Saying His Peace

Video

Rare English Gandhi Recording from 1947

Mahatma Gandhi Speaks: In what may have been the final speech of his life that recorded Mahatma Gandhi speaking in English, the leader of India's independence movement addressed a gathering of Asian leaders in New Delhi on April 2, 1947.

» LAUNCH VIDEO PLAYER

Despite Gandhi's success in persuading the British to leave, his ideas about community amity deeply offended many Hindu nationalists unwilling to accommodate India's Muslim minority. Even as Alfred Wagg was recording the April speech, the emotional riptides that produced the conspiracy to assassinate Gandhi were already swirling. On Jan. 31, 1948, a Hindu extremist fired three bullets into Gandhi's chest at a public prayer meeting in New Delhi.

The quiet idealism of Gandhi's speech -- along with his radical ideas about love and nonviolence -- were consigned to the world of what-ifs.

Tough Love

There was much about Mohandas Gandhi that resembled a force of nature, extraordinary to behold -- from a distance. To those in his immediate presence and to those who saw politics in essentially pragmatic terms, Gandhi often seemed equal parts tyrant and madman. He made extraordinary demands of himself and those around him. He rarely told his audiences what they wanted to hear.

"Christianity became disfigured when it went to the West," Gandhi says at one point in the April 1947 speech, possibly referring to the violence of the recently completed Second World War and the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust. "I am sorry to have to say that, but that is my feeling . . . [the] West today is pining for wisdom. [The] West today is despairing of multiplication of atom bombs, because a multiplication of atom bombs means utter destruction, not merely of the West, but it will be a destruction of the world, as if the prophecy of the Bible is going to be fulfilled, and there is to be a perfect deluge."

Worries about violence were never far from Gandhi's mind: Two spates of sectarian strife had erupted in India in the months before Gandhi's speech. The first was in the eastern province of Bengal, where Muslims killed Hindus. Weeks later, in Bihar, Hindus retaliated against Muslims. In short order, the death toll climbed into the thousands.

Gandhi saw these blood baths not just as political setbacks but as personal failings. In his mind, there was no clear line between the personal and the political. "Sins" in the public sphere reflected "personal sins" for Gandhi. Accordingly, he began to punish himself.

He cut back on his already meager supply of food and sleep. He began to conduct tests of his own chastity -- taking breaks from prayer meetings and politics to write public accounts about his experiments not just to remain chaste, but to not even think about sex, even in his dreams. A widower by now, Gandhi invited a niece to share his bed to test their mutual commitment to chastity. If he could keep his mind completely pure, Gandhi told his associates, he believed the violence would end.

Gandhi's "experiments" triggered knowing winks from skeptics and critics. And his allies were horrified that he seemed to spend as much time trying to cleanse his soul as solving political problems. Several tried to keep the Mahatma's "experiments" hush-hush. But Gandhi held that secrecy was another form of dishonesty. He announced his experiments in the press, solicited feedback, and encouraged a colleague who was critical of him to take his concerns public.

In the months before his April 1947 speech, Gandhi began rising at 4 o'clock each morning, and sometimes at 2, to pray. He was 77 years old, but he undertook a walking tour from village to blood-soaked village in Bengal, covering nearly four dozen villages in as many days. He discarded footwear as one of his self-inflicted punishments, and ignored the cuts and blisters on his feet. At each village, he sought out cobblers and farmers and spent the night in their huts. If he was to speak on behalf of the vast numbers of people who lived in poverty in India, Gandhi reasoned, he had to live like a poor person himself.

"If you really want to see India at its best, you have to find it in the Bhangi cottage, in a humble Bhangi home," Gandhi says at one point in the 1947 speech, referring to one of the lowest and poorest castes. "Of such villages, so the English historians teach us, are 700,000. A few cities, here and there; they don't hold 7 crores [70 million] of people but the 700,000 villages do hold nearly 40 crores [400 million] of people."

Gandhi's self-denial and tour of rural poverty was rooted in political philosophy. The central reason people turn to violence, Gandhi believed, was that they were afraid. Fear of others, fear of the unknown, fear of losing one's possessions and fortunes, fear of loss, fear of death -- these were the things that prompted people, groups and nations to seek physical protection, to seek arms and armies. Fear was the root cause of corruption and greed.

The way to destroy fear, Gandhi argued, was to give up the things that people held precious in the first place. When you have no possessions, you fear no thieves. So Gandhi gave up most of his possessions. He gave up emotional ties to family and friends. Sacrificing food, sleep and sex were only a way to show that the needs of his physical body -- and life itself -- could be held lightly.