Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (52 page)

Jinnah’s gossamer promise was the obverse of a pious hope that had been slowly forming in Gandhi’s mind, which was now not infrequently despairing. By prodding Noakhali Hindus to return to their villages and
by living there peacefully himself, he still meant to prove to all the subcontinent’s Muslims and Hindus that there was no need for a Pakistan of any size or description. “
If the Hindus could live side by side with the Muslims in Noakhali,” Pyarelal wrote, putting the Mahatma’s utopian vision into his own words, “the two communities could coexist in the rest of India, too, without vivisection of the Motherland. On the answer to the challenge of Noakhali thus hung the fate of India.” Having placed himself beyond the very periphery of the subcontinent, he now vowed to make isolated Noakhali central to its destiny.

Consciously or not, Gandhi was following his old impulse to turn inward and go it alone, the one that had caused him a decade earlier to attempt to strike out for the remote village of Segaon by himself in hopes of finding a way through obstructions and caste prohibitions that had blocked and defeated his co-workers: the same impulse that had led, in his South Africa years, to the short-lived experiment in communal living called Tolstoy Farm.
In an analogous quest, he now vowed to bury himself in a remote village in Noakhali where he could go without his entourage and take up residence with a
Muslim League family. He said that would be his “ideal.” If he failed to find willing Muslim hosts there, he’d live by himself. So he headed for an obscure village called Srirampur, not far from the epicenter of the worst Noakhali violence, bringing with him only an interpreter and a stenographer. The interpreter doubled as a Bengali teacher; he’d now be asked to function as well as masseur.

The stenographer normally handled Gandhi’s correspondence and whipped up the transcripts of his nightly talks at prayer meetings for the small retinue of journalists that trailed him. A pioneer in the art of press manipulation, Gandhi insisted the journalists file not on the words that had actually come out of his mouth but on versions he “authorized” after his own sometimes heavy editing of the transcripts. The journalists—like the armed police detachment assigned by Suhrawardy to protect him—were also instructed to keep a decent distance so that the Mahatma’s sense of his solitary mission would not be compromised.

Gandhi now drafted a statement for the colleagues he was leaving behind. “
I find myself in the midst of exaggeration and falsity. I am unable to discover the truth,” it said. “Oldest friendships have snapped. Truth and ahimsa by which I swear and which have to my knowledge sustained me for sixty years, seem to fail to show the attributes I ascribed to them.” On that unhappy note, he disembarked at Srirampur, where he’d dwell for six weeks in a small wood-frame shelter with walls of corrugated
metal and woven palm fronds, making a disciplined effort to push down dark premonitions and thoughts that continued to well up in his mind, waiting for inspiration.

Elderly people still living in the district retain distinct mental images of Gandhi from those days. They picture the public man, animated, soft-spoken, and smiling, his regularly oiled and massaged skin gleaming. A Hindu woman named
Moranjibala Nandi, said by her son to be 105, was capable of describing the moment when the Mahatma came into the compound, where she was still living sixty-three years later, to distribute cloth to refugees. She pointed out the spot where he stood, about twenty yards from where, wrapped in a white widow’s sari, she now sat crumpled into something like a small ball with only her sunken cheeks and gnarled, expressive fingers showing. “He didn’t have a sad face,” she said. I heard descriptions of similar encounters from a half-dozen other nonagenarians and octogenarians.
But four days after his arrival in Srirampur, his new interpreter and Bengali tutor, a Calcutta intellectual named
Nirmal Kumar Bose, heard him muttering to himself in Hindi, “
Kya karun, kya karun?
” “What should I do, what should I do?” the Mahatma was asking.

If Gandhi returned to Srirampur today, he’d easily recognize the place even though the population has tripled over the decades. Where people actually reside and mingle, the bright sunlight is still largely filtered through palm canopies and foliage of other trees that yield their own modest cash crops—betel nut, papaya, mango—planted as densely as possible not for the shade but the cash. The light that seeps through takes on a greenish, seemingly subaqueous quality that’s soothing in contrast to the direct rays that then startle the eye when, following the swept dirt paths that are still the main thoroughfares, the visitor emerges on the embankments that frame the rice paddies, long vistas of a stunning electric green in the growing season that turn scrubby and dun colored after the harvests.

When Gandhi took his twice-a-day walks here, the harvest was just beginning; by the time he left, it was in. The men who lounge around the tea stalls at intersections of the paths mostly wrap themselves in lungis, the casual skirts, tied at the waist, seldom seen in North India. When it’s hot, as it mostly is in Bangladesh, they don’t bother with shirts. Cars don’t get to these hubs—even rickshaws are sparse—but buses and trucks can now reach the edge of the village as they couldn’t in Gandhi’s
day, when most transport was by canals that have long since been choked by hyacinth plants and blocked by buildings on cement pilings.

In Srirampur
(photo credit i11.4)

“
Hardly a wheel turns … I saw no motorable road. The bullock cart, one of India’s truest symbols, does not exist here,” wrote
Phillips Talbot, a young American journalist, later a diplomat, who caught up with Gandhi in Noakhali. “The civilization is amphibious.”

Viewed superficially, the place today looks timeless, beyond history, becalmed. But mention Gandhi and the short season of slaughter that made Noakhali notorious, more than six decades ago when what’s now Bangladesh was still India, and someone who was a child then steps forward to point out landmarks from his time here or, more likely, the sites from which those landmarks have now vanished. The simple cottage that was thrown up for Gandhi is long gone, as is the ruin of a Hindu landowner’s large house that was set on fire before the Mahatma came. But any villager with a little gray in his hair knows where they stood. A
banyan tree under which a small Hindu shrine was smashed back then is pointed out as a place where the Mahatma once paused to shake his head over the damage. The shrine has since been restored; the village’s handful of Hindus pray there for protection against diseases. At a nearby village mosque an elderly attendant named Abdul Rashid Patwari, now ninety, gives a convincing account of Gandhi’s visit on one of his morning walks.

The story is known, but in another sense it’s prehistoric since history, as it’s taught and understood in today’s Bangladesh, generally begins with the country’s “liberation” from Pakistan in 1971. The short, twenty-four-year existence of East Pakistan, as the country was called before that sundering, is remembered, when it’s acknowledged at all, as a time of heavy-handed oppression by Muslims from the Punjab, on the other side of the subcontinent. Jinnah, never a hero among Bengalis, is lost in a deep amnesia. But Gandhi, faintly venerated as a saintly Hindu who came here on a peace mission, retains a presence. Voices become hushed. His name evokes a formal reverence, even among those who have never known the details of his time here.

Such flimsy sentiments are not without value, but the evidence of the failure of the Mahatma’s mission here is also on the surface in Srirampur.
If the size of the Hindu population was on the order of one-fifth in East Bengal in 1946, it’s now closer to one-twentieth in Srirampur; in its vicinity, no more than five hundred souls. Hardly anyone mourns the long-ago partition Gandhi was hoping to ward off by raising up a compelling, shining example of nonviolence that the rest of the subcontinent would have to take into account. That dream is forgotten. What remains is the idea of peace and a lingering impression that it had something to do with good works. There are no memorials for Pakistan in Noakhali, but, amazingly, less than fifteen miles from Srirampur there’s a modest Gandhi museum near a town named Joyag, where he once spent a night, part of an underfinanced social service organization called the
Gandhi Ashram Trust that traces its inspiration to his time in the district. Its top officers are Hindu, but 80 percent of its beneficiaries are Muslim. There, Bengali women are still taught to spin and weave by hand. The trust hopes it will begin earning a modest profit on its handicrafts sometime soon and thus begin to fulfill the Mahatma’s vision. It’s enough part of the landscape to maintain good relations with the chairman of the Joyag village council, an orthodox Muslim named
Abdue Wahab who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and ran on the ticket of the
Jamaat-i-Islami, a religious party generally classed as militant. “A man like
Gandhi is needed by this society and the world,” the Jamaat man told me. Some people in his movement blame him for cooperating with the
Gandhi Ashram Trust because Gandhi was a Hindu. “
That’s due to lack of understanding,” Chairman Wahab said, smiling sweetly.

In a nearby village, I sipped the watery, sweet juice of a green coconut with an elderly Hindu and an even more ancient Muslim who remained neighbors as Noakhali became part of Pakistan instead of India, then Bangladesh instead of Pakistan. They now sat side by side. I couldn’t be sure whether that was out of long habit or for my benefit. “He brought peace here,” the Hindu said piously. “The sad part is no one followed him,” the Muslim said. I took that to be a comment on the standard of leadership the country has seen since. History, it seemed in that moment, had simultaneously moved on and stood still. The killings are remembered as a long-ago typhoon, another kind of natural disaster. Gandhi’s time here is sanctified or sentimentalized—depending on how the questions are put—as if his mission somehow accomplished its ends, as if the relative absence of communal violence ever since can be attributed to his influence.

That’s not how the Mahatma experienced it. Most of Srirampur’s Hindus had, in fact, fled by the time he took up residence there.
According to
Narayan Desai, only three out of two hundred Hindu families remained. In a letter written in his first week there, Gandhi himself boasts, “There is only one Hindu family living in the entire village, the rest are all Muslims.” No
Muslim League family ever came forward to offer him the refuge he sought, so he remained in his little cabin, venturing out for his walks, which sometimes included calls on ailing children whose Muslim parents were willing to hear his advice about nature cures involving diet and mud poultices. On rare occasions, he left the village for meetings with local Muslim religious or political leaders, who then routinely would dwell on conditions in Bihar, implying not so subtly that it was time for him to move on. Regularly he met with Gandhian workers he’d stationed in nearby villages in the stricken area, drafting new instructions as they reported on the dearth of cooperation from local officials, following these up with appeals to Suhrawardy, who unfailingly responded by pressing him on the pointlessness of his mission in Bengal while Bihar was burning. Assured by Congress leaders in Bihar that peace had been restored, Gandhi resumed his consumption of goat’s milk and gradually increased his daily intake of food. (His weight, so
Bose tells us, had dropped to 106½ pounds.) His intelligence on Bihar was more to be trusted than Suhrawardy’s, he insisted. But he didn’t need reminding that he was making little progress. He just had to look around. Few Hindus were returning to their burned-out homes, despite his assurances or promises of assistance in rebuilding. And Muslims were continuing to distance themselves, boycotting his prayer meetings and the small number of Hindu shopkeepers still in business in the bazaars.

“
My unfitness for the task is showing at every step,” he declared in the course of his Srirampur sojourn. Once again, it was as if the intractable problem of communal strife in India was somehow internalized within himself, that his failure to work the miracle on which he was bent could be traced to some personal “imperfection” or defect. Ultimately, he’d say exactly that. “
I can see there is some grave defect in me somewhere which is the cause of all this. All around me is utter darkness. When will God take me out of this darkness into his light?”

To speed that illumination, a desperate Gandhi took two vows. On December 11, just three weeks after he arrived in Srirampur, he gave up on his pledge to stay in a single place until a glorious refulgence of peace burst forth for all to see. Instead, he said he’d soon extend his mission by venturing on a Noakhali walking tour, staying in a new village every night. As if to prepare for that challenge, he privately vowed to deepen his personal
yajna
, his own course of self-sacrifice. What this phase of his life entailed, he convinced himself, was a further testing of his forty-year commitment to celibacy in order to discover the defect at the root of his “unfitness.”