Raghu Karnad: Mother Father

Raghu Karnad

Gandhi’s adversaries seem to have prevailed. The last generation of his disciples is dying off, and his pedestal can now be dismantled. In the LRB in 2012, Perry Anderson could still describe a reverent consensus around the Mahatma, which he then assailed with a catalogue of Gandhi’s missteps and obdurate follies. In 2014, Arundhati Roy wrote an introduction to Annihilation of Caste (1936) by B.R. Ambedkar, a leader of the untouchables, explaining his contempt for Gandhi, who in 1932 had begun a ‘fast unto death’ to end a plan that would have given untouchables separate electoral representation. Also in 2014, Hindu nationalists won the general election in India: power was now held by admirers of Savarkar, who had been tried as an accomplice to Gandhi’s assassination, and of Nathuram Godse, who had fired the gun.

The assassins’ point of view – that Gandhi was a misguided pacifist who had appeased Muslims and compromised Hindu interests – had become the establishment’s. Gandhi’s vast correspondence was combed for its most egregious or dated remarks. It is true that he was too hostile to modern industry and too cold towards militant labour; he was too cautious in 1922, when he called off the Non-Co-operation Movement against British rule, but too reckless in 1942, when he launched the Quit India campaign; he was effete but a bully, a pious Hindu crank, a Muslim-lover. Then there’s the weird sexual stuff – his trials of chastity – intensely criticised by his followers during his stay in Noakhali, a district in Bengal, near the end of his life. By the 2020s, it seemed to be harder to recite the events of his life than the faults and failures that attended them.

‘And now, the more terrible and darker the picture you draw of Noakhali, the more is my mind steeled to stay,’ Manu Gandhi, not yet twenty years old, wrote to her great-uncle Mohandas – ‘Bapu’ – before joining him in December 1946 on Bengal’s eastern coast. He had warned her that, as well as physical danger and hardship, their mission in Noakhali would involve intense trials of the spirit. The local situation was ‘an altar for self-sacrifice’. Since October, it had been a preview of Partition: hamlets had been burned down, women and girls abducted; thousands were dead and tens of thousands had fled. There had been rioting in Bengal for years. In Noakhali, however, a district in what would soon be Pakistan (and is now in Bangladesh), the object was unprecedented: to push out the minority Hindu population and shut the door behind them.

Manu, who was one of those closest to Gandhi after the death of his wife, Kasturba, in 1944, was happy to reach Noakhali. ‘The journey was trying,’ her diary says, but ‘that day is written in letters of gold in the book of my life.’ Manu marched beside the 77-year-old Mahatma as he went from village to village. She cooked and cleaned, treated the cuts on his feet, attended his sermons, took dictation of his letters. It was a strange place to find the beacon of the national movement as India careened towards self-government. Noakhali was a swampy, mofussil district midway between Dhaka and Chittagong, where Gandhi did not speak the language. He wanted not only to halt the flight of the area’s Hindu residents but to summon them back, even to their deaths. He was there, as Manu was, to offer the same sacrifice. By that example of ahimsa, he hoped to reverse the tide of violence that was carrying India towards Partition.

As late as 1946, the British position was still that ‘neither a larger nor a smaller sovereign state of Pakistan would provide an acceptable solution to the communal problem.’ This was the conclusion of the cabinet mission dispatched by the prime minister, Clement Attlee, to Delhi and Shimla to thrash out the terms of independence. Carving through the middle of the Punjab and Bengal, it said, would be ‘contrary to the wishes and interests of a very large proportion of the inhabitants’, sharing as they did the ties of language, history and tradition. Still, it was clear that the increasing bloodshed and unravelling trust between India’s Muslims and Hindus required a constitutional remedy before any transfer of power.

The Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was by now the sole representative of Indian Muslims. Gandhi was intent on a single national destiny; Jinnah was adamant there must be separation. The weary cabinet mission arrived at a baroque compromise to end the deadlock. It proposed a single federal entity: India’s provinces would be grouped along religious lines, with separate constitutions. Nehru, leader of the Congress, consented to the plan but then backtracked. Jinnah complained of sabotage. It was time, he said, for Muslims to ‘bid goodbye to constitutional methods’. He promised a general strike and a day of ‘direct action’ on 16 August. ‘If you want peace, we do not want war,’ he declared at a rally in Bombay. ‘If you want war, we accept your offer unhesitatingly.’

The competitive identities of Hindu and Muslim had hardened in Bengal earlier than in the rest of India. In 1905, Lord Curzon split the province in two: his sole object, in the view of the Liberal MP Henry Cotton, was ‘to shatter the unity and to disintegrate the feelings of solidarity which are established’ there. The decision was so unpopular, and so helpful to agitators, that the partition was reversed in 1911. (George V made the announcement himself, at the Delhi Durbar, a huge gathering to mark his accession.) More than a century later, there are still efforts to identify and disenfranchise Bengali-speaking migrants from Bangladesh. The contention is that Bengali-speaking Muslims are ‘infiltrating’ India, demographically transforming and ‘Islam-ising’ eastern states. India’s most inflamed arguments about national identity revolve around the figure of the ghuspetia, a Bengali Muslim ‘infiltrator’.

In the days following the general strike on 16 August, hearing reports of the ‘direct action’ taking place in Bengal, the photographer Margaret Bourke-White flew to Calcutta. The Muslim League had taken power in the province after elections earlier that year. In Calcutta, a tea-shop owner called Nanda Lal gave her a vivid account of his street’s descent into havoc. It had begun with lorries arriving on Harrison Road and unloading a rabble who began to attack non-Muslim shops and houses. College students and rival party cadres were drawn into street fighting. Soon, Bourke-White wrote, ‘through the entire city the terror and arson spread, through the crowded bazaars, the teeming chawls and tenements.’ One night, Nanda Lal was approached by a neighbour, the owner of the Gulzar Shawl Repair Company, and asked to help rescue nine Hindu college girls (they were smuggled home through his courtyard). He was taken aback. ‘He had completely forgotten … that Mussulmans could be benevolent human beings.’ On the third day, the army arrived and began to use machine guns. On the fifth day there was silence. To Bourke-White, who had been in Germany the year before, Calcutta’s streets ‘looked like Buchenwald’. Thousands were dead (the majority Muslims) and ‘vast areas were dark with ruin.’ But ‘Calcutta was only the beginning of a chain reaction of riot, counter-riot and reprisal’; the next link in the chain was Noakhali.

A Hindu minority of about 20 per cent, many of them landowners, had prospered in Noakhali under the Raj. An organised local movement of peasants and sharecroppers was co-opted in the 1940s by the Muslim League, whose utopian promises about a new state easily outshone more pragmatic demands for tenancy reform and interest-free loans. In the same years, the Bengal coast was battered by cyclones, tidal waves and crop failures. In 1942, after the fall of Burma, the British implemented a ‘Policy of Denial’ in Noakhali, in an attempt to impede the anticipated arrival of the Japanese army in Assam and Bengal. Boats and vehicles were confiscated or scuttled and huge amounts of rice disposed of. Bengali villages were more isolated than ever when famine set in the following year.

By 1945, in an attempt to feed their families, women in Noakhali were forced to ‘sell themselves … in hordes’ to the troops moving down to Chittagong and the Burma front, according to a local communist leader. The famine sharpened the peasantry’s anger at landowners, and by August 1946 the mutation from class struggle to communal paranoia was complete. Pamphlets called for ‘a revenge of Calcutta’, and for Muslims in Noakhali to save themselves from a similar fate. One pamphlet, circulated by a subdivisional office of the Muslim League, warned of the ‘secret and evil plan’ of the ‘fascist, bourgeois caste-Hindu Congress in alliance with the bourgeois imperialist British’. It went on: ‘Not just in India, all Muslims all over the world are now living in imminent danger.’ On 10 October, Gulam Sarwar gave an incendiary speech in the district’s main bazaar. Sarwar, until recently a leader of the peasants’ party, had lost his seat in the election earlier that year to the League and gone over to its cause. His militia blocked the roads and docks, cut telegraph lines and stopped trains from entering the district, as the purge of Hindu households began.

‘The situation in Bengal is so desperate,’ Horace Alexander, a Quaker, wrote to Gandhi in late October, ‘it can only be cured by a heroic remedy.’ Gandhi was still occupied with the independence negotiations in Delhi. He was old and unwell, but he foresaw that Noakhali would serve as a final trial of his beliefs and the last chance to defeat the logic of Partition. With a company of disciples – and a party of Sikh army veterans – he left for Calcutta. On 6 November, a boat was arranged to take him to Noakhali. The countryside was described in the gazetteer as ‘a vast rice plain … where rich groves of areca nut and coconut palms rising out from the dense undergrowth of Mandar [coral] trees … make every village look like a forest’ – but now it was strewn with looted property and grisly evidence of violence. In one place, Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee writes, an anxious dog attracted Gandhi’s attention. It led the group to a spot in the bushes where they found the remains of its human family. On another occasion, a traumatised woman approached Gandhi at a prayer meeting to present him with her husband’s thigh bone. Women in Hindu neighbourhoods told of being abducted, raped and sent home at daylight, just to be taken away again at sundown.

In 1930, when Gandhi embarked on his Salt March to Dandi (an act of civil disobedience aimed at ending the colonial monopoly on the production and sale of salt), a similar procession set out to collect salt on the beach at Noakhali. At that time, nobody had yet heard the word ‘Pakistan’. It was the high-water mark of satyagraha, or ‘truth force’, the term Gandhi coined for his practice of non-violent resistance. It was the high point, more generally, of Gandhi’s charismatic sway over the national movement and of Hindu-Muslim amity within it. But Noakhali was now a symbol of the undoing of all three. V.S. Naipaul, reviewing Gandhi’s autobiography in 1976, invented a poignant image: ‘Sad last pilgrimage: embittered people scatter broken glass on the roads he is to walk. Seventeen years before, on the Salt March, at the other end of India, the poor had sometimes strewn his path with cool green leaves.’

In fact, huge crowds turned out at every stop to hail Gandhi. His party met relief workers and refugees, who were crowded into school buildings, warehouses and any structure promising safety. Muslim Leaguers visited him to pledge peace. They blamed the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha for spreading panic through rumour and exaggeration, and asked sarcastically if Gandhi would go to Bihar, where the counter-riot against Muslims was underway. ‘I find myself in the midst of exaggeration and falsity,’ Gandhi wrote. ‘I am unable to discover the truth.’ In Noakhali, even ‘truth and ahimsa … seem to fail to show the attributes I have ascribed to them.’

To Gandhi, Bhattacharjee writes, satyagraha was a ‘science in the making’, subject to experiment and revision. Having failed to validate it at the level of the nation or district, he attempted the smallest scale of praxis: go to a village, stay there. On 20 November he instructed his followers, including the women, to disperse into the countryside. There they would offer themselves up in an exemplary performance of non-violence, becoming martyrs if need be. He went to Srirampur, a village from which all but one of the Hindu families had fled. Here, Gandhi hoped, he could be like a gardener, tending to his patch in order to learn ‘the exact conditions under which the plant will thrive’. With him went only an interpreter, the anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose, and a stenographer, R.P. Parasuram.

On his first evening there, the Hindu’s correspondent found him ‘in his new abode … sitting calmly in a half-burned house amid ruins’. Of course, Gandhi in 1946 was never alone; visitors were numerous, journalists hovered. He held interfaith prayer sessions and sat with both Hindu and Muslim households. He kept up his daily quota of spinning cloth, sometimes getting back at 11 p.m. to sit at the charkha for an hour before he slept. He woke every day at three. He stayed in Srirampur for 43 nights, which, as his biographer Ramachandra Guha notes, was the longest he spent anywhere apart from his ashrams – or in prison – in more than thirty years of public life.

Still, he knew he was failing. ‘In spite of all my efforts exodus continues and very few persons have returned,’ he confessed on 3 December. ‘Why does the spell not work?’ he wrote to a friend. ‘May it not be because I have temporised in the question of brahmacharya?’ Manu’s arrival, on 19 December, gave him hope – and brought a strange turn to the Noakhali experiment, one that still confounds his believers and delights his critics. Forty years earlier, in South Africa, he had taken a vow of sexual abstinence. Now he felt it urgent to test his discipline, and his disciple. He asked Manu (who had taken similar vows) to share his bed at night, possibly unclothed. Among his party and his colleagues elsewhere there was muffled uproar. Parasuram – ‘the whole thing is considered wrong by the world’ – left in protest.

Gandhi, making little effort at secrecy, engaged in earnest correspondence on the question. Vallabhbhai Patel growled about the political risk, the danger of their opponents finding out. Vinoba Bhave observed that, to a true brahmachari, lying with a woman would be no different from lying with a man. Nehru pressed Gandhi to return to Delhi, where his advice and authority were needed. India was on the brink of freedom but no closer to agreement on what that would mean. In his replies, Gandhi was as gently obstinate about continuing his nightly experiment as he was about staying in Noakhali. Manu, to judge by her diary, was distressed only by the intrusive fuss. But her diary wasn’t private: her great-uncle discussed every entry with her. She describes his attentions as tender, maternal care. On 21 December, when he first asked whether she was willing to share a bed with him, she replied: ‘Why did you even ask? I have made you my mother and a child sleeping by her mother’s side sleeps naturally.’ Gandhi, typically forthright, replied: ‘I am like a mother to you. But I am a man, and you are a woman. You are young.’ He likened their trial to a yagna, a ritual fire sacrifice.

Manu’s mother had died when she was young, and she was raised by Gandhi and his wife at their ashram. After the Quit India uprising of 1942, Gandhi was imprisoned for the remainder of the war in the comfort of the Aga Khan’s mansion in Poona. Both Manu and Kasturba went there with him, and Manu remained after Kasturba died. In Noakhali, the maternal metaphor persisted, though in a euphoric register that hardly calls to mind a more usual mother-daughter relationship. When Gandhi warned Manu not to carry a heavy bucket of water, she wrote: ‘What male shows motherly care and love as he does? … Oh, joy! I am actually having that experience! It is I who am that beloved child of Mother Bapu!’ As ‘Mother Bapu’ – literally ‘Mother Father’, as Guha points out – Gandhi embodied a chimeric ideal of authority and care, in opposition to the sexual violence, revenge and honour-killing that was taking place across India.

Bhattacharjee’s book, which describes Gandhi’s final months, interpolates with a free hand snatches of literature and moral philosophy. He relates Gandhi’s ‘division of labour … between the satyagrahi (by day) and the brahmachari (at night)’ to Foucault’s view of the chaste struggle of the Christian ascetic Cassian, ‘to stay awake night and day – at night for the day, and in the day thinking of the night to come’. In Noakhali, Gandhi’s hope was for the pure, sublimated powers of the brahmachari to effect a worldly victory for ahimsa. ‘The common element,’ Bhattacharjee writes, ‘was intensification: if violence provokes, meet it with a disarmed body. If sexuality distracts, expose yourself to a bare body. Truth is not metaphysics. It had to be confronted daily in the body.’

Many have accused Gandhi of doing too much of that. Perry Anderson observed that Gandhi’s metaphysics treated the person and the world as fungible. He noted the dual connotations of swaraj, or ‘self-rule’, which was ‘far from simply political. It was mastery of the passions and of the senses in the ascent of the soul’ – something Gandhi demanded of his followers as much as of himself. Naipaul said of Gandhi’s younger years in England that ‘the inward concentration is fierce, the self-absorption complete.’ Even at the end of his life, the pattern held. But when Gandhi’s distress over the killings and abductions took him to Noakhali, and his febrile obsession with chastity returned, he did not falter in his march. Naipaul: ‘At this terrible moment his thoughts are of action, and he is magnificent.’

Gandhi left Srirampur on 2 January 1947, going ‘on foot, when possible and necessary, from village to village [to] induce the evacuees to return’. He walked barefoot and his party sang hymns as they marched; after sunrise, a crowd would swell around them. In due course, he would relent and go to Bihar, then to Delhi – opposing Partition to the last – before returning to Calcutta in August. He was there when the two states formalised independence, fasting in a half-ruined house to demand an end to the riots in the city. They ended, and the peace held, in Noakhali too. Six months later Gandhi was killed, by an assassin who believed – as do others, legion in India today – that he emboldened Muslims, betrayed his homeland and consented carelessly to its partition.

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