The art of dying


While it is untrue to say that Gandhi came to Delhi with the conscious intention to die, it is perhaps not an exaggeration to claim that he was preparing himself for such an eventuality. In his last 133 days he repeated his resolve to ‘do or die’ probably 50 times. Early on, in a piece in Harijan called ‘One Step is Enough for Me’ published on 22 September 1947, he calmly contemplated the eventuality with remarkable foresight and fortitude, but without any hint of a violent termination:

My death can take place in three ways: 1. The usual dissolution of the body. 2. Only the eyes move but the mind no longer works. 3. The body and mind may work but I may withdraw from all public activity. The first kind overtakes everybody – some die today, others tomorrow. It demands no consideration. The second variety is to be wished by or for nobody. I for one do not wish for any such imbecile state. It is a burden on earth. The third variety does demand serious consideration. Some readers suggest that the period of my active life should be over now. A new age for India began on 15th August last. There is no place for me in that age.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 403)

What is clear is that Gandhi does not want to die helpless and disabled, a burden upon others, but he does not mind withdrawing or retiring from public life. He is quite convinced of his own irrelevance to the new age that has dawned with India’s independence and the Partition of the country. Gandhi is also increasingly aware of his sense of helplessness, the waning of his ability to influence policy or change the way the new governments of India and Pakistan behave. As he confesses in his discussion with Kripalani on 25 Sep tember 1947, ‘I have become useless because I cannot make the Pakistan authorities do the right thing’ (ibid.: 425). Yet it is also clear from this conversation, as it was from his very first prayer meeting on 9 September 1947, that he was far from retiring or quitting. Instead, he was already in the middle of his last yajna in which the key assumption was that Delhi was India in miniature; if Delhi could be persuaded to turn around, then the rest of the country might be saved; the repercussions might also cross the border to Pakistan. If that were to happen, Gandhi was prepared to go to Pakistan himself, taking his mission of peace there. As he said to Kripalani, ‘if normalcy is restored in Delhi I would like to go and die there’ (ibid.). But the crucial part of this conversation was his assertion about knowing how to die: ‘I am not being arrogant when I say that I know the art of dying but I have the courage to say it’ (ibid.). That his remark was not a sign of hubris was clear by his brutal modesty and the exacting self-appraisal that followed:

But God alone knows if I will run away when I am being shot at or attacked with knives or will get angry with the attacker. If this happens then also there is no harm because the people will come to know that the man they looked upon as a Mahatma was not a true Mahatma. I too shall come to know where I stand. It is possible that I may still utter ‘Rama Rama’ when I am shot at or attacked. Let the outcome be either; ultimately it will be for good.

(Ibid.)

When it came to the decisive moment, Gandhi went just as he had predicted, exiting according to his own script right down to the last words.

As the days went by, his inner resolve to make this his final confrontation with the forces of communal hatred and violence became firmer. In the fragment of a letter of 11 November 1947, he said: ‘Maybe my end is approaching. I am fully prepared. Everyone should be prepared’ (ibid.: 282). But with this came also the growing conviction that he was on the right track, that the final task he had set for himself was the natural culmination of a life dedicated not only to the building of a nation but also to ensuring a certain kind of future for it with his last sacrifice. As he added in another fragment of a letter dated 15 November 1947, ‘The more I look within the more I feel that God is with me’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 317). Again, this quiet inner conviction goes contrary to the view that he was either deeply depressed or delusive in this final phase. Instead, a gradual clarity was emergent within as to what he must do for the cause to which he had dedicated his life. In the Harijan of 23 November 1947 he continued his reflections on an appropriate end to a life lived according to certain principles, upholding the kind of values that he had espoused: ‘Life becomes liveable only to the extent that death is treated as a friend, never as an enemy’ (ibid.: 372). He had begun, like Socrates, to argue that life was worth living only on certain conditions, not under all circumstances:

To conquer life’s temptations, summon death to your aid. In order to postpone death a coward surrenders honour, wife, daughter and all. A courageous man prefers death to the surrender of self-respect. … A beginning is always made by a few, even one.

(Ibid.)

Postponing death, clinging to an ignoble life, was meaningless. Embracing death as a friend was the only way for a principled man to be able to resist evil without fear. All that someone might threaten you with was your life. Once you were prepared to lose that, nothing could cow you down.

He insisted that he would rather die than be a mute and helpless witness to the fires of hatred and destruction raging all about him. On his seventy-eighth birthday, he asked his listeners to pray that ‘either the present conflagration should end or He should take me away’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 475). He had no wish to live on to watch the undoing and destruction of all that he had stood for: ‘I do not wish another birthday to overtake me in an India still in flames’ (ibid.). In anguish he asked Patel, ‘What sin must I have committed that He should have kept me alive to witness all these horrors?’ (ibid.). In his prayer meeting on 25 November 1947, he admitted: ‘Today I am very much disturbed. My life has become a burden to me. I wonder why I am still here. I could become strong if Delhi were restored to sanity’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 394). In a fragment of a letter written on the same day, upon hearing that Khwaja Abdul Majid, President of the All-India Muslim Majlis, was attacked when he tried to intervene to stop the violence, Gandhi replied, ‘Had they killed you, I would have danced (with joy). And by dying you would have rendered service both to Muslims and Hindus’ (ibid.: 389). For the yajna that he was conducting he wanted others to similarly offer themselves as sacrifice. Only several such pure-hearted self-immolations in the cause of non-violence might bring about a change of heart of the sort he wanted.

In another letter written on 21 December 1947, he said in his prayer meeting,

I am not certain how long I shall have to be here. I must do or die. And since I am resolved to die I do pray to God that He may fulfil the wish. All of you too should make the same prayer.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 90)

He added that he had no doubt, but calm certainty, that his was the right course of action in trying to bring peace and normalcy back to Delhi. He felt that he was merely an instrument of the divine in such an endeavour: ‘In the end it will be as Rama commands me. Thus I dance as He pulls the strings. I am in His hands and so I am experiencing ineffable peace’ (ibid.: 90–91). In a letter written on 2 January 1948, he offered yet another iteration of his view of life and death, before offering up his own life to bring about communal harmony:

No one can harm another. In my view man is himself the cause of his sufferings. … Why is it that the freedom achieved through non-violence is sought to be sustained by violence? I have been searching my heart. I find despair there. Maybe it was the will of God that I should witness this day. Now I have to do or die.

(Ibid.: 158)

Again, in his in his prayer meeting of 9 January 1948, Gandhi averred:

We should not fear death. We must fear dishonour and indignity. To save one’s honour one must lay down one’s life. If someone is asked to embrace Islam or be prepared to die, he must choose death.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 203)

If we all lived as if death were preferable to dishonour, the world would be a different kind of place. In the context of the violence of Partition, Gandhi believed that a certain kind of noble death was better than either cowardly victimhood or cowardly brutality. He made Hindu-Muslim rapprochement and the ending of communal violence the precondition of his continuing to live; rather than seeing the freedom so hard-won being squandered away in a blood-feud between Hindus and Muslims, Gandhi preferred to die:

Death for me would be a glorious deliverance rather than that I should be a helpless witness of the destruction of India, Hinduism, Sikhism and Islam. That destruction is certain if Pakistan does not ensure equality of status and security of life and property for all professing the various faiths of the world and if India copies her.

(Ibid.: 219)

Devdas, his youngest son, had tried to dissuade him from embarking upon his fast. In his reply on 14 January 1948, the day after he had started his fast, he said: ‘So long as we are unable to leave aside the question of life and death it is an illusion to think that we can do a particular thing only if we are alive’ (ibid.: 231). Gandhi was already seeing embodiment as a limitation and was considering the possibility of a more effective afterlife when released from the body.

What Gandhi meant, of course, was that the cause that he had spelled out was worth dying for rather than continuing to live having accepted its failure or impossibility. He spoke about the inevitability of death in his prayer meeting of 15 January 1948:He who is born cannot escape death. Why then should we fear death or grieve over it? It is my belief that death is a friend to whom we should be grateful, for it frees us from the manifold ills which are our lot.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 236)

Death here is a release from the ills of the world.

Meanwhile, with mounting anti-Gandhi feelings in a section of the Hindu and Sikh refugees, there were increased concerns for his safety. G. D. Birla, his host, was also concerned at Gandhi’s reluctance to increase the security at his residence, where Gandhi was staying. Gandhi wrote to him:

it is all the same to me whether there are or there are not all these police and military personnel posted here for my protection. Because it is Rama who protects me and I become more and more convinced that everything else is futile.

(Ibid.: 279)

Sardar Patel, the Home Minister of India and a close associate of Gandhi, had already received information about a conspiracy to assassinate Gandhi after the bomb explosion on 20 January 1948. He moved to enhance the security cover at Birla House by posting army and police personnel along with plainclothes men. But Gandhi refused to allow all those entering the compound to be searched. After the assassination, Patel made a statement in Parliament on 6 February 1948, where he reported:

the D.I.G. met Gandhiji and represented to him that there was danger and they should be allowed the facilities asked for, otherwise they would be discredited if anything untoward happened, but Gandhiji would not agree. He said that his life was in the hands of God, that if he had to die, no precautions could save him and that he would not agree to anybody being restricted from coming to prayer meetings or anybody being allowed to come between his audience and himself. I myself pleaded with Gandhiji for allowing the police to do their duty in regard to his protection, but without success.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 279)

But this justification after the fact seems somewhat weak, if not unconvincing. As Home Minister, Patel should have taken whatever measures he deemed necessary to protect Gandhi without seeking the latter’s approval. After all, nowhere in the world is the protection of leaders left entirely to their own whims or oddities.

Gandhi, no doubt, was courting death. He was convinced that if his offering himself to the forces of hatred and violence might save thousands of lives, then it was well worth making. It was as if the monster of Hindu-Muslim enmity wanted some price before it would quieten and he was willing to be the scapegoat. He began to reduce his reliance on human and worldly agencies, placing his trust entirely in God. As he wrote in response to the letter from a young man: ‘If God wants to save me He will do so’ (ibid.: 288). But even more importantly, ‘The death of a non-violent man will always have desirable consequences’ (ibid.). That such a sacrifice may be insufficient was not lost on him: ‘But when Krishna was no more the Yadavas did not become better and purer. They destroyed themselves in fratricidal strife. I shall not weep over it’ (ibid.). To resist evil even with one’s own life was a duty, an end in itself, even if it did not yield the desired fruit in the real world. Having done one’s best, one had no reason to lament over the failure of one’s actions. Gandhi repeated the allusion to the destruction of the Yadavas that is mentioned in the Mahabharata. He feared that like these accursed clansmen of Krishna, the Hindus and Muslims, who were equally dear to him, would also destroy each other after he was gone.

In another letter dated 24 January 1948, he once again asserted that his life was not his any more and that he had already ‘arranged’ for a certain kind of death: ‘I will do His work so long as He wills. I shall have won if I am granted a death whereby I can demonstrate the strength of truth and non-violence’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 298). He reflected on the bomb that was exploded on 20 January 1948 with the intention of killing him. Gandhi had continued the prayer meeting without flinching. Now he refused to take any credit for his courage and heroism:

I did not display any courage in what happened on the 20th. I thought it was part of some army exercise. Had I known that it was an intimation of my death I cannot tell how I might have reacted. So I am not yet a mahatma. What does it matter if people describe me as one? I am only an ordinary mortal.

(Ibid.)

But in the very next sentence, he raises the bar for himself when the end really comes:

Yes, if I have been sincere in my pursuit of truth, non-violence, nonstealing, brahmacharya and so on and if I have done all this with God as my witness, I shall certainly be granted the kind of death that I seek. I have expressed the wish at the prayer meeting also that should someone kill me I may have no anger against the killer in my heart and I may die with Ramanama on my lips.

(Ibid.)

Again, Gandhi is scripting his own death in considerable detail. In a fragment of a letter written a few days before he was murdered, he repeated, But this can only be if I can joyfully take a volley of bullets. I do not think that I deserve to be congratulated on what happened on the 20th. It was only God’s blessing. But I am fully prepared to go when the summons comes.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 308)

On 30 January 1948, the day he was murdered, Gandhi gave his energy to another big problem that was confronting the Indian government; the rift between Nehru and Patel. In Gandhi’s Emissary Sudhir Ghosh remembers his meeting with Gandhi on the morning of the 30 January:

As I sat down he handed to me a letter written to him by Agatha Harrison enclosing with it a clipping from the London Times. Agatha’s letter said that the whispering campaign about a serious rift between his two lieutenants Mr. Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel had spread to London and The Times editorial on this rift between the two men was a bad omen; was Gandhiji not going to do something about it?

(Quoted in Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 338)

Gandhi himself was aware of this and had already referred to it in one of his prayer meetings, on 20 January 1948. He realized that healing this breach was of fundamental importance not only to the smooth running of the Cabinet but also to maintaining the public perception that the government was united. Ghosh continues:

‘I wonder what I am going to do about it’ – as if asking himself a question. I said, ‘Well they are so big that nobody dares to talk to them about it; but people talk behind their backs. Some day you may like to talk to both of them about it. You alone can do it.’ He pondered over my remark and said, ‘Well, there is something in what you say. I think I am going to talk about it. I think I will talk about it after prayers this evening.’

(Ibid.)

As it happened, Patel was to see Gandhi at 4:00 in the afternoon and Nehru at 7:00. He was with Patel when he was called away to the prayer meeting, on the way to which he was killed. He never got to see Nehru.

But in his death, the two stalwarts of the Congress Party and the most powerful members of the Cabinet were reunited. During the funeral procession and ceremonies both were seen together and were, indeed, together in spirit in Manubehn’s account The End of an Epoch. Patel sat with the body in the gun carriage while Nehru led the procession and sat in the carriage by turns (Manubehn 1962b: 56). Nehru was asked to light the pyre but Ramdas Gandhi, Gandhi’s son, did so at Nehru’s behest. When the pyre was lit, however, the blaze was so intense that all the onlookers had to step away:

Very soon, the pyre was ablaze. The wind fanned the fire and the flames soared high. The fire became too hot for people to stay near it. It seemed as if the flames were reprimanding us for our sins and telling us that the great world citizen whom it was now transporting to another world, was a victim of the wicked passions that consume us humans. The flames seemed to be telling us that we had no right to go near one who had tried to rid society of its passions, but had, alas! died in the attempt. And so the flames kept us away from Bapuji.

(Ibid.: 61–62)

Gandhi burned alone in his solitary anguish and splendour.