Part II
‘My death is my message’
Mahatma, the last 133 days
A few days before leaving Calcutta, Gandhi was asked by the newly constituted Shanti Sena Dal (Peace Force Corps) for a message. Peace had returned to Calcutta, thanks to his efforts; now the Dal, made up of volunteers from all communities, had pledged to maintain it. They would patrol sensitive areas to inspire confidence and prevent the eruption of violence. In a way, the feuding communities had come to an understanding, brokered and presided over by a fasting Gandhi, that they would not shed each other’s blood. Almost miraculously this covenant has still persisted in Calcutta, underwritten and renewed from time to time by the changing power structures and governments. Now that he was leaving, the Shanti Sena Dal wanted a message from him. Blessing the ‘soldiers of peace’, he told them ‘My life is my message’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 342). This simple five-word sentence was written in Bangla and given to Devtosh Das Gupta, Secretary of the Dal, when he called on Gandhi.1 That Gandhi really meant it is evident in his repeating the same words in his letter of 29 November 1947 to Anasuyaben Sarabhai (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 418).
In a sense, this whole book has been an attempt to understand the fuller significance of this message. What we have tried to do is to understand and articulate the coherence of an exemplary life. Given how he regarded himself – ‘My life is my message’, as we just saw – Gandhi invites the possibility of being read in terms of a consistency in anubhav (original experience), vichar (thought and ideas) and achaar (conduct and action). The best place to examine these in action was the end of his life, where Gandhi’s beliefs, principles and basis for living were sorely tested. He was forced to admit that he had been wrong on a number of issues, including non-violence, which had been the cornerstone of his whole public career and had come to be identified so closely with his praxis. While he believed that Indians were trying out non-violence against the British, they were actually only offering passive resistance, the weapon of the weak. Gandhi struggled the hardest to bring about Hindu-Muslim unity, which now seemed almost impossible after Partition. Finally, he gave up his life in persisting against all odds to live on his own terms and for what he thought was right.
In all, despite the odds stacked against him, his ideals betrayed by his followers and associates, and the freedom he fought for itself turning out to be a bitter harvest, Gandhi persisted. We have therefore to try to understand what made him do so. Even after his death, Gandhi persists. By persistence is meant not just continuation, but also an insistence, an ability to persevere in the face of odds. This book is an attempt to examine why and how Gandhi and his ideas continue to matter. It tries to capture what it is that makes the Mahatma challenge, puzzle and exasperate us, to discover how he continues to be relevant, even contemporary, and to define what saves him from simply fading into oblivion. The last days of his life offer us an unparalleled vantage point from which to examine this issue. In fact, during these days, with growing premonitions of his death, we could turn this message around to read it as meaning ‘My death is my message’. Thus, paradoxically, it is not just his life but his death which is his message. It is from this edge of the abyss, as it were, that we may re-examine key facets of his life in an integral rather than fragmentary fashion, showing what he has to say not only to his own times but to ours. This is why these last 133 days of his life, from his arrival in Delhi on 9 September 1947 to his murder on 30 January 1948, bear closer examination.2 Indeed, the second part of this book tries to bring to life the meaning of his death so as to show how Gandhi substituted ‘death’ for ‘life’ in his famous statement, ‘My life is my message’. He thus proved that in death as in life, the message was the same. By dying the way he lived, he demonstrated the efficacy of the message. The message of truth and non-violence was, in other words, as much worth dying, as living for. But by dying for it, he gave life to what otherwise might have died, the new nation that he had fought so hard to create, and an old civilization based on friendship between two communities that seemed all but dead with the Partition of India.
At first, what we see resembles almost the enactment of a black comedy or theatre of the absurd played out in macabre colours on the blood-soaked plains of north India. One the one hand – two new nations, India and Pakistan, embroiled in civil strife, in compulsive and retaliatory cycles of murderous violence, rape and unprecedented exchanges of population characterized by endless caravans of refugees snaking across borders incarnadine, newly etched in blood and fire. On the other hand – an old, frail Mahatma, captive within the walls of nationalist India’s richest tycoon, a Father of the Nation, whom no one was listening to, still scolding his errant children in his feeble voice, trying in prayer meeting after prayer meeting to bring his truant flock to order. Anyone disinclined to be charitable to Gandhi might thus view him and his last mission impossible in Delhi. While Gandhi preached non-violence and mutual empathy, much of northern India and Pakistan were in flames all about him. A lone, old man, shrunken and gaunt, his voice hoarse with shrieking the same admonitions to homicidal mobs – urging them to refrain from butchery, rape and internecine bloodshed – might indeed resemble a prophet in the wilderness.
But the very persistence of the lonely Mahatma acquires epic proportions in his last days. He never gives up – regardless of the odds. He continues, day after day, repeating, insisting on the same message.
Until, miraculously, the tide begins to turn, slowly but surely, and peace is restored. What at first may seem like the almost ludicrous contrast between the continuing, even escalating conflagration of violence across the land and this image of an old man simply sitting at prayer meetings and scolding his children comes, on closer examination, to reveal the extraordinary triumph of the one true man over the misguided and mad mob. It is not just a matter of words of wisdom versus images of violence, but of the power of love over the self-forgetfulness of hatred. The cloistered old Mahatma, who at first seems ineffectually sermonizing while the world falls to pieces, slowly reassembles, restores and makes whole these very shards and broken bits of the nation, paying with his very breath and life-blood to do so. The force of ahimsa, animated by the spirit of the fragile Mahatma, becomes a mighty praxis in the blood-soaked streets and back alleys of north India and Pakistan.
Notes
1 The Collected Works do not give the actual Bangal sentence, which according to Umashankar Joshi (1969: 1) was ‘Amar Jivani Amar Vani’.
2 The only one who has attempted to do this thus far is Sudhir Chandra (2011), who in his Hindi book, Gandhi: Ek Asambhav Sambhavana, treads similar ground.
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