When peace walked barefoot

In the months before Partition, Mahatma Gandhi travelled across India trying to prevent communal violence and what would become one of the 20th century’s greatest tragedies. Among those who witnessed his ultimately futile mission up close was his grandniece, Manu Gandhi. Her diary captures an intimate portrait of hope against darkness. Through her eyes, we see Gandhi’s final mission for peace, recorded in quiet moments between epochal changes. Edited and translated by the scholar and historian Tridip Suhrud, the second volume of her diary titled The Diary of Manu Gandhi (1946-1948) has just been published by Oxford University Press.

This volume follows the first book chronicling Manu’s first two years with Gandhi (1943-44), during which she, as an adolescent woman, takes up writing as a mode of intellectual pursuit and self-examination. Here, maturing in the art of diary writing under Gandhi’s watchful eyes, her quiet chronicle is an extraordinary witness report of the last phase of Gandhi’s life as well as India’s freedom movement.

The volume begins with Manu reaching Srirampur, a village in East Bengal (now Bangladesh), on December 19, 1946, accompanied by her father. Gandhi gives Manu a few lessons about how to carry herself in a place that recently witnessed barbaric violence. Gandhi’s peace mission in Noakhali with a small troupe was involved in calming down tempers and healing fractured relations. Manu joined the troupe as Gandhi’s personal attendant. Some of the members of the troupe were spread in different areas, but Manu stayed with Gandhi.

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Manu spends the first couple of days settling into her new role, her presence having ruffled a few feathers. Gandhi’s close associate Pyarelal wanted to marry Manu since 1944, and his sister, Sushila, who was a doctor and part of Gandhi’s associates, advocated for her brother. Congress leader Amrit Chatterjee’s daughter, Abha, who married Kanu Gandhi (Gandhi’s grandnephew), was also not particularly pleased about Manu taking her place. These distractions and heartburns convey a touching fragility of the troupe, illustrating how the lives and personal relations of people who dedicate their lives to bring amity in the world can be far from perfect.

Gandhi’s peace mission

As Manu writes on her everyday life in Noakhali, one slowly learns of the stakes involved in being there. Gandhi, whose barefoot political pilgrimage involved crossing rickety bridges made of bamboo, would practise crossing them alone early morning so that he did not waste precious time when walking with the troupe on his mission.

Full of simple details of her attending to Gandhi and how he was taken care of by others, Manu’s diary reveals the everyday life of peace activists in the middle of communal strife, hoping to heal wounds. Even if most of them did not share the language of the local people, they reached out to them in gestures that were commonly understood.

Even as Manu learns first-hand from Gandhi lessons about moral depravity in people, the real challenge lay in meeting the survivors of communal genocide. In Noakhali, Manu often described the scenes in sparse language, as in this diary entry from January 3, 1947: “In the forenoon we went to visit the Harijan locality—they are called Namasudra—here. The inhumanity perpetrated on them makes one quiver.”

Having registered the sociological detail of the victims, Manu makes a short but striking statement regarding her state of shock on the scene of genocide. She does not elaborate on what she sees or couch her experience with sentimentality. She does not describe the indescribable, except her feelings.

Unlike the anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose’s diary, My Days with Gandhi, or Pyarelal’s The Last Phase (both mature, reflective witness accounts on Gandhi’s peace mission in Noakhali, Bihar, Calcutta, and Delhi), Manu’s diary is more personal and impressionistic. She is too young to be part of the troupe and face the ordeals of the lingering shadows of mass violence. But she is there by Gandhi’s side, detailing his everyday life as much as her own, whenever she is not running an errand or taking rest. Her diary is a testimony of time and labour, and the idea of truth that lay shattered by history.

Shadow of nationalism

The shadow of evil that fell upon the idea of religion was that of nationalism. In the name of creating Pakistan, members belonging to the Muslim League in Bengal had planned and perpetrated violence against the Hindus of Noakhali and Tippera. On February 4, 1947, Manu writes from a village named Sadhur Khil: “It is certain that there is widespread poison. People are being led astray in the name of religion by those learned men who are in fact doing the work of Satan.”

Here, Satan is an ideologue instigating and justifying godless acts for a nation in God’s name and vice versa. The fulfilment of the Muslim League’s dream of Pakistan required Hindus to be either converted or killed. Manu witnessed the poisoned aftereffects of this terrible project.

Not just people, even sacred sites were not spared. Manu writes how a village temple in Raipur was converted to “Pakistan Club” during the killings in Noakhali and two mosques in East Punjab were converted to temples when Partition violence spread in the north. When Gandhi’s troupe was in the village of Haimchar in Noakhali, news poured in from Bihar of retributive violence against Muslims at a massive scale, including reports of Congress workers being involved.

Gandhi took up the news of the involvement of Congressmen seriously when he reached Bihar, as Manu writes on March 28, 1947, from Jehanabad: “Mridulabehn [Mridula Sarabhai] has convened a meeting of Congress workers. She works tirelessly without a rest of even a minute. Bapuji attended that meeting as well and scolded the Congressmen as many of them had participated in the riots. Bapuji has been deeply pained by this.”

Manu’s diary offers details of political violence where description merges into perspective, overwhelmed by sadness. The writing is closest to what one calls human, where a young woman is able to see people through their deeds and their vulnerability alone, and not by their political and religious identity.

Yet, a maturing Manu, after they returned to Calcutta in early August 1947, does not spare the Bengal Chief Minister Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, who, having promised to stay with Gandhi in Hydari Manzil, used to slip away to his own house at night. Manu tells him, “I have no faith in you. You don’t keep your word. You have a new excuse every day.” The young woman was not hesitant to share her lack of faith in a man at the helm of political affairs in Bengal and who played a dubious role in the 1946 Calcutta Killings and the Noakhali genocide.

One also learns about Gandhi’s crumbing health condition, who occasionally suffered from an upset stomach. Doctors were constantly attending to him. Even Manu suffered from frequent nosebleeds and an occasional stomachache. The intense work of the peace mission took a toll on their bodies, but did not dampen their labour.

The world Manu and Gandhi inhabited

The diary also offers details on the controversial brahmacharya experiment, or yagna, that Gandhi conducted briefly with Manu. Manu was ready for the experiment and trusted Gandhi like her own mother, as she wrote on January 26, 1947: “This chapter of my sleeping in the same bed has caused quite a storm. But for some reason I am not worried by that. Perhaps because he is my mother; though a male, he is a mother to me…”

What made the experiment difficult for her were the constant insinuations and discouragement by Gandhi’s associates which included Kanu Gandhi, his wife Abha, and Sushila, among others. Finally, Manu decided to end the experiment of sharing the bed with Gandhi on March 2, 1947, and Gandhi gave her his “consent”.

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For Gandhi, the experience of sexual passivity in a woman’s presence was necessary as an antidote to the atmosphere of mass violence. There was no secrecy involved in the project. The ethical implications of involving someone much younger than him in a psychologically difficult experiment need to be judged not by current and secular standards of understanding but by the world that both Manu and Gandhi inhabited and shared. Gandhi’s genuinely mystical self-fashioning, Manu’s willingness to serve him as part of the larger ethic of “seva”, her trust in her Bapu, and her sense of agency that made her stop the experiment must be considered.

When Gandhi fell from Nathuram Godse’s bullets, Manu was by his side before she disappeared into a life of oblivion. Her diary is both personal and political, drawing that relationship in a remarkable way. It also resists the prevalent idea that the political is always necessarily a critique of the personal. In Manu’s case, who witnessed the cult of violence in the company of people who practised nonviolence as a self-examining mode of everyday life, it is often the opposite: the personal is the critique of the political.

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Nehru and the Spirit of India.