Remembering the Mahatma: Loss, meet love…

Lost and Found

They stand on the opposite banks of the river. One, shrinking into itself, separate, fearful, mistrustful, unable to see beyond its own needs and instincts for survival. The other, waiting for the crossover. Not now or later, but eternally.

In Gandhi, the two, loss and love, met. Not just your loss or mine. His too. He was, after all, a man, even if a Mahatma. But the river that connected the two banks flowed through him. The river of love. You could submerge your loss in him. And be submerged by him.

He never ran dry. Not even in the months leading up to Independence when loss’s furious, unstoppable reprisals, its blind, numb loathing, held sway in India.

Calcutta was a gutted city. Communal killings had broken out on ‘Direct Action Day’, August 16, 1946, and they carried on, renewing themselves in fresh spasms of hate. The violence blazed through Noakhali in East Bengal, torched Bihar, engulfed Punjab and Delhi, threatened to consume the whole country. India had become a wracking, unconsolable fireball that would not be put out until Gandhi’s own blood had been shed. No, not even then did he run dry.

Here he is in Noakhali, in a famous photo from 1946. Alone, head down, walking with staff in hand, trying to restore sanity in an area where Hindus had been killed in hundreds, houses burnt, women raped, in vengeance for attacks on Muslims in Calcutta.

Many villagers he met were hostile to his arrival but he took it in his stride, went to live in their homes. He sought out those who had suffered to provide courage. To the community, his message was clear: He wanted “repentance.” Rajmohan Gandhi writes in The Good Boatman: A Portrait of Gandhi that he spoke to the large gatherings in an idiom they understood: “Hindus and Muslims were nourished by food grown from the same soil, quenched their thirst from the waters of the same river, and finally laid themselves to rest in the same earth. If they feared God, they would fear no one else.”

In Bihar, which saw a terrible retribution against Muslims for Noakhali, he told a crowd of 100,000 on March 5, 1947, that he wanted “honest reparations greater in magnitude than their crimes.” And that “everyone of us is equally guilty of what any one of us has done.” A Hindu beggar came to give him four annas for the Muslim relief fund he had set up. Gandhi saw “true charity” in this act and found the real face of Bihar in him.

Calcutta saw him go on a fast, his second-last, where he would have nothing save water. It would be his one last attempt to return sense to a city that continued to smoulder despite a spell of amity around Independence. The fast began on September 1, 1947. By the time he broke it three days later, the impossible had happened. “The nerve of feeling had been restored, the pain began to be felt; the pain of the whole society, because of the pain of its members, whether Hindu, Muslim, or others…it was fundamentally the joy of union, and the acceptance of new responsibility which such glad assurance of united strength makes possible,” wrote Amiya Chakravarty, who was an eye-witness to the fast. C Rajagopalachari, then the new Governor of West Bengal, said nothing that Gandhiji had achieved, “not even independence” was “so truly wonderful as his victory over evil in Calcutta.”

Love, you must meet loss. Loss, inscribed by the memory of more than a million dead, homes and relationships abandoned, friendships extinguished. The loss of a promised wholeness. No, we haven’t acknowledged or understood, we are still capable of a return to madness. What to even speak of forgiveness?

But loss, meet you must love. Love, inscribed by the fact of three bullets fired at point-blank range into the open heart of a 78-year-old man, his hands folded in the gesture of greeting, forgiveness and love. He embraced his death willingly. He had prayed earlier to forgive his assassin. His surrender to Rama was finally complete.

The river connected the two banks because they weren’t really apart, weren’t really separate. The river knew, it trusted. It still does. We have to let go. Let ourselves be swept by love. We have nowhere else to go.