Part 11 (1/2)

Speaking to dispossessed caste Hindus, he was hardly more tender. They needed to understand, he evidently felt, that their privileges and vices had something to do with their present misery. Those who don't labor but live on the toil of others are thieves, he said. It's surprising to discover how often he harps on the evil of untouchability when talking to the Noakhali refugees. He even makes collections there for his Harijan fund. Given that he's speaking to caste Hindus who have recently been burned out of their homesteads in strife with Muslims, it seems, at first, inappropriate, an old man's non sequitur. But untouchability had long since become for Gandhi a metaphor for all forms of social oppression involving ”high” and ”low.” If caste Hindus resist dining and intermarriage with Muslims, he's now prepared to say, they're practicing a form of untouchability; in the back of his mind, he may have harbored the thought that many Muslims descended from untouchables who converted. ”He had told us time and again,” Pyarelal later wrote, ”that the Hindu-Muslim question had its roots in untouchability.”

After many years of verbal tiptoeing, it seems, he has ceased to speak in code or measure his words on issues of social equality. It's the end of the long intellectual and political journey that began in Durban when he first had the thought that whites treated Indians the way Indians treated one another, as untouchables. Asked what it would take to heal the rift between Muslims and the mainly Hindu Congress, he replied: ”Giving equality to the untouchables.” What sounds like a riddle is his way of saying what Ambedkar had been saying all along-that the disease in Hindu society starts with the practices of caste Hindus.

On the second day of his Noakhali walking tour, he addresses a gathering of Hindu women in Chandipur. Just as he once traced an earthquake to G.o.d's displeasure over untouchability, he now ascribes the Noakhali calamity to the same transgression. According to the authorized summary of his talk that is more than likely the result of his own rewriting, he said: If they still went on disowning the untouchables, more sorrow was in store for them. He asked the audience to invite a Harijan every day to dine with them. If they could not do so, they could call a Harijan before taking a meal and ask him to touch the drinking water or food...Unless they did penance for their sins...more calamities and more severe ones would overtake them.

The next week he twice urges the Muslim majority of the district not to treat Hindus as untouchables. A month later, still in Noakhali, he's calling for a casteless society. In Kamalapur, he's challenged to say how he feels about intercommunal marriages if he now condones intercaste unions. According to Bose's paraphrase, he responds: ”He has not always held this view [but] had long come to the conclusion that an inter-religious marriage was a welcome event whenever it took place.” So long, he couldn't refrain from adding, as it wasn't inspired by l.u.s.t.

As the tour proceeds, Muslims mostly keep a distance. Those who come to the prayer meetings are typically impa.s.sive. As described by Phillips Talbot, they ”listened quietly to the after-prayer talk, and then went away.” The young American wondered if he was witnessing a subtle s.h.i.+ft from opposition to ”neutral silence.” Had he stayed with Gandhi a few weeks more, he'd have had to give up that thin hope. Increasingly, with the tightening of Muslim boycotts-not only of Gandhi's meetings but of Hindu landowners and fishmongers and merchants-the Mahatma finds himself speaking to Hindus on what might be considered Hindu themes. On February 22 he pitches up at a place called Char Krishnapur, a spit of an island in the delta where his audience is predominantly made up of untouchables, called Namasudras in Bengali. As poor as the poorest Muslim peasants, they'd suffered as much as the richest Hindu landlords during the riots. There Gandhi stayed in ”a low-roof shelter improvised from charred, corrugated sheets salvaged from a burnt-down homestead.” In Haimchar, which turned out to be his last stop, he told Namasudras they needed to lift themselves up by their own efforts; for a start, they could do away with child marriage and promiscuity, so that ”the higher castes so-called would be ashamed of their sin against them.”

He'd already mapped out the next stage of his village tour, but here, finally, he felt compelled to come to grips with rising criticism on two fronts, one being his own camp and the other Muslim Leaguers. Though little was said in public, Gandhi's own circle was in turmoil over the brahmacharya test: perhaps even more than the nightly cuddle itself, his readiness to defend it openly, as he had in the first three days of February. Muslim Leaguers continued to harp on his stubborn refusal over four months to go to Hindu-dominated Bihar, where Muslims had been the victims. On the surface, the two issues seem unconnected, but it's probably no coincidence that they come to a head in his mind at very nearly the same moment, for in his own mind they'd always been linked.

In Haimchar, Gandhi spends six days with A. V. Thakkar, called Thakkar Bapa, another aging Gujarati, who'd been his closest and most respected co-worker on issues of untouchability. The two old men debate Gandhi's sleeping arrangements, which Thakkar closely observes on a nightly basis. Thakkar is finally persuaded that the yajna has spiritual meaning for the Mahatma but writes what Gandhi later dismisses as ”a pathetic letter” to Manu urging her to withdraw from the ”experiment,” presumably for Gandhi's sake and that of the movement. According to a less than disinterested Pyarelal, Manu then tells Gandhi she sees ”no harm in conceding Thakkar Bapa's request for the time being.” Angry and unrepentant, Gandhi blames Manu's ”lack of perspicacity,” we're told by his biographer who is also her disappointed suitor. Conceding nothing, the Mahatma agrees to let her leave his bed. The yajna is suspended, if not over, and so, simultaneously, is the Noakhali walking tour.

Almost at once, he decides to break it off. He'd said he was prepared to spend years in Noakhali and ”if necessary, I will die here.” But on March 2, 1947, he donned sandals for the first time in two months, since the start of the walking tour, and began the reverse journey toward Bihar.

For four months he'd been fending off appeals from Muslims across India to prove his good faith by confronting the violence Hindus had wrought. His excuses for not going there earlier had come to sound increasingly far-fetched. He'd long since recognized that the Bihar violence had been far worse than that of Bengal. It was now early March, four months after Nehru had been so appalled by the carnage he'd witnessed in Bihar that he'd threatened to order the bombing of Hindu mobs there. Now, all of a sudden, Gandhi finally allowed himself to be moved by a letter from a nationalist Muslim saying that his Congress had done as little to address the violence there as the Muslim League had in East Bengal.

He promised he'd return to keep his commitments in Noakhali. In the months left to him, he kept that trip near the top of his ever-lengthening to-do list. But with part.i.tion looming and Hindu-Muslim slaughter spreading like an epidemic across North India-perhaps more like a wildfire, since it burned in some places and skipped over others-he faced new demands for the balm of his presence. Noakhali kept having to be put off.

At the midpoint of the tour, there'd been a foreshadowing that would later be recalled as fateful. Gandhi had run out of goat's milk and had to take coconut milk instead. Later that evening the stressed-out old man experienced severe diarrhea, started sweating heavily, and finally fainted. That was January 30, 1947. If he died of disease, he told Manu on regaining consciousness, it would prove he'd been a hypocrite. So Manu later wrote in a memoir. She then has him saying: ”But if I leave the world with the name of Rama on my lips, only then am I a true brahmachari, a real Mahatma.” So it is written in her gospel. Exactly a year later, on January 30, 1948, when he fell at her side, she'd recall these words as a prophecy fulfilled.

By any secular, this-worldly accounting of Gandhi's months in Noakhali district, it would be hard to show a political or social gain. The rupture he hoped to forestall occurred. Pakistan happened. By June 1948, more than one million Hindu refugees had crossed the new international border into the Indian rump state of West Bengal. In the next three years, that number doubled; by 1970, the total of refugees from East Bengal resettled in India exceeded five million. ”The makers of the sh.e.l.l bangles that were obligatory ornaments for married Hindu women, the weavers of the fine silks and cottons worn by well-to-do Hindus, the potters who fas.h.i.+oned idols used in Hindu festivals, and the priests and astrologers who presided over Hindu rituals of birth, marriage and death were among the earliest migrants,” according to the scholar Joya Chatterji. They'd fled in hot pursuit of the gentry and townsmen who'd employed them. The social order Gandhi had been willing to give his life to reconcile and reform had been-to use his word-”vivisected.” Yet part.i.tion, as he predicted, had resolved little. It led to a division of land, spoils, and political authority, but majorities on each side of the new Bengal had to coexist with a substantial minority. Though a military government had proclaimed contemporary Bangladesh an Islamic republic, it still contained twelve million Hindus.

And, somehow, Gandhi still seems to register there as a possible source of inspiration. A lifetime after he left Noakhali, I found myself in Dhaka, the capital of this Islamic republic, at a well-attended commemorative gathering of intellectuals and ardent social reformers marking the 140th anniversary of his birth. The minister of law lit a lamp. Verses from the Koran were read, followed by a pa.s.sage from the Bhagavad Gita, then Buddhist and Christian prayers, making the event as self-consciously inclusive as Gandhi's own prayer meetings. Five Muslims and three Hindus spoke-against religious extremism and for harmony, the rule of law, clean politics, rural development, social equality-dwelling not on the Raj and Gandhi's time but on today's teeming Bangladesh. A half-dozen TV crews recorded their remarks for the evening news, cameras sweeping across the audience, to pick out upturned faces that could be read as inspired. ”The fact is that such a man of flesh was born on our subcontinent and we are his descendants,” said a woman introduced as a human rights advocate. ”I feel his necessity every moment.” The gathering ended with one of Gandhi's favorite devotional songs, sweetly sung by a small, evenly balanced group of Hindu and Muslim students, with most of the audience joining in.

As I said, by any secular accounting, it would be difficult to show a political or social gain from Gandhi's four months in Noakhali district, near the end of his life in 1946 and 1947. Yet this happened in 2009.

12.

DO OR DIE.

EVERYWHERE HE WENT he was urged to go somewhere else. In East Bengal's Noakhali district, where Hindus had been slaughtered, Muslim Leaguers pressed Gandhi to take his pilgrimage off to Bihar and prove there that he was willing to confront a Hindu majority with blood on its hands. Once he finally reached Bihar, Hindu nationalists tried to divert him to the Punjab, where Hindus and Sikhs were being terrorized out of Muslim-majority portions of the province, soon to be sliced off and st.i.tched into a gestating Pakistan. Eventually, with less than two weeks to go to part.i.tion and independence, an overstretched and agitated Mahatma popped up in the Punjab and, speaking in Lah.o.r.e on August 6, 1947, offered perhaps the most surprising of his absolute, flat-out vows. Having said he'd ”do or die” in Noakhali, then in Bihar, the man who'd ever after be called ”Father of the Nation” now promised: ”The rest of my life is going to be spent in Pakistan.” he was urged to go somewhere else. In East Bengal's Noakhali district, where Hindus had been slaughtered, Muslim Leaguers pressed Gandhi to take his pilgrimage off to Bihar and prove there that he was willing to confront a Hindu majority with blood on its hands. Once he finally reached Bihar, Hindu nationalists tried to divert him to the Punjab, where Hindus and Sikhs were being terrorized out of Muslim-majority portions of the province, soon to be sliced off and st.i.tched into a gestating Pakistan. Eventually, with less than two weeks to go to part.i.tion and independence, an overstretched and agitated Mahatma popped up in the Punjab and, speaking in Lah.o.r.e on August 6, 1947, offered perhaps the most surprising of his absolute, flat-out vows. Having said he'd ”do or die” in Noakhali, then in Bihar, the man who'd ever after be called ”Father of the Nation” now promised: ”The rest of my life is going to be spent in Pakistan.”

He'd been yearning to come to the Punjab, he explained, but now had to rush clear across the subcontinent, all the way back to Noakhali, for he'd committed himself to marking India's independence there on August 15. That's to say, on the day of independent India's birth, he meant to awaken in Pakistan. ”I would go there even if I have to die,” he said. ”But as soon as I am free from Noakhali, I will come to the Punjab.”

His head was evidently spinning as, careering bravely from Hindu pillar to Muslim post, he contemplated the impending ”vivisection.” The only way he could cling to the dream of a united India he'd spun decades earlier on the other side of the Indian Ocean, in Durban and Johannesburg, was to declare that henceforth he'd have two homelands. Perhaps one day they'd be reunited, but for now, obviously, he couldn't be everywhere. This was precisely the point the Congress president, Kripalani, had mournfully made back on June 15, the day Gandhi's movement had put its final seal of approval on the part.i.tion plan over his muted objections. He'd followed the Mahatma for thirty years, Kripalani said, but couldn't go any further. He still felt ”that he, with his supreme fearlessness, is correct, and my stand [in favor of part.i.tion] is defective,” but simply didn't see how Gandhi's n.o.ble efforts in Bihar could save the Punjab. ”Today he himself is groping in the dark...Unfortunately for us today though he can enunciate policies, they have in the main to be carried out by others, and these others are not converted to his way of thinking.”

That said it all, but Gandhi carried on. His pledge to return to the Punjab and spend the rest of his life in Pakistan had to be diluted two days later in Patna when he promised to return to Bihar after a few weeks in Noakhali. In fact, none of these promises would be kept. Gandhi was now in the final half year of his life. He would never reach Noakhali, never return to Bihar or the Punjab, never set foot in independent Pakistan. In these final months, his view took in the whole subcontinent, but his field of endeavor was limited to two cities. First in Calcutta, then in Delhi, he managed almost single-handedly to roll back tides of violence by embarking on his final fasts ”unto death.” He was never more heroic, never more a miracle worker, but the Punjab, acting out Kripalani's anxious premonition, still burned with horrendous ma.s.s violence: Sikhs and Hindus slaughtering Muslims in the eastern portion of the province, now India; Muslims butchering Hindus and Sikhs, seizing their women, sacking their temples, in West Punjab, now Pakistan. Gandhi's theory that inspired peacemaking in one place could prove contagious, dousing explosions of extreme violence in others, would not be borne out until an exhausted subcontinent had to contemplate the fact of his death. By then, hundreds of thousands had been slain, millions displaced.

”The country was part.i.tioned in order to avoid Hindu-Muslim rioting,” Rammanohar Lohia, a Socialist leader, would later write. ”Part.i.tion produced that which it was intended to avoid in such abundance that one may forever despair of man's intelligence or integrity.”

The Mahatma had no elixir other than his presence, his example. Wherever he traveled, his basic strategy was to revive the courage of besieged and vulnerable minorities while shaming and coaxing marauding majorities back to some elementary level of reason, if not compa.s.sion. If he'd lived to go to Pakistan, he'd have extended his protection, such as it was, over the Hindu minority. Since his last months came to be spent in what would remain India, it was the Muslim minority that cried out for his moral s.h.i.+eld. Circ.u.mstances thus cast him as pro-Muslim in the eyes of dispossessed and enraged Hindu and Sikh refugees pouring in from what was becoming Pakistan, in the eyes of Hindu chauvinists generally. Playing the part for which his whole life had prepared him, Gandhi now helped frame the death warrant under which he'd long felt himself to be laboring.

To those charged with the main business of extracting the British and establis.h.i.+ng the new states, the Mahatma's successive, overlapping pilgrimages registered mainly as a sideshow. An impatient Nehru said he was ”going round with ointment trying to heal one sore spot after another on the body of India.” When the part.i.tion plan came up for final Congress approval, Nehru was so concerned that Gandhi might break ranks that he had his right-hand man, Krishna Menon, seek the help of Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy. The Mahatma was in an emotional, unpredictable frame of mind, Menon warned in the first week of June.

The viceroy then made sure to see Gandhi before he next spoke in public at a prayer meeting. A pressing invitation was sent for him to come to the Viceregal Lodge, a 340-room imperial pile in contrasting shades of red sandstone-which the Mahatma had recently proposed turning into a hospital-for what became a virtuoso recital by this great-grandson of Queen Victoria, the first empress of India. The courtly Mountbatten used all the charm and flattery at his command to persuade his guest that the plan was actually a composite of Gandhi's own ideas about non-coercion and self-determination, a.s.suring what he had long sought-the earliest possible departure of the British. Really, the viceroy said, it should be called not the Mountbatten Plan but ”the Gandhi Plan.” Gandhi must have known this ma.s.sage was meant for his ego. But it eased the tension he'd been feeling. That evening at his prayer meeting, he said the viceroy was as much opposed to part.i.tion as the Congress. Since Hindus and Muslims couldn't agree, the viceroy had ”no choice.” If this was less than a green light, it was his way of saying proceed with caution.

In using Mountbatten to get to Gandhi in this way on June 4, Nehru might have reflected that Gandhi had regularly dealt with viceroys and other colonial envoys without bothering to consult his own colleagues. As recently as April 1, Gandhi had ”staggered” the newly arrived Mountbatten at their second meeting with the idea of offering Mohammed Ali Jinnah an opportunity to serve as head of the interim government in order to pry him loose from his fixation on Pakistan, long enough, at least, to avoid part.i.tion. Jinnah, in this scheme, would be free to include only members of the Muslim League. The corollary that this might have meant sending Congress into the wilderness didn't particularly disturb Gandhi, who'd have considered that a small price to pay for the country's unity, not to mention an opportunity for the movement to renew itself, finally, at its neglected gra.s.s roots as he'd been imploring it to do for two decades. It was part of Gandhi's proposal, according to Mountbatten's later reminiscences, that it would be the viceroy, not himself, who'd broach the scheme to Nehru and the other Congress leaders. Mountbatten, understandably, declined to serve as the Mahatma's nuncio. By the time he and Nehru touched on the plan, the viceroy had already been told by his advisers that it was ”an old kite” Gandhi had flown before, an idea Jinnah had never taken seriously. Nehru's reaction was openly dismissive. He told the viceroy, with whom he was developing a more confidential relations.h.i.+p than any he had with his colleagues, that Gandhi ”had been away for four months and was rapidly getting out of touch.”

Gandhi drafted a nine-point summary of his plan. This would be the last of countless pet.i.tions and diplomatic notes and aide-memoire he laid before British colonial authorities on three continents over half a century. Then he had to confess to Mountbatten what Mountbatten already knew: that his idea had attracted next to no support from the Congress high command. ”Thus I have to ask you to omit me from your consideration,” he wrote abjectly, meaning he now lacked the influence to be considered someone who had to be consulted.

When the viceroy first heard Gandhi's audacious suggestion, he asked what Jinnah would say. ”If you tell him I am the author, he will reply, 'Wily Gandhi,'” he predicted. That's close to what Jinnah did say. It's not refuted by what Gandhi himself had to say to the viceroy, if Mountbatten's paraphrase more than two decades after the fact can be accepted as somewhat accurate, rather than written off as a snippet of stray embroidery, a misattributed surmise. ”Jinnah won't be able to do very much,” Gandhi is supposed to have said, ”because in effect you can't coerce a majority by executive acts at the center and he'd have less power than he will think he's going to get.” The catch in Gandhi's ”wily” scheme had all along been that his imagined Jinnah government would inevitably be responsible to an a.s.sembly with a Congress majority that could check it and, eventually, bring it down.

The day after bowing out in his letter to Mountbatten, Gandhi returned to Bihar, where he'd spent scarcely three weeks on his earlier visit. He'd arrived in Bihar late, four months after the worst bloodshed, but found scant signs of remorse among most Hindus, including most congressmen, until he started preaching on themes of repentance, atonement, and unity. Often the killings, he was told, had been accompanied by cries of ”Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!”-”Glory to Mahatma Gandhi!”

”I hate to hear Jai Jai shouts,” he said. ”They stink in my nostrils when I think that to the shouting of these shouts,” he said. ”They stink in my nostrils when I think that to the shouting of these Jais Jais, Hindus ma.s.sacred innocent men and women, just as Muslims killed Hindus to the shouting of Allah-o-akbar! Allah-o-akbar! ['G.o.d is great!'].” ['G.o.d is great!'].”

On his second swing through Bihar he managed to stay another two weeks before being summoned back to the capital. His moral authority had perhaps never been higher, but his political isolation couldn't be ignored, leading him to feel, not for the first time, that his career as an active leader might have reached its terminus. The thought still didn't sit easily in his mind. He called himself a ”spent bullet” and a ”back number.” He was now afflicted with a kind of split vision that was becoming chronic. On one level, he was resolute, ready to stand alone; on another, he allowed himself to wonder if the Congress leaders, now going their own way, might have a better grasp on the country's needs. On the train to Bihar, he wrote a letter to his erstwhile disciple Vallabhbhai Patel, now yoked to Nehru in an uneasy duumvirate. ”It is just possible,” he conceded, ”that in administering the affairs of the millions you can see what I cannot. Perhaps I too would act and speak as you do if I were in your place.” In context, it sounds like a genuine doubt, not a gesture or courtesy, meant to placate. He's asking whether India can possibly be run on Gandhian lines.

The same sort of split vision shows up in what sounds like a valedictory comment on the efficacy of his campaigns. The nonviolent resistance he'd meant to inspire was muscular, disciplined, brave enough to risk injury, even death; this he called ”the nonviolence of the strong.” All he'd evoked from the ma.s.s of Indians, he now commented, was mere pa.s.sive resistance, ”the nonviolence of the weak.” Speaking to an American professor in the first days of independence, he reflects that his career had been all along based on an ”illusion.” He's not bitter. He even manages to draw a measure of comfort from what he now presents as his disillusion. ”He realized that if his vision were not covered by that illusion,” according to the summary he authorized of that conversation, ”India would never have reached the point it had today.” If he'd conned anyone, he seems to be saying, it was himself. With at least a touch of pride, he said he wasn't sorry.

It's monsoon season when he finally embarks on his long-promised return to Noakhali, hoping to arrive in the district in time for the dual independence of Pakistan and India. Going back to Noakhali would be a way of distancing himself from any responsibility for part.i.tion without having to denounce the Congress leaders.h.i.+p, a way also to express his continued devotion to the cause of Hindu-Muslim ”unity,” now seemingly down to its last gasp. ”I do not like much that is going on here...[and] do not want it to be said that I was a.s.sociated with it,” he'd written to Patel before embarking on this latest swing. This time he manages to get no farther than a demoted, deflated Calcutta: capital of the whole subcontinent, the entire Raj, until 1911 when the British announced their intention to s.h.i.+ft the seat of government to Delhi; of an undivided Bengal thereafter; now, with part.i.tion, about to become the seat of a smallish Hindu-majority Indian rump state to be known as West Bengal.

The Muslim League government had already decamped to Dacca, about to be proclaimed capital of East Pakistan, taking with it the upper tier of Muslims in the civil service and police, which were suddenly, by default, overwhelmingly Hindu again. Anxious Muslims who remained saw the writing on the wall-revenge for the Great Calcutta Killing of the previous year. Just as the Muslim League's chief minister, Suhrawardy, had called on Gandhi then at the Sodepur ashram ten months earlier with the aim of getting him to change his travel plans, another Muslim League delegation waited on him there the day of his arrival, August 9, with an even more urgent plea. They implored him to stay in Calcutta to protect their community now living in terror, according to them, under the shadow of a Congress government.

”We have as much claim on you as the Hindus,” the leader of the delegation, a former Calcutta mayor named Mohammad Usman, said on his return the next day. Usman belonged to the same Muslim League that had done much to precipitate the crisis, that only half a year earlier was decrying the Mahatma's mission in East Bengal. But now that Gandhi had actually gone to Bihar and denounced as b.e.s.t.i.a.l and barbaric what Hindus had done to their co-religionists there, and now that part.i.tion had left them feeling vulnerable in a state where they'd be a minority henceforth and forever, Bengali Muslims left behind in India saw the Mahatma in a new light: as a potential savior. ”You yourself have said that you are as much of Muslims as of Hindus,” the pleading former mayor said.

Gandhi agreed to delay his return to Noakhali on two conditions. One was that the Muslims guarantee peace and the protection of minority Hindus in Noakhali as he had meant to do; if there were a provocation there, his life would be ”forfeit” through fasting, he threatened. The other was that Suhrawardy-who'd rushed to Calcutta from Karachi on hearing of Gandhi's arrival there-join him in a peace committee of two to maintain order in Calcutta as British rule ended.

Suhrawardy was one Muslim League politician whose political fortunes had taken a dive with the advent of Pakistan. The united Bengal he'd governed was about to go out of existence; he would then hold office in neither Pakistan nor India, thanks in part to a quixotic and doomed eleventh-hour push he'd led to keep Bengal united, even if that meant its being part.i.tioned off as a third independent state. The failure of that effort left the chief minister, an Urdu speaker who was not viewed as a true Bengali, as a leader without a following, an isolated, uncommitted actor with what seemed to be dwindling prospects. In the Mahatma's depressed mood, that defined him again as a sympathetic character; it might even be said, as a disappointed fellow sufferer.

The idea of a single Bengal uniting Hindus and Muslims had appealed to Gandhi as a refutation of Jinnah's theory that they were, by definition, two nations-so much so that during the movement's brief spasm in May, this elderly non-Bengali, this beginning student of the Bengali language, had offered to enlist as what amounted to a headquarters warrant officer. ”I am quite willing,” the aging Mahatma wrote to Suhrawardy then, ”to act as your honorary private secretary and live under your roof, till Hindus and Muslims begin to live as the brothers they are.”

”What a mad offer!” Suhrawardy was supposed to have responded. ”I will have to think ten times before I can fathom its implications.” In effect, Gandhi was offering to revive the partners.h.i.+p he'd had a quarter of a century earlier with the Khilafat leader Muhammad Ali.

He wasn't one to waste an inspiration. So taken was he with this latest scheme for reaching across the communal divide that now, three months later, on the eve of independence, he revived it, daring Suhrawardy to move with him into a troubled area of Calcutta whose Muslim residents felt vulnerable, to live with him there under the same roof without military or police protection. The Muslim Leaguer took a night to think it over, then agreed, attaching no conditions. On August 13, with less than two days to go to independence, the two moved into a ramshackle, abandoned mansion in a teeming area called Beliaghata where Muslim bustee bustee, or shanty, dwellers lived at close quarters with marginally less impoverished Hindus who lived in houses, into which refugees from East Bengal had lately been crowding. The neighborhood had already been shown to be a tinderbox. Hindu gangs attacked Muslim dwellings with Sten guns and homemade grenades, putting their residents to flight.

On his arrival, Gandhi was greeted with black flags and a chorus of abuse from a crowd of two hundred or so Hindus, some of whom tried to shove their way into the building through the window of the room reserved for the Mahatma. An attempt to close the old shutters was met by a barrage of stones. Once the young Hindu men were more or less calmed down, they demanded to know why Gandhi was so concerned about Muslims.

He faced down the rowdiest in discussions that seem to have gone on for an hour or more. ”We don't need your sermons on ahimsa,” one of these young Hindus supposedly blurted out to his face. Gandhi told them he wouldn't be bullied, that he'd never give in to force, nor call for help. Then he took up their charge that he was an enemy of Hindus. ”Can't you understand that being a Hindu by religion, deed and name, I cannot possibly be an enemy of my own community?” he retorted. To that the young men had no answer. Some finally volunteered to stand guard over him.

A bemused Vallabhbhai Patel was only slightly more understanding. ”So you have got detained in Calcutta...[in] a notorious den of gangsters and hooligans. And in what company too!” he wrote from New Delhi, where he was running the Home Ministry, making him the Indian official with paramount responsibility for keeping the peace. ”It is a terrible risk.”

The Hydari Manzil, as the dilapidated one-story villa was known, had only one toilet to accommodate its guests and the hundreds of visitors they attracted daily and only one charpoy, or string cot, which the old man refused to use as a bed, preferring the floor. The strong smell of ammonia, used in a hasty mopping to disinfect the place before the Mahatma moved in, hung in the air that first day. The scale of the villa was the only clue to its former opulence: ceilings about thirty feet high, large cas.e.m.e.nts and doorways, the gla.s.s and the doors often smashed. Keeping his distance from the independence celebrations in Delhi, Gandhi made it his headquarters for the first three roller-coaster weeks of Indian independence. Today, with the installation of marble wainscoting, fluorescent lights, and the usual displays of old photographs, it's a museum, yet another Gandhi shrine, only dimly reflective of the fears and pa.s.sions that surged and then were tamed there in 1947.

He'd been saying that he'd devote himself to fasting and spinning on Independence Day, August 15. When the BBC asked that he record a special independence message, the old man replied: ”They must forget that I know English.” When All India Radio came with a similar request, he said: ”I've run dry.” He awoke at 2:00 a.m. that day after only three hours of sleep. Beliaghata was quiet at that early hour, but a small, mostly Muslim crowd was waiting outside to congratulate him on the achievement of freedom. When daylight came, larger crowds began to gather. Strikingly, they were mixed; Hindus and Muslims who'd been taking up offensive and defensive positions days earlier were now celebrating together; according to contemporary reports, they were embracing and calling each other ”brothers.” The euphoria lasted two weeks. Instead of another Great Calcutta Killing, there was suddenly talk of a Calcutta miracle, which many were quick to attribute to Gandhi's presence and the example he'd set.

With Suhrawardy at the wheel, Gandhi went out for a drive two nights in a row to witness the big civic party, soak up the joy. At first he wouldn't allow himself to be drawn in, even when crowds in a Muslim section surrounded his car crying, ”Jai Hind!” At his prayer meetings on the fifteenth and sixteenth, he spoke with chagrin about the rampaging celebrants who'd surged through Government House, the former seat of the viceroys (newly turned over to an Indian governor on Independence Day), stealing the silver, defacing pictures more or less in the spirit of the rowdy crowd that celebrated Andrew Jackson's inauguration by ransacking the White House; and as reports came in on rioting in Lah.o.r.e on the other side of the subcontinent, Gandhi went on mournfully about the bloodshed with which independence was being marked. His doubts about the durability of the Calcutta miracle persisted. ”What if this is just a momentary enthusiasm?” he wrote to Patel.