Again, Gandhi

In a jail cell in Poona last week squatted India's most famous man, the wizened little brown man with the big-eared, big-eyed face of a bespectacled lemur: the Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. For four months he had been out of the news, drinking goat's milk, spinning cotton on his charkha, brooding as ever on the woes of India's Pariah Untouchables. Inside the bare parched skull "a tempest was raging." Finally, "the voice became insistent and said, 'Why don't you do it?' I resisted but in vain.'' Last week on Harijan (Untouchables' Day) Gandhi announced what "it" was: a three-week fast to force all India's temples to admit Untouchables. He will begin on May 8. Doctors last week said he could not survive another fast. Said Gandhi, "I have no desire to die. . . . But I need for myself and my fellow-workers greater purity, application and dedication. . . ."

Sitting in his cell, fasting is Gandhi's only tool but it is potent. Last September a six-day fast nearly killed him but forced a settlement between the caste Hindus and the Untouchables, which was accepted in principle by the British Government (TIME, Oct. 3). In December a 36-hour fast got another prisoner, a high-caste Brahmin, the right to do Untouchables' work as penance. For his new fast, he asked for the world's prayers, commanded that he be let alone in his cell.

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