11

Partition and Death

LORD WAVELL, a career soldier, was more interested in efficiency than in quibbling. He welcomed Congress and others addressing the problems of India in a practical manner; he had no respect for ‘Quit India’ or any other sloganising. He quickly organised relief for famine-stricken Bengal, a task that had been neglected by his aristocratic predecessor. A cultured and versatile man who wrote verse, Wavell was appalled at the poor quality of the administrators who had been left behind to run India while better men were doing war work. He freed Gandhi despite his own musings on the subject: ‘Personally I could not see that we gained much credit by releasing him at the point of death; and if he was not at the point of death there was no need of such hurry.’¹

Churchill had agreed to free Gandhi partly because it was felt unlikely that he would ever be well enough to return to active politics. But with his usual knack of surprising his enemies, Gandhi’s spirits rose with his recuperation in the houses of his wealthy supporters and he was soon his old self again. He asked to see the (still imprisoned) Congress working committee members and the Viceroy. The United Provinces Governor Sir Maurice Hallett considered Gandhi ‘cunning as a cartload of monkeys’ and advised Wavell not to see him.² Churchill, wondering why Gandhi was not dead yet, was opposed to the Viceroy’s giving imperial attention to a prisoner recently released on the grounds of ill-health. Wavell merely suggested that if Gandhi had ‘a definite and constructive policy to propose for the furtherance of India’s welfare’ he would be glad to consider it. ‘Quit India had cost the nationalists dear in terms of the latitude the British were prepared to extend. Wavell’s wish to be at least courteous in his correspondence was frustrated by the fact that he was expected to get London’s approval for everything he wrote to Gandhi, so that his drafts were sharpened up and made more arrogant by the intervention of Whitehall.

Gandhi often declared: ‘I consider the vivisection of India to be a sin,’ but there had in fact been a major shift in attitudes.³ The senior Congressman Rajagopalachari had not taken part in the Quit India movement and had therefore remained at liberty. Both as a respected politician and as a family member (his daughter was married to Gandhi’s son Devdas) he had access to Gandhi, and he visited the Aga Khan Palace in February 1943. There he floated a scheme, which Gandhi accepted, for a Congress-Muslim League national government and a plebiscite to determine whether the Muslim-majority provinces wanted to secede. In the event of separation, mutual agreements would cover such matters as defence, commerce and communications. This would be a federation with a promise of local Muslim rule in the Muslim-majority provinces. The far-sighted Rajagopalachari, who was to become the first Indian Governor General, had two objectives. One was to maintain India’s integrity during the war and address the challenge of Japan, which he saw as his country’s major foe. Second, he wanted to keep India entire, as a joint Hindu and Muslim state, after the granting of independence when the fears of invasion and resentment of the British would be things of the past; and a popular government would have to work out the nation’s future.

By July 1944 Rajagopalachari was ready to present his formula to the public. He told Jinnah that Gandhi was not inflexible, but Jinnah needed to hear it from Gandhi himself, and talks between the two on the constitutional future of the country were announced. Gandhi’s meetings with Jinnah had the long-term effect of stimulating the supporters of Vinayak Savarkar, the Hindu extremist with whose views Gandhi had clashed in London thirty-five years previously, and in response to whose arguments he had writtenHind Swaraj. When it was announced that Gandhi would meet Jinnah, two of Savarkar’s followers, Nathuram Godse and L.G. Thatte, led some supporters to Gandhi’s ashram at Sevagram, intending to form a picket to stop him from leaving. The police arrested the leaders and found a dagger on Thatte, who said that a martyr would kill Gandhi. As president of the All-India Hindu Mahasabha Savarkar warned the Secretary of State for India Leo Amery: ‘Hindusabhites can never tolerate breaking up of union of India their fatherland and holy-land.’⁴

Gandhi talked with Jinnah fourteen times, each time walking from where he was staying with the Birlas on Mount Pleasant Road to Jinnah’s house in the same exclusive Malabar Hill area of Bombay. Gandhi found the meetings with Jinnah exhausting; Jinnah had first asked what the point was in talking to him if he represented only himself. ‘It was a test of patience,’ Gandhi explained to Rajagopalachari. ‘I was amazed at my own patience.’ Pressed on Pakistan, Gandhi conceded to Jinnah: ‘I endorse Rajaji’s [Rajagopalachari’s] formula and you can call it Pakistan if you like.’⁵

Gandhi was therefore prepared to ask Congress for a post-independence secession by plebiscite, as in Rajagopalachari’s formula. It still did not go far enough for Jinnah, who wanted his Pakistan to be larger and with more sovereign powers than those which Gandhi was prepared to endorse, and he wanted it before independence. The principle was conceded, nevertheless, but Gandhi later backed off. He began again to criticise the entire principle of the Muslims in India constituting a separate nation, particularly given that if there were a plebiscite, Jinnah did not want non-Muslims to have a right to vote on the issue in Muslim-majority provinces—hardly a democratic procedure.

While Wavell thought both leaders were ‘obstinate, intransigent, crafty old men,’ he at least felt they could achieve something. But his conclusion was: ‘The two great mountains have met and not even a mouse has emerged.’⁶ Wavell analysed the differences between them: Jinnah wanted Pakistan first and independence afterwards, ‘while Gandhi wants independence first with some kind of self-determination for Muslims to be granted by a provisional government which would be predominantly Hindu.’⁷ Jinnah simply did not believe that a Hindu-majority government would grant any significant level of Muslim self-determination. He was betting on getting Pakistan from the British before they left.

They were unable to continue their meetings, which had anyway become less than cordial, in January 1945 because both were ill, Jinnah with pleurisy. If Gandhi was often distinguished by putting this whole body into the national struggle, Jinnah was no less so: he maintained a glassy outward persona while his body was racked with disease; every public appearance took an effort of will.

Jinnah unwound enough to mention to Gandhi that he was troubled by a nervous rash on one foot. Gandhi knelt on the floor and insisted he remove Jinnah’s shoes and socks, then held the affected part, saying: ‘I know what will heal you. I will send it tomorrow morning.’ He sent a box of healing earth, which Jinnah accepted with his usual good manners, declaring he had already seen improvement, but in fact he made no more use of that than of anything else Gandhi had to offer.⁸ As to his own health, Gandhi was suffering from exhaustion, amoebic dysentery and a bronchial cough. His cure for these ills was, of course, to propose a fast. With exquisite diplomacy, Rajagopalachari suggested a ‘work-fast’ for a month. Gandhi succumbed to his love of novelty, and had what anyone else would call a rest.

Wavell lobbied British politicians for the release of the other Congress leaders—Churchill had kept them locked up long after detention served any useful purpose. Finally the Viceroy was able to announce in a radio broadcast the release of the Congress working committee in June 1945. Indian leaders were now invited to talk with the Viceroy at Simla about the composition of a new interim government council. Gandhi was invited, and went to the town to be consulted but did not attend the meetings. In his progress by train he was greeted by crowds ‘delirious and deaf with love or joy.’⁹ Jinnah thought the choice not to attend the conference was ‘another trick of Gandhi’s, he pretended not to belong to Congress when it suited his book, but when necessary appeared as the Dictator of Congress which everyone knew he was.’¹⁰

The proceedings at Wavell’s conference were blocked by Jinnah’s insistence that the League alone should represent Muslims. In part this was attributable to Jinnah’s nature, but it was also a result of government policy. Neither Wavell nor Churchill was prepared to see a Congress-dominated constitutional conference, so they elevated the League to parity with Congress, a danger Congress should have foreseen in 1939 when they withdrew from the provincial ministries and left a political vacuum for the Muslim League to fill. Jinnah’s intransigence was the correct stance for him politically: he gained ground against non-Muslim League co-religionists who now felt progress could not be made outside the League.

Events in India were accelerated by the British elections in 1945 with Labour coming to power in July; a Labour or Liberal victory had always been good for progressive Indian politics. The government was now led by Clement Attlee, who had sent Cripps to offer dominion status in 1942. Having been a member of the Simon Commission, he knew both the constitutional problems and the strength of Indian nationalist feeling.

Elections were to be held in India in 1945–6 for the central assembly and the provincial legislatures. The elections were held—and independence was voted for—under the prevailing legislation, the Government of India Act of 1935. Congress campaigned on the principle of independence, the Muslim League on the creation of Pakistan. In what was virtually a straightforward battle between them, the Muslim League won all the assembly seats reserved for Muslims and more than 80 per cent of the Muslim seats in the provincial legislatures; Congress became the largest single party in the assembly, and won 90 per cent of the provincial seats, forming ministries in eight provinces with a share in a coalition in another.

Gandhi took no interest in these matters. ‘For years I have not been taking any part in elections,’ he explained.¹¹ He argued with Jawaharlal Nehru about his vision of India as expressed in Hind Swaraj and frequently expressed thereafter, of a village nation sustained by farming and home spinning, enjoying the purifying influence of physical labour. Nehru argued for progress through science and industrialisation.

Gandhi had promoted Nehru as the next president of Congress, meaning that he would, in the course of things, become prime minister. He had not been the only candidate, but Gandhi pressed the other two, Vallabhbhai Patel and J. R. Kripalani, to withdraw. Nehru was therefore selected as head of the interim government that would bridge the gap between British rule and independence. Nehru was the natural leader, anointed by Gandhi as his heir despite their differences. Subhas Chandra Bose would not be coming back from the Far East: he had died in a plane crash. Patel, the other realistic option, was dominated by Gandhi and would do as he was told.

From August to October 1945 Gandhi reverted to his passion for healing the sick, working in a clinic near Poona. He used to prescribe the repetition of the name of God (Ramanama), sunbathing, hip baths and simple eliminative diets of milk, fruit and fruit juices with plenty of clean fresh water. He explained: ‘All mental and physical ailments are due to one common cause. It is, therefore, but natural that there should be a common remedy for them, too... I therefore prescribed Ramanama and almost the same treatment to all the patients who came to me this morning.’¹² He also used to visit the homes of patients and comment on their cleanliness and sanitary arrangements.

He did not comment on the atomic bomb after its use on Japan in August 1945, answering a journalist quixotically: ‘The more I think the more I feel I must not speak on the atomic bomb. I must act if I can.’¹³ He used it as a metaphor, however, for a cycle of violence: ‘The world has reached the stage of atomic warfare in returning violence for violence. Let us pray to God that he will save us from this atom bomb mentality. I have been persuading everyone to observe silence in reply to abuse or violence.’¹⁴

He had returned to the ashram, ever irritated by the quarrels, the differences of opinion and the temperaments of the ashramites; sometimes he wondered whether to close it down and take up a peripatetic life. In early 1946, sidelined by the political process—for he was neither standing for election nor negotiating with the government—Gandhi travelled to Bengal, Assam, Orissa and south India where people would walk for miles just for a glimpse of this exalted person.

In this restless spirit he moved on to ever more testing experiments in brahmacharya. ‘I deliberately want to become a eunuch mentally,’ he explained. ‘If I succeed in this then I become one physically also.’¹⁵ He detailed the precise difficulty, that of controlling ejaculation in sexually challenging circumstances: ‘I did have experiments with Ba, but that was not enough. If emission took place then, it would have been less regrettable morally than any emission occurring now. Emission was a possibility then. I feel it is not a possibility now.’¹⁶ It is unclear precisely what was taking place, but it is quite possible that the ‘experiments’ did not merely entail his being in the presence of naked women but that some further stimulation was involved during which he must withhold ejaculation for the experiment to be considered a success.

He had blessed the celibate marriage of his submissive ashram manager Munnalal Shah to the rather more wilful Kanchan, and was not short of instructions as to how they should behave. To Munnalal: ‘You should not meet alone, nor touch each other... You should not talk with each other, nor work together, or take service from each other. I would advise you to go away for some time.’¹⁷ In a later letter Gandhi was to describe to Munnalal how he had obliged Kanchan to sleep with him: ‘Abha slept with me for hardly three nights. Kanchan slept one night only. Vina’s sleeping with me might be called an accident. All that can be said is that she slept close to me.’ This is an interesting remark, implying that really getting into the spirit of the experiment was something more than just sleeping close to Gandhi. He continued: ‘Kanchan’s case was rather tragic. I didn’t understand her at all. What Abha or Kanchan told me was this: that she [Kanchan] had no intention whatever of observing brahmacharya but wished to enjoy the pleasure of sex. She, therefore, stayed only reluctantly, and undressed only for fear of hurting me. If I remember rightly, she was not with me even for an hour.’¹⁸ How that information left the state of Munnalal Shah’s marriage can only be imagined.

Despite criticism of his behaviour, he continued having physical contact with women, justifying himself via the circular argument that ceasing now would be to concede that he was wrong to have started. ‘If I stop sleeping together for all time it will mean that I have been mistaken. Otherwise why should I stop it? There is a limit to abstaining from it for the sake of my friends.’ It was not a path for others to follow, however: ‘The experiment is not to be imitated. But if I can become a perfect brahmachari thereby, would I not be able to contribute more to the welfare of the world?’¹⁹ He was, therefore, connecting the degree of sexual restraint he could achieve with the contribution he could make to humanity. The more he could resist increasing sexual challenges, the better he would be.

Following Kasturba’s death Gandhi showed signs of valuing his family more. His grandson Arun, Manilal’s son, visited his father in 1945 and 1946. He was ‘amazed at his capacity to be loving and grandfatherly one moment, and a serious politician the next. He spent an hour with me every day, and he told me stories and examined my lessons.’²⁰ Manilal, who had been editing Indian Opinion in South Africa, noticed how much Gandhi’s attitude had changed since his own childhood:

It seemed to me that he spoilt those near him by his extreme love and affection. They had become his spoilt children, as it were, and much more so after my mother had been called away from this life... One of the things that struck me was the extreme softness in father’s attitude compared with what it was when we four brothers were under him... When I saw this, many a time I chafed him and said to father, ‘Bapu, you have vastly changed from the time we were under you. You never pampered us; I remember how you made us do laundry work and chop wood; how you made us to take the pick and shovel in the bitterly cold mornings and dig in the garden, to cook and to walk miles. And I am surprised to see how you now pamper these people around you.

Gandhi would listen, then burst into hearty laughter. ‘Well children,’ he would say, ‘are you listening to what Manilal is saying?’ And he would love and caress them as his own children had so wanted to be loved.²¹

The principle of Indian independence was conceded without fanfare on 15 March 1946 by prime minister Attlee in the House of Commons. A British journalist, H.N. Brailsford, found Gandhi ‘happy when I met him, for Mr Attlee’s speech in the Indian debate had just opened the road to Indian independence. He looked well and very much less than his age... His manner was never solemn and often he relaxed in a humorous chuckle.’²²

The Labour Secretary of State for India was an old friend, Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, once a leading backer of the suffragette movement; Gandhi had seen his wife Emmeline speak in London before the First World War. As a pacifist, a socialist and someone who himself had been imprisoned for his actions in support of women’s suffrage and had been on hunger strike, he was more Gandhian than most British politicians. Pethick-Lawrence and Stafford Cripps were sent as part of a cabinet mission in March 1946 with the objectives of forging an interim national government and resolving the problem of Pakistan with a constitutional settlement. Pethick-Lawrence visited Gandhi in the colony of untouchables where he was living on the Reading Road in Delhi, and attended some of his prayer meetings.

It would take more than goodwill to square the circle of communal aspirations in India, however. Wavell and the cabinet mission met Gandhi on 3 April—‘naked except for a dhoti and looking remarkably healthy,’ noted Wavell despondently. He remarked how Pethick-Lawrence ‘began with his usual sloppy benevolence to this malevolent old politician, who for all his sanctimonious talk has, I am sure, very little softness in his composition.’²³ Gandhi began talking about the salt tax; Wavell noted in his journal that he had never heard anyone but Gandhi suggest it was oppressive, but Gandhi wanted it removed as a sop to his vanity as he had gone to prison over it. Wavell felt the cabinet mission showed ‘absurd deference’ to Gandhi, who had ‘brought to a fine art the technique of vagueness and of never making a statement which is not somehow so qualified or worded, that he cannot be pinned down to anything definite.’²⁴ Gandhi stayed out of the detailed negotiations, though he put forward his ideas of government to the mission: independence first, before any moves toward the creation of Pakistan, with Jinnah leading the government if that was what it would take to keep him in the process.

The cabinet mission negotiated the perilous waters of Indian politics with not only the Muslims and Hindus but the Sikhs and untouchables also wanting a say in the future constitution. Another Simla conference was convened in May 1946; again Gandhi did not attend but stayed nearby, and leaders went to see him every morning in his bungalow. Wavell noted that Gandhi ‘seemed quite unmoved by the prospect of civil war. I think he has adopted Patel’s thesis that if we are firm the Muslims will not fight.’²⁵ The Muslims knew this line of reasoning, and had every intention of fighting; if anything, Jinnah had trouble holding back his co-religionists.

On 16 May 1946 the cabinet mission declared a plan for a federated India with strong provincial governments and a central government retaining responsibility for defence, foreign affairs and communications. They rejected a separate Pakistan but the provinces would form three groups for intermediate administration: the Punjab, the Afghan Province (North-West Frontier), plus Sind and Baluchistan together—as one big provincial grouping. The second group would contain Bengal, which was heavily Muslim, and the next-door province Assam; and the third would contain all the rest of India. The mission wanted this to be the constitutional basis on which an assembly would meet—a compromise on the framework on which everyone was agreed.

There seemed to be slow progress towards agreement. Cripps and Pethick-Lawrence retained their faith in Gandhi until 20 May when he called for the British to leave, whatever the constitutional position, saying there should be an Indian national government before a constitutional assembly was called. This would mean the British would leave without a settlement of the claims of the Muslim League. It was effectively what he had been asking for in 1942—for the British to leave the Indians to their disputes, which, given the Hindu majority, meant their domination over the Muslims—exactly what Jinnah was attempting to prevent. Wavell enjoyed the scene: ‘I have never seen three men taken more aback by this revelation of Gandhi in his true colours... Cripps and the Secretary of State were shaken to the core.’²⁶ They were learning the facts of Gandhian logic: he did not lie, but he had his own interpretation of the truth. Pethick-Lawrence declared that only cabinet mission members should see Gandhi in future, and notes should be taken of all meetings.

After many weeks of wrangling, Congress accepted the mission’s long-term constitutional assembly plans—the ‘grouping’ of provinces into a proto-Pakistan—which, as he had opposed them, was an indication of Gandhi’s declining influence in Congress. Pyarelal recorded the moment when he admitted defeat and the Congress working party, chaired by Abul Kalam Azad, who was a Muslim but opposed to the Muslim League, let him go: A hush fell on the gathering. Nobody spoke for some time. [Abul Kalam Azad] with his unfailing alertness at once took in the situation. “What do you desire? Is there any need to detain Bapu any further?” he asked. Everybody was silent. Everybody understood. In that hour of decision they had no use for Bapu. They decided to drop the pilot. Bapu returned to his residence.’²⁷

Jinnah and the Muslim League had accepted the plan on the grounds that if they accepted it and Congress rejected it, Wavell would ask Jinnah to form the interim government. The cabinet mission returned to Britain at the end of June, believing they had achieved their objective.

Presumably under Gandhi’s influence, Nehru scuppered the agreement at the beginning of July, after a Congress meeting called to ratify it. He said that ‘grouping’ would not work—they had agreed only that they should operate as an assembly and that that assembly would be free to do what it chose, thus snatching away assurances that had been built in to satisfy Jinnah. The Muslim League felt betrayed—they had accepted an Indian union only under the proposals ratified by the cabinet mission. If all these agreements were off, they would not enter into an Indian union. They reverted to their objective of a fully independent Pakistan, ‘to vindicate their honour and to get rid of the present British slavery and the contemplated future Caste-Hindu domination.’²⁸

Nehru had been too candid—a better politician such as Patel or Azad would not have betrayed the underlying intention before the deal was in the bag. Even Gandhi told him his commentary on the agreement ‘does not sound good. If it is correctly reported, some explanation is needed.’²⁹ Gandhi was much better at weaving a web of words to confound the listener. The end result was that the cabinet mission’s plan was wrecked—Gandhi’s position (independence first, without strings, then a constitutional settlement) was left as the policy of the Congress president. Wavell believed Gandhi had undermined both his Simla conference and the cabinet mission plan. Despite this, Gandhi was declining in influence with the politicians, who were now looking towards their own positions and power in the future.

With no agreement between the parties, Wavell asked Nehru as head of Congress, the largest party, to form an interim government. The Muslim League could come in as they chose. Jinnah and the League raised the political temperature with a trick they had learned from Gandhi: they announced their own Muslim hartal—strike—for 16 August.

The date became known as the start of the ‘Great Calcutta Killing.’ It was described at the time as the worst communal riot in India’s history, though it is now seen as a foretaste of worse things to come. Muslim youths armed with sticks and daggers roamed the city shouting pro-Pakistan slogans and looking for weak and unprotected Hindus to kill; homes and shops were sacked and burned. On the second day Hindus responded with equal vehemence, and Sikhs joined in on the attacks on Muslims. For four days there were riots, and a final toll of more than five thousand dead and twenty thousand injured. One feature of the destruction was the immunity of the Europeans: they were already being sidelined—the battles to come would be between Indians.

In the aftermath of the Great Calcutta Killing Wavell called Gandhi and Nehru to the Viceregal residence to make one last attempt to bring them to accept the cabinet missions statement, which Congress had previously endorsed and whose interpretation Nehru had subsequently questioned. Wavell wanted a clear and unequivocal statement that they accepted the ‘grouping’ of provinces before a constitutional assembly would take place.

Gandhi started picking over legalistic points and Wavell snapped that he himself was ‘a plain man and not a lawyer.’ As the discussion became heated Gandhi, according to Wavell, said: ‘If India wants her bloodbath, she shall have it.’³⁰ Wavell said he was shocked to hear such words from him. We have only Wavell’s record of this remark, but it is startlingly close to others made by Gandhi about India resolving her conflicts after the British had left. “There might be a blood-bath,’ he told Woodrow Wyatt who had accompanied the cabinet mission. ‘It will be settled in two days by non-violence if I can persuade India to go my way, or the ordeal may last longer.’³¹ Even Gandhi’s friend and admirer Lord Pethick-Lawrence ‘was coming to believe Gandhi did not care whether two or three million people died and would rather that they should than that he should compromise.’³²

There was some consistency in this view of Gandhi’s. In 1941 in response to British concerns about the gulf between the Muslim League and Congress he had said that if the British withdrew,

I promise that Congress and the League and all other parties will find it in their interest to come together and devise a home-made solution for the Government of India. It may not be scientific; it may not be after any western pattern; but it will be durable. It may be that before we come to that happy state of affairs, we may have to fight amongst ourselves. But if we agree not to invite the assistance of any outside power, the trouble will last perhaps a fortnight. And it will not mean even one day’s destruction of human heads such as goes on in Europe today, for the simple reason that thanks to the British rule we are unarmed.³³

He minimised the dangers: ‘It is the politically conscious Muslims and Hindus who will fight. They will fight with sticks, staves and soda-water bottles, but they will soon tire, and there will be wise men enough among us to bring about an honourable peace.’³⁴Gandhi was fully aware of the inflammatory nature of communal passions in India. He correctly judged that the communal riots in four regions in spring 1941 were ‘a rehearsal for a civil war’ or, as he said later, ‘like a miniature civil war.’³⁵ He was not prepared to do anything to avoid violence if ‘anything’ meant conceding a move towards the break-up of India. His intransigence spoiled the best chance of a settlement that would have secured peace, at least in the short term.

Nehru took office as prime minister on 2 September 1946. Early that morning, he and his ministers went to the untouchables’ quarter where Gandhi was living. It was Monday, a day on which Gandhi still maintained silence (a discipline he had first imposed on himself back in 1921), so his advice to the prime minister of India was in written form: ‘You have been in my thoughts since the [morning] prayer. Abolish the salt tax, remember the Dandi March. Unite Hindus and Muslims. Remove Untouchability. Take to Khadi.’³⁶ Gandhi gave each of the ministers his blessing and thus armed they went off to confront India’s problems; the old magician could offer them nothing new.

Jinnah commemorated the day as one of mourning—millions of Muslims appeared on the streets in black-flag demonstrations. The Muslim League joined the government the following month, but merely obstructed its functioning so as to demonstrate that a Congress-League coalition was not practical: they had no interest in making a united India work.

Gandhi contemplated returning to his ashram at Sevagram but was diverted by the news of massacres in Noakhali in East Bengal, where a small Hindu minority had been attacked by a large Muslim majority. Refugees told of mass killings in which well organised gangs went from village to village carrying out murder, forced conversions, rape, forced marriages, the destruction of homes, forcible feeding with beef and the defiling of temples. Gandhi felt he could most usefully go to the villages of Noakhali to try to bring peace. Whatever his faults, he had a supreme sense of duty towards his fellows that drove him to put himself in the place of maximum hardship and danger, if he could help. The seventy-seven-year-old therefore boarded the train for Calcutta on 28 October 1946, his progress disturbed, as ever, by people who clambered on to the train and crowded the windows, calling for him and demanding darshan. He sat with his fingers in his ears to keep out the shouting.

By the time he reached Calcutta on his way to Noakhali there had already been retaliations against Muslims by Hindus in Bihar. Other leading Congress members were also active in an attempt to contain what was potentially the start of an Indian civil war. Nehru threatened to use aerial bombing to quell the disturbances (which, in practical terms, suggests a lack of understanding of the capabilities of air power). Gandhi responded: ‘But that was the British way. By suppressing the riots with the aid of the military they would be suppressing India’s freedom.’³⁷ He went on a minimal diet and threatened to fast in the near future. Gandhi now wrote in leaflets that were widely distributed to the Hindus of Bihar, where perhaps seven thousand Muslims had been killed: ‘You should not rest till every Muslim refugee has come back to his home which you should rebuild and ask your ministers to help you to do so... What you have done is to degrade yourselves and drag down India.’³⁸

On 6 November he travelled with his entourage and a number of provincial government officials to Noakhali in a train arranged by the Bengal government. At Chandpur they boarded a steamship to take them upriver to the remote lush region where the wealthy landowning Hindu minority had been under attack from their more numerous, poorer Muslim neighbours. He set up in Srirampur where a cottage was found for him, and he held prayer meetings and acted as a focus for politicians: the provincial commerce minister worked with Gandhi and the local police to draw up a plan for restoring harmony in a place where some three hundred homes had been plundered and burnt down. His mind was filled with the example of Jesus, ‘a man who was completely innocent [who] offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies.’ Answering a rhetorical question as to the truth of Jesus’s story he said: ‘To me it is truer than history because I hold it to be possible and it enshrines an eternal law—the law of vicarious and innocent suffering taken in its true sense.’³⁹

He trudged from village to village, saw the destruction of homes, peoples skulls and charred remains, the ashes of public buildings. He went barefoot, considering it part of his penance despite the broken glass, brambles and filth sometimes deliberately strewn in his path. His tramping through the villages produced one of the iconic images of the bare-legged Gandhi with his shaven head, dhoti, large pocket-watch and sometimes a shawl, and carrying a long bamboo staff.

But the image of the lone sage striding out against the world’s evils was a journalistic invention. He was accompanied—as well as by the press themselves—by his usual entourage, by the police and by local volunteers including Nirmal Kumar Bose, a professor who acted as an interpreter, and a local ‘fixer,’ Charu Chowdhury. Chowdhury remarked: ‘Since all the paraphernalia he needed—the buckets, the bathtubs, the commode, the syringes, and whatnot—had to come with us, it was no easy task getting from village to village.’⁴⁰ This is something of an exaggeration—there was just one commode and one hand basin. The inclusion of syringes indicates Gandhi was maintaining his regime of enemas. He also had a travelling library of twenty books including the Sayings of Muhammad, A Book of Jewish Thought and Bengali language primers. He was taking regular lessons in Bengali to help him communicate with the locals; this urge for self-improvement never left him—he was studying a Bengali primer on the day he died.

One morning when he had been there less than two weeks he gathered his followers together then sent Pyarelal, Sushila, Abha and others off to live in seven riot-torn villages, to act as focuses for peace. They protested—as one recalled, they ‘said we would all be killed if we didn’t stay together. But Bapu insisted that only by being on his own could he find his bearings and test his faith in truth and non-violence but also in God.’⁴¹ The absence of most of his entourage meant Gandhi had less support when facing the Muslim peasantry, but at the same time he was unencumbered by direct challenges over the brahmacharya ‘experiment’ that he was now conceiving as a yajna or sacrifice.

In what was probably not a coincidence, on 17 December 1946 he was heard arguing with Sushila when she came to visit him. They were alone and shouting excitedly at each other at about 3.20 a.m., some forty minutes before normal waking time. When Bose went to see what was going on he found them both crying, Gandhi motioning Sushila to go away. It would be many months before they would be close again. It may not be unconnected with this outburst that within days Gandhi was to start his sexual experiments with a woman almost half Sushila’s age.

He wrote to the father of nineteen-year-old Manu Gandhi, saying he needed her support. Manu was his grandniece, whom he often called his granddaughter. She had lost her mother at twelve and been cared for by Kasturba, and in her turn, when she was sixteen, had nursed Kasturba in her final illness in the Aga Khan Palace. After Kasturba’s death Gandhi became a ‘mother’ to the girl, telling her how to do her hair, how to wear her clothes and taking an interest in her physical development, though there were quite enough women surrounding Gandhi who were in a position to advise a girl on intimate matters—his involvement was not a matter of necessity. He found her sexuality—or lack of it—fascinating. Pyarelal records that ‘she claimed to be a complete stranger to sexual awakening generally associated with a girl of her age,’ and Gandhi felt magnetically attracted to such natural chastity.⁴²

When he contacted her father he had already written to Manu from Noakhali, telling her: ‘I shall be happy if you come over and have a talk with me. I do not wish to put any pressure on you. It is my earnest desire that you should remain a pure virgin till the end of your life and spend your life in service.’⁴³ She arrived at his temporary headquarters in Srirampur on 19 December. Early on the morning of the 20th Bose entered Gandhi’s room and found them in bed together. Gandhi later explained to Bose that they had been discussing ‘a bold and original experiment’ whose ‘heat will be great.’ Only those who realised this and were prepared to remain at their posts should be with him.⁴⁴

Gandhi explained to Sushila, as she later recounted, that ‘even on the first night Manu was snoring within minutes of getting into his bed.’ When, some time later, he said to Manu: ‘We both may be killed by the Muslims at any time. We must both put our purity to the ultimate test, so that we know that we are offering the purest of sacrifices, and we should now both start sleeping naked’ she acceded.⁴⁵ He was able to report to Pyarelal at the end of December: ‘She sleeps naked but she sleeps soundly.’⁴⁶

Gandhi described his concept of a brahmachari thus:

One who never has any lustful intention, who, by constant attendance upon God, has become proof against conscious or unconscious emissions, who is capable of lying naked with naked women, however beautiful they may be, without being in any manner whatsoever sexually excited... who is making daily and steady progress towards God and whose every act is done in pursuance of that end and no other.⁴⁷

Thus far, his reasoning was spiritual, but in the maelstrom that was India approaching independence he began to see his sex experiments as having national importance: ‘I hold that true service of the country demands this observance,’ he stated.⁴⁸ Pyarelal examined his thought processes in relation to Manu:

Gandhiji had claimed that he was mother to her and she had endorsed the claim. If the truth of it could be tested, it would provide a clue to the problem that baffled him. Incidentally it would enable him also to know how far he had advanced on the road to perfect Brahmacharya—complete sexlessness... He did for her everything that a mother usually does for her daughter. He supervised her education, her food, dress, rest, and sleep. For closer supervision and guidance he made her sleep in the same bed with him. Now a girl, if her mind is innocent, never feels embarrassment in sleeping with her mother.’⁴⁹

Manu apparently accepted the word—one of the books she wrote about her time with Gandhi is titled Bapu—My Mother.

Pyarelal explained how this related to the challenge India faced: ‘If his sincerity could impress itself upon her and evoke in her all the excellences that he aimed at, it would show that his quest of truth had been successful. His sincerity should then impress itself upon the Muslims, his opponents in the Muslim League, and even Jinnah, who doubted his sincerity, to their own and India’s harm.’⁵⁰ Gandhi thus connected his own physical state with the very survival of a united India. He is reported to have said of his sex trials: ‘If I can master this, I can still beat Jinnah.’⁵¹

Gandhi’s behaviour was widely discussed and criticised. He wrote to his son Manilal: ‘Do not let the fact of Manu sleeping with me perturb you. I believe that it is God who has prompted me to take that step.’⁵² In response to criticism at a prayer meeting reported in his newspaper Harijan in February 1947. he maintained that his ‘experiments’ were an integral part of the yajna he was performing. He conceded that many friends had become upset because of his behaviour, but found a way of regarding the objections as a further reason why he should continue: ‘If I do not appear to people exactly as I am within, wouldn’t that be a blot on my non-violence?... If I don’t let Manu sleep with me, though I regard it as essential that she should, wouldn’t that be a sign of weakness in me, and in that case would not my death, since I would have failed to realise perfect ahimsa, be the best thing for me?’⁵³

He used frequently to wake Manu up at night to talk to her and to scribble in his diary. On 2 January 1947 he wrote: ‘Have been awake since 2 a.m. God’s grace alone is sustaining me. I can see there is some grave defect in me somewhere which is the cause of all this. All round me is utter darkness. When will God take me out of this darkness into His light?’⁵⁴ There was no doubt that Manu was going into real danger when she willingly went to him in Noakhali. Violence was ever present, and Gandhi’s mission was resented. At one time the superintendent of police showed him printed placards put up by hostile Muslims demanding his expulsion. They tramped every day, Gandhi haranguing the villagers they passed and engaging in dialogues. She tended his cut feet in the evenings when they stayed in bare huts blasted by cold winds.

He lost two people who had been with him in Noakhali: R.P. Parasuram, who had acted as his secretary, and Nirmal Kumar Bose; both of them wrote criticising Gandhi’s behaviour with Manu. Two supporters who were editing Harijan in his absence also resigned after refusing to print parts of Gandhi’s sermons dealing with his sleeping arrangements. His son Devdas wrote to tell him that he was taking the wrong path. Congress leaders Patel and Kripalani (Congress president since November 1946) expressed their disapproval, despite the latter’s engagement with brahmacharya—he had a celibate marriage with a woman called Sucheta who was also sometimes part of Gandhi’s entourage.

His habit of sleeping with Manu was discontinued in March that year to please Amritlal V. Thakkar, one of Gandhi’s leading disciples and a kingpin of his organisations helping untouchables and developing villages. Thakkar had spent a week with Gandhi at the end of February and impressed upon him that gossip about the practice was adversely affecting their work. He wisely also asked Manu to ask Gandhi to stop. Her intervention on the matter seems to have been the deciding factor: Gandhi stopped sleeping with her, but with no admission that he had done anything wrong. Manu was well aware of the controversy; at one point she is recorded as translating for Bose a letter in Gujarati from a critic to the effect that ‘Gandhiji was obviously suffering from a sense of self-delusion in regard to his relations with the opposite sex.’⁵⁵

Manu’s devotion to Gandhi was genuine. She wrote (or was involved in the writing of) five books and booklets about her time with him, and made no complaint in them about her sleeping arrangements, though she did complain about being sent on petty errands by Gandhi. She describes the fierce rains, strong winds, the slippery roads and pathways and the soft marshy puddles that they had to cross with the help of improvised bamboo bridges. Her recollections of Gandhi, despite their occasional quarrels, are profoundly loving and sympathetic. She wrote in her diary of my good fortune in having the chance to travel with the saint who pilgrimages barefoot in this stinging and oppressive cold weather.’ Once on a river crossing, Gandhi put his head in Manu’s lap and went to sleep. She wrote: ‘I was alone in the boat, except for one boatman who was no company, with one of the world’s most exalted souls, with him lying cosily on my lap and with my palm on his forehead. It was just a fleeting five minutes, but a five minutes that were full of bliss for me.’⁵⁶ Given the attractions of fame, all accounts suggest there was no shortage of young women eager to serve Gandhi in any way he wished.

Even the ever-loyal Pyarelal, despite Gandhi’s urging him to report the brahmacharya experiments in full, is surprisingly coy. He reports Gandhi’s activities with Manu, but not with his own sister Sushila. There was a further dimension in the endless psychodrama of Gandhi and his disciples in that forty-seven-year-old Pyarelal was obsessed with Manu and wanted to marry her. Gandhi disapproved of his pursuit of her, but Sushila pressed her to accept Pyarelal, presumably because that would wrest her from Gandhi and leave a vacancy that she herself could again fill. Gandhi tried to be understanding of Pyarelal: ‘I get the impression that you have been terribly disappointed,’ he wrote. ‘You do not know how much I have talked to her and tried to persuade her.’ But he finally remarked to his assistant: ‘I can see that you will not be able to have Manu as wife.’⁵⁷

There were genuine achievements at Noakhali—some looted property was returned and some abducted women restored; Hindus who had fled returned. The attention that Gandhi and his followers attracted discouraged bad behaviour. Journalists, too, played a part in assuring wrongdoers that their deeds were observed by the world. Gandhi always enjoyed a good press. Many showed no pretence to objectivity: two of the journalists who travelled with him, from UPI and The Hindu, took over typing Gandhi’s letters for him as a labour of love.

Muslims had taunted Gandhi that here he was, caring for the suffering Hindus, but what about the Muslims who had been attacked in Bihar? There, Hindu mobs had killed at least seven hundred Muslims. He had received no call from within, he said, but when the government of Bihar sent him a message inviting him, he left, in March 1947. This pleased the Governor of Bengal, Sir Frederick Burrows, who told Wavell that he ‘was very relieved that Gandhi had left Bengal, as it had taken twenty of his best police to protect him; and he was sarcastic over an American correspondent’s article headed “Gandhi walks alone.”’⁵⁸

The violence in Bihar was felt the more deeply by Gandhi because in some places the Hindu crowds had committed barbarities against Muslims while shouting ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai.’ Again he begged the Hindus to make what amends they could: ‘Rebuild their houses with your own hands, clean their wells, sink new wells to replace the ones filled with the corpses of massacred Muslims.’⁵⁹ He told Congress workers, some of whom he believed had taken part in the disturbances: ‘I have vowed to do or die. I will not rest or let others rest. I would wander all over on foot and ask the skeletons lying about how that had happened. There is such a fire raging in me that I would know no peace till I have found a solution for all this.’⁶⁰

While Gandhi was witnessing the horrors of communalism being visited on his beloved village life, India was inching towards the end of British rule and its unified state. Attlee announced that the transfer to Indian control would take place no later than June 1948, even if that meant transferring power to provincial governments. He also announced the departure of Wavell; the Viceroy gave Gandhi a copy of his anthology of verse, Other Men’s Flowers, as a parting gift. His replacement was the Supreme Allied Commander of liberated South-East Asia, Lord Mountbatten, cousin of the king and naval officer. When Mountbatten arrived in March 1947 it was with the objective of setting up a unitary government in accordance with the cabinet mission’s plan. If he had failed in this by 1 October, he was to report back with realistic alternative proposals of how to hand over power.

The Muslim League had succeeded in making India ungovernable at cabinet level and were now refusing to take part in the constituent assembly. The realists in Congress were coming to terms with the fact that they had a choice between partition and civil war—any civil war probably ending in partition, anyway. Unrest in the Punjab was such that by March that year they were already resigned to the partition of at least that province into Muslim and non-Muslim areas. Congress had therefore sent a proposal secretly, but with Wavell’s consent, to London, suggesting the transfer of power to two governments, both of which would have dominion status under the Crown. So dominion status, long the shibboleth of Congress hardliners, was now to be accepted, five painful years after it had been proffered as part of the Cripps mission.

In his first days in office Mountbatten met all the major figures in Indian politics including Gandhi, who impressed the Viceroy with his strength of personality, as he always did at first meetings. He suggested calling on Jinnah to appoint his own administration, in an attempt to maintain the unity of India, a notion that initially rather engaged Mountbatten; but Congress rejected the idea and the Viceroy’s advisers identified it as an old and impractical proposal. Gandhi’s experiences in Bengal and Bihar had not led him to alter his opinion on the causes of the problem; Mountbatten’s press secretary recorded Gandhi’s position thus: ‘The British system of “divide and rule” had created a situation in which the only alternatives were a continuation of British rule to keep law and order, or an Indian blood-bath. The blood-bath must be faced and accepted.’⁶¹

At Mountbatten’s instigation Jinnah agreed to sign an appeal to end the violence and incitement to violence, but the Muslim leader insisted that only two people should sign it, he himself representing the Muslims and Gandhi representing the Hindus, thus making a humanitarian appeal into a political statement. Gandhi returned to Bihar and the powers in Delhi moved towards a resolution without his input. Nehru told Mountbatten that partition was accepted but that it was the provinces themselves that must be partitioned—they could not break off in their entirety. Jinnah was outraged, but Mountbatten explained that any argument for the partition of the nation of India into Muslim and non-Muslim applied equally well to the partition of its provinces.

Jinnah’s urgency to see his new nation materialise was hastened not merely by the departure of the British: he knew his days were numbered; he was hollow-eyed and skeletal, conserving his energy at every turn. If he wanted a Pakistan, he would have to move fast. Eventually he was to come round to accepting a ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan, as he put it. The Mountbatten plan for partition was formally announced on 3 June 1947, with Muslim-majority provinces in the west of India breaking away and the non-Muslim parts of East Punjab and West Bengal going with India. Gandhi was appalled: ‘It is not for the British Government to change the map of India,’ he said. ‘All it has to do is to withdraw from India, if possible in an orderly manner, maybe even in chaos, but withdraw in any case.’ He now saw the merits of the cabinet mission’s position, which he had previously dismissed, saying he would ‘urge every patriot and certainly the British power, irrespective of the worst kind of violence, to leave India under the Cabinet Mission’s document.’⁶²

Mountbatten already had the agreement of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim leaders to partition, so it was with some trepidation that he moved to clear the agreement with Gandhi, as he was fearful the old sage would wreck the plan. To Mountbatten’s delight, when Gandhi arrived at the viceregal palace on 2 June 1947 he entered the room with his finger on his lips: it was his day of silence. Mountbatten explained the plan and Gandhi responded by scribbling notes on the backs of old envelopes. There was a provision allowing him to break his vow of silence on Mondays in order to talk to someone as senior as the Viceroy on urgent matters, but clearly he had decided there was nothing in it for him.

Mountbatten, still worried that Gandhi would sabotage the plan, later saw him again and urged him to consider the settlement not as a Mountbatten but as a Gandhi plan, for the Viceroy said he had striven to incorporate in it Gandhi’s major concepts of non-coercion, self-determination and the earliest possible date for British withdrawal. It is a testament to Mountbatten’s diplomacy that at his prayer meeting that night Gandhi said: ‘The British Government is not responsible for partition. The Viceroy had no hand in it. In fact he is as opposed to division as Congress itself, but if both of us—Hindus and Muslims—cannot agree on anything else, then the Viceroy is left with no choice.’⁶³

Some agreement on partition was long anticipated, but the timetable came as a surprise when Mountbatten announced it at a press conference on 4 June: the transfer of power would take place on 15 August—the British Raj was to be wound up in seventy-two days’ time. ‘My life’s work seems to be over,’ Gandhi remarked sadly. ‘I hope God will spare me further humiliation.’⁶⁴ As an enduring symbol of the nation’s rejection of what Gandhi had to offer, the flag of the new India was the Congress tricolour but without the spinning-wheel that he had placed at its centre. In its place was the wheel of Asoka, the third-century BC king of a unified India.

Gandhi was on the move to Bihar but as he passed through Calcutta he was urged by the city’s Muslims to stay on at least until after independence. He agreed to do so if they would use their influence with the Muslim League to ensure Muslims did not attack Hindus at Noakhali. He took up residence in one of the houses abandoned by Muslims who had fled the looting and murder, and he was now berated by Hindus who accused him of siding with the Muslims. He exerted a calming influence on his surroundings; compared to the Punjab, Bengal was a haven of peace. Mountbatten gallantly paid tribute to him as a ‘one-man boundary force.’⁶⁵

He had stopped sleeping with Manu at the end of February 1947, but in May he resumed the challenges of chastity in the belief that if he had perfect equilibrium it would dispel the violence around him—and the continued violence meant that he must demonstrate ever more spiritual purity. ‘This is the culmination of my striving for the last sixty years,’ he told Manu. ‘You have become an instrument in this. In this yajna I got a glimpse of the ideal of truth and purity for which I had been aspiring.’⁶⁶

Eighteen-year-old Abha, the wife of Gandhi’s grandnephew Kanu Gandhi, rejoined his entourage in July, and by the end of August he was sleeping with both girls at the same time. Abha had been sleeping with him since she was sixteen, though less willingly than Manu. Abha later recalled: ‘He did ask me to take my clothes off. But, as far as I remember, I usually kept my petticoat and choli [bodice] on.’⁶⁷ The men from Gandhi’s entourage, including Kanu, asked him to stop, but he continued. It may have been that he felt he required added spiritual strength for the challenges of the times. Resistance to the charms of one naked teenage girl was not sufficient—perhaps two would provide the necessary power in these difficult days. It is hard to imagine what sexual experiment he might have thought of next.

The greatest opposition to Gandhi came not from Muslims but from violent Hindu nationalists who believed he had sided with the Muslims and sacrificed India. Pakistan was shaping up to be unworkable as a nation, with a large western wing and, more than a thousand miles across India, a populous eastern wing carved out of Bengal. The possessions of the old united India—government offices, railway lines, military hardware, finances—were now shared out between what remained of India and the new state.

Asked to give media statements on the final victory of the nationalists, Gandhi refused, sadly—it was no time for celebration. He spent 15 August, Independence Day, fasting and spinning. Manu wrote: ‘His visage was grave. While the people in his room rejoiced, his mind kept thinking of the suffering people in riot-torn regions.’⁶⁸

Worse was to come. The report of the boundary commission for the division of Bengal and the Punjab was delayed until after the independence celebrations. Within days of the announcement, Sikhs and Hindus attacked the Muslims of eastern Punjab while Muslims attacked Sikhs in the west. The slaughter triggered a further exodus of refugees until there were millions of people crossing over the Indo-Pakistan border—perhaps as many as eleven million, probably the largest human migration in history in such a short period. No one had realised how bad the situation would be, though the shock was compounded for Congress leaders because they had previously clung to the comforting delusion that communal violence was a product of imperialism—as Nehru had said: “When the British go, there will be no more communal trouble in India.’⁶⁹ Huge marching convoys with their carts and bundles were attacked; refugee trains would arrive at their destinations with no living passenger on board—all had been slaughtered. Gandhi’s belief that any violence accompanying independence could not be extreme because Indians had been denied arms by the British was shown to be monstrously wrong: this violence between neighbours was all the more intimately horrendous becausethey had no arms—killing was done with farming and kitchen implements. Tens of thousands were butchered with the most primitive tools, sometimes suffering humiliation and torture beforehand. Though Gandhi did not know it (and he never did appreciate the full horror of what happened in the Punjab), some half a million people perished in a month-long orgy of killing, and countless numbers of women were raped or abducted. Gandhi commented: ‘I am told that I should count the figures. What figures should I count?... And what will I do, knowing the figures?’⁷⁰

Two weeks after Independence Day an angry crowd of young men bent on violence forced their way into the house where Gandhi was staying in Calcutta, smashing doors, windows and ceiling fans. Gandhi was in bed between Abha and Manu. He got up and approached the invaders, touching his palms in a traditional salutation. A blow was aimed at him, and a brick meant for him struck a Muslim beside him. Manu and Abha stayed by his side. Even though it was his day of silence, he spoke to them, saying: ‘What is it? Kill me, kill me... Why don’t you kill me? My God asks me, where are you?... I am deeply pained.’⁷¹ The police arrived, chased the marauders out of the house and dispersed the crowd outside with tear gas. Gandhi recorded that he had shouted at the crowd but was unable to command silence, and as they were Bengali and he was speaking in Hindustani it was a futile effort. ‘I feel totally lost,’ he wrote to Vallabhbhai Patel the next morning.⁷² Some Congress leaders had taken Gandhi’s Hindu message but ignored the nonviolence part of it, which was felt to be merely an opportune tool against the British. They also rejected the universalism, feeling, along with Patel, that it was better to cut off the ‘gangrenous arm’ of Muslim power in India than to allow it continued influence.

Gandhi decided to fast after seeing the bodies of some Muslims killed when a hand-grenade was thrown into a truck being used to take them to safety. To those who would dissuade him from putting himself in mortal danger he said: ‘If the riots continue what will I do by merely being alive? What is the use of my living? If I lack even the power to pacify the people, what else is left for me to do?’⁷³ As soon as it was announced on the evening of 1 September, the fast began to have an effect: murders and looting abated. Many police and other Calcuttans went on a symbolic one-day fast in sympathy, university students gathered weapons from streets and homes and delivered them to Gandhi. Hooligan bands went to his bedside to see him and pledged to desist from violence. Weapons were piled up at the gates of his house. On 4 September the police reported the city had been at peace for twenty-four hours.

He went on to Delhi, intending to continue to the Punjab where he hoped to promote peace, but found himself staying there with his entourage, including Manu and Abha; Pyarelal later joined them. They could not stay in the untouchables’ quarter as usual as it was occupied by refugees, so instead went to Birla House as guests of Gandhi’s rich industrialist friend. There was work enough for him in Delhi, where violence had broken out on 5 September. Hindu and Sikh refugees had run wild, attacking Muslim homes and businesses, thereby making many Muslims refugees in their own city. Refugees from West Punjab crowded into three camps. Gandhi prayed to God to let him die rather than see the suffering of India. He determined to stay in Delhi until it had recovered itself, proposing to go to the Punjab later. ‘I have to do or die here’ he said, ‘If heart unity is not restored in Delhi, I can see flames raging all over India.’⁷⁴

The authorities were overrun. Nehru did what he could, sometimes placing himself between gangs of killers and their victims. He visited Gandhi every evening for spiritual comfort. The Viceroy’s wife Edwina also frequently visited Gandhi, while undertaking a self-imposed mission to organise sanitation and health facilities in the refugee camps. Nehru’s daughter Indira worked with the refugees camped around her father’s house until Gandhi asked her to work in the Muslim camps. She was still weak, having just given birth, but was willing to go. She asked who would be with her and Gandhi replied: ‘My dear girl,’ if I had someone else to go, I wouldn’t ask you.’⁷⁵ She reported back to him each day, or if there was no time he would send a flower or a message. Sushila Nayar tells of how she was in a car in Delhi with Gandhi when they came to a point where an angry, menacing crowd of Muslim refugees had gathered on the road. The driver accelerated to escape quickly. Gandhi told him to stop, but he refused. Gandhi was furious and shouted at the driver to stop, which he finally did. The crowd, which had been left a little distance behind, quickly surrounded the car. Sushila wrote:

Gandhiji stepped out—a sad, frail figure—and placing his hands on the shoulders of two angry young men on either side for support, asked them all to move on to the lawn. As they sat down, Gandhiji addressed them. They could see and feel the force of his love and his desire to help them. The eyes which were emitting sparks of hatred a moment earlier were filled with tears and they told him of their sufferings and their grievances of various kinds, including the lack of medical care. Gandhi sent Nayar to look after them in her capacity as doctor.⁷⁶

After partition the accession of the princely states, whether to India or to Pakistan, became the major constitutional problem for the subcontinent. Most of the princely states that had a Hindu population acceded to India, some under threat though none with bloodshed. Kashmir had a Muslim population with a Hindu ruler, though the Muslims of Kashmir had been traditionally closer to Congress than to the Muslim League. Pakistan claimed Kashmir (it was, after all, what the K in the name represented) but the Maharaja of Kashmir acceded to India. Kashmir had been invaded by tribesmen, encouraged by Pakistan’s leaders, in order to force accession to Pakistan. India then sent troops in by air, the Pakistani army invaded, and the first war between India and Pakistan began.

The government of India attempted to pressure Pakistan by withholding the 550-million-rupee balance of the agreed portion of the assets of old India. Gandhi felt the government of India was behaving dishonourably. Gandhi was always scrupulous about money and about debts being paid. This was a fine attribute for the marketplace but, as Patel said, the Pakistanis would be using the money to buy arms with which to kill Indians. It would not have been too much of a stretch of principle to use money as a bargaining counter to save life in Kashmir. Nevertheless, Gandhi started a fast on 13 January 1948 for peace in Delhi, the money symbolising peace between Hindus and Muslims. This time he had less support than usual; opponents picketed outside Birla House with banners saying ‘Let Gandhi Die.’

Valabhbhai Patel offered to resign if that would end the fast but Gandhi wanted him and Nehru to stay in the government together. Three days later, on 16 January, the government of India announced its decision to release the cash balances due to Pakistan. Patel was in tears at the cabinet meeting where the decision was taken—as well he might be. The failure to settle the problem of Kashmir then was egregious; more than sixty years later the province was still seeing conflict resulting from it.

On the positive side, the gesture was appreciated in Pakistan: offers were made to help rescue abducted Hindu and Sikh women. A representative delegation of the religious communities called on Gandhi to pledge themselves to encourage Muslims in Delhi to feel able to return to their homes, and to return mosques that had been seized. Thus reassured, Gandhi ended his last fast with a glass of orange juice on 18 January.

On the evening of the 20th, as he was giving his post-prayer discourse there was a loud bang—an explosive charge had been set off by a wall near where Gandhi sat. Manu clung to his legs in fright. ‘Suppose someone really came to shoot us down, then what would you do?’ Gandhi asked her.⁷⁷ As the audience panicked Gandhi said, in a voice clearly recorded by All India Radio: ‘Listen! Listen! Listen! Nothing has happened.’ Order was restored and he resumed speaking—his physical courage was always beyond reproach. The bombers’ courage failed, however. They had planned to attack Gandhi with revolvers and grenades after the explosion, but they panicked and made off in the confusion—except one, a refugee from Pakistan called Madanlal Pahwa, who was arrested.

Ten days later, just after 5 p.m. on 30 January, Gandhi walked out of Birla House with his hands on the shoulders of Manu and Abha. As he passed along the cordoned lane through the prayer congregation, he took his hands off the shoulders of the girls to acknowledge greetings, his palms pressed together. A stocky young man in a khaki bush-jacket elbowed his way towards them. Manu thought he was attempting to touch Gandhi’s feet and remonstrated with him, saying they were already late for prayers. He pushed her away violently, causing the notebook, spittoon and rosary that she was carrying to fall. She stooped to pick them up and the man stood in front of Gandhi and fired three shots at point-blank range from a 9mm Beretta. Gandhi fell, with the words ‘Hey, Rama’ or ‘Raa... m.’⁷⁸

Abha caught his head as he fell and the crowd surged forward to catch him, too. But he was already dead, at 5.17 p.m., with blood soaking through his white clothes as he lay on the floor. His body was taken back into Birla House. Manu, temporarily deafened by her proximity to the gunshots, her clothes stained with Gandhi’s blood, tried to help. Sushila’s first-aid box ‘had no effective remedies in it,’ she remarked pathetically.⁷⁹

Gandhi had said he hoped to meet death ‘calmly, with a smile, and all the while remembering my chosen God.’⁸⁰ He had told Manu: ‘If it occurs to me to utter the name of Rama with my last breath, it should be taken as a proof of the success of my attempt [to attain perfect non-attachment].’⁸¹ Manu also wrote of his thinking about finding a good death. Only she mentioned his last words; when the assassin was interviewed he remembered Gandhi saying nothing. It may be that she merely thought she remembered his last words being the name of God. Perhaps he did, quite reasonably in the circumstances, cry out ‘Oh God!’ when he was attacked. Or, given his constant repetition of the name of God, it would not be unlikely that this was his last word anyway.

A doctor arrived and made a detailed examination, pronouncing him dead from three bullets, one of which was still lodged in his right lung. Nehru, Patel and Mountbatten arrived on the scene. An angry crowd had gathered. Someone said a Muslim had murdered Gandhi. The quickwitted Mountbatten countered: ‘You fool, everyone knows it was a Hindu!’ He knew nothing of the kind, but he realised violence would follow if a Muslim were implicated.⁸² Nehru was said to be beside himself, sobbing over Gandhi’s body for a few moments; then he recovered himself and became the statesman again. Mountbatten pressed him into making a speech to the nation to defuse the tension. Rising to the occasion, Nehru made a great and memorable opening:

Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere. I do not know what to tell you or how to say it. Our beloved leader, Bapu as we called him, the Father of the Nation, is no more. Perhaps I am wrong to say that. Nevertheless, we will not see him again as we have seen him for these many years. We will not run to him for advice and seek solace from him, and that is a terrible blow not to me only but to millions and millions in this country... The light has gone out, I said, and yet I was wrong. For the light that shone in this country was no ordinary light... For that light represented something more than the immediate present, it represented the living, the eternal truths, reminding us of the right path, drawing us from error, taking this ancient country to freedom.⁸³

Manu with Gandhi’s son Devdas performed the last service for Gandhi, washing his body. They anointed it with sandalwood paste, and placed his rosary in his hands, along with a garland of hand-spun yarn. The body was arranged in a room filled with flowers; ‘He Rama’ was written in rose petals near his head. Gathering crowds were now calling to see the body, and it was taken to the balcony of the house and placed on a raked catafalque so that as many people as possible could view it.

The following day, 31 January, flags flew at half-mast as the hastily arranged state funeral took place. The body was carried on the five-and-a-half-mile route to the cremation ground on an army weapon-carrier covered in a white sheet. In deference to Gandhi’s opposition to machines, the vehicle was pulled by two hundred uniformed servicemen. Crowds shouted: ‘Mahatma Gandhi has become immortal!’ and blew holy conch-shells as the cortege proceeded slowly by. People swarmed on rooftops, up telegraph poles and trees as far as the eye could see. Planes of the Indian Air Force circled showering flowers, bringing to mind the flying chariot described in the Ramayana. A raised platform twelve feet square had been constructed at Rajghat near the River Jamuna. Gandhi’s son Ramdas performed the Vedic rites; sandalwood was piled on top of the body and the pyre was ignited, sending red flames high in the sky. Manu buried her face in Patel’s lap and wept. The pyre burned for fourteen hours during which time priests recited the entire text of the Bhagavad Gita.

Manu, who preserved Gandhi’s fingernail clippings as a last relic, was speedily removed from the scene. Despite Gandhi’s having written to Ramdas: ‘I have asked her to write about her sharing the bed with me,’ the protectors of his image were now eager to silence her.⁸⁴ Devdas, Sushila and others accompanied her to Delhi station. The train was late and Devdas took the opportunity of taking Manu aside and talking with her. She wrote: ‘His particular topic of conversation was my diary... Kaka [Uncle] warned me not to disclose the contents of my diary to anyone and at the same time forbade me to divulge the contents of important letters... He said “You are very young but you possess a lot of valuable literature. And you are also unsophisticated.”’⁸⁵ Though she wrote five books about Gandhi (or were they ghost-written from her recollections?), she was never to disclose her side of the brahmacharya experiments.

Gandhi’s ashes were scattered in the Ganges, the Hoogli, the Sabarmati and other major rivers of India on 12 February, and at four points in the sea. The assassin, thirty-seven-year-old Nathuram Godse, editor of the Marathi journal Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Polity),was one of the conspirators who had exploded the bomb days previously. Among at least eight others involved in the conspiracy were thirty-four-year-old Narayan Apte, the journal’s manager, a hotel keeper, and Nathuram Godse’s brother Gopal.

The Hindu extremist leader Vinayak Savarkar with whom Gandhi had argued in London in 1909 before writing Hind Swaraj, was associated though not directly connected with the conspiracy. Godse and Apte were known to have been with him in August 1947 and may have been, twice, in January 1948. At the trial, at which Savarkar was acquitted, it was testified that they had visited his house and he had wished them luck days before the first assassination attempt.

Godse had been immediately arrested and had expressed no remorse. He was one of the men who had appeared at Gandhi’s ashram in 1944 in a picket attempting to stop him from meeting with Jinnah, and he had been a member of various Hindu extremist groups. His motive was his resentment of Gandhi’s sympathy for Muslims, and he also hated non-violence and all that the spinning-wheel stood for; in his view Gandhi was weakening Hindu society.

The assassination had political repercussions. A professor in Bombay who had been trying to help Madanlal Pahwa was shocked when he read that the young refugee from Pakistan had been arrested for the first attack. He remembered Pahwa’s talking of a conspiracy to assassinate Gandhi and had informed the authorities, alerting leading members of the Bombay government to the plot. The information was passed on to Patel who spoke to Gandhi, but Gandhi refused to have a police presence at his prayer meetings or to allow attendees to be searched for weapons. Leads to other conspirators were not followed up, leaving them free to launch their second attack. Patel’s poor handling of the case discredited him and weakened him in his battles with Nehru. He would never regain his earlier prestige.

As the messages of condolence from all parts of the world pouring into India demonstrated, whatever differences people may have had with Gandhi, he had been the best-known and most respected Hindu on earth. The nation had lost one of her greatest assets. Some weeks after his death, in his inimitable style, both intimate and grandiloquent, Nehru wrote an article for Gandhi’s newspaper Harijan: ‘Our memories of him will be of the Master, whose step was light to the end, whose smile was infectious and whose eyes were full of laughter. We shall associate no failing powers with him of body or mind. He lived as he died at the top of his strength and powers, leaving a picture in our minds and in the mind of the age that we live in that can never fade away.’⁸⁶