Of Truth and Shame

For five hours, as Gandhi's body was pulled through the streets of Delhi, Vallabhbhai Patel crouched on the funeral cart, his head bowed; not once did he raise it. Alongside, barefoot in the dust, walked Jawaharlal Nehru. Said Nehru: "I have a sense of utter shame."

The shame spread through the world with the news of Gandhi's murder. The event brought the shock of recognition, rather than the shock of surprise. More forcibly than anyone in his age, Gandhi had asserted that love was the law; how else should he die but through hatred? He had feared machines in the hands of men not wise enough to use them, had warned against the glib, the new, the plausible; how else should he die, but by a pistol in the hands of a young intellectual?

The world knew that it had, in a sense too deep, too simple for the world to understand, connived at his death as it had connived at Lincoln's. The parallel between Gandhi's martyrdom and Lincoln's was close and obvious. Each went down in the hollow between the crest of political victory and the crest of moral defeat. And Gandhi's ashes were not cold before the world had begun to vulgarize his saintliness (as it had vulgarized Lincoln's*) by insisting, against the facts, that there was no vulgarity in him. The world finds it hard and self-shaming to believe that truth can be glimpsed from the earth; its heroes must be projected into a nebulous world of "mysticism."

In the little circumstances surrounding Gandhi's death, in the sordid surroundings of his funeral, there were hints of the real Gandhi, the Gandhi who did not escape reality but pursued it in the teeth of all the windy words like "power" and "progress."

The story of the death and funeral of Gandhi, however, is best read after a glance south from Delhi, to the place where stands a monument, the Taj Mahal, to another dead Indian. The great Shah Jehan built it to immortalize the memory of his empress' beauty. It is man's most eloquent effort to deny that the body and its beauty dies. It is a triumph of the mortician's art. Some may try to raise a Taj to Gandhi (the prettifiers will scarcely be able to stand statues of that ugly body). But Gandhi's true monument will be his story--told again & again.

"Let Me Go Now." On the night before his death, Gandhi had recited a homely Gujarati couplet known in Porbandar (where he was born in 1869). It went:

This is a strange world, How long have I to play this game?

His last hours were full of this sense of imminence. A few minutes before his assassin shot him down, Gandhi had looked at the tinny dollar watch that dangled from his loincloth. He had been talking with Sardar Patel, Deputy Prime Minister of India. "Let me go now," said Gandhi. "It's prayer time for me."

Then, with his arms round the shoulders of his grandnieces Ava and Manu, the knobby brown man shuffled weakly down the red sandstone pathway leading from Birla House to the vine-covered pergola which served as his prayer-meeting place. Slowly he climbed the three steps leading to the pavilion. A stocky young man in grey slacks, a blue pullover and khaki bush jacket stepped forward and knelt at Gandhi's feet. He was Nathu Ram Vinayak Godse, editor of the extremist newspaper Hindu Rashtra, which had denounced Gandhi as an appeaser of Moslems. "You are late today for the prayer," said the murderer. "Yes, I am," said Gandhi.

Godse suddenly pulled out a tiny Beretta automatic pistol. He fired three times. One bullet ripped into Gandhi's chest, two into his belly. With hands folded, as if welcoming the blow, in the gesture that is both the Hindu greeting and the Christian attitude of prayer, Gandhi fell backward. He murmured, "Ai Ram, Ai Ram" (0 Rama, 0 Rama), in invocation to the gentle hero of the Hindu pantheon, Gandhi's favorite.

"Neither Welcoming. . . nor Shrinking." A sergeant of the Indian Air Force knocked the gun out of Godse's hands and the yelling crowd bloodied the assassin with blows. The police wrestled him loose and bore him off to jail, where he said: "I am not at all sorry for what I have done. . . " His two male secretaries carried the bleeding Gandhi into Birla House. He never spoke again. As his soul seeped out, his grandniece Ava chanted Gandhi's favorite verses from the Hindu holy book Bhagavad-Gita:

"Arjuna asked: 'My Lord, how can we recognize the saint who has attained pure intellect, who has reached this state of bliss, and whose mind is steady? How does he talk, how does he live, and how does he act?' ". . . The sage whose mind is unruffled in suffering, whose desire is not to rouse by enjoyment, who is without attachment to anger or fear--take him to be one who stands at that lofty level. "He, who wherever he goes, is attached to no person and to no place by ties of flesh; who accepts good and evil alike, neither welcoming the one nor shrinking from the other--take him to be one who is merged in the infinite."

Soon one of Gandhi's disciples appeared at the door to Birla House, to speak to the crowd. "Bapuji [little father] is finished," he said. Just 28 minutes after he was shot, Gandhi had died.

"Have Your Bath." A moan went up from the crowd. By the thousands, his followers began to file by the dead man, who was draped in white khadi (homespun cotton) and sprinkled with rose petals. The crush became so great that the body was finally put on a tilted slab on an outside balcony, and bathed in floodlights so that all might see. At the head burned five lamp wicks representing the five elements--air, light, water, earth and fire.

The good friend, disciple and political heir of Gandhi, India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, spoke to the nation on the radio, in quivering voice: "Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere."

The nation went into 13-day mourning. In old Delhi a bride and bridegroom about to be married were seated in front of the sacred fire when they heard the news. They postponed the wedding and returned to their respective homes. A milkman emptied his buckets of milk on the street, crying: "Bapuji is no more. What's the use of selling milk now?"

The All-India radio broadcast Gandhi's favorites: extracts from the Gita, the Upanishads and the Koran; the Lord's Prayer; the Christian hymn, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross. Then, after midnight, Gandhi's youngest son Devadas (who insisted that Gandhi be cremated, as he had wished) helped wash the body. He and Gandhi's secretary Pyarelal then wrapped the body in pure white khadi. They put a yellow paste of sandalwood and water on his face.

The household chanted their leader's favorite Hindu song: "Dress yourself in rich attire, befitting the occasion, because you are now to go to your beloved's haven. You will have to lie on the bare earth, cover yourself with dust and ultimately become one with the dust. Have your bath and dress properly. Remember you are not to come back from where you are going."

The vehicle selected to bear this man of nonviolence on his last journey was a weapons carrier. Those in charge of the arrangements, recalling Gandhi's opposition to machines, did not let the weapons carrier's motor propel it; men with ropes dragged it through New Delhi's streets. The men were soldiers, and soldiers headed the cortege. Police, about whom Gandhi also had had his doubts, lined the streets. Overhead, military airplanes, built to drop bombs on people Gandhi loved, dropped rose petals on Gandhi's bier. Tanks and armored cars rumbled behind, as if to make it very clear that the world had said: "You are dead and I will not die and, though you have made me feel uneasy, I have not listened to what you have been trying to tell me."

In front of the bier marched Gandhi's third and fourth sons, Ramdas and Devadas,* barefoot. It took almost five hours for the marchers to cover the six miles to the banks of the sacred river, Jumna. The surging crowd, which sometimes threatened to engulf the funeral procession, threw rose petals at the bier, shouted "Mahatma Gandhi ki jail"--"Victory to Great Soul Gandhi!"

At the river bank the procession came to a field as different as possible from the glittering Taj Mahal. This field looked like a junkyard. Here & there water buffalo were grazing. The Department of Public Works had built overnight a square platform of brick and cement, three feet high and twelve feet square. At the four corners were stumps of the sacred peepul tree. On the platform was half a ton of sandalwood, mixed with ghi (melted butter), incense, coconuts and camphor. Gandhi's body was raised to the pyre.

As Gandhi's sons gently laid more sandalwood atop the corpse, the throng pressed wildly in. Screaming men tried to get close enough to place a stick of sandalwood on the pyre. Hysterical women clamored for one last look; some tried to throw themselves on the pyre. Soldiers and police had to beat the crowd back with lathis (police sticks), just as they had beaten Gandhi's nonviolent followers in scores of demonstrations.

Son Ramdas set fire to the ghi-soaked wood with the charcoal he had carried, smoldering, all the way from Birla House. Nehru, Patel, Governor General Earl Mountbatten and his Lady threw last rose petals on the pyre as the white smoke of sweet-smelling sandalwood rose against the scarlet evening sun. From nearly a million throats came the chant, half in mourning, half in triumph: "Mahatma Gandhi amar ho gae!"--"Mahatma Gandhi has become immortal!"

"Is He Redly Great?" When Mahatma Gandhi was in London in 1931 to plead for Indian independence, a small girl started to ask for his autograph. Then she drew back shyly before the strange little dhoti-clad man with a cavernous mouth, jutting ears and scrawny neck. She looked up at her mother and asked: "Mummy, is he really great?"

Last week the answer from all continents was a fatuous yes. The answer missed the point; Gandhi was a rarer human being--a good man. He disturbed people by his goodness. He called himself "a Hindu of Hindus," and yet he put many a professing Christian to shame. "The spirit of the Sermon on the Mount," wrote the man who fitted the rubrics of the Beatitudes more comfortably than most Christians, "competes almost on equal terms with the Bhagavad-Gita for the domination of my heart."

"I Heartily Detest. . . ." From the Russian pacifist Count Leo Tolstoy and the American hermit-naturalist Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi learned the doctrines of nonviolence and deliberate, organized disobedience to unjust power. He said it was better to be poor and secure with a home spinning wheel than to be less poor and frightened with a great steel mill. He combined the elements into a belief of Christlike simplicity: oppose hate with love, greed with openhandedness, lust with self-control; harm no feeling creature. Of material progress, he said: "I heartily detest this mad desire to destroy distance and time."

The house where Gandhi died belonged to Ghanshyam Das Birla, owner of some of the largest textile mills in the world. Gandhi, who hated Birla's mills, loved Birla, whose devotion to Gandhi did not reach to Gandhi's anti-industrial ideas.

"Where We Have the Weapons. . ." Satyagraha (soulforce, or conquering through love) was the name Gandhi gave to mass nonviolent resistance. Potently he applied satyagraha against the British Raj. "The British," he wrote, "want us to put the struggle on the plane of machine guns. They have weapons and we have not. Our only assurance of beating them is to keep it on the plane where we have the weapons and they have not."

Yet Gandhi's weapon contained a measurable threat of violence in India. When Gandhi fasted, Britons sometimes dared not keep him in jail, lest a massive anger at his death in their hands engulf India. "I always get my best bargains behind prison bars," he once chuckled. When Gandhi fasted, Moslem, Hindu and Untouchable leaders had to promise to work better together, lest that anger of the masses be directed against them. No communal group, not the mighty British Raj itself, dared have Gandhi's blood on its hands.

"If We Could Spit . . ." With independence, Gandhi's great victory, came defeat. India, seething with fear and fanaticism, spurted blood in scores of riots. Mohamed Ali Jinnah, once a member of Gandhi's All-India Congress Party, bolted, saying that the Congress was an instrument to impose Hindu rule on India's Moslem minority. With a notably unmystical metaphor, Gandhi said: "If we Indians could only spit in unison, we would form a puddle big enough to drown 300,000 Englishmen." But Jinnah refused to spit in unison with Hindus, for any cause. He demanded, and got, his separate Moslem state of Pakistan.

Lone Voice. Independence without unity was as ashes in Gandhi's mouth. He continued to work for the reunion of Pakistan with India. But in the last half year of his life Gandhi found not only the Moslem leader, but many of his own Hindus, opposing attempts at reconciliation. Orthodox Hindus resented his inroads on Hindu customs which Gandhi considered brutal, and therefore indefensible: untouchability, suttee (widow suicide), child marriages. Hindu and Sikh refugees from Moslem hate and murder, pouring into Delhi and other Indian cities, clamored for revenge. The militant Hindu organization Mahasabha (Great Society), to which Gandhi's assassin belonged, worked to make Indiaa purely Hindu state. Patel gave some encouragement to the extremists, which may partly explain why, at Gandhi's funeral, his head was bowed.

Hindus, not Moslems, stoned Gandhi's house when he went to Calcutta to encourage communal peace last August. On his 78th birthday, Oct. 2, Gandhi spoke sadly: "Why do I receive all these congratulations? . . . The time was when whatever I said, the masses followed. But today I am a lone voice in India." In November, a TIME correspondent went to see him. Gandhi said: "Can you squat?" The reporter squatted. Gandhi at one point in the interview said: "Three hundred years is as nothing." He returned to the present: "The fear haunts me that India must yet go through a deeper blood bath." The government which he had dominated came closer & closer to open war on Pakistan. Only Gandhi's fast last month checked the drift toward open hostilities over Kashmir State.

Violence broke out in India anew after Gandhi's death. Fifty were reported killed as-Gandhi admirers exacted a blood price from the Mahasabha extremists. Some dared to hope that Gandhi's injunction to abhor violence might take on added force from his martyrdom.

The hope was slim. In his lifetime his fellow men had sensed that Gandhi had a great message; of what the message was, they had scarcely an inkling. Gandhi, by the manner of his death, told them a little more of what he had been trying to communicate--but not enough to make them live as he had tried to. The world which revered few men had revered him--but not enough to follow where he pointed. The world was ashamed, and bewildered. Premier Nehru, that great and learned and most fluent man, came back to Gandhi's cooling pyre the day after the cremation. He spoke a few halting, wistful sentences, like a lost child. Said Nehru:

"Bapuji, here are flowers. Today, at least, I can offer them to your bones and ashes. Where will I offer them tomorrow, and to whom?"

*To this day, Americans will not believe that Lincoln's achievements were built on consummate skill at political patronage and courthouse politics, just as Gandhi's were built on shrewd lawyer tricks and diplomatic maneuvering. Charles Francis Adams, great with a sense of historic mission, called on Lincoln before departing for the London legation. Lincoln had little to say of high politics. Adams, being an Adams, never got over the fact that what Lincoln really had on his mind that fateful day was the patronage struggle for the Chicago postmastership. *Gandhi, like Lincoln, had his family sorrows. His first son Hiralal, who drinks, was estranged from Gandhi, was once a convert to Islam. Last week second son Manilal was in Durban, South Africa.

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