Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (57 page)

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
, 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 casements and doorways, the glass 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 passions 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 Lahore 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.

From one moment to the next, he was torn between wariness and hope. As the mixed throngs of Hindus and Muslims that turned out almost daily to hear him and Suhrawardy continued to swell—to half a million or more, it was reported on at least two occasions—he was
reminded of the high tide of the Khilafat movement that had swept him into a position of national leadership. “
One might almost say that the joy of fraternization is leaping up from hour to hour,” he allowed himself to write.

Shaheed Suhrawardy, who’d tried to maneuver him out of Noakhali earlier in the year, now basked in the glow of the Mahatma, paying him tribute for the joy and relief Calcutta was drawing from its astonishing plunge into amity. “
All this is due to the infinite mercy of Allah and the good work of our beloved Bapu,” this Muslim Leaguer said. Mountbatten, now governor-general of an independent India, noted that a “boundary force” under British officers had been dispatched to the Punjab in hopes of containing the violence there. “
In the Punjab,” he wrote, “we have 55,000 soldiers and large-scale rioting on our hands. In Bengal our forces consist of one man, and there is no rioting … May I be allowed to pay my tribute to the One Man Boundary Force, not forgetting his Second-in-Command, Mr. Suhrawardy.”

Mountbatten’s letter was delivered to Gandhi on August 30. Gandhi then scheduled his return to Noakhali for September 1. But that day didn’t dawn peacefully. On what was to have been his last evening in Calcutta, the Hydari mansion, his Beliaghata command post, was again invaded by surly young Hindus with a score, they said, to settle with Suhrawardy. Luckily, the former chief minister had gone home to pack for the Mahatma’s Noakhali trip, for which he’d enlisted. According to Gandhi’s account, the invaders were carrying a Hindu man wrapped in bandages who had been stabbed by a Muslim, or so they claimed. On closer examination, it was shown he hadn’t been stabbed at all. Gandhi had just retired for the night; at first, he said, he lay still with his eyes shut. Then, hearing shouts and the smashing of more glass, the old man stepped into the adjoining reception room to face the attackers. It was his silent day, the one day a week he refrained from speech, but given the provocation, he made an exception.

“
What is all this?” he demanded. “Kill me, kill me, I say. Why don’t you kill me?”

He was speaking Hindi. Even after his words were translated into Bengali, they’d no effect. A chunk of brick was thrown at a man mistaken for a Muslim who’d been standing near the Mahatma. “Is this the reality of the peace that was established on August 15th?” a distraught but undaunted Gandhi then asked. “I offer myself for attack.”

Again, there had to be a pause for translation. Slowly his words sank in, but as he himself wrote the next day after gathering reports of violent
outbreaks around the city, “
The Calcutta bubble seems to have burst … What was regarded as a miracle has proved a short-lived, nine-day wonder.” Within hours, having scrubbed the trip to Noakhali yet again, he’d resolved to stay in place and fast. It was, he’d said, his “
fiery weapon,” or sometimes, his “infallible weapon.” Perhaps this time it would touch hearts in the Punjab as well as Calcutta. “If I lack even the power to pacify the people,” he wrote to Patel, “what else is left for me to do?”

The day after the attack on the Hydari mansion, about fifty persons were reported to have been killed and three hundred injured in uncontrolled rioting in Calcutta. Troops were called out, but there weren’t nearly enough to handle the situation; the local garrison had been depleted by reassignment of units to crisis areas in North India and the Punjab. The city seemed to be slipping back, heading for a reenactment of the previous year’s “great killing,” when Gandhi began his fast on September 2.

Two days later it was quiet. Large peace marches, propelled by an urgent sense of necessity, headed for Beliaghata to assure the Mahatma that this time the truce would hold. Militant Hindu groups and known gangsters came and laid at least some of their weapons at his feet. Untold thousands fasted in sympathy, including members of the police. Two Hindus, striving as Gandhian peace workers to protect Muslims under assault, were themselves cut down, thus fulfilling, with the sacrifice of their lives, his most severe definition of satyagraha. All accounts point to one conclusion, that the city was gripped by a sense of how unthinkable, how disgraceful, it would be to let the saintly old man who’d led the independence struggle die within its precincts at what was supposed to be the dawn of India’s freedom.

On the evening of the third day, a remarkable gathering, representing virtually the entire religious and political spectrum, crowded into Gandhi’s room to urge that he break the fast. There were leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League, of the Sikhs who’d been aroused by reports of the massacres in the Punjab, of the militant
Hindu Mahasabha; and there was Shaheed Suhrawardy, the former chief minister, publicly atoning for his failure at the time of the Great Calcutta Killing by orchestrating the proceedings. Living up to the stereotype of his Bania caste, Gandhi bargained before settling.

The delegation would have to meet two conditions to satisfy him. First, they’d have to sign an open-ended pledge that communal violence
would never recur in Calcutta; that was the easy part. Second, the pledge would have to include a promise that if it did break out again, each would personally lay down his life to restore peace. The leaders withdrew to another room, then returned with the document he’d demanded. The same Bengali song Tagore had sung at the end of the fast in Yeravda prison fourteen years earlier was sung again as Suhrawardy did the honors, handing Gandhi a small glass of sweet lime juice: “
When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy.”

Calcutta rejoiced.
His old comrade Rajagopalachari, West Bengal’s new governor, said nothing Gandhi had achieved, “not even independence,” had been “so truly wonderful as his victory over evil in Calcutta.” Gandhi’s own depiction of his role sounds humble enough but, on a careful reading, reflects his mounting conviction that he’d been chosen to serve as peacemaker. “
This sudden upheaval is not the work of one or two men,” he wrote on first hearing talk of a Calcutta miracle, before either the renewed violence or the fast that ended it. “We are toys in the hands of God. He makes us dance to His tune.”

Three days later, on September 7, he left by train for Delhi, on what would prove to be the final stage in his long life as wanderer and seeker, a perpetual pilgrim, leaving unfulfilled his pledges to return to Noakhali or start a sojourn in Pakistan’s portion of the Punjabi killing fields. What kept him in Delhi was the spread of the wildfire of communal violence to the city, which was really in those days two cities that hadn’t yet grown together: old Delhi, former Mughal capital, scene of a rebellion against British control nearly a century earlier in which Hindu as well as Muslim troops had fought in the previous century to restore a Muslim dynasty; and
New Delhi, proud seat of the foreign imperium, completed as it was losing its grip on the subcontinent, newer in 1947 than such later twentieth-century creations as Brasília or Islamabad are today. Delhi is actually as close to Lahore as Washington is to New York. Suddenly, now, they were worlds apart as traumatized Hindu refugees streamed across the border telling of family members and homes they’d lost, the devastation they’d witnessed. With seeming inevitability, a furious spirit of revenge and sheer human need combined to extend the chain reaction that the Great Calcutta Killing had ignited thirteen months earlier: Hindus driven from their homes in the Punjab now joined forces with local extremists to drive Muslims from their homes in Delhi.

It was still the first month of Indian independence. Soon one in four of the capital’s residents would be classed as refugees. By the time Gandhi arrived in Delhi on the morning of September 9, mosques were under attack, mob looting and killing were only beginning to taper off after rolling unchecked for several days, bodies were still being picked up from the streets, and a military curfew had been imposed. Fresh from his “miracle,” an understandably shaken but calm Mahatma followed his own drill, doing what he’d done successively over those months in Noakhali, Bihar, and Calcutta: promising to stay in the capital until it was entirely peaceful, to “do or die.” This time his favorite shibboleth would burn like a fuse.

So thick were the insecurity and fear gripping the capital that Patel told Gandhi, in no uncertain terms, that he couldn’t possibly return to the quarter of the most despised untouchables, the Bhangis, or sweepers, which he’d been pointedly using as his Delhi base for the better part of two years. In his own mind, making Indians and foreigners who wanted to call on him come to the Bhangi colony was simply a logical extension of the struggle against untouchability that he regularly traced to his experiences in South Africa.

Without his knowing it, the Bhangi colony had been partially turned into a stage set before he took up residence there in 1946 by minions of the industrialist
G. D. Birla, his chief financial backer. Mr. Gandhi, meet Mr. Potemkin.
Margaret Bourke-White, the American photojournalist, has a
wonderfully dry description of how they’d razed an authentically miserable shantytown and, banishing half its population, had thrown up, for those allowed to remain, rows of tidy little mud houses with casements and doorways providing decent ventilation, all arrayed on a regular grid of widened paths edged in brick, watered daily to keep down dust. Electricity, electric fans, and phones were part of this new deal, according to her account. There in the somewhat larger but still modest structure that had been put up for Gandhi, near a small freshly whitewashed temple, he conferred with Congress leaders and British cabinet ministers.
When he had to leave what was now the most presentable, least malodorous slum in India, for conferences at the palatial Viceregal Lodge, he’d been chauffeured in the industrialist’s “milk-white Packard car.”