long vistas of a stunning electric green in the growing season that turn scrubby and dun colored after the harvests.

When Gandhi took his twice-a-day walks here, the harvest was just beginning; by the time he left, it was in. The men who lounge around the tea stalls at intersections of the paths mostly wrap themselves in lungis, the casual skirts, tied at the waist, seldom seen in North India. When it's hot, as it mostly is in Bangladesh, they don't bother with s.h.i.+rts. Cars don't get to these hubs-even rickshaws are spa.r.s.e-but buses and trucks can now reach the edge of the village as they couldn't in Gandhi's day, when most transport was by ca.n.a.ls that have long since been choked by hyacinth plants and blocked by buildings on cement pilings.

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In Srirampur (photo credit i11.4) (photo credit i11.4)

"Hardly a wheel turns...I saw no motorable road. The bullock cart, one of India's truest symbols, does not exist here," wrote Phillips Talbot, a young American journalist, later a diplomat, who caught up with Gandhi in Noakhali. "The civilization is amphibious."

Viewed superficially, the place today looks timeless, beyond history, becalmed. But mention Gandhi and the short season of slaughter that made Noakhali notorious, more than six decades ago when what's now Bangladesh was still India, and someone who was a child then steps forward to point out landmarks from his time here or, more likely, the sites from which those landmarks have now vanished. The simple cottage that was thrown up for Gandhi is long gone, as is the ruin of a Hindu landowner's large house that was set on fire before the Mahatma came. But any villager with a little gray in his hair knows where they stood. A banyan tree under which a small Hindu shrine was smashed back then is pointed out as a place where the Mahatma once paused to shake his head over the damage. The shrine has since been restored; the village's handful of Hindus pray there for protection against diseases. At a nearby village mosque an elderly attendant named Abdul Ras.h.i.+d Patwari, now ninety, gives a convincing account of Gandhi's visit on one of his morning walks.

The story is known, but in another sense it's prehistoric since history, as it's taught and understood in today's Bangladesh, generally begins with the country's "liberation" from Pakistan in 1971. The short, twenty-four-year existence of East Pakistan, as the country was called before that sundering, is remembered, when it's acknowledged at all, as a time of heavy-handed oppression by Muslims from the Punjab, on the other side of the subcontinent. Jinnah, never a hero among Bengalis, is lost in a deep amnesia. But Gandhi, faintly venerated as a saintly Hindu who came here on a peace mission, retains a presence. Voices become hushed. His name evokes a formal reverence, even among those who have never known the details of his time here.

Such flimsy sentiments are not without value, but the evidence of the failure of the Mahatma's mission here is also on the surface in Srirampur. If the size of the Hindu population was on the order of one-fifth in East Bengal in 1946, it's now closer to one-twentieth in Srirampur; in its vicinity, no more than five hundred souls. Hardly anyone mourns the long-ago part.i.tion Gandhi was hoping to ward off by raising up a compelling, s.h.i.+ning example of nonviolence that the rest of the subcontinent would have to take into account. That dream is forgotten. What remains is the idea of peace and a lingering impression that it had something to do with good works. There are no memorials for Pakistan in Noakhali, but, amazingly, less than fifteen miles from Srirampur there's a modest Gandhi museum near a town named Joyag, where he once spent a night, part of an underfinanced social service organization called the Gandhi Ashram Trust that traces its inspiration to his time in the district. Its top officers are Hindu, but 80 percent of its beneficiaries are Muslim. There, Bengali women are still taught to spin and weave by hand. The trust hopes it will begin earning a modest profit on its handicrafts sometime soon and thus begin to fulfill the Mahatma's vision. It's enough part of the landscape to maintain good relations with the chairman of the Joyag village council, an orthodox Muslim named Abdue Wahab who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and ran on the ticket of the Jamaat-i-Islami, a religious party generally cla.s.sed as militant. "A man like Gandhi is needed by this society and the world," the Jamaat man told me. Some people in his movement blame him for cooperating with the Gandhi Ashram Trust because Gandhi was a Hindu. "That's due to lack of understanding," Chairman Wahab said, smiling sweetly.

In a nearby village, I sipped the watery, sweet juice of a green coconut with an elderly Hindu and an even more ancient Muslim who remained neighbors as Noakhali became part of Pakistan instead of India, then Bangladesh instead of Pakistan. They now sat side by side. I couldn't be sure whether that was out of long habit or for my benefit. "He brought peace here," the Hindu said piously. "The sad part is no one followed him," the Muslim said. I took that to be a comment on the standard of leaders.h.i.+p the country has seen since. History, it seemed in that moment, had simultaneously moved on and stood still. The killings are remembered as a long-ago typhoon, another kind of natural disaster. Gandhi's time here is sanctified or sentimentalized-depending on how the questions are put-as if his mission somehow accomplished its ends, as if the relative absence of communal violence ever since can be attributed to his influence.

That's not how the Mahatma experienced it. Most of Srirampur's Hindus had, in fact, fled by the time he took up residence there. According to Narayan Desai, only three out of two hundred Hindu families remained. In a letter written in his first week there, Gandhi himself boasts, "There is only one Hindu family living in the entire village, the rest are all Muslims." No Muslim League family ever came forward to offer him the refuge he sought, so he remained in his little cabin, venturing out for his walks, which sometimes included calls on ailing children whose Muslim parents were willing to hear his advice about nature cures involving diet and mud poultices. On rare occasions, he left the village for meetings with local Muslim religious or political leaders, who then routinely would dwell on conditions in Bihar, implying not so subtly that it was time for him to move on. Regularly he met with Gandhian workers he'd stationed in nearby villages in the stricken area, drafting new instructions as they reported on the dearth of cooperation from local officials, following these up with appeals to Suhrawardy, who unfailingly responded by pressing him on the pointlessness of his mission in Bengal while Bihar was burning. a.s.sured by Congress leaders in Bihar that peace had been restored, Gandhi resumed his consumption of goat's milk and gradually increased his daily intake of food. (His weight, so Bose tells us, had dropped to 106 pounds.) His intelligence on Bihar was more to be trusted than Suhrawardy's, he insisted. But he didn't need reminding that he was making little progress. He just had to look around. Few Hindus were returning to their burned-out homes, despite his a.s.surances or promises of a.s.sistance in rebuilding. And Muslims were continuing to distance themselves, boycotting his prayer meetings and the small number of Hindu shopkeepers still in business in the bazaars.

"My unfitness for the task is showing at every step," he declared in the course of his Srirampur sojourn. Once again, it was as if the intractable problem of communal strife in India was somehow internalized within himself, that his failure to work the miracle on which he was bent could be traced to some personal "imperfection" or defect. Ultimately, he'd say exactly that. "I can see there is some grave defect in me somewhere which is the cause of all this. All around me is utter darkness. When will G.o.d take me out of this darkness into his light?"

To speed that illumination, a desperate Gandhi took two vows. On December 11, just three weeks after he arrived in Srirampur, he gave up on his pledge to stay in a single place until a glorious refulgence of peace burst forth for all to see. Instead, he said he'd soon extend his mission by venturing on a Noakhali walking tour, staying in a new village every night. As if to prepare for that challenge, he privately vowed to deepen his personal yajna yajna, his own course of self-sacrifice. What this phase of his life entailed, he convinced himself, was a further testing of his forty-year commitment to celibacy in order to discover the defect at the root of his "unfitness."

So also on that same day, hours before announcing at his evening prayer meeting his new plan to tour the district walking through its harvested paddy fields and over its rickety bamboo bridges, he sent a telegram to a nephew, Jaisukhlal Gandhi, whose young daughter Manu had nursed the Mahatma's wife nearly three years earlier as she faded from life in detention and finally died of heart failure. Now a shy and unaffected seventeen with an appearance that could not be called striking, the devoted Manu had become a favorite pen pal of Gandhi, who coaxed and cajoled her to rejoin his entourage, all the while insisting he only wanted what was best for her. The telegram to her father was oddly worded. It said: "IF YOU AND MANU SINCERELY ANXIOUS FOR HER TO BE WITH ME AT YOUR RISK, YOU CAN BRING HER."

Gandhi made it sound as if he were giving way to the wishes of father and daughter. In fact, he'd planted the idea himself and cultivated it in an epistolary campaign spanning months. "Manu's place can be nowhere else but here by my side," he'd written. It soon became obvious that the Noakhali Gandhi was now bent on making his young relative his primary personal attendant, the person who'd monitor his daily schedule, see that he was fed exactly what he wanted, measured out precisely in ounces (eight ounces boiled vegetables, eight ounces raw vegetables, two ounces greens, sixteen ounces goat's milk boiled down to four ounces), at exactly the desired time; not only that, the person who'd administer his daily bath and ma.s.sage, which could take longer than an hour and a half. An ounce of mustard oil and an ounce of lemon juice had to be mixed for the ma.s.sage, which proceeded "in exactly the same manner every day," according to a memoir Nirmal Bose later wrote: "first one part of the body, then another...in invariable succession."

Even that could be considered just the beginning. It turned out that Manu Gandhi would also be expected to play the female lead in the brahmacharya test the Mahatma now saw as essential to his self-purification. Starting in the late 1930s, he'd had female attendants sleep on bedrolls laid out to the side of his; if he experienced tremors or s.h.i.+vers, as sometimes he did, they'd be expected to embrace him until the shaking stopped. Now he planned to have Manu share the same mattress. Perfection would be achieved if the old man and the young woman wore the fewest possible garments, preferably none, and neither one felt the slightest s.e.xual stirring. A perfect brahmachari, he later wrote in a letter, should be "capable of lying naked with naked women, however beautiful they may be, without being in any manner whatsoever s.e.xually aroused." Such a man would be completely free from anger and malice.

s.e.xlessness was the ideal for which he was striving. His relation to Manu, he told her, would be essentially that of a mother. None of this would go on in secret; other members of his entourage might share the same veranda or room.

What's important here is less Gandhi's belief in the spiritual power to be derived from perfect, serene celibacy than the relation of his striving for self-purification to his lonely mission in Noakhali. Where could the real motivation be located, in his gnawing sense of failure for which a ratcheting up of his brahmacharya might provide healing, or in his need for a human connection, if not the intimacy he'd long since forsworn? There's no obvious answer, except to say the struggle was at the core of his being and that it had never been more anguis.h.i.+ng than it was in Srirampur. The two most conspicuous elements of his life there-the mission and the spiritual striving-are usually treated as separate matters. But, here again, they were happening simultaneously, crowding in on each other: in Gandhi's own mind, inextricably connected to the point of being one and the same.

The immediate effect of his summons to Manu was a cascading emotional crisis in his own inner circle, all taking place in the obscurity and shade of mostly Muslim Srirampur but soon seeping into public view. Plainly, the starting point was within Gandhi himself, in his sense that doctrine and mission were failing. "I don't want to return from Bengal defeated," he remarked to a friend a few days after the summons to Manu. "I would rather die, if need be, at the hands of an a.s.sa.s.sin. But I do not want to court it, much less wish it."

He'd cleared the decks for her arrival by dispatching his closest a.s.sociates-notably Pyarelal, his secretary, and Pyarelal's sister, Dr. Sus.h.i.+la Nayar-to workstations in other villages. Sus.h.i.+la had previously played the part for which Manu was now being recruited. Back in 1938, Gandhi had tried out a young Jewish woman from Palestine named Hannah Lazar, a niece of Hermann Kallenbach's, who'd trained in ma.s.sage. "Of course she knows her art," he wrote to her uncle in Johannesburg. "But she can't all of a sudden equal the touch of Sus.h.i.+la who is a competent doctor and who learned ma.s.sage especially for treating me." Here Gandhi sounds more like a discriminating pasha with a harem than the ascetic he genuinely was.

Now, more than eight years after this letter and just six days after his summons to Manu, Gandhi told Sus.h.i.+la that it would remain her duty to stay in her village-in other words, that she'd not be included on his walking tour, because Manu would be taking care of his most personal needs. Nirmal Bose, who was standing just outside, heard "a deeply anguished cry proceeding from the main room...[followed by] two large slaps given on someone's body. The cry then sank down into a heavy sob." When Bose got to the doorway, both Gandhi and Sus.h.i.+la were "bathed in tears." The cries and heavy sob had been the Mahatma's, he realized. Three days later, while bathing Gandhi for what appears to have been the last time, Bose summoned the courage to ask him whether he'd slapped Sus.h.i.+la. "Gandhiji's face wore a sad smile," Bose wrote in his memoir, "and he said, 'No, I did not beat her. I beat my own forehead.'" That same evening, on December 20, 1946, with Manu beside him in his bed for the first time, Gandhi began his supposed yajna, or self-sacrifice, sometimes termed an "experiment" by him.

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With Manu, his "walking stick" (photo credit i11.5) (photo credit i11.5)

"Stick to your word," he wrote in a note to Manu that day. "Don't hide even a single thought from me...Have it engraved in your heart that whatever I ask or say will be solely for your good."

Within ten days, Gandhi's stenographer, a young South Indian named Parsuram, quit in protest over his revered leader's nightly cuddle with Manu, which he couldn't fail to have witnessed. Instead of questioning Gandhi's explanation of its spiritual purpose, he registered a political complaint-that the inevitable reports and gossip would alienate public opinion. His argument didn't impress the Mahatma. "I like your frankness and boldness," he wrote to the young man after reading his ten-page letter of resignation. "You are at liberty to publish whatever wrong you have noticed in me and my surroundings." Later he scolded Bose for glossing over in his Bengali interpretation his attempt at one of his prayer meetings to offer a frank public account of the latest test he'd set for himself.

Pyarelal was also drawn into this emotional maelstrom, and not simply because he was partial to his sister. He'd had a crush on Manu himself. Gandhi now promised to keep his secretary at a distance if Manu "does not want even to see him." He could testify to his aide's good character. "Pyarelal's eyes are clean," he wrote to Manu's father a week before she was scheduled to reach Noakhali, "and he is not likely to force himself on anybody." Gandhi then writes to Pyarelal urging him to keep his distance. "I can see that you will not be able to have Manu as a wife," says the revered figure who is now bedding down next to her on a nightly basis. Self-purification, it was already clear, could not be attempted in this world without complications.

Nirmal Bose, the detached Calcutta intellectual serving as Gandhi's Bengali interpreter, wasn't initially judgmental about Gandhi's reliance on Manu. But his allegiance was gradually strained as he observed Gandhi's manipulative way of managing the emotional ripples that ran through his entourage at a moment of national and personal crisis. He felt the Mahatma, in his preoccupation with the feelings of Pyarelal and his sister, was allowing himself to get distracted. "After a life of prolonged brahmacharya," Bose wrote in his diary, "he has become incapable of understanding the problems of love or s.e.x as they exist in the common human plane." So Bose took it upon himself, in conversation and several long letters over the next three months, to acquaint his master with the psychoa.n.a.lytic concepts of the subconscious, neurosis, and repression. Gandhi jumped on a single pa.s.sing reference to Freud in one of Bose's letters. He'd read Havelock Ellis and Bertrand Russell on s.e.x but not Freud. It was only the second time, he wrote back, that he'd heard the name. "What is Freudian philosophy?" asked the Mahatma, ever curious. "I have not read any writing of his."

Bose's basic point was made more bluntly in his diary and a letter to a friend than in his correspondence with the Mahatma. It was that Gandhi had allowed himself to use his bedmates as instruments in an experiment undertaken for his own sake and that he thus risked leaving "a mark of injury on personalities of others who are not of the same moral stature...and for whom sharing in Gandhiji's experiment is no spiritual necessity." He thought Manu might be an exception but wasn't sure. Despite his restraint, Gandhi got the point. "I do hope you will acquit me of having any l.u.s.tful designs upon women or girls who have been naked with me," he wrote back. That was the one count on which the Freudian in Bose felt certain of Gandhi's innocence.

Feeling himself to have been distanced by his own frankness, Bose came to doubt he could be of much further use to Gandhi. Finally he asked to be relieved of his duties. In a valedictory letter, he said he saw signs that the Mahatma had, in fact, begun to attain the level of concentrated personal force for which he'd been reaching in these months: "I saw your strength come back in flashes when you rose to heights no one else has reached in our national life."

A week after Gandhi established his grandniece Manu in his household and bed, the urgency and weight of the const.i.tutional crisis in New Delhi descended on the remote village of Srirampur, brought there on a visit of two and a half days by Nehru, now head of an "interim government" still subject to the British viceroy, and Nehru's successor as Congress president, J. B. Kripalani, a follower of Gandhi's for three decades. Given that the Congress president's wife, Sucheta, had shared the Mahatma's bed with him and Manu on one recent night, there was no need for Gandhi to brief his visitors on the yajna he'd just undertaken. According to one account, Nehru himself came to the doorway of the room where Gandhi and Manu slept on his first night in Srirampur; having looked in, he silently stepped away. The sketchy account does not record whether he raised his eyebrows or shook his head.

In the following month, Gandhi would seek to explain his quest to both men in letters. Neither wanted to sit in judgment on the Mahatma. "I can never be disillusioned about you unless I find the marks of insanity and depravity in you," Kripalani replied. "I do not find such marks." Nehru was even more reticent. "I feel a little out of my depth and I hate discussing personal and private matters," he wrote to a mentor he revered but frequently found perplexing, even troublesome.

Gandhi had first singled Nehru out as a Congress leader in 1928 and, while acknowledging conspicuous differences in outlook, had been openly calling him "my heir and successor" since 1934 when he made a show of giving up his own Congress members.h.i.+p. "Jawaharlal is the only man with the drive to take my place," he remarked five years later. For all his doting on Nehru, this was a practical political judgment based on two obvious factors-Nehru's demonstrated ma.s.s appeal and tendency in a crisis to bend to the Mahatma's view. He knew his heir would never score high on any checklist of Gandhian values, that the younger man, more a Fabian than a Gandhian, could be expected to promote state planning and nationalized industries over the sort of village-level reconstruction he'd always advocated, that there was little question in his mind about the need for a modern military establishment in a future Indian state. But he waved aside such contradictions, treating them as matters of emphasis. "He says what is uppermost in his mind," Gandhi observed in 1938, in a comment as revealing of himself as it was of Nehru, "but he always does what I want. When I am gone he will do what I am doing now. Then he will speak my language."

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With his chosen "successor," 1946 (photo credit i11.6) (photo credit i11.6)

Later he got closer to the truth, perhaps, when he said of Nehru: "He has made me captive of his love."

But now-with the Noakhali Gandhi out of touch and power s.h.i.+fting rapidly into his hands-Nehru, by inclination as well as necessity, was speaking his own language and listening less. The ostensible point of his journey to Srirampur had been to update Gandhi on a resolution he planned to put before the party the next week, further locking it into a process that could lead to part.i.tion and Pakistan; also, Nehru said, it was to urge Gandhi to put Noakhali behind him and return to Delhi so he could be more easily consulted and-this would have gone without saying-privately implored not to stray too far from the emerging party line.

The Mahatma's appet.i.te for grappling with national issues was tickled, but he wasn't tempted to return. He said there was still work to be done in Noakhali; by his own reckoning, his mission there would remain unfinished until the day he died. More compelling was his sense that he'd lost the ability to influence his erstwhile followers, as he'd recently complained in a note to the industrialist G. D. Birla. "My voice," the note said, "carries no weight in the Working Committee...I do not like the shape that things are taking and I can't speak out."

Such misgivings, however, didn't stop him from sending Nehru back with "instructions." The doc.u.ment, drafted late on Nehru's last night in Srirampur, pointed in several directions at once. Basically, it said Gandhi had been right in suggesting the Congress reject the British plan; that now that it had failed to heed his advice, it was stuck with the plan; that therefore it needed an accord with Jinnah giving him "a universally acceptable and inoffensive formula for his Pakistan," so long as no territories were compelled to be part of it.

The phrase "acceptable and inoffensive" was telling. It pointed in more or less the same direction as Nehru's unusually dense resolution, which all but smothered its essential acceptance of an unpalatable British formula with a blanket of technicalities, exceptions, and complaints. Between the lines, both Gandhi's "instructions" and Nehru's resolution pointed to the quickest deal for independence, on the best available terms, with the fewest possible concessions to the Muslim League. Obviously, Gandhi meant "acceptable" and "inoffensive" to the Congress and himself, not Jinnah and his followers; he didn't say how that could be accomplished. On one level, he hadn't budged from the position he'd taken when Jinnah broke off talks with him two years earlier. On another, he'd shown that he'd do nothing to delay a handover of power even if it involved two recipients instead of one.

Nehru's resolution was adopted the next week by the All India Congress Committee by something less than acclamation, a vote of 9952. When a member asked to know Gandhi's advice, Kripalani snapped that it was "irrelevant at this stage," not bothering to cite the woolly "instructions" the Mahatma had written out for Nehru, who'd flown to East Bengal, it seems likely, partly to ensure that Gandhi wouldn't come out on the other side. Gandhi himself had been pleased to paper over his most recent breach with the leaders.h.i.+p. "I suggest frequent consultations with an old, tried servant of the nation," he'd written in a fond farewell note to Nehru.

Just two days later, on the second day of the new year, he pulled up stakes in Srirampur and left on his walking tour of Noakhali, with one hand clutching a bamboo staff and the other resting on Manu's shoulder. He was barefoot and would continue without sandals every step of the way for the next two months. In the mornings, the pilgrim's feet were sometimes numbed by cold; on one occasion at least, they bled. Nightly they were pressed and ma.s.saged with oil. Srirampur's Muslim villagers lined the path that circled Darikanath pond, a well-stocked fishery, that first morning; a crowd of about a hundred walked in his footsteps, with a detachment of eight armed police and at least as many reporters. The next morning headlines in Calcutta's Indian-owned, pro-Congress, English-language daily, the Amrita Bazar Patrika Amrita Bazar Patrika, heralded the launch: GANDHIJI'S EPIC TOUR BEGINS.

HISTORIC M MARCH T THROUGH.

PADDY F FIELDS AND AND.

GREEN G GROVES.

GANDHIJI LIKELY.

TO WORK.

MIRACLE.

The newspaper kept the tour on its front page every day but one for the next six weeks, conveying the authorized versions of Gandhi's nightly prayer meeting talks. Too early by a matter of decades to have made great television, it faded as a big story elsewhere. So the loneliness and vicissitudes of the trek never really registered beyond Bengal. After the first few days, the crowds dwindled, with Muslims once again conspicuous by their absence. This time there could be little doubt that elements in the Muslim League were promoting a boycott. In the second month, handbills started appearing urging Gandhi to focus on Bihar, amplifying the theme of most Muslim officials he encountered. "Remember Bihar," one said. "We've warned you many times. Go back. Otherwise, you'll be sorry." Obviously meant for his eyes, another said: "Give up your hypocrisy and accept Pakistan."

On some mornings, Gandhi's companions would find that human feces had been deposited, dumped, or spread on paths he could be expected to walk. On his way to a village called Atakora, the old man himself stooped over and started scooping up excrement with dried leaves. A fl.u.s.tered Manu protested that he was putting her to shame. "You don't know the joy it gives me," the Mahatma, now seventy-seven, replied.

In fifty-seven days, he visited forty-seven villages in Noakhali and a neighboring district called Tipperah, trudging 116 miles, barefoot all the way, in order to touch Muslims' hearts through a personal demonstration of his own openheartedness and simplicity. He called it a "pilgrimage." Sometimes he said it was a "penance," for the slaughter Hindus and Muslims had recently inflicted on each other, or his own failure to end it. He greeted every Muslim he pa.s.sed, even where most of them stolidly refrained from responding. Only three times, in all those days and weeks, all those villages, was he invited to stay in a Muslim home. His followers prefabricated a tidy hut of bamboo panels to be disa.s.sembled on a daily basis and, with each new village, rea.s.sembled for his comfort. He complained it was "palatial." When he learned it took seven porters to carry his collapsible shelter, he refused to sleep in it, insisting it be converted into a dispensary. If Muslims stayed away from his prayer meetings, he pursued them in their houses and huts. In each new village, Manu was dispatched to call on Muslim women in seclusion. Sometimes she managed to persuade them to meet the Mahatma, sometimes doors were slammed in her face. When young Muslim Leaguers came to his meetings to heckle, he turned back their sharp questions with calm, reasoned replies.

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January 1947, bones of Noakhali victims on display for the Mahatma (photo credit i11.7) (photo credit i11.7)

"How did your ahimsa work in Bihar?" he was pointedly asked in a village called Paniala.

"It didn't work at all," he replied. "It failed miserably."

"What in your opinion is the cause of the communal riots?" another asked.

"The idiocy of both communities," said the Mahatma.

Twice in nine weeks, he's brought to exposed human remains left over from the killings. The first time, on November 11, a stray dog leads him to the skeletons of the members of a single Hindu household; then, on January 11, he pa.s.ses by a doba doba, or pond, that has finally been dragged to retrieve the bodies of Hindus killed in the earliest and ugliest of these pogroms at Karpara.

The Mahatma moved on briskly. "It is useless to think about those who are dead," he said. His aim was less to console bereaved Hindus than to stiffen their spines while touching the hearts of Muslims who'd looked away from the carnage, or even approved it. He could only demonstrate his good intentions "by living and moving among those who do not trust me," he said. So every morning, he trudged on, regardless of the reception he encountered. His followers sang religious songs, always including one by Tagore with a Bengali poem called "Walk Alone" as its lyric. Occasionally there was a welcome, occasionally a large crowd. In the fourth week, at a village called Muriam, a warm reception from Muslims was orchestrated by a friendly maulana named Habibullah Batari who, if Pyarelal's account can be accepted, introduced him by saying: "Our community today suffers from the stigma of shedding the blood of our Hindu brothers. Mahatmaji has come to free us of that stain." For Gandhi, this was proof of the possibilities before him and the country. But it was hardly an everyday occurrence. At Panchgaon, four days later, he was urged by the head of the local Muslim League to discontinue his prayer meetings because they offended Muslims and, better yet, end his Noakhali tour altogether.

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In his mobile hut, November 1946 (photo credit i11.8) (photo credit i11.8)

At the prayer meetings, he'd size up his audiences, then draw familiar themes and messages from the repertoire of a lifetime. If seeking to make the point that he and the village workers he brought with him had come not to sit in judgment but to serve, he'd dwell on all that could be done to improve sanitation and the cleanliness of the district's water. Speaking of lost livelihoods, he'd talk about crafts and what they could do for village uplift. On the fraught, overarching issue of land tenure, he'd say the land belonged to G.o.d and those who actually worked it, that reduction in the landlord's share of crops was therefore only just, with the Gandhian proviso that it had to be accomplished without violence.

The value he upheld most insistently was fearlessness. To insure peace, he said, Muslims and Hindus had to be ready to die. It's the message he'd given Czechs and European Jews in the previous decade about how to face the n.a.z.is, the idea that a courageous satyagrahi could "melt the heart" of a tyrant. Repeatedly he asked that the police guards Suhrawardy had sent be withdrawn so as not to weaken the example he was hoping to set through his pilgrimage. (The guards never left. Suhrawardy said it was the government's responsibility to make sure the Mahatma got out of East Bengal alive.) Early on he talked about martyrdom: "The sacrifice of myself and my companions would at least teach [Hindu women] the art of dying with self-respect. It might open the eyes of the oppressors, too." To a refugee who asked how he could expect Hindus to return to villages where they might face attack, he replied: "I do not mind if each and every one of the five hundred families in your area is done to death." Before arriving in Noakhali, he'd struck a similar note speaking to a trio of Gandhian workers who were planning to precede him: "There will be no tears but only joy if tomorrow I get the news that all three of you were killed."

Not infrequently in these months, Gandhi comes across as sounding this extreme, very nearly the fanatic he'd sometimes been accused of being. We may a.s.sume it's a figure of speech, not meant to be taken literally. But even Manu isn't immune from his determination to teach that his kind of courage in the cause of peace could be-sometimes had to be-as fierce and selfless as any shown on a battlefield.

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(photo credit i11.9)

On reaching a village called Narayanpur in the third week of the walking tour, Gandhi couldn't find a piece of pumice he used to sc.r.a.pe his feet before soaking them. He'd last used it at a weaver's hut where he'd stopped to warm his chilled feet. Evidently, Manu had left the stone behind. This was a "major error," Gandhi said sternly, ordering her to retrace their steps and find it, which meant following a path through thick jungle in an area where a.s.saults on young women were not unknown. When she asked if she could take a couple of volunteers, Gandhi refused. She had to go alone. The weaver's wife had tossed the stone out, not knowing that the Mahatma counted it as precious. When Manu finally recovered it and returned, Pyarelal tells us, she burst into tears, only to be met by Gandhi's cackle. To him, her afternoon's ordeal was part of their mutual "test."

"If some ruffian had carried you off and you had met your death courageously," he told her, "my heart would have danced with joy. But I would have felt humiliated and unhappy if you had turned back or run away from danger."