A study of Indian myths and legends, as we have already seen, indicates that no matter how strong the younger challengers are the elders always win in the end. As Ramanujan plainly states, ‘we must note that the son never wins, almost never kills the father figure. … The power of the father-figure is never overthrown’ (1999: 387–388). We have previously discerned how Nathuram’s symbolic patricide is thus unprecedented. It is the magnitude of its violation of settled beliefs and mores that has made it unspeakable to Hindus, who still continue to repress it. That Gandhi was also the Father of the Nation makes this repression not just personal but collective and national. His murder is the nation’s dark and shameful stain that must not be openly acknowledged. But could it be that Gandhi, as all powerful patriarchs in Hindu tradition, did not lose after all, finding a way to turn his death into Godse’s defeat?
As Nandy suggests, Savarkar served as the assassin’s ego-ideal (1990: 85); in that sense, Savarkar was the good father, the ‘real’ but thwarted father, the proper father to partner the Motherland, one who would save and protect her mother from the aggressive and polluting infidels who had already despoiled her. A strong, masculine, even militant father figure like Savarkar would put an end to centuries of pillage, rape and humiliation that the Motherland had undergone. All the alternative ‘ego-ideals’ to Gandhi – Jinnah, who became the ‘father’ of Pakistan, Savarkar who couldn’t become the ‘father’ of India, Bose, another ‘dutiful’ son like Godse who also failed, and Ambedkar, the ‘father’ not so much of the Indian constitution as of the dalit nation – were all ‘modernizers’ and, to varying degrees, Gandhi-haters. They distrusted and disliked Gandhi precisely because he refused to become modern, refused to buy into realpolitik, refused to subordinate morality to the quest for power; Gandhi stubbornly refused to allow the end to justify the means. Gandhi’s great, almost single-handed rejection of the dominant political culture of his times was voiced in his radical critique of modernity, Hind Swaraj. That is why Hind Swaraj was founded on a civilizational discourse, one which actually spelled out the clash of civilizations thesis long before Huntington, albeit in a totally different manner. Gandhi pitted the traditional, virtue and liberation-oriented Indian civilization against the modern pleasure and consumption-driven civilization that was threatening to engulf India. He clearly saw that India’s freedom struggle would be as good as lost even before it was begun if India imitated the civilizational goals of the West and modelled its nation on Western ideals; equally, he felt that India’s freedom would be lost even if it was won if India achieved its aim of political independence through a violent overthrow of the British empire. Writing in the Young India of 12 February 1925, Gandhi had said,
I hold that the world is sick of armed rebellions. I hold too that whatever may be true of other countries, a bloody revolution will not succeed in India. The masses will not respond. A movement in which masses have no active part can do no good to them. A successful bloody revolution can only mean further misery for the masses. For it would be still foreign rule for them.
(1999, Vol. 30: 248)
A freedom so won would only spell India’s moral degradation; it would be no freedom at all, but only a mimicry of Western ideas of freedom and nationhood. Such a freedom would continue to oppress and exploit the vast mass of Indians who continued to live in the old manner.
For Godse, dispatching this recalcitrant but irritating Mahatma was one way to secure India’s future as a modern, Hindu state, which took its decisions rationally and pragmatically, not hampered or handicapped with self-defeating ideologies like ahimsa or morality. Gandhian politics, according to Godse, ‘was supported by old superstitious beliefs such as the power of the soul, the inner voice, the fast, the prayer and the purity of mind’ (Godse and Godse 1993: 95). This was not only a grave error, but an extremely harmful one as far as India was concerned. Politics was, after all, about seizing power and holding whatever the cost; it was high time that the Hindus had an unabashed will to power. Whatever stood in the way of their attaining power had to be shoved aside. Godse ‘wanted Indian politics to be “rational”, “power-oriented”, “normal” politics. He felt that the elimination of Gandhi from the Indian scene would remove the Gandhian constraints on mature statecraft and hard realpolitik’ (Nandy 1990: 114). So what if it meant the killing of the Father of the Nation? The nation could ‘re-marry’ a more suitable ideologue, someone who better embodied the values of supremacist Hinduism. Unfortunately Savarkar, whether from astute practical considerations or from a well-worked-out strategy for self-preservation was utterly cold to Nathuram during the long-drawn trial, hardly deigning him a nod, let alone a look of recognition. That the ‘good’ father on whose behalf he had carried out the coup of killing the ‘bad’ father was so aloof must have hurt Nathuram, heightening his sense of isolation and alienation. The brave son remained unacknowledged, ever the pariah, irredeemably polluted.
But did Godse really succeed? Or did the Mahatma, even in his own death, turn the tables on his assassin? In order to address such a question we must at last consider the responsibility of the one person we have not suspected in this inquiry over Gandhi’s murder – Gandhi himself. It is at last worth asking if after considering and exhausting all other actors the needle of suspicion does not, after all, quite decisively point at him? I am not by any stretch suggesting that Gandhi’s murder was actually a self-inflicted suicide. That would be too simplistic. It was not that Gandhi deliberately stationed himself in the way of an assassin’s bullets because he ‘knew’ and willed his own death, but, to put it in a slightly different way, just as Nathuram was looking for answers, so was the Mahatma. He was also wondering what went wrong, why India had turned out so differently from his plans. Why had the Partition, with all its carnage and brutality, happened? Where did India go wrong? Where did he go wrong? What was the way out of the horrors that had engulfed India’s freedom? Why was the end so bitter? The bloodshed and false freedom that he had warned his readers against in Hind Swaraj, why had that very same fate overtaken his country, despite his efforts to lead a non-violent struggle to freedom? If he could only locate the malaise, put his finger on it, he might do something to stem the tide, if not to overturn it. He wanted to heal the wounds that had gashed his nation’s heart and sundered its body politic even in its very first throes of freedom and its very first birth pangs. As Payne documents, during the last days of his life Gandhi was not only searching for answers to such questions, but also gradually becoming reckless of his own safety and almost inviting a violent death and martyrdom, even as he was working for peace and taking Bengali lessons at 78 (1969: 573). As many have suggested, moreover, he seemed to have premonitions of his own end. How responsible, then, was he for it?
It is Nandy who provides us the best clue to this conundrum: ‘Every political assassination’, he claims, ‘is a joint communiqué. It is a statement which the assassin and his victim jointly work on and co-author’ (1990: 71). T. K. Mahadevan writing in the Times of India goes even farther, using references from Hindu mythology which assert the special, even divinely ordained missions of both the Mahatma and his assassin:
Godse was to Gandhi what Kamsa was to Krishna. Indivisible, even if incompatible. Arjuna never understood Krishna the way Kamsa did … hate is infinitely more symbiotic than love. Love dulls one’s vision, hate sharpens it.
(Mahadevan 1978: 1)
This puts the whole murder in a slightly different perspective. What if Gandhi ‘knew’ or sensed that his end was near, what if he had already understood, deeply and unconsciously, if not consciously and deliberately, what the ‘real’ root of the deadly poison that was spreading its tentacles across the land was; what if he had also, with the unerring instinct that he was famous for, also ‘decided’ to offer the supreme sacrifice of the last and only thing he had left, his life, his remaining energy, and his last breath to arrest the contagion?
What if, unbeknownst to him, Nathuram had been ‘chosen’ and ‘prepared’ for this final showdown of the Mahatma with his adversaries, this final act of courage and self-assertion, of satyagraha or truth-force, the ultimate denouement, before the curtains fell on his remarkable life? What if, to put it simply, the Mahatma had, after all, scripted his own exit?
That there is sufficient evidence to suggest this cannot be denied. Manubehn, Gandhi’s grand-niece, and one of his closest confidants, offers us a remarkable if tantalizing peek into those fatal final days in Last Glimpses of Bapu (1962). Just two days before his assassination, he told Manu:
If I were to die of a lingering disease, or even from a pimple, then you must shout from the housetops to the whole world that I was a false Mahatma. … If I die of illness, you should declare me a false or hypocritical Mahatma. And if an explosion took place, as it did last week, or somebody shot at me and I received his bullet on my bare chest, without a sigh and with Rama’s name on my lips, only then you should say that I was a true Mahatma.
(Manubehn 1962a: 54)
Another version of the same passage is found in Manubehn’s The End of an Epoch translated from Gujarati by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, but in this account Gandhi says these words the night before the murder: If I die due to a lingering illness, nay even by as much as a boil or a pimple, it will be your duty to proclaim to the world, even at the risk of making people angry at you, that I am not the man of God that I am claimed to be. If you do that, my spirit will have peace. Note down this also that if someone were to end my life by putting a bullet through me, as someone tried to do with a bomb the other day, and I met this bullet without a groan, and breathed my last taking God’s name, then alone would I have made good my claim.
(Manubehn 1962b: 28–29)
These remarkable passages show that Gandhi was not only aware of how serious the threat to his life was, but also that knowing of the failed assassination attempt by the same group of conspirators, he had done nothing to increase his security or take any measures to prevent its recurrence. Indeed, receiving bullets on his bare chest unflinchingly with Rama’s name on his lips was exactly as he actually died, almost foretelling in an uncannily precise manner, how his end would come. He even had a sense of what kind of man his killer might be: ‘If I am to die by the bullet of a mad man, I must do so smiling, God must be in my heart and on my lips’ (Manubehn 1962a: 55). That his murderer would be some sort of ‘madman’, indeed that the turning of his beloved country into the killing fields of Partition was also nothing but a bout of temporary insanity that that engulfed the country was also perhaps evident to him. Perhaps it was against this madness that he had taken his final stand. The drops of his own blood, so precious and few, would somehow staunch the wounds of his country, preventing any more bloodletting. These would be the purifying drops of blood that would end the contagion and pollution that all this killing had caused. That is why he was unequivocal in telling Manu, ‘And if anything happens, you are not to shed a single tear’ (Manubehn 1962a: 55). There was to be no mourning not just because the Mahatma had led a full life or that his death was, as his life had been, quite ‘beautiful’, but because it was no accident in the first place, no ordinary murder or crime, but a strange and complex ritual, so necessary to his final transformation; therefore the ultimate manoeuvre of the Mahatma, so to speak. No wonder, on the eve of the fateful termination of his life, Manu portrays him quoting an Urdu poem: ‘Short lived is the splendour of Spring in the garden of the world’ (Manubehn 1962b: 28).
How morbidly prescient of Gandhi, therefore, jestingly to scold Manu on the morning of his death day even as she is busy making his throat lozenges for the evening, ‘Who knows what is going to happen before nightfall or even whether I shall be alive? If at night I am still alive you can easily prepare some then’ (Manubehn 1962a: 287). Early that morning, less than 12 hours before the event, he says to Manu: ‘If someone fires bullets at me and I die without a groan and with God’s name on my lips, then you should tell the world that here was a real Mahatma’ (Manubehn 1962b: 32). Gandhi’s biographer D. G. Tendulkar notes that on that same fateful morning Gandhi tells a co-worker, ‘bring me my important letters. I must reply to them today, for tomorrow I may never be’ (1951–54, Vol. 8: 287). Pyarelal in Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase also documents a similar incident. A few minutes before he is shot, he instructs his assistants to tell two men who want to see him, ‘Tell them to come after prayer; I shall then see them – if I’m alive’ (Pyarelal 1958, Vol. 2: 772).
In fact, according to Pyarelal, Gandhi’s will to live, which was normally so robust that he wished to go on for 125 years, was now weakening; Gandhi, Pyarelal observed, was anxious, even depressed: ‘I watched day after day the wan, sad look on that pinched face, bespeaking an inner anguish that was frightening to behold’ (ibid.: 686). To one reporter Gandhi said, ‘I have lost the hope because of the terrible happenings in the world. I don’t want to live in darkness’ (Manubehn 1962a: 284). Historian and biographer B. R. Nanda wonders ‘whether he had a presentiment of an early end’ or whether such remarks ‘were no more than occasional glimpses of the torture of mind and spirit which he suffered during this period’ (1958: 509). By December 1947, a little over a month before he was murdered, Pyarelal felt that Bapu ‘was literally praying that God should gather him into his bosom and deliver him from the agony which life had become’ (Pyarelal 1958, Vol. 2: 685). Accustomed to mobs shouting ‘Death to Gandhi’, he had, according to Nandy, become ‘a self-destructive depressive’ (1990: 90).
Unlike the claims of some of these scholars, I believe that Gandhi, instead of yielding to despair, was actually deeply aware of the kind of death he wanted: ‘There is an art in dying’, he wrote to a correspondent, ‘As it is, all die, but one has to learn by practice how to die a beautiful death’ (1999, Vol. 86: 6). His whole life had been one long preparation for this moment, which would be of his own choosing, not that of his assassin’s. Gandhi, the supreme life-artist, was still in charge, even in the manner in which he scripted his own death. As Nandy theorizes, ‘No victory is complete unless the defeated accepts his defeat’ (1990: 87). Despite the horrors of Partition and the apparent failure of non-violence, Gandhi never accepted defeat. Just has he had not accepted that the British, superior in military might, had defeated India. As always, Gandhi changed definitions, thus giving the defeated a new way to see themselves and their vanquishers. ‘Militant nonviolence …’ as Nandy puts it, ‘totally refuses to recognize the defeat in violent confrontation to be defeat’ (1990: 87). Similarly, Gandhi refused to let his assassin vanquish him. He turned the tables on Nathuram.
It is not as if the possibility of such a twist to the tale went entirely unnoticed. As Payne says, For Gandhi, this death was a triumph. He had always believed that men should be prepared to die for their beliefs. He died as kings die, felled at the height of their powers, and Sarojini Naidu was right when she said that it was appropriate that he should die in Delhi, the city of kings.
(1969: 647)
Gandhi connived at his own assassination because he hoped, in his violent death, to bind the nation to his memory more radically in death than in life: ‘Gandhi knew how to use man’s sense of guilt creatively’ (Nandy 1990: 93). This bonding with the nation through his martyrdom was his way to continue to haunt the nation that he had fathered, never letting it go in a direction that would destroy it – unlike Pakistan which, without such a moral anchor or haunting, went, as some would say, to rack and ruin. Gandhi, who had shunned the label of Mahatma through most of his life, seemed, thus, to embrace it in death. In her perceptive essay ‘From Mohandas to Mahatma: The Spiritual Metamorphosis of Gandhi’ Karen E James says, ‘He had accepted his public and spiritual role as a Mahatma, and he realized that only death at the hand of an assassin would finally complete and confirm his life’s work’ (1984: 10). Gandhi, then, had crafted his own death as he had his life. James considers the death to be the validation of his life, the proof that he was not a ‘false Mahatma’ (James 1984: 10).
Of the many reflections on the meaning of his martyrdom, Nirmal Kumar Bose’s bears recollection. Bose, an eminent scholar and teacher, had served as Gandhi’s interpreter in Bihar and Bengal during the latter’s peace marches. In the conclusion of My Days with Gandhi he says,
But that martyrdom which brought his life to a finale which is comparable to the Greek tragedies acted as the touchstone which gave new meaning and new significance to the words which had so long sounded commonplace or strange in our heedless ears … India is blessed because she gave birth to one who became Gandhi, and perhaps, blessed again that, by dealing him the blow of death, we endowed his life with an added radiance which shall enrich the heritage of humankind in all ages to come.
(Bose 1974: 252–253)
The death, to Bose, endows the life with an added glow, but as we have seen at such great length, that is not strictly speaking true. The halo was added by his admirers and followers, but Gandhi’s purpose in ‘choosing’ such an exit from the world stage was entirely different. It was not to enhance his prestige or burnish his image for posterity. That was not the work of the Mahatma as he saw it. The work of the Mahatma was nothing less than to trigger the transformation in the hearts and minds of his countrymen and women. The death was meant to flag and foreground the task as yet unaccomplished, the purging in the hearts of Indians of hatred, healing the wounds in the nation’s psyche, challenging Hindus to look closely into their own minds for precisely those fanatical ideals which they saw so clearly in their fellow-countrymen. The work of the Mahatma was to show us that our own purpose as a nation was far from done despite our political independence.
James offers a different, more obviously Christian interpretation, which turns Gandhi into a saint. That this reading is based on ideas of sin and redemption is not surprising:
In retrospect, Gandhi’s violent death is the only logical culmination of his life’s work, and especially of his last years. During his last phase, Gandhi accepted himself as a true Mahatma, and thereby accepted the responsibility for India’s fate and for her sins. An introspective, depressed state of mind is concomitant with the carrying of such a burden. At the same time, the depth of his conviction that his path was the right one, and that God would show him the light, was also to be expected. Without such beliefs, the burden he carried would have crushed him. Only a man of intense spiritual conviction could attempt to face the communal problem as Gandhi did.
(James 1984: 24–25)
James also brings in the personal dimension in which such an acceptance of his destiny was the only way that Gandhi could cope with the failure of his project. Once again, it is not his public role, but his private quest for liberation and self-realization that is crucial. Whether or not Gandhi could ‘save’ others, he certainly had to do this to redeem, if not prove, himself. It is not that Gandhi’s blood can wash away all our crimes; on the contrary, he invites us to follow in his footsteps by accepting responsibility for our actions as he did. That he atoned for the sins of others with his own life and blood may be true, but his saintly sacrifice does not absolve us from our own accountability. Gandhi’s sacrifice does not offer us an easy way out of our guilt; rather, it forces us to confront it and take on the unfinished project of self and national transformation. James returns to her Christian reading when she says, ‘In life he aspired to suffer for India. It was fitting that his death should complete that suffering’ (James 1984: 24–25). But Gandhi’s ‘suffering’ was not a proxy for ours; it was for the sake of truth, for non-injury.
It was almost as if Gandhi, by dying in this manner, was making it impossible for us to forget him or disregard his life’s message. Over and over again, Indians and non-Indians alike who had occasion to encounter his life and works would be perplexed and challenged by his death. They would, in a sense, be compelled to make sense of it, to try to understand its true significance. Gandhi was daring us to be content with the false propaganda of Nathuram and his intellectual descendants – as if saying, believe that if you will be content with it or embark upon the journey to discover for yourselves what really happened, what this face-off between two Hindus was really about. If Gandhi had died quietly it would have been easier to ignore his ideas, but his murder created a permanent disturbance in the mind of Indians, especially Hindus, which made him and his mission unforgettable. Gandhi chose this death not to crown himself with martyrdom or sainthood; on the contrary he did so to make it impossible to forget him or what he stood for.
That is why even the controversy over his last words is not only somewhat less important but also provokes us, as his death does, to find out the truth for ourselves, to take sides. Gandhi’s critics and opponents reject the claim that his last words were indeed ‘He Rama’. The accounts of Manu and Abha who both aver that he did say ‘He Rama’ as he collapsed are not only reliable because they were closest to him, but are also corroborated by a whole range of sources. On ‘the other side’, Godse and his followers maintain that the last sound to escape from Gandhi’s lips was merely a guttural cry of pain, not the name of the Lord. Nathuram, who pulled the trigger, may not have heard what Gandhi said because the explosions were deafening; Gopal Godse, his brother and justifier, was not present, but is responsible for averring that Gandhi did not say ‘He Rama’. According to Manohar Malgonkar, Gurbachan Singh, a businessman from Panipat, also verified that Gandhi’s last words were ‘Hai Rama!’ while Karkare said that all he heard was a ‘cry of pain, a guttural rasp, “Aaah!” ’ (Malgonkar 1978; 2008: 251).
The issue was important to both sides partly because both swore by the Bhagawad Gita, which pays a great deal of importance to a dying man’s last words or thoughts. According to the Gita, anyone with God on his mind goes to God after death, while those whose minds are elsewhere lose that opportunity. The implicit idea is that only those whose lifelong devotion and concentration are on God can have him on their mind till their dying moment; the others, by force of habit, will be distracted by other thoughts and desires, which in turn will influence their next birth. Even if Gandhi’s last sound was a gasp, not the name of his ishta devata or favourite deity, Rama, there’s no denying the possibility that his mind may have been on the Lord. So this controversy serves little purpose. The historian Vinay Lal sums up Gandhi’s challenge to present day Indians even in his dying words:
When Gandhi uttered the words ‘He Ram’, he was doubtless true to himself; but, politically speaking, he managed to confound, as he does so down to the present day, both the Hindu militants who falsely declared him a traitor to his faith and so showed only their own miserable conception of Hinduism, as well as the secularists whose conception of both religion and politics is much too narrow to accommodate the creative ecumenism of true dissenters like Gandhi.
(2001: 38)
Whether we are Sanatani Hindus or secularists, Gandhi, ultimately, forces us to meditate on both his life and death. He does so by co-scripting his murder with Nathuram, thus negating or subverting the latter’s design to wipe out what Gandhi lived and, quite deliberately, died for.
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