Great Soul_ Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India Part 9

Many things are happening at once. He's trying to build an "army" of exemplary village workers who have mastered the urges he himself, in his late sixties, is still struggling to master. He commits himself to becoming one of those workers in his chosen Segaon, where his message is not embraced. He tours Travancore at the tip of the subcontinent one year and visits far-off Frontier Province-a battleground in today's Pakistan-the next. He strategizes with the Congress leadership about whether it should take office on British terms after provincial elections. And, finally, through all this, he tries to find the right degree of closeness or distance that he as an inveterately judgmental father should maintain with his alcoholic eldest son, Harilal, not the least of whose many problems, in Gandhi's view, has been his weakness for prost.i.tutes since the early death of a wife he had loved. Four days before the Mahatma is due to move to Segaon, he meets Harilal in Nagpur. His forty-eight-year-old son asks for money; thinking it would go for drink, Gandhi refuses to give the handout. Then, only two weeks after Gandhi's arrival in his chosen village-bringing with him his high blood pressure and anxiety over his own erotic nightmare-Harilal changes his name to Abdullah and converts to Islam. Five months later, having flung his Oedipal challenge as publicly as possible, taking to public platforms as a Muslim proselytizer, he converts back.

"He remains the same wreck that he was before," Gandhi writes, in an open letter "To My Numerous Muslim Friends," prior to the re-conversion. "I do not mind whether he is called Abdullah or Harilal," the letter says, "if, by adopting one name for the other, he becomes a true devotee of G.o.d which both the names mean."

But, of course, he does mind. Harilal continues to disappoint, and so, it's beginning to seem, will the village of Segaon, even though he has had the a.s.sistance of at least three additional workers there. Still, Gandhi seems to be back in command of his busy life, until April 14, 1938, when, just as he's preparing for a crucial meeting in Bombay with Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who has deflected a couple of invitations to rural Segaon, it all happens again-another erection, another wet dream. Nearing his seventieth year, not only is the Mahatma upset, but, as he later writes to Mirabehn, "That degrading, dirty, torturing experience of 14th April shook me to bits and made me feel as if I was hurled by G.o.d from an imaginary paradise where I had no right to be in my uncleanliness."

A week after the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, he issues a troubled, less explicit statement to the press saying, "For the first time in my public and private life I seem to have lost self-confidence...I find myself for the first time during the past fifty years in a Slough of Despond. I do not consider myself fit for negotiations or any such thing for the moment."

Are we dealing with one history in this relatively compact time frame or several? Even with some unraveling, the answer can never be obvious. Disappointments are piling up. Gandhi, it seems, has found it necessary to shoulder them all. Normally, he's able to keep his disappointments-with himself, with Harilal, with the pace of reconstruction in Segaon, with the rising violence between Muslims and Hindus, with the meager returns on the work for Harijans-in separate compartments. On a daily basis, his demeanor remains cheerful. He's as diligent as ever, writing his articles, keeping up his devotions and correspondence, offering advice to his wide family circle, his most devoted acolytes, and strangers, with all his usual firmness and a.s.surance. He never used the word "sublimation," but he was familiar with the concept. "The man who sits idle cannot control his pa.s.sionate urge," he said once. "The remedy, therefore, is to keep the body engaged in work." So he fills his days with minutely scheduled tasks. Still, when he admits to feeling let down, a little depressed, it's sometimes hard to tell whether the feeling has a specific source or many, hard to trace the boundaries of the slough of despond he has now entered. Does his flawed brahmacharya really undermine the village strategy? Or could it be the other way round?

"I am after all a sinking ship," he remarks to his faithful Mahadev in September 1938. "Who would want to sail in such a ship?"

Segaon represents his abiding commitment to the "dumb millions." But the story of his involvement there turns out to be a sad one. Here is Gandhi coming to grips with the reality of the Indian village, which he has fervently idealized ever since Hind Swaraj Hind Swaraj, written nearly three decades earlier, before he'd left South Africa, before he'd even thought to test his ideas at Tolstoy Farm. He never breaks his tie to the village, but it takes less than a year before it becomes evident that he's dis-appointed.

At the end of 1936, before his Travancore trip, he's a.s.sailed by a politician there for sounding off on local conditions when he has never even succeeded in getting temples opened up in Ahmedabad, his base for his first sixteen years back in India, where he was on home ground as a Gujarati. Gandhi replies with touching Gandhian directness: "Not only have I not succeeded in having temples opened in Ahmedabad but I have not succeeded in having temples opened even in Wardha after my having established myself there. And what is even more damaging to my reputation is that I have not succeeded in having the only two caste temples in Segaon opened to the Harijans of the little village."

Six months later Gandhi calls a meeting in Segaon to scold the villagers. He has two complaints. One is that they've shirked an obligation they've freely undertaken to supply labor and rocks for a road between his quarters on the outskirts and the village itself, which would connect to a wider road being put through to the town of Wardha. The other involves the old business of sanitation. Gandhi and his co-workers, it seems, are no longer scooping up the village's t.u.r.ds, perhaps because doing so inevitably renders them untouchable in the villagers' eyes and thus makes it harder for them to be accepted. In what appears to be a tactical retreat, therefore, the ashram has actually hired a scavenger for the village. Still the villagers don't cooperate. They continue to defecate along the lanes and refuse to hire out their carts for the removal of human manure.

"I am told that you are indifferent to all that is happening," the Mahatma says. "I cannot make your village neat and clean and sweet-smelling without your cooperation. We have engaged a scavenger here. We pay for his service, but it is for you to keep your streets and lanes clean...Nowhere do we come across such apathy."

Gandhi has just returned from an interlude in Gujarat. From there he'd written to a co-worker in Segaon apologizing for his "failure" to spend more time in the village. He has other jobs, he pointed out. By speaking of failure, he said, he didn't "mean that we have not been able to do anything at all. But whatever we have done cannot be said to be of much value." The next day he wrote again, telling one correspondent that his "real work" is still in Segaon and another, "My heart is there." These are reminiscent of letters, long years before, from the Transvaal to the Phoenix Settlement explaining his long absences.

Mahadev Desai sums up the situation in 1940, four years after Gandhi's arrival in Segaon-Sevagram. "There is a hiatus between the villagers and us," he acknowledges. "There is yet no living link between us...[We have] not succeeded in coming down to their level and becoming one with them."

By then, various realities have come crashing in on Gandhi. Village reality is one, but also there are the unresolved political issues between Muslims and Hindus and the looming involvement of the colonial power in another world war. Gandhi never loses faith in the central importance of his "constructive program." In his writings and p.r.o.nouncements, he campaigns for its principles until the day of his death. But one by one, he has been forced to recognize that he has been checked on the causes he'd singled out as "pillars" of swaraj. Mainly these were Hindu-Muslim unity, the struggle against untouchability, and village industries as symbolized by the spinning wheel, each an ideal he brought home to India with him, shaped in large measure by his experience on another subcontinent.

On Hindu-Muslim unity he'd acknowledged feeling "helpless" as early as 1926. Eleven years later he repeats the word in a note to Jinnah: "I am utterly helpless. My faith in unity is as bright as ever; only I see no daylight out of the impenetrable darkness and, in such distress, I cry out to G.o.d for light."

On untouchability, he writes after the end of his tour in 1934, "Unfortunately the higher castes have failed to identify themselves with their humbler fellows...I have no excuse to offer."

On village work, he's forced to acknowledge his failure to recruit the corps of self-sacrificing satyagrahis he'd counted on dispatching to the 700,000 villages. He even has doubts about the dozens drawn to his immediate ambit at Sevagram. Here too he speaks of feeling "helpless." He cannot prevent the place from becoming a magnet for persons of uncertain dedication-in Mirabehn's words, "a strange medley of various kinds of cranky people." Sizing them up, the Mahatma himself says, "Quite a few are only temporary inhabitants and none of them will stay on after my death." In 1940 he makes one of his service organizations, the Gandhi Seva Sangh, commit "hari-kari" because it has attracted unprincipled timeservers and job seekers. Five years later he acknowledges that the All India Village Industries a.s.sociation, which he had started with such high hopes in 1934, didn't "show the results it might have."

"Whatever I do is for the poor," Gandhi finally said with the same unflinching honesty, "but today I am unable to prove it in Sevagram." As late as 1945, he's still pondering plans to draw volunteers to Sevagram to give the village a good cleanup-a clear sign that a decade of Gandhian ministrations has failed to persuade the villagers to do it for themselves.

It's not difficult to feel sorry for the Gandhi who carries on in his last decade after having been forced to acknowledge that many of his most cherished values and programs have not taken root, the Gandhi who recognizes a decade before it comes to pa.s.s that swaraj was now more likely to come as a result of a war that would exhaust the colonial power than as a "solid awakening" by a united people who'd achieved self-mastery. "Any extraneous event may put power into our hands," he observed in 1937. "I would not call that swaraj of the people."

It can also be argued that the aging Gandhi, carrying on in the face of such profound disappointments, is as true to himself as he had ever been when he allowed himself to imagine that India could be talked into a social transformation. Seldom does he give in to the politician's usual temptation to blithely sweep away any sense of letdown, to proclaim victory at every juncture. This unsatisfied Gandhi, the one who doesn't know how to pretend, is the one who still makes a claim on Indian social conscience, such as it is.

"We cannot command results," he said. "We can only strive." It's in these years that he had to recognize that the movement that held his image aloft was now marching on without him. "Let no one say that he is a follower of Gandhi," he then said. "It is enough that I should be my own follower."

It's also at this time that he's finally reunited with the dearest of his early followers, Hermann Kallenbach. The Litvak architect from Johannesburg by way of East Prussia, who'd been barred from India and then interned by the British as an enemy alien after the outbreak of World War I, finally lands in Bombay in May 1937. He'd eventually been repatriated to Germany in a prisoner exchange. Adrift there after the armistice, he didn't complete his interrupted journey to Gujarat and Gandhi but found his way back to Joburg instead, where he soon reestablished himself in the comfortable life of a big-time property developer that Gandhi had earlier persuaded him to give up.

Years pa.s.sed, but the Mahatma never quite let go of his dream of having his old Jewish housemate again at his side, running his Indian ashrams the way he'd run Tolstoy Farm. When they resumed correspondence after the war, they were still Lower House and Upper House. "How I should love to hug you and see you face to face and have you by me during my travels!" Upper House wrote in 1921, when he was already the undisputed leader of the Indian national movement. Twelve years later, writing from South India in the midst of his crusade against untouchability, he still sounds ardent. "You are always before my mind's eye," he tells Lower House. "When are you coming?" These letters offer a glimpse of a loneliness Mahatma Gandhi continued to feel even in the midst of his ashrams, his inner circle of dedicated attendants and followers, and the huge throngs drawn to his public appearances. Maybe that's what Pyarelal is getting at when, later, he's moved to write in his diary, "There is something frightening in Bapu's utter spiritual isolation."

The moment of reunion between the Joburg architect and India's leader was captured by Mahadev Desai in Harijan Harijan. Kallenbach lingered in Bombay only long enough to pick up an ample khadi wardrobe, then caught a train up the coast that stopped not far from a Gujarati village near the sh.o.r.e where Gandhi was taking a respite from Segaon. He arrived before dawn during morning prayers. "After how many years?" Gandhi asked when prayers were done. Kallenbach bowed at his feet. "Twenty-three," he said as they embraced. "With childish delight," according to Mahadev, Gandhi lifted up a lantern to examine his long-lost friend's features, then pulled at his hair. "So the hair has all turned gray," he said.

Upper House then asked whether Lower House had sailed in first or second cla.s.s. It was a test to see how far he had lapsed back into his old materialist ways. "Tourist cla.s.s," the visitor said. "I knew that would be the first question you would ask me."

Kallenbach wore a dhoti, sometimes went bare chested like his host, slept under the stars near Gandhi. It was almost as if twenty-three years had disappeared, he wrote to his brother. He's "just like one of us," said a gratified Gandhi. It doesn't seem, however, that the architect was seriously tempted by the old idea of shutting down his practice and moving to the ashram. What's clear is that his trip had a purpose beyond reconnecting with his old friend; he had a mission. He'd been recruited to make the case for the Zionist cause in Palestine to the Indian leader.

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Gandhi and Kallenbach reunited, June 1937 (photo credit i10.2) (photo credit i10.2)

The impetus came from the head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency in Palestine. Under the British mandate, the agency was the de facto government for the small but growing community of Jewish settlers; the Political Department functioned as its foreign ministry. Its head was Moshe Shertok, who, as Moshe Sharett, would become Israel's second prime minister, succeeding David Ben-Gurion. Shertok, seeking a connection to "the greatest of living Hindus," had learned of Kallenbach's existence from a recent visitor to South Africa. Instantly, it seems, he wrote a long letter to the architect. "There are few people whom circ.u.mstances have placed in a position enabling them to render service of an extraordinary character," the letter said. "I am advised and believe that you are at the present moment such a person...You are in a unique position to help Zionism in a field where the resources of the Jewish people are so meager as to be practically non-existent."

Kallenbach signed on. Two months before arriving in Bombay, he met Shertok in London and also Chaim Weizmann, the head of the Zionist movement and future first president of Israel. Then he stopped in Palestine, where he was particularly impressed by the early kibbutzim, which reminded him, with their emphasis on hand labor and simple living, of the values Gandhi had inculcated at Tolstoy Farm. (After his death in Johannesburg in 1945, his ashes would be buried at Kibbutz Degania on the Sea of Galilee, Israel's oldest kibbutz, where Tolstoy's influence on the first settlers had been especially marked.) There is no sign that Lower House mentioned his briefings by prominent Zionists to Upper House. But he can hardly be said to have been acting undercover; he'd been openly a Zionist since the days when they lived together in Joburg, when he alternately studied Hebrew and Hindi as he tried to decide whether he'd be moving to Palestine or India.

Now, in the month they had together in 1937, Gandhi eagerly entered into a discussion of the rights and wrongs of Arab-Jewish strife in Palestine. He'd had a firm position on the subject since 1921, at the high tide of the Khilafat movement. Basically, his position was that Indian Hindus ought to support their seventy million Muslim brethren on what was for them an issue of religious principle. His friend urged him to pay sympathetic attention to the Zionist side of the argument. Gandhi promised he would. Kallenbach then had the Jewish Agency furnish the Mahatma with a twenty-five-page essay on the historic, spiritual, and political underpinnings of Zionism, prepared especially for him. "The sender's name is not given," Gandhi noted, but he found the piece "very impressive, deeply interesting." So impressive that he was moved to consider proposing an effort to mediate between Arabs and Jews under his supervision, with Hermann Kallenbach, now back in Johannesburg, as his lead mediator. "I quite clearly see that if you are to play any part in bringing about an honorable settlement," Gandhi writes the architect, "your place is in India." Apparently concerned that his friend might suspect that pressure was being applied for personal reasons, Gandhi adds: "All this I say irrespective of the domestic arrangement between us." Gandhi himself seems as ardent as ever. His wishes are unambiguous, but with what seems an effort, he practices restraint. "I must not force the pace," he writes to his friend in Joburg a half year later. "You must come in your own good time."

After Kallenbach's return to South Africa, Gandhi had turned his hand to distilling his view of the problem in a draft he sends on to his Zionist friend for his approval. "In my opinion the Jews should disclaim any intention of realizing their aspiration under the protection of arms and should rely wholly on the goodwill of Arabs. No exception can possibly be taken to the natural desire of the Jews to found a home in Palestine. But they must wait for its fulfillment till Arab opinion is ripe for it." Gandhi basically wants the Jews to become satyagrahis, the Arabs too. Kallenbach, half won over, sends the draft on to Chaim Weizmann. It's never published.

His offer to mediate in Palestine is just a beginning. At a time when the Mahatma feels increasingly stymied in his efforts to reform India, he becomes increasingly inclined to issue encyclicals on international problems. Obviously, his frustration at home is not the only reason for his readiness to speak out. The world is hurtling toward catastrophe, and as the appointed keeper of the doctrine of nonviolence he feels a responsibility to make himself heard. A series of moral p.r.o.nouncements flows from his humble quarters near Segaon. In all, they are a mixed bag, full of trenchant moral insights, desperate appeals, and self-deluding simplicities. A subsequent statement on Palestine draws an anguished rebuke from the theologian Martin Buber, a refugee from Hitler who has become prominent in the earliest version of a Jewish peace movement. Buber writes that he "has long known and honored" Gandhi's voice, but what he hears on Palestine he finds "barren of all application to his circ.u.mstances." He then goes on to dissect a p.r.o.nouncement of the Mahatma's on German Jews. Gandhi has prescribed satyagraha as the answer to n.a.z.i barbarism. He has found "an exact parallel" between the plight of the Jews under Hitler and that of the Indians in his time in South Africa. Buber tells Gandhi he lived under n.a.z.i rule before becoming a refugee and saw Jewish attempts at nonviolent resistance. The result was "ineffective, un.o.bserved martyrdom, a martyrdom cast to the winds."

There's reason to believe that Buber's letter, dispatched to Segaon from Jerusalem in March 1939, never reached Gandhi. In any case, by then the Mahatma had already left a distressing trail of futile, well-intentioned missives. He'd written to the Czechs on the uses of satyagraha to combat storm troopers and to the viceroy, offering to mediate between Hitler and his Western prey, including Britain. Within several months, he'd write the first of two letters to the fuhrer himself. "Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?" he asked rhetorically, in a desperate, naive mix of humility and ego. The British, who monitored his mail, made sure the letter went nowhere. The letter to Hitler began with the salutation "My friend." Hitler had already indicated what he thought of the Mahatma and his nonviolence. "All you have to do is to shoot Gandhi," he advised a British minister.

Eventually, after the outbreak of war and his own final imprisonment, Gandhi would write to Churchill offering his services in the cause of peace. "I can't imagine anyone with Gandhi's reputation writing so stupid a letter," a new viceroy, Lord Wavell, confides to his diary after intercepting it.

Unrealistic, self-regarding, and dubious in their reasoning as most of these letters were, Gandhi's basic understanding of Churchill's "gathering storm" wasn't always unfocused. "If there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified," he wrote. "But I do not believe in any war."

The onetime sergeant major had volunteered as a noncombatant in the Boer and Zulu wars. He'd offered to serve as the "recruiting agent-in-chief" for the viceroy at the end of the previous world war, even inscribing himself as a candidate for enlistment at the age of fifty. Now, for the first time, he was striking a truly pacifist stance. This can only be understood in the Indian context. The looming issue was whether the national movement could barter its support for the war effort in exchange for a reliable promise of freedom. Put another way-in the way most Indian nationalists at the time understood it-the pivotal issue was whether India could be asked to fight for the freedom of the colonial power when the colonial power's commitment to India's freedom was still uncertain. Gandhi's dogmatic p.r.o.nouncements on the application of satyagraha to the Jewish-Arab conflict and the menace of n.a.z.i Germany can best be interpreted as trial runs for the penultimate chapter of the Indian struggle. It was as if he sensed that he'd be called back one last time from Segaon to lead his movement, and that this time he might have to put aside whatever lingering loyalty he might still have felt to the British.

However, when Britain finally entered the war, following the n.a.z.i invasion of Poland in September 1939, Gandhi's immediate instinct was to tell the viceroy that he viewed the struggle with "an English heart." This viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, had proclaimed India's entry into the war the previous day without consulting any Indian. Summoned to the Viceregal Lodge in Simla, Gandhi had offered no protest, not even a mild complaint, over this stunning oversight-stemming from habitual presumption and a calculated refusal to negotiate-that would soon ignite a prolonged struggle between the colonial authority and the Indian national movement. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, but only after much wavering, Gandhi would again take on the mantle of leadership to set out the strategy for that confrontation. It would pit him against the British at the height of the war. But in Simla the day after the viceroy's declaration, under the illusion that he had established a warm personal tie to Linlithgow-not unlike what he sentimentally imagined his tie to s.m.u.ts to have been a quarter of a century earlier in South Africa-Gandhi by his own testimony "broke down," shedding tears as he pictured the destruction of the houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and the heart of London. "I am in perpetual quarrel with G.o.d that he should allow such things to go on," he wrote the next day. "My nonviolence seems almost impotent."

11.

Ma.s.s MAYHEM.

BY THE END of his seventh decade, Mahatma Gandhi had been forced to recognize that the great majority of his supposed followers hadn't followed him very far when it came to what he'd listed as the four pillars of swaraj. The last and most important of these was supposed to be ahimsa, or nonviolence, which for Gandhi was both a core religious value and his set of patented techniques for militant resistance to injustice. Now, with the eruption of another world war, he was forced to recognize that "Congressmen, barring individual exceptions, do not believe in nonviolence." It would be his lot "to plough a lonely furrow," for it seemed he had "no co-sharer in the out-and-out belief in nonviolence." of his seventh decade, Mahatma Gandhi had been forced to recognize that the great majority of his supposed followers hadn't followed him very far when it came to what he'd listed as the four pillars of swaraj. The last and most important of these was supposed to be ahimsa, or nonviolence, which for Gandhi was both a core religious value and his set of patented techniques for militant resistance to injustice. Now, with the eruption of another world war, he was forced to recognize that "Congressmen, barring individual exceptions, do not believe in nonviolence." It would be his lot "to plough a lonely furrow," for it seemed he had "no co-sharer in the out-and-out belief in nonviolence."

Here the Mahatma seems to be deliberately striving for pathos. It's a favorite posture, that of the isolated seeker of truth, and it's not untinged with moral and political pressure, a whiff of emotional blackmail; his closest a.s.sociates are left to feel guilty over their failure to measure up to his high ideal. Increasingly, this self-portrayal comes to define his sense of his inner reality as well as his political position. He can still draw huge reverential throngs, has a loyal entourage hanging on his every word and wish, but there are intangible, evidently important ways in which he feels himself to be alone. If Gandhi the prophet is to be taken at his word here, the temple of swaraj as he'd conceived it had now collapsed with the crumbling of its last pillar.

But the prophet's declaration of his "out-and-out belief" doesn't remove the political leader from the scene. Gandhi is never more elusive or complex than he is in this final decade of his life and career as he strains to balance his own precepts, values, and self-imposed rules with the strategic needs of his movement. It's a strain that only increases as power is seen to be within its grasp. From wrenching questions about the uses of nonviolence in a war against fascism (but not imperialism, as India was quick to catch on) to the just-emerging issue of what he'd term "vivisection"-the carving out and renaming of India's Muslim-majority areas as a state called Pakistan-Gandhi would regularly manage to stand on at least two sides, distinguishing his personal position from that of his movement, before stepping forward at the last hour to offer his loyal support for the position of the movement, and then, almost as regularly, stepping back. As early as 1939, he drew a distinction between himself and his supporters who "want to be true to themselves and to the country which they represent for the time being, even as I want to be true to myself." The idea that country and what he'd long since been used to calling "truth" could pull in opposite directions was a relatively new one, a source of profound inner conflict.

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Again on tour, 1940 (photo credit i11.1) (photo credit i11.1)

To a bluff British general like Lord Wavell, the penultimate viceroy, it was all an act. Gandhi was a "malevolent old politician, who for all his sanctimonious talk has, I am sure, very little softness in his composition," Wavell wrote after his first encounters with the Mahatma. Had the viceroy's skepticism been anywhere near the mark, the climax of Gandhi's career would amount to little more today than an extended footnote, a kind of tributary to the torrent of onrushing events he tried and largely failed to influence. Instead, Gandhi's last act can be read as a moral saga in its own right, not unworthy of the rubric "tragic" in its fullest, deepest sense. The public issues with which he wrestled retain their importance, but what stands out after all these years is the old man himself as he goes through a series of strenuous self-imposed trials in a time of national crisis, veering at the end of his life between dark despair and irrepressible hope.

If readiness to offer up one's own body and life-what he called "self-suffering"-were the mark of a true votary of Gandhian nonviolence, a true satyagrahi, then the Mahatma's lonely, detached, largely ineffectual last years and months can be invested with grandeur and interpreted as fulfillment. Which was one of the ways that Gandhi, shaping his narrative as always, was inclined to see it. The premonition that he might meet an a.s.sa.s.sin's bullets became a persistent leitmotif of his private ruminations. More than five years before his actual end in a New Delhi garden on January 30, 1948, he imagined his a.s.sailant would be a Muslim, despite all he'd done since the "glorious days" of the Khilafat movement, when, in his recollection, dignity and "n.o.bility of spirit" reigned. "My life is entirely at their disposal," he said. "They are free to put an end to it, whenever they wish to do so." Perhaps he was thinking back to the slaying of his fellow mahatma Swami Shraddhanand at the hands of a Muslim extremist in 1926. His foreboding proved to be partly misplaced. It antic.i.p.ated the circ.u.mstances of his death but not the motive behind the eventual plot or the ident.i.ty of the plotters. It was Hindu extremists who targeted him. They saw him as pro-Muslim.

At the same time, the tragic narrative can't be easily disentangled from the self-staged, nearly comic subplot of the Mahatma's ins and outs-his repeated exits from leadership of the national movement and his sudden returns. In the months and years following the viceroy's declaration of war on behalf of an India he never bothered to consult, Gandhi's comings and goings get to be like the old stage routine of a performer holding up one end of a very long ladder while exiting stage left, only to reenter stage right an instant later, hoisting the other end.

In September 1939, in the immediate aftermath of the declaration, the Congress rejects a resolution Gandhi drafted. It's the first time in twenty years this has happened; he views it as a "conclusive defeat." The spurned draft promised support of the British war effort by all available nonviolent means. Instead, the Congress sets up a bargaining situation, making its promise of support conditional on a British commitment on independence. Implying the bargain it imagines, it soft-pedals Gandhi's emphasis on nonviolence. Ten months later, in June 1940, it formally votes at Gandhi's request "to absolve him from responsibility for the program and activity which the Congress has to pursue" in order to free him "to pursue his great ideal in his own way." Three months later, after the viceroy has brushed off its demand for a commitment on Indian freedom, it summons Gandhi back to leadership. In December 1941 he's out again, over disagreements about the use of force. A mere two weeks later, he's back on his own terms, only now his terms have started to undergo a subtle shift. Eventually, he makes a reluctant concession: if India is declared independent during the war, he acknowledges, it will probably conclude it needs armed forces; he also agrees that Allied forces could continue to use its territory as a base from which to bomb j.a.panese positions in Burma and fly arms over the hump to China. These adjustments in his and the Congress's position come painfully, over many months. They've no effect. The British still aren't biting: Winston Churchill, the "die-hard" imperialist, would famously a.s.sert that he hadn't become prime minister to preside over the empire's dissolution. Having failed so far to dislodge or even budge the Raj, Gandhi and the Congress prepare for the largest campaign of noncooperation and nonviolent resistance in twelve years, since the Salt March, serving an ultimatum on the British: hand over sovereignty or face the consequences. In 1942, at the height of the j.a.panese advance across Asia, against the better judgment of Nehru, who took the threat of an invasion seriously, "Quit India!" becomes their cry.

Through all his ins and outs, Gandhi has now moved over three years from unconditional support for the war effort by all available nonviolent means to a threat of nonviolent resistance on a ma.s.sive scale unless India is freed to make "common cause" with the Allies in ways that wouldn't necessarily be nonviolent. On August 8, 1942, the Congress endorses the "Quit India" resolution, which promises that a free India will "resist aggression with all the armed as well as nonviolent forces at its command." That phrase embodies Gandhi's tacit shift on the question of armed force, his willingness to align himself with Nehru and other Congress leaders. Now he's ready to go full tilt. The coming campaign will be, he promises, "the biggest struggle of my life." Here we've a flash of the fully possessed, "do or die" Gandhi, the fervent commander, who led indentured miners into the Transvaal in 1913, who later promised "swaraj in a year," who subsequently marched to the sea to harvest a handful of salt. But the morning after the vote on the "Quit India" resolution he's arrested again in Bombay and taken as a prisoner to the Aga Khan Palace outside Poona, where he's sidelined for the next twenty-one months until the British, alarmed by his high blood pressure, decide to let him go in order not to have to face an uproar over his dying in detention.

Churchill's cabinet has discussed the idea of deporting Gandhi to Uganda but recognizes finally that its American ally, not to mention the ma.s.ses of India, might find this hard to swallow. Gandhi's last campaign hadn't achieved anything like his standard of nonviolent discipline. "Mob violence remains rampant over large tracts of the countryside," the viceroy reported to Churchill three weeks after his arrest. By the end of the year, nearly one thousand persons had been killed in clashes with the police; some sixty thousand arrested in the British crackdown on the Congress. Egged on by Churchill, the British searched for evidence that Gandhi, though jailed, had been complicit in this violence, perhaps conspiring with the j.a.panese. They never found it, but Gandhi's own words before his arrest seemed to hint that he wouldn't be surprised by a surge in rioting. Indian nonviolence had always been imperfect, "limited in both numbers and quality," he coolly told an American correspondent-that is, in the availability of trained satyagrahis who could be relied on to make the requisite self-sacrifice-but "it has infused life into the people which was absent before." He isn't threatening or justifying violence, but a.s.suming for the moment the position of a detached observer, a realist, he seems to be suggesting that this time it couldn't be ruled out. This Gandhi sounds like the pre-Mahatma of 1913 who warned the South African authorities he might lose control of his movement.

Gandhi's moral stubbornness, ascribed by the Mahatma to the dictates of his "inner voice," seems to function in his later years like a suddenly released spring or coil, distancing him from responsibility for far-reaching political decisions. The pattern had been set by the time his last imprisonment ended on May 6, 1944. But Nehru and Patel, the whole Congress Working Committee, remained in jail; the viceroy rebuffed his request to consult them. So, for the next thirteen months, until their release, only he could act on national issues. His most significant venture in that time was an attempt to bridge the widening chasm between the Indian National Congress and the Muslims-in particular, a resurgent Muslim League under its self-styled Quaid-i-Azam, or "great leader," Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

This was the same Jinnah who'd welcomed him to India nearly three decades earlier with a heartfelt plea for national unity; the nationalist whom Gokhale, Gandhi's sponsor and guru, had earlier hailed as an "amba.s.sador of Hindu-Muslim unity"; who in 1916 lived up to that tribute by cementing an accord between the Congress and the Muslim League that seemed a breakthrough at the time; the same Jinnah, fastidious lawyer that he was, whose belief in const.i.tutional methods had then been so ruffled, so offended, by Gandhi's introduction of ma.s.s agitation based on appeals to religious themes (of Muslims as well as Hindus) that he'd walked away from the Congress; the political broker who was, nevertheless, still trying as late as 1928 to find common ground between the two movements on the const.i.tutional shape of an independent India; and who in 1937 offered to enter coalitions with new Congress governments at the provincial level, only to be rebuffed.

He was the same man but no longer the same nationalist. Returning from his four-year exile in England, he paid Gandhi the implicit compliment of imitation. Ma.s.s agitation based on religion no longer offended him; it was, he'd learned, the surest path to national leadership. Now he argued that there'd never been and never could be an Indian nation, only Hindu India (Hindustan) and Muslim India (Pakistan)-two equal nations, no matter that one outnumbered the other by better than two to one (roughly three to one if untouchables were counted as Hindus). By Jinnah's reasoning, if Muslims were a nation, they weren't a minority, whatever the population tables showed; any negotiations, he insisted, had to be on that basis. The Quaid's sartorial transformation wasn't as drastic as the Mahatma's, but in place of his smart, custom-tailored double-breasted suits he now sometimes appeared in the long traditional, b.u.t.toned-up coat known as a sherwani sherwani and the rimless cap fashioned from sheep hide that learned Muslims called maulanas favored; henceforth it would sometimes be described as a Jinnah cap, worn in contrast to the white khadi caps donned by congressmen that were everywhere known as Gandhi caps. With skill and considerable cunning, the Quaid had set himself up to be Gandhi's foil. and the rimless cap fashioned from sheep hide that learned Muslims called maulanas favored; henceforth it would sometimes be described as a Jinnah cap, worn in contrast to the white khadi caps donned by congressmen that were everywhere known as Gandhi caps. With skill and considerable cunning, the Quaid had set himself up to be Gandhi's foil.

There'd never been much warmth between these two Gujarati lawyers, but Gandhi, who'd always treated Jinnah with respect and had reached out to him at times when Nehru and most other Congress leaders tended to write him off, now made a point of referring to him as Quaid-i-Azam. (In 1942, days before the launch of the "Quit India" campaign, he'd even suggested that Jinnah could form a government if the British weren't ready to hand over power to the Congress.) For his part, Jinnah had always made a point of referring to him frostily as "Mr. Gandhi," conspicuously shunning any use of his spiritual honorific. But now the Quaid unbent sufficiently, on one occasion at least, to call him Mahatma. "Give your blessings to me and Mahatma Gandhi so that we might arrive at a settlement," he asked a throng of Muslim Leaguers in Lah.o.r.e as the day of their summit neared. These small glimmers of regard were enough to make the British worry that the two leaders might form an anticolonial front in the midst of the war. Hindu nationalists worried as well. A mob showed up at Wardha with the intention of physically blocking Gandhi's way when it was time for him to leave for the station to board his train for Bombay to meet Jinnah. Their idea, then as now, was to protest any move to alienate any piece of the "motherland." Prominent in the crowd was a high-strung Brahman editor named Nathuram G.o.dse who several years later, after India's part.i.tion, would step forward as the gunman Gandhi had long antic.i.p.ated.

When the leaders finally faced each other in the study of Jinnah's residence on Mount Pleasant Road in the upscale Malabar Hill section of Bombay on September 9, 1944, in the first of what would be a marathon of fourteen sessions over eighteen days, Jinnah asked for Gandhi's credentials. "I thought you had come here as a Hindu, as a representative of the Hindu Congress," he said archly, according to Gandhi's version of the exchange, fully aware that this formulation would grate on his guest. "No, I have come here neither as a Hindu nor as a representative of the Congress," Gandhi replied. "I have come here as an individual." In that case, his host wanted to know, if they reached an accord, who would "deliver the goods"?

It was a barbed but reasonable question. Setting aside his openly eclectic, nonsectarian approach to religion, not to mention his decades-long quest for "unity," Gandhi had tacitly accepted the idea of a separate Muslim state as a basis for negotiation. Not only had the Congress already voted down the set of proposals he now advanced for discussion; it had done so with his approval. If he was reversing himself, Jinnah wanted to know, who would follow him? Was he even serious? The Pakistan Gandhi was ready to support would enjoy a certain amount of autonomy within an Indian union, which might be a relatively loose federation in which defense and foreign affairs were handled as national concerns. If Pakistan could be kept within India, he allowed himself to hope, "heart unity" might yet follow. Putting it in writing at the start of the third week of talks, Gandhi went a step further, acknowledging a right of secession for the Muslim-majority areas that could lead to a "Treaty of Separation" between "two sovereign independent states."

That still wasn't far enough for Jinnah. The Pakistan he had in mind had to start off as sovereign. It couldn't trust a Hindu-dominated regime to draw its boundaries or see to the terms of its separation; only by its own free choice could it find itself inside an independent India. Thus its destiny and boundaries had to be determined before independence, not after, as Gandhi kept insisting. Immediately, it was apparent that they were discussing two different Pakistans, two different ideas, at least, of the bargaining power Jinnah would wield in any showdown. "I am amazed at my own patience," Gandhi said after a grueling first session, which lasted three and a quarter hours.

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With Jinnah at the start of Malabar Hill talks, September 1944 (photo credit i11.2) (photo credit i11.2)

G.o.dse, the a.s.sa.s.sin-to-be, and his fellow Hindu chauvinists needn't have feared that Gandhi would embrace a shrunken Hindustan. His aim, Gandhi remarked privately, while the talks were still going on, was to prove to Jinnah "from his own mouth that the whole of the Pakistan proposition is absurd." His words here convict him of overconfidence. The Quaid-i-Azam finally became convinced that a wily Gandhi was stringing him along. "I have failed in my task of converting Mr. Gandhi," he said. The "Mr." could be read as a tip-off that the talks had failed.

Jinnah claimed that only the Muslim League could speak for British India's ninety million Muslims and only he could speak for the Muslim League. Gandhi's claim, though couched with infinitely more generosity and tact, was no less sweeping. "Though I represent n.o.body but myself," he wrote to Jinnah, "I aspire to represent all the inhabitants of India. For I realize in my own person their misery and degradation, which is their common lot, irrespective of cla.s.s, caste or creed."

Jinnah was so engrossed in the tactics of the moment that he may have outmaneuvered even himself by waiting so long to define his idea of a satisfactory Pakistan, putting it forever beyond reach. (This is so, at least, if, as has sometimes been argued, his actual aim was to secure for Muslims a permanent share of power at the national level within India, rather than a separate state.) Gandhi, a master of the art of compromise, at least by his own estimate, may have been willing now to recognize a right of "self-determination" in Muslim-majority provinces and, therefore, a theoretical right of secession. But he was elusive on the central issue of power. Just as in his bargaining with Ambedkar, he couldn't contemplate any scaling back of his movement's claims-or his own-to represent the whole of India. That was the difficulty with "truth" as a standard for political judgment: it lacked flexibility. Neither the Quaid-i-Azam nor the Mahatma was a completely independent actor. Jinnah had to take care not to shatter the expectations he'd aroused in Muslim-minority provinces that could never be part of any conceivable Pakistan. Gandhi couldn't ignore the rising specter of Hindu militancy. Each needed an act of faith from the other that was next to impossible now that Jinnah had given up on Indian nationalism.

"I could not make any headway with Jinnah because he is a maniac," Gandhi told Louis Fischer. In the next breath he said, "Jinnah is incorruptible and brave." It's a tantalizing statement, seeming almost to imply that Jinnah had been unmoved when Gandhi dangled the possibility of high office.

Having decided he couldn't depend on Gandhi to deliver "the goods," the Quaid-i-Azam continued to be a prideful and elusive negotiator, counting on the British, the waning colonial power, to push a const.i.tutional deal better than any he could hope to wrest from the Congress. Finally, with no words to his followers about such niceties as nonviolence, he gambled on what, with menacing ambiguity, he called "direct action" to force the pace. Direct action, his followers explained, meant ma.s.s struggle by nonconst.i.tutional means.

By then, virtually ensuring that some kind of part.i.tion, some kind of Pakistan, would be the price to pay for independence, the Congress had reluctantly accepted a British proposal for the creation of an interim government and the start of a const.i.tutional process in which the agreement of the Muslim League was to be treated as a virtual prerequisite. Gandhi, who'd negotiated on a separate Muslim state with Jinnah two years earlier, had swung around to proposing a boycott of the interim government as a way of forestalling Pakistan, keeping it from becoming an inevitability. But his stand was laced with equivocation, as if he knew it stood no chance with the movement he no longer dominated. He said it was based on an "unfounded suspicion," an "intuition," an "instinct." His suspicion was that the division of the country could be cataclysmic.

If he'd pushed his case forcefully and publicly, the Congress might have found it difficult to proceed without him. But he had no appet.i.te for such a test, and couldn't see clearly where it would lead. Instead, on June 23, 1946, the day of decision on the intricate, multistage British plan, he asked permission to be excused. "Is there any reason to detain Bapu further?" asked Maulana Azad, a nationalist Muslim chairing the Working Committee meeting. "Everybody was silent. Everybody understood," writes Narayan Desai, son of Gandhi's devoted secretary, Mahadev, and author of a magisterial Gujarati-language biography of the Mahatma. Pyarelal's version captures the bitterness Gandhi had to swallow. "In that hour of decision they had no use for Bapu," he wrote.

"I know India is not with me," he told Louis Fischer a few days later. "I have not convinced enough Indians of the wisdom of nonviolence."

Jinnah had antic.i.p.ated a Congress rejection of the British plan. Perhaps he'd hoped that the viceroy would then turn to the Muslim League-meaning him-to form the interim government. "Direct action" can be seen as the consequence of his disappointment. It was an adaptation-calculated, deliberately vague-of the Gandhian tactic of noncooperation, from which he'd recoiled a generation earlier. Jinnah was inevitably asked the day his new campaign was proclaimed, scarcely a month after the fateful Congress decision on the British plan, whether it would be violent. His reply, non-Gandhian in the extreme, was probably meant as psychological mood music rather than as a signal for mob violence. Nevertheless, it was chilling. "I'm not going to discuss ethics," he said.

He'd set Direct Action Day for August 16, 1946. What happened then over four days came to be known as the Great Calcutta Killing. By August 20, some three thousand persons had been beaten, stabbed, hacked, or burned to death in the capital city of Bengal, the only province at the time with a government dominated by the Muslim League. Corpses littered the streets, pulled apart by swarming vultures and dogs. If Muslims were the initial aggressors, the Hindu response was no less organized or brutal. Both sides deployed gangs, armed in advance with swords, knives, the lead-tipped rods called lathis, gasoline and other inflammables. But Calcutta was a Hindu-majority city-Muslims accounting for barely 20 percent of its population-and numbers finally told: more Muslims were killed than Hindus. In New Delhi, Vallabhbhai Patel, one of Gandhi's original disciples, expressed satisfaction over that result. "Sword will be answered by sword," this old Gandhian later warned. But that wasn't the way the story was generally understood or told at the time by caste Hindus who remained convinced that their community had endured the brunt of the attacks. Each side, having suffered grievously, felt thoroughly victimized.

For India's prophet of unity, nonviolence, and peace, these events-the overture for a year and a half of ma.s.s mayhem, murder, forced migration, property loss on a vast scale, extensive ethnic cleansing-provided ample reason for despair, enough to bring his whole life into question. Or so he seemed to feel at his lowest ebb. But if he was shaken, he clung ever more fervently to his core value of ahimsa, on which much of India seemed to have given up. And so, after a period of uncertainty over what his role now should be-which "lonely furrow" he should plow-he made his way at the start of his seventy-eighth year to a remote, watery district of Muslim-dominant East Bengal, now Bangladesh, putting himself almost as far in an eastward direction as he could get in what was still India from the center of political decision making in Delhi, a distance of more than a thousand miles. The district, known even then for the extremism of its mullahs, was called Noakhali. It had few phone lines and was actually closer to Mandalay in central Burma than it was to Delhi. As seen from the capital, Gandhi was practically in Southeast Asia.

Noakhali qualified as a destination because it had lately been the scene of another communal mania: gruesome violence, committed mostly by Muslims, in retaliation for the Calcutta bloodletting. Here Hindus had been beheaded, burned alive, raped, forcibly converted to Islam, made to eat beef, and, in the case of at least two and possibly many more women, married off under duress to Muslim men. In an a.s.sault on a single household belonging to a Hindu landowner in a village called Karapa, twenty-one men, women, and children were slaughtered. The Calcutta papers soon put the deaths at five thousand, which turned out to be a mighty exaggeration. Two to three hundred proved to be the more likely figure. It was bad enough.

The chief minister of what was still an undivided Bengal, a smooth Muslim politician with an Oxford pedigree named Shaheed Suhrawardy, saw only problems for himself and the Muslim League if Gandhi made it to the troubled area of East Bengal. So he tried to head the Mahatma off, calling on him on October 31 at a small one-story khadi center and ashram at Sodepur, on the outskirts of Calcutta, where the Mahatma often camped. Suhrawardy, who'd reemerge in the 1950s as prime minister of Pakistan, had a reputation among Muslims as well as Hindus for opportunism. Conspiratorial theorists among Hindus could not be convinced that he was anything other than the mastermind behind the Great Calcutta Killing. But he claimed a filial relationship to Gandhi dating back to the Khilafat agitation, and the old man, who had few illusions about Suhrawardy, retained a measure of affection for him from those days. "Shaheed sahib, everyone seems to call you the chief of the goondas," Gandhi began teasingly, using a common term for goons. "n.o.body seems to have a good word to say about you!" Lounging on a bolster, the chief minister bantered back, "Mahatmaji, don't people say things about you too?"

Barun Das Gupta, a retired correspondent of The Hindu The Hindu newspaper and son of the founder of the Sodepur ashram, witnessed that exchange as a young man. The impression he retains is that the chief minister was a little tipsy. Suhrawardy did what he could to persuade Gandhi to give up his Noakhali mission, trying out an argument that Gandhi would increasingly hear over the ensuing months: that he could be of more use in Bihar, a predominantly Hindu North Indian province he'd just traversed to get to Calcutta. Six days earlier Hindus there had proclaimed a "Noakhali day," which they'd marked and were still marking by a retaliatory slaughter of their own, including forced conversion of Muslims and razing of Muslim homes. The killing in Noakhali had all but stopped; the killing in Bihar was continuing in a widening swath, far surpa.s.sing in numbers of dead the grisly achievement of East Bengal. Before it burned out, it may have resulted in the loss of eight or nine thousand lives. newspaper and son of the founder of the Sodepur ashram, witnessed that exchange as a young man. The impression he retains is that the chief minister was a little tipsy. Suhrawardy did what he could to persuade Gandhi to give up his Noakhali mission, trying out an argument that Gandhi would increasingly hear over the ensuing months: that he could be of more use in Bihar, a predominantly Hindu North Indian province he'd just traversed to get to Calcutta. Six days earlier Hindus there had proclaimed a "Noakhali day," which they'd marked and were still marking by a retaliatory slaughter of their own, including forced conversion of Muslims and razing of Muslim homes. The killing in Noakhali had all but stopped; the killing in Bihar was continuing in a widening swath, far surpa.s.sing in numbers of dead the grisly achievement of East Bengal. Before it burned out, it may have resulted in the loss of eight or nine thousand lives.

According to the old Hindu Hindu correspondent, Gandhi heard Suhrawardy out in silence. The chief minister's argument wasn't lacking in force, but the Mahatma wouldn't be moved; he'd fixed his sights on East Bengal and Noakhali. His instinct and ambition went beyond making a politician's symbolic drop-in to an area in crisis, what now might be discounted as a photo op. He'd settle down and dwell in Noakhali, he'd eventually vow, until the district presented an inspiring example of reconciliation to the rest of the subcontinent. Behind this vow was a peculiarly Gandhian mix of calculation and deep, half-articulated feeling. For his own reasons, he placed a greater emphasis on showing by his presence there that Hindus could live peacefully in the midst of a Muslim majority than on persuading Bihar's Hindus not to ma.s.sacre Muslims. Noakhali struck him as a greater challenge for himself and his doctrine than Bihar precisely because it was Muslim League territory and thus an area bound to be ceded in any likely part.i.tion. Too easily, he persuaded himself that he could calm Bihar's Hindus from afar by going on a partial fast, which involved giving up goat's milk and reducing his meager intake of mashed vegetables; if the killing went on, he warned, he'd take no food at all. With that powerful ultimatum hanging over their collective heads, the new Congress government in Bihar a.s.sured him that it could be relied on to restore order. Allowing himself to be detoured away from Muslim-dominated Noakhali would, in his view, be tantamount to ceding the province. He was thus making himself a hostage not only in the cause of peace but that of an undivided India. correspondent, Gandhi heard Suhrawardy out in silence. The chief minister's argument wasn't lacking in force, but the Mahatma wouldn't be moved; he'd fixed his sights on East Bengal and Noakhali. His instinct and ambition went beyond making a politician's symbolic drop-in to an area in crisis, what now might be discounted as a photo op. He'd settle down and dwell in Noakhali, he'd eventually vow, until the district presented an inspiring example of reconciliation to the rest of the subcontinent. Behind this vow was a peculiarly Gandhian mix of calculation and deep, half-articulated feeling. For his own reasons, he placed a greater emphasis on showing by his presence there that Hindus could live peacefully in the midst of a Muslim majority than on persuading Bihar's Hindus not to ma.s.sacre Muslims. Noakhali struck him as a greater challenge for himself and his doctrine than Bihar precisely because it was Muslim League territory and thus an area bound to be ceded in any likely part.i.tion. Too easily, he persuaded himself that he could calm Bihar's Hindus from afar by going on a partial fast, which involved giving up goat's milk and reducing his meager intake of mashed vegetables; if the killing went on, he warned, he'd take no food at all. With that powerful ultimatum hanging over their collective heads, the new Congress government in Bihar a.s.sured him that it could be relied on to restore order. Allowing himself to be detoured away from Muslim-dominated Noakhali would, in his view, be tantamount to ceding the province. He was thus making himself a hostage not only in the cause of peace but that of an undivided India.

Suhrawardy didn't press his point. In a generous gesture, the Muslim League chieftain sportingly laid on a special train to carry the Mahatma and his party to the station nearest his destination, a.s.signing three members of his provincial government to tag along. Gandhi, who now had fifteen months to live, stayed in the vicinity of Noakhali for the next four. He said he'd make himself a Noakhali man, a Bengali, that he might have to stay many years, possibly even be killed there. Noakhali, he said, "may be my last act." With his usual flair for self-dramatization, he raised the stakes from day to day. "If Noakhali is lost," he declared finally, "India is lost." What could he have meant? What was it about this small and obscure, impoverished and virtually submerged patch of delta on the fringe of the subcontinent that so transfixed him?

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In Noakhali, November 1946 (photo credit i11.3) (photo credit i11.3)

The answers, though Gandhi provided many, aren't instantly obvious. It had been the suffering of Hindus-in particular, Pyarelal tells us, "the cry of outraged womanhood"-that had established Noakhali in Gandhi's imagination as a necessary destination: the reports of rapes, forced conversions, followed by the rewarding of Hindu women to Muslim rioters as trophies, sometimes literally at sword's point. Judging from his later preaching, Gandhi's original concept of his mission involved persuading Hindu families to take back wives and daughters who'd been s.n.a.t.c.hed from them rather than reject them as dishonored. He also wanted to persuade them to stay put in their villages where, typically in East Bengal, they were outnumbered four to one, or if they'd already fled to refugee camps, as they had by the tens of thousands, to now open their minds to the idea of returning to rebuild their charred, ruined homes. But as long as communal peace was his overriding objective, he needed a message for the area's Muslim majority as well. For East Bengal's Muslims, avenging Calcutta had been an occasion-it might even be called a pretext-for ousting Hindu landowners and moneylenders, thereby overturning a lopsided agrarian order that oppressed them. The defining social statistic was that the minority Hindus owned 80 percent of the land. In a sense, he'd have to balance "the cry of outraged womanhood" against the cry for a fairer division of the income that could be squeezed from Noakhali's bountiful harvests of fish, rice, jute, coconuts, betel, and papayas.