After 21 Months

The old man seemed cheerful. Now & then his eyes twinkled; sometimes he joked. But all this was deceptive. Mohandas Gandhi's shriveled body was racked by malaria. His pulse lagged. He had moments of delirium. He was 73. Death, which had walked beside him through many a fast and many a jail, again stood close. Or so, at least, it seemed last week to the British rulers of India.

From Gandhi's prison in the Aga Khan's shabby villa at Poona, doctors' bulletins went to Viceroy the Viscount Wavell in New Delhi. The Raj had never intended to let the old man die in custody, and thereby become a martyr in the eyes of India's restive masses. The Viceroy, with a nod from London at the proper medical moment, ordered Gandhi's release.

Next day the old man wrapped himself in his shawl, passed through his prison's iron gates. Outside, a cluster of followers cheered him. Wanly he smiled back. He had spent 21 isolated, sorrow-steeped months in the Aga Khan's villa ; there his Boswellian secretary, Mahadev Dezai, and his loyal wife, Kasturbai, had died (TIME, March 6). Now he journeyed to nearby Parnakuti, the rambling, white stone residence of his longtime friend, the wealthy, widowed Lady Vittal das Thackersey.

The old man's doctors warned friends to spare him "all strain for some time to come." Gandhi's son, amiable, pudgy Devadas Gandhi, editor of the Hindusthan Times, did not feel optimistic. His father, he said, scorned medicines, relied for recuperation on massage, water and vegetables, and spiritual resources "beyond the conception of the Western world." But the old man was indomitable: at Parnakuti he climbed 70 steps, led a household prayer meeting on an open terrace, asked for war news: "Let me know what is going on around me. If I am to die, let me not die an ignorant man."

For once India's nationalist and British newspapers saw eye to eye: they were glad that Gandhi had been released, glad that the Viceroy had been wise.

Change of Spirit? The Raj made one request of Gandhi: to keep political silence. The old man's intimates prayed that he would regain strength for one more grand effort. They spoke hopefully of a meeting between him and the Viceroy, a meeting that might wipe the slate clean, win at long last the cooperation of India's nationalists in the Empire's war. Said Devadas Gandhi's Hindusthan Times: "... Though the communique says the decision was taken on purely medical grounds, we permit ourselves the hope that this marks a change of spirit which may show the way to understanding and good will."

But the men at New Delhi still had Gandhi's once potent political machine, the Congress Party, jacked up. Still at odds with Gandhi and his party was the increasingly powerful Moslem League. Still in jail were Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Kalam Azad and some 8,000 other great & small leaders of the Congress Party. Even when, or if, the Congress Party recovered from British pressures and its own mistakes, and began to function again, it would not be the same without the binding personality of Gandhi.

Released, Mohandas Gandhi no longer spoke for all of India, nor even for all of the Congress Party. But he was still the symbol of India.

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