Freedom at Midnight (5 page)

He, a Hindu, would go among those enraged Moslems, moving from village to village, from hut to hut seeking to restore with the poultice of his presence Noakhali's shattered peace.

Because this was a pilgrimage of penance, he said, he wanted no other companion but God. Only four of his followers would accompany him, living on whatever charity the inhabitants of the villages they visited were ready to offer them. Let the politicians of his Congress Party and the Moslem League wrangle over India's future in their

endless Delhi debates, he said. It was, as it always had been, in India's villages that the answers to her problems would have to be found. This, he said, would be his "last and greatest experiment." If he could "rekindle the lamp of neighborliness," in those villages cursed by blood and bitterness, their example might inspire the whole nation. Here in Noakhali, he prayed, he could set alight again the torch of nonviolence to conjure away the specters of communal violence and division haunting India.

His party set out at sunup. Gandhi's pretty nineteen-year-old grandniece Manu had put together his Spartan kit: a pen and paper, a needle and thread, an earthen bowl and a wooden spoon, his spinning wheel and his three gurus, a little ivory representation of the three monkeys who "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil." She also packed in a cotton sack the books that reflected the eclecticism of the man marching into the jungle: the Bhagavad-Gita, a Koran, the Practice and Precepts of Jesus, and a book of Jewish Thoughts.

With Gandhi at their head, the little band marched over the dirt paths, past the ponds and groves of betel and coconut palms to the rice paddies beyond. The villagers of Srirampur rushed for a last glimpse of this bent seventy-seven-year-old man striding off with his bamboo stave in search of a lost dream.

As Gandhi's party began to move out of sight across the harvested paddies, the villagers heard him singing one of Rabindranath Tagore's great poems set to music. It was one of the old leader's favorites, and as he disappeared they followed the sound of his high-pitched, uneven voice drifting back across the paddies.

"If they answer not your call," he sang, "walk alone, walk alone."

The fraternal bloodshed that Gandhi hoped to check on his lonesome pilgrimage had for centuries rivaled hunger for the honor of being India's sternest curse. The great epic poem of Hinduism, the Mahabharata, celebrated an appalling civil slaughter on the plains of Kurukshetra, northwest of Delhi, 2,500 years before Christ. Hinduism itself had been brought to India by the Indo-European hordes descending from the north to wrest the subcontinent from its more ancient Dravidian inhabitants. Its sages had

written their sacred Vedas on the banks of the Indus, centuries before Christ's birth.

The faith of the Prophet had come much later, after the cohorts of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane had battered their way down the Khyber Pass to weaken the Hindus' hold on the great Gangetic plain. For two centuries, the Moslem Mogul emperors had imposed their sumptuous and implacable rule over most of India, spreading in the wake of their martial legions the message of Allah, the One, the Merciful.

The two great faiths thus planted on the subcontinent were as different as the manifestations of man's eternal vocation to believe could be. Where Islam reposed on a man, the Prophet, and a precise text, the Koran, Hinduism was a religion without a founder, a revealed truth, a dogma, a structured liturgy or a churchly establishment. For Islam, the Creator stood apart from his creation, ordering and presiding over his work. To the Hindu, the Creator and his creation were one and indivisible, and God was a kind of all-pervading cosmic spirit, to whose manifestations there would be no limit.

The Hindu, as a result, worshiped God in almost any form he chose: in animals, ancestors, sages, spirits, natural forces, divine incarnations, the Absolute. He could find God manifested in snakes, phalluses, water, fire, the planets and stars.

To the Moslem, on the contrary, there was but one God, Allah, and the Koran forbade the faithful to represent him in any shape or form. Idols and idolatry to the Moslem were abhorrent, paintings and statues blasphemous. A mosque was a spare, solemn place, in which the only decorations permitted were abstract designs and the repeated representation of the ninety-nine names of God.

Idolatry was Hinduism's natural form of expression, and a Hindu temple was the exact opposite of a mosque. It was a kind of spiritual shopping center, a clutter of goddesses with snakes coiling from their heads, six-armed gods with fiery tongues, elephants with wings talking to the clouds, jovial little monkeys, dancing maidens and squat phallic symbols.

Moslems worshiped in a body, prostrating themselves on the floor of the mosque in the direction of Mecca, chanting in unison their Koranic verses. A Hindu

worshiped alone, with only his thoughts linking him and the god he could select from a bewildering pantheon of three to three and a half million divinities. At the core of this pantheon was a central trinity—Brahma, the Creator; Shiva, the Destroyer; Vishnu, the Preserver—positive, negative, neutral forces, eternally in search, as their worshipers were supposed to be, of the perfect equilibrium, the attainment of the Absolute. Behind them were gods and goddesses for the seasons, the weather, the crops, and the ailments of man, like Mariamman, the smallpox goddess revered each year in a ritual strikingly similar to the Jewish Passover.

Hie greatest barrier to Hindu-Moslem understanding, however, was not metaphysical, but social. It was the system that ordered Hindu society, caste. According to Vedic scripture, caste originated with Brahma, the Creator. Brah-mans, the highest caste, sprang from his mouth; Kshatriyas, warriors and rulers, from his biceps; Vaisyas, traders and businessmen, from his thigh; Sudras, artisans and craftsmen, from his feet. Below them were the out-castes, the Untouchables, who had not sprung from divine soil.

The origins of the caste system, however, were notably less divine than those suggested by the Vedas. It had been a diabolic scheme employed by Hinduism's Aryan founders, to perpetuate the enslavement of India's dark, Drav-idian populations. The word for caste, varda, meant "color," and centuries later, the dark skins of India's Untouchables gave graphic proof of the system's real origins.

The five original divisions had multiplied like cancer cells into almost 5,000 subcastes, 1,886 for the Brahmans alone. Every occupation had its caste, splitting society up into a myriad closed guilds into which a man was condemned by his birth to work, live, marry and die. So precise were their definitions that an iron smelter was in a different caste than an ironsmith.

Linked to the caste system was the second concept basic to Hinduism, reincarnation. A Hindu believed that his body was only a temporary garment for his soul. His body's life was only one of his soul's many incarnations in its journey through eternity, a chain beginning and ending in some nebulous merger with the cosmos. The karma, the accumulated good and evil of each mortal lifetime, was a soul's continuing burden. It determined whether in its next

incarnation that soul would migrate up or down in the hierarchy of caste. Caste had been a superb device to perpetuate India's social inequities by giving them divine sanction. As the church had counseled the peasants of the Middle Ages to forget the misery of their lives in the contemplation of the hereafter, so Hinduism had for centuries counseled the miserable of India to accept their lot in humble resignation as the best assurance of a better destiny in their next incarnation.

To the Moslems, for whom Islam was a kind of brotherhood of the faithful, that whole system was an anathema. A welcoming faith, Islam's fraternal embrace drew millions of converts to the mosques of India's Mogul rulers. Inevitably, the vast majority of them were Untouchables seeking in the brotherhood of Islam an acceptance that their own faith could offer them only in some distant incarnation.

With the collapse of the Mogul Empire at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a martial Hindu renaissance spread across India, bringing with it a wave of Hindu-Moslem bloodshed. Britain's conquering presence had forced its Pax Britannica over the waning subcontinent, but the distrust and suspicion in which the two communities dwelt remained. The Hindus did not forget that the mass of Moslems were the descendants of Untouchables who had fled Hinduism to escape their misery. Caste Hindus would not touch food in the presence of a Moslem. A Moslem entering a Hindu kitchen would pollute it. The touch of a Moslem's hand could send a Brahman, shrieking, off to purify himself with hours of ritual ablutions.

Hindus and Moslems shared the villages awaiting Gandhi's visit in Noakhali just as they shared the thousands of villages all through the northern tier of India in Bihar, the United Provinces, the Punjab; but they dwelt in separate neighborhoods. The frontier was a road or path frequently called the Middle Way. No Moslem would live on one side of it, no Hindu on the other.

The two communities mixed socially, attending each other's feasts, sharing the poor implements with which they worked. Their intermingling tended to end there. Intermarriage was almost unknown. The communities drew their water from separate wells, and a caste Hindu would choke before sipping water from the Moslem well perhaps yards from his own. In the Punjab, what few scraps of

knowledge Hindu children acquired came from the village pandit, who taught them to write a few words in Punjabi in mud with wheat stalks. The same village's Moslem children would get their bare education from a sheikh in the mosque reciting the Koran in a different language, Urdu. Even the primitive drugs of cow's urine and herbs, with which they struggled against the same diseases, were based on different systems of natural medicine.

To those social and religious differences had been added an even more divisive, more insidious distinction. It was economic. The Hindus had been far swifter than the Moslems to seize the opportunities that British education and Western thought had placed before India. As a result, while the British had been socially more at ease with the Moslems, it was the Hindus who had administered India for them. They were India's businessmen, financiers, administrators, professional men. With the Parsis, the descendants of ancient Persia's fire-worshiping Zoroastrians, they monopolized insurance, banking, big business and India's few industries.

In the towns and small cities, the Hindus were the dominant commercial community. The ubiquitous role of the moneylender was almost everywhere taken by Hindus, partly because of their aptitude for the task, partly because of the Koranic proscription of the practice of usury.

The Moslem upper classes, many of whom descended from the Mogul invaders, had tended to remain landlords and soldiers. The Moslem masses, because of the deeply ingrained patterns of Indian society, rarely escaped in the faith of Mohammed the roles the caste system had assigned their forebears in the faith of Shiva. They were usually landless peasants in the service of Hindus or Moslems in the country, laborers and petty craftsmen in the service of Hindu employers in the city.

This economic rivalry accentuated the social and religious barriers between the two communities, and it made communal slaughters, like that which had shattered the peace of Srirampur, regular occurrences. Each community had its preferred provocations for launching them. For the Hindus it was music. Music never accompanied the austere service of the mosque, and its strains mingling with the mumble of the faithfuls' prayers was a blasphemy. There was no surer way for the Hindus to incite their Mos-

lem neighbors than to set up a band outside a mosque during Friday prayers.

For the Moslem, the provocation of choice involved an animal, one of the gray skeletal beasts lowing down the streets of every city, town and village in India, aimlessly wandering her fields, the object of the most perplexing of Hinduism's cults, the sacred cow.

The veneration of the cow dated to Biblical times, when the fortunes of the pastoral Indo-European peoples migrating onto the subcontinent depended on the vitality of their herds. As the rabbis of ancient Judea had forbidden pig flesh to their peoples to save them from the ravages of trichinosis, so the sadhus of ancient India had proclaimed the cow sacred to save from slaughter in times of famine the herds on which their people's existence depended.

As a result, India had in 1947 the largest and most useless bovine herd in the world, 200 million beasts, one for every two Indians, an animal population larger than the human population of the United States. Forty million cows produced a meager trickle of milk averaging barely a pint per animal per day. Forty or fifty million more were beasts of burden tugging their bullock carts and plows. The rest, a hundred-odd million, were sterile, useless animals roaming free through the fields, villages and cities of India. Every day their restless jaws chomped through the food that could have fed ten million Indians living on the edge of starvation.

Every instinct of reason, of sheer survival, should have condemned those useless beasts. Yet, so tenacious had the superstition become that cow slaughter remained an abomination for the very Indians starving to death so those beasts could continue their futile existence. Even Gandhi maintained that in protecting the cow it was all God's work that man protected.

To the Moslems, the thought that a man could so degrade himself as to worship a dumb animal was utterly repugnant. They took a perverse delight in driving a protesting herd of cows right past the front door of a Hindu temple en route to the slaughterhouse. Over the centuries, thousands of human beings had accompanied those animals to their death in the riots which inevitably followed each such gesture.

While the British ruled India, they managed to keep a fragile balance between the two communities, using at the

same time the antagonism to ease the burdens of their rule. Initially, the drive for Indian independence was confined to an intellectual elite in which Hindus and Moslems ignored communal differences to work side by side toward a common goal. Ironically, it was Gandhi who disrupted that accord.