Gandhi: The End of Non-Violence
By Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee
Vintage Books, 528 pages, Rs 699
 
The last years of Mahatma Gandhi’s life were marked by great inner drama. The values he upheld were going up in flames. A freedom struggle marked by non-violence was culminating in horrific massacres. His method of nonviolence was under trial during the ferocity of Partition. In ‘Gandhi: The End of Nonviolence’, Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee explores this crisis in depth.

Putting Gandhi center stage in significant political events ranging from the Khilafat Movement (1919-1922) to Partition (1946-1947), Bhattacharjee critically engages with some of the key figures who had a stake on the Hindu-Muslim question: Maulana Mohamad Ali, Muhammad Iqbal, the Arya Samajists, B.R. Ambedkar, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.

The tragic repercussions of Jinnah’s declaration of ‘Direct Action Day’ on 16th August 1946 leads him to ask probing questions on the persistent malady in our political history: How does communal politics descend into genocide? What is the psychology of communal violence? Attentively reading the exceptional witness accounts of Pyarelal, Nirmal Kumar Bose and Manu Gandhi, Bhattacharjee throws light on the many shades of Gandhi’s epic peace mission as he walks (often barefoot) through the devastated neighbourhoods of Noakhali, Bihar, Calcutta and Delhi, offering courage and healing wounds.

Combining poetic flair, diligent research and argumentative rigour, this one-of-a-kind book reminds us why Gandhi is part of our ethical conscience and transforms our understanding of the human condition.

This work has already received high praise from scholars such as Ashis Nandy and Rajmohan Gandhi.  

Here is an excerpt from the book:

God is in the details

The Gandhi–Manu relationship became a matter of controversy as Gandhi made his 19-year-old grand-niece part of his Brahmacharya experiment. Its place in Gandhi’s peace mission in Noakhali has been debated by Gandhi’s associates during his time, and commented upon by scholars and writers later.

The popular idiom, the truth is in the details, and the devil is in the details, are later variations of an older idiom attributed to Gustave Flaubert (1821–80): Le bon Dieu est dans le détail or God is in the details. It is a good idiom vis-à-vis the idea of a telos, or finality. There is no truth, or god, or devil to be found at the end of the text. They are part of the entire text. You meet them along the way. It is good to keep this in mind in this unusual story about Manu and her Bapu.

Manu came from a different world, not the kind of world we live in. It is important to understand that world in the way of understanding her and her relationship with Gandhi. Manu joined Gandhi and his wife Kasturba at Sevagram at the age of seventeen after her mother passed away, for literary training and seva, or service. When Kasturba passed away at the Aga Khan prison on 22 February 1944, Manu was present. She had started writing her diary much earlier, since 11 April 1943. It was essential for Gandhi that all satyagrahis (who were also ashramites) keep a diary. Explaining its importance, Gandhi told fellow ashramites:

‘Thinking about a diary I feel that it is of priceless value to me. For a person who has dedicated himself to the pursuit of truth, it serves as a means of keeping watch over himself, for such a person is determined to write in it nothing but the truth.’

Foucault traces the western genealogy and tradition of this practice of a ‘self-technology’ in relation to the ‘discovery and formulation of the truth concerning oneself’ to the Delphic precept, ‘know yourself’. The act of radical self-examination for the sake of what Foucault calls ‘the obligation to tell the truth about oneself’ is akin to the Christian verbalization during confession. Writing the diary is an act of self-confession to oneself. In the Christian era, Foucault tells us, the practice involved confessing your thoughts to your spiritual guide and this transformation had an impact on modern subjectivity.

Gandhi, as Manu’s spiritual guide, would read and sign her diary entries as ‘Bapu’. However, unlike the private act of confession, Manu’s diary was meant to be a public record for the future.

Gandhi wrote his first note in Manu’s diary two days after she was into the practice: ‘You must keep an account of the yarn you have spun. Thoughts coming into your mind should also be noted down. You should keep a record of all that you have read.’ On his day of silence on 27 February 1944, Gandhi wrote a note to Manu:

‘I feel much worried about you. You are a class by yourself. You are good, simple-hearted and ever ready to help others. Service has become dharma with you. But you are still uneducated and silly also. If you remain illiterate, you will regret it, and if I live long, I too will regret it. I will certainly miss you, but I do not like to keep you near me as that would be weakness and ignorant attachment. I am quite sure that at present you should go to Rajkot . . . You will learn there besides music, the art of working methodically. You will learn Gujarati, too. There may be other benefits also. If you spend at least one year there, your slovenliness will disappear. If you go to Karachi or anywhere else you like after you have become more mature, you will get all that you want.’

From Gandhi’s letter to Manu’s father, Jaisukhlal, on 12 June 1944, we learn that Gandhi wanted to send Manu to Rajkot, but she was reluctant to go there. She was excited by a letter she had received from a teacher in Karachi and Gandhi sent her there. On 19 June, Gandhi wrote to Manu in Karachi, ‘I have your letter. If you behave as you promise, I shall be very happy. I am glad that you did not go to the cinema.’ On 27 July, Gandhi’s letter read, ‘I have your letter. That your weight should go down to 87 lb. is a matter of shame. It is sinful to read up to 2 o’clock at night.’ These were the early correspondences between Manu and Gandhi.

On 4 November 1946, Gandhi wrote to Jaisukhlal from Calcutta, making an authoritative wish: ‘Manu’s place can be nowhere else but here by my side.’332 Reading it on 1 December, Manu wrote, the sentence ‘moved me deeply’. Manu wanted to take care of Gandhi’s personal needs, but since he had spread his associates across Noakhali, Manu wondered if that was possible. The thought made her ‘sleepless.’ She woke her father in the middle of the night and he advised her to write to Gandhi. Manu wrote to Gandhi at 1.30 a.m. on 12 December, ‘explicitly laying down the condition’ under which she was willing to join him. ‘I do not wish to come, if you want me to work in some village away from you’. She was willing to ‘brave any dangers’337 that might befall her.

Manu reached Srirampur with her father in the afternoon on 19 December. During the conversation, Gandhi told Jaisukhlal,

‘I have had a regard for her ever since she came to me. Pyarelal also saw in her some great qualities, which he hoped to nurture and help blossom. It is for this reason that he had expressed to me his desire to marry Manu. I have never believed that they have done anything wrong. Even then, they would be tested here. I have described Hindu–Muslim unity as a yajna. And in this sacrifice, nothing impure can subsist. So, if Manu were to be impure, even with a mere trace of it, she would be in a terrible state. You must understand this clearly, discuss it with Manu so that she could return with you if she so wants. It is better to return now, than later when one may be in a bad state.’

[The excerpt reproduced with the permission of the publishers.]