Astrologers had deemed 14 August to be an unlucky day for Hindus, and so India was born as a nation at midnight between the two days of 14 and 15 August 1947. Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech to the Constituent Assembly was a splendid piece of rhetoric:
Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the larger cause of humanity.1
An age had indeed ended. Churchill, now leader of the Conservative Opposition, was despondent. ‘In handing over the Government of India to those so-called political classes, we are handing over to men of straw of whom in a few years no trace will remain … Many have defended Britain against her foes, none can defend her against herself.’2 Earlier, he had petulantly told the Americans that he had not become the King’s First Minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire. But that dissolution was the ineluctable consequence of the war Churchill had waged, so bravely and so defiantly, against Hitler. His doctor, Lord Moran, travelling with him in America in 1952, when the old man had once again become the Prime Minister, sensed that Churchill had begun to understand this. Bowling along on the train from Washington to New York, Churchill allowed his mind to wander back to his youth, to dinners with Joe Chamberlain in 1895, to his absorption of Kipling, in whose writings, he said, he could have sat an examination, and to the attitude of mind which these imperialists had instilled in him. ‘When you learn to think of a race as inferior beings it is difficult to get rid of that way of thinking; when I was a subaltern the Indian did not seem to me equal to the white man.’ There was an unspoken ‘but, now …’ hovering after this paragraph. ‘Was he too’, asked the doctor, ‘having second thoughts? Was the India of his youth, Kipling’s India, a mistake after all? Had he been wrong about the Empire?’3
Moran leaves the question in the air. The wistful moment in the American railroad carriage, however, suggests that within five years of India having its independence, even the doughtiest defender of the British Empire had come to see its dissolution as an inevitability. Interestingly, Churchill focuses upon its racialism as the core of why it was unworkable, and that, surely, historically, is right. The India of Clive, and of the East India Company making a whole series of alliances with local princes, was the beginning of the Empire; but it had not begun with an imperialistic idea. It was trade which had led the British to India, and those who went there, absorbing Indian customs, very often falling in love with India’s language, philosophies, religions, women, did not in the first instance come with the sense that European culture was superior to Indian, still less white faces superior to brown. These things developed as the deadly combination of Benthamite economists and Christian missionaries enforced in the British a sense of Indian barbarism. The Indians, like the poor at home in Britain, needed to be improved. That was when the trouble started. After the tragic events of 1857–9, the so-called Indian Mutiny, the East India Company was wound up and the British governor became a viceroy. Eighteen years later the queen became the empress of India, and the whole aberration of the ‘British Empire’ was enforced. It lasted, as far as India was concerned, just ninety years, a very short period in the lives both of Britain and of India.
One thing was certain: the British could not continue to govern India against its will. Another certainty was that the British incursion into India, which had begun as a profit-making enterprise for merchants, had become a drain on British resources. The war in the Far East had demonstrated that it took very little to make a British stronghold such as Singapore collapse. Throughout the war years, India had seethed with discontent, and the problems of the subcontinent were never going to be resolved until independence was achieved. The dilemma was: what sort of polity would be acceptable to the multitudinous peoples of this vast land mass, which had never been a united nation? Mahatma Gandhi had been its prophet, its Moses, or its Garibaldi leading it into its promise. Jawaharlal Nehru needed to be its Saviour, the modernizing liberal statesman who had to moderate the fervour of the early revolutionary nationalist sentiments of his followers in order to hold together the opposing factions of the new nation. The nub of the difficulty was actually a reworking of a problem which the British themselves, with the best of intentions, had brought to India in the first place. Lord Macaulay, as early as his years as legal adviser to the Supreme Council of India, 1834–8, had made English the official language of Indian law, schools and professions. Those Indians who had absorbed Victorian liberalism were those who were anxious to bring India up to date, and this in time included independence. But their very liberalism was a threat to the ancient religions and customs of the subcontinent. That was what had provoked the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857–9: the fear of the traditionally minded Indian soldiers, the sepoys, that they were being made to defile themselves by biting cartridges which were greased with impure animal-fat. Behind the casual, thoughtless British insistence that such matters were trivial was the much bigger thought that whole Indian ways of living and thinking should be modernized, brought up to nineteenth-century European levels of cleanliness, efficiency, common sense. In time, this meant intrusions by secular liberalism into the Indian home, the Indian marriage bed, even into the Indian funeral pyre.
Gandhi, by adopting the loincloth and the begging bowl, had tried to reverse this trend and to emphasize that he was at one with the Indian peasant. But the very fact that he was, as Churchill never tired of mockingly reminding the world, a Middle Temple lawyer, lay behind the device; and in his war on the caste system, even he had a touch of the improving Victorian liberal.
The Old Harrovian Nehru was a modernizer and a would-be democrat. And as soon as you brought democracy to a society as diverse as India’s, you invited a tyranny by the majority. For this reason, the Muslims dreaded a democratic election after British withdrawal, and this was the problem which faced the Attlee government as soon as they had decided upon a speedy and immediate departure from India after the war, a war in which well over 2 million Indian troops had served and over 100,000 had been killed or wounded.
Since at least Curzon’s time, Bengal had seen itself as separate from its Hindu neighbours. The Punjab had only been brought into the union with the rest of India, as far as modern times were concerned, after the wars of the late 1840s. When Dalhousie had arrived as the youngest (aged thirty-five) Governor-General in history (1847–56), he regarded the Sikhs there as little better than savages. He soon discovered them to be honourable warriors, with a fine religious tradition which respected the equality of men and women rather more than Christianity did. The Sikhs and the Muslims in the Punjab, after Dalhousie’s settlements, had come to an uneasy truce. ‘The modern spirit had come to the Punjab with all its material benefits and spiritual unrest.’4 The idea of asking them, a century later, to submit to a government by Hindus was not so much a pipedream as an impossibility. To this Gandhi tried to blind himself, but it was probably always going to be the case.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, originally an ally of Gandhi in the fight for Indian independence, had struck out on his own for Muslim independence from the Hindus. In the great city of Lahore, where little Kim had sat astride the cannon outside the museum in Kipling’s great tale, Jinnah had made his revolutionary proclamation. He had left India for England in 1930 an all but forgotten figure in Indian politics, and returned in 1934. Somehow he got elected as the President of the Muslim League. And in the Lahore declaration of March 1940: ‘If the British Government are really earnest and sincere to secure peace and happiness of the people of this sub-continent, the only course open to us all is to allow the major nations separate homelands by dividing India into autonomous national states.’5
It was an inflammatory and unstoppable idea which complicated the question of Indian independence immeasurably. Not only did it fly in the face of Gandhi’s (and at first the British government’s) idea of a united India, in which peoples of different ethnicities and languages and creeds formed a common polity. It also posed questions of the greatest difficulty about precise borders of any autonomous state. What, for example, would be the fate of the Sikhs in any independent Punjab? What about Hyderabad, hundreds of miles south of Jinnah’s political stamping grounds in the northwest; a state which was primarily Hindu, ruled over by a Muslim Nizam who said he would prefer to be part of an independent Muslim state under the protection of Jinnah’s Pakistan than to be part of Nehru’s India? What about Kashmir? – a tragic question this, which rages to this very hour. What about Bengal? Jinnah assumed he would be able to take Calcutta into his Muslim state. Terrible violence erupted in that huge city, once the capital of the British Raj, on 16 August 1946, with 5,000 dead, over 15,000 injured and more than 100,000 rendered homeless in only four days of fighting, when the Hindus rose up to demonstrate what they thought of the Muslims taking their city.
When Clement Attlee became Prime Minister in 1945, he knew that the likelihood of Labour surviving more than one term in office was slight. (In fact they scraped in a second time in 1950, to be thrown out in 1951.) He had a huge political programme to push through – the nationalization of the major industries and the setting up of a welfare state at home, and the solution of the Indian problem abroad, as well as many other imperial and post-imperial problems which included the future of Palestine.
Since 1927, when he had sat on the Simon Commission to discuss the future of India, Attlee had favoured self-government for India, and he believed that ‘but for the violent and obstructive opposition’ of ‘Winston Churchill and his friends we might perhaps have got an all-India solution to the Indian problem before the Second World War’.6 He decided that the only way, in the circumstances, to solve the Indian question was to set a deadline and to tell the various parties, including Jinnah, Gandhi, Nehru and the other leaders, that after a certain date they would be responsible for the future of their country.
With peremptory lack of grace, Attlee recalled Lord Wavell, who was Viceroy. He made him no gracious speech of thanks upon his arrival in London, nor did he reveal to him the name of his successor, the man selected by the Labour government to become the last Viceroy, charged with the responsibility of handing over power in summer 1947.7 Given the egalitarian nature of the times, and the socialist complexion of Attlee’s government, it was perhaps surprising that his candidate was Lord Louis Mountbatten, by now Viscount Mountbatten of Burma (1900–1979), who took up his appointment as Viceroy on 23 March 1947.
Dickie Mountbatten, who was destined to be blown up in a fishing boat off the coast of County Sligo on 27 August 1979, by a bomb planted by the IRA, was one of the most colourful members of the royal family. His extraordinary popinjay arrogance and self-conceit were marked even in his boyhood when he joined the naval training college at Osborne House in 1913, twelve years after the death of his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.8 But he was an energetic and courageous naval officer. As captain of the destroyer HMS Kelly, he displayed extraordinary heroism trying to evacuate British troops from Crete during the disastrous engagement there in May 1941. The Kelly was sunk with the loss of half the crew. Mountbatten had to swim out from under the ship when it turned turtle. Noël Coward, a friend, perhaps lover, of Mountbatten’s, acted the role in a film, In Which We Serve, which moved cinema audiences in wartime by its demonstration of simple heroism, even though viewed today it seems screamingly camp.
Even after he had left active service, Mountbatten maintained his links with the navy. When an employee of Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage called on the war hero in his small mews house in Belgravia shortly before his assassination, he found the place ‘awash with young, muscular and suspiciously good-looking Naval ratings, bustling about the place to no apparent purpose’.9 The young genealogist found Mountbatten abuzz with one of his obsessions, namely that the royal family should take his surname. Although he had never met the 25-year-old Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, who had only called on him to discuss the possibility of his writing a foreword to a Guide to the Royal Family, Mountbatten poured out indiscreet talk about the quarrels which had erupted in the family ever since Princess Elizabeth married Philip Mountbatten in 1947. When the cabinet refused to allow the new Royal House to take the name Mountbatten, “‘That old drunk Churchill backed up by that crooked swine Beaverbrook (who paid off all Churchill’s debts) objected to this and forced the Queen to announce that ‘the House of Windsor’ would continue as before. My nephew was furious as you can imagine. ‘It makes me into an amoeba’, he said, ‘a bloody amoeba’. Have you ever wondered why there was a ten-year gap between the births of Princess Anne (1950) and Prince Andrew (1960)”?’10 This vignette of Mountbatten in old age (‘Mountbottom’ as old friends knew him) gives an unforgettable picture of his impulsiveness, his indiscretion, his bustling desire to change, reform, interfere. He was destined to be the power behind Queen Elizabeth II’s throne, an eminence less grise than cerise perhaps.
In his very early twenties he had married Edwina Ashley, granddaughter of Edward VII’s hugely wealthy financial adviser Sir Ernest Cassel, and descended via her mother from the great Victorian statesman Palmerston and collaterally related to the philanthropist Earl of Shaftesbury. Broadlands, Palmerston’s estate near Romsey, became the Mountbattens’ through inheritance (together with £2.3 million, in 1923) from Cassel, and it was here that Philip Mountbatten and Princess Elizabeth spent their honeymoon.
The marriage of Edwina and Louis Mountbatten was, to put it mildly, stormy, and there were many affairs. Whether or not it was true, there was an inevitability about the claim that both Mountbattens, having arrived in India in 1947, conducted love affairs with Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru’s most recent biographer points out that the war had liberated Edwina Mountbatten to escape the somewhat stultifying world of a 1930s heiress and society flapper and to do something ‘in her own right’ with the International Red Cross. She loved India, and was determined to assist her husband in making the transition from British rule to independence as successful as possible. It was after independence, when Mountbatten stayed on as governor-general for a short period, that Edwina’s relationship with Nehru deepened. The extent to which the relationship between them was ‘in any way physical … pales into insignificance beside the fact that two lonely and complex individuals, both driven personalities, found in each other in middle life a source of inspiration, fun, solace and strength’.11
Whatever else was going on between Edwina Mountbatten, Nehru and Dickie Mountbatten, it was clearly all very different from what had happened when Lord Dalhousie had gone out to bring British rule to the Punjab a hundred years before. It is difficult to agree with the assessment that the extent of physicality of the relationship was irrelevant. There is the world of difference between highly charged flirtations and love affairs proper. The latter dredge up, irrespective of the lovers’ wishes, all kinds of uncontrollable feelings which in the former case may be kept under control. The highly charged, brittle and almost manic relationship which both Mountbattens had with Nehru seems to the eyes of hindsight to be much more explicable in terms of a non-consummated sexual–emotional passion.
It is against this background that we read the extraordinary and tragic events of the Partition.
By the time the Mountbattens arrived, the pressure from Jinnah and the Muslim League to establish an independent Pakistan was already all but irresistible. Mountbatten and Attlee shared a Pontius Pilate-like desire not to be held responsible for any of the ensuing violence, so that the British line, until the last possible minute, was to press for a united independent India. The dissension and subsequent bloodshed was to be seen as the responsibility of the Indians alone. In Mountbatten’s case there was also an obsessive desire to get the Indian business finished before his nephew Philip’s wedding to Princess Elizabeth, a ceremony in which he had every intention of playing a major role, as in the subsequent marriage.
One of the most grotesque things about the rush to independence, and the British acceptance of Partition as an idea, was the way they eventually decided on the boundaries of the new states. They brought in a clever Inner Temple lawyer (Haileybury, like the Prime Minister, and New College, Oxford) by the name of Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who had never been to India in his life. He was given a house on the viceregal estate in early July 1947, just weeks before independence, and, with a pile of maps of a country he had never visited, he was asked to devise the boundaries. Judges sitting in Calcutta and Lahore submitted to him further evidence to help him in his deliberations. He had to make a hasty pronouncement about the tremendously complicated question of which territories in the Punjab should be given to the Sikhs and which to the Muslims. On 17 August East Punjab was deemed to contain the whole of the Jullundur and Ambala divisions, and the Amritsar district of the Lahore division. The East Punjab gained control of three of the five rivers (Punjab means Five Rivers), the Beas, the Sutlej, and the upper waters of the Ravi – a decision with devastating consequences for tens of thousands of people whose irrigation was now in the hands of those they considered their enemies. West Punjab, however, was granted, by a stroke of Radcliffe’s pen, 62 per cent of the area and 55 per cent of the population. For the Sikhs, the loss to Pakistan of Lahore as well as the canal colonies of Shekhupura, Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) and Montgomery (now Sahiwal) was grievous; the Muslims resented not getting the whole of the Lahore division.
No sooner had he made his decision than Radcliffe skedaddled. ‘People sometimes ask me whether I would like to go back and see India as it really is. God forbid. Not even if they asked me. I suspect they’d shoot me out of hand – both sides.’12 Within days of his boundaries decision, one of the greatest migrations in human history overtook the Punjab. A sea of humanity broke across the steamy plains. Massacres on both sides were of appalling savagery. Muslims set fire not only to Sikh homes but to Sikh beards, even though being bearded was something which the men of both religions had in common. No one has ever calculated the exact numbers killed in the Punjab, but probably half a million is about right.13 The tryst with destiny which Nehru envisaged was to be a bloody one. They had stepped out of the old world, in which a few hundred people being massacred in Amritsar by General Dyer was rightly regarded as an intolerable outrage, into a world where Amritsar and Lahore had become scenes of unspeakable butchery, where whole villages were put to fire and sword, and where religious and racial hatred was allowed to rage unchecked. They had made their tryst with a new world in which Islam would be perpetually at war with its neighbours and rival religions, ever more paranoid, ever more violent, ever more detested and feared, its noble intellectual and moral traditions less and less highly regarded.
Much of the blame for the way that Partition was handled – its brusque haste, its insufficient policing, the genocidal carelessness with which the fine print and the borders were decided – must be laid at the door of Louis Mountbatten, whose government awarded him an earldom in October 1947. By his superficial haste, his sheer arrogance, his inattention to vital detail, and his unwillingness to provide the huge peace-keeping forces which could have protected migrant populations, Mountbatten was responsible for as many deaths as some of those who were hanged after the Nuremberg trials.
On 21 July 1947, President Harry S. Truman wrote in his diary: ‘Had ten minutes conversation with Henry Morgenthau about Jewish ship in Palistine [sic]. Told him I would talk to Gen[eral George] Marshall about it.’14 That day, the world had heard that the ship Exodus, containing 4,500 Jewish refugees, had tried to land at Haifa, and been seized by British troops. These displaced persons, as they were called in those days, were moved on to three other vessels and taken to Cyprus for detention. The homeless families, who included 1,000 children, were kept in cages on board. The aim was to return them to Europe, where they had come from.
The United States had refused any more Jewish refugees. The British, whose job it was to keep the peace in the Mandated territory of Palestine, believed that any more Jewish immigrants would exacerbate an already explosive situation in which Jews and Arabs were killing one another. On 22 July 1946 Jewish terrorists led by Menachem Begin, a future Israeli Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner, blew up the British HQ in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people. Twenty British servicemen were killed in that year. A year later the same group captured two British army sergeants and hanged them in retaliation for three of their own members having been executed.15 One hundred thousand British personnel – 80,000 troops and 20,000 special police – were trying to keep peace between the Jews, desperate for somewhere to live free of persecution, and the Palestinian Arabs who saw Jewish arrivals as a threat to their freedom.
President Truman was the first world leader to recognize the state of Israel when it was finally proclaimed on 14 May 1948. It therefore came as a shock to many when his diary entries about the telephone call with Henry Morgenthau came to light in 2003. Morgenthau, who had been US Treasury secretary under FDR, was chairman of the United Jewish Appeal. Truman went into a tirade to his diary. ‘He’d no business whatever to call me,’ wrote the President. ‘The Jews have no sense of proportion, nor do they have any judgement on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed.’ Warming to his theme, Truman made a statement which, written in only the second year after the world had discovered the horrors of Auschwitz and the other death camps, is quite startling. ‘The Jews I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as Displaced Persons as long as Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog.’16
In a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, the late President’s widow, Truman wrote: ‘Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath.’17 The director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum is quoted as saying that such remarks are ‘typical of a sort of cultural anti-Semitism that was common at the time’.
Since this was President Truman’s view, it is not surprising that Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, told a Labour party conference that the Americans were pushing for a Jewish state in Palestine because ‘they did not want too many Jews in New York’.18 Interestingly enough, identical views were entertained by other members of the British government at the time, but these led Clement Attlee and Bevin to oppose the setting up of a Jewish state. When Labour came in Chaim Weizmann assumed that they would be sympathetic to the Zionist cause, but the burly figure of Bevin, who was once described by Churchill as a working-class John Bull, consulted with the Foreign Office and then waddled across Whitehall to consult the Prime Minister. ‘Clem,’ he said, ‘about Palestine. According to my boys, we’ve got it wrong. We’ve got to think again.’19 Attlee like Truman possessed the flaw of ‘cultural anti-Semitism’. When his Chancellor Hugh Dalton suggested Ian Mikardo and Austen Albu as potential junior ministers in the government, Attlee replied that ‘they both belonged to the Chosen people and he didn’t think he wanted any more of them’.20
The decision to allow a Jewish homeland was an admission by the British that they were unable to control the situation in Palestine. They did not do so willingly. They did so because they had no other option. Just as their method of abandoning India left the subcontinent with problems which persist into our own day, the abandonment of the British mandate in Palestine before any international agreement had been formed about the political future of the Arabs in the region, or any plan for relief and aid to the inevitable multitude of new refugees caused by the setting up of the state of Israel, must be seen as another current world problem21 which has the ‘Made in England’ label stamped indelibly upon it.
After hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in India, there was one, in Delhi, on 30 January 1948 which rounded the story in the most tragic way. Throughout the disturbances, Mahatma Gandhi had prayed and fasted for peace. The emaciated lawyer, turned political agitator, turned holy man, was seventy-eight years old, but by now he could really have been any age. He had become like the statue of a saint. The skinny figure in its loincloth symbolized an ideal which was never, it would seem, to be accomplished, a time when religious hatred and the rivalries between political and creedal factions would cease, and the human race unite in the love of God. Tolstoy, Gandhi’s great mentor, had essentially been a man of the Enlightenment. Distrustful as he was of science, technological progress, wealth-creation and so many of the achievements of which the capitalistic nineteenth century had been so proud, and in love as Tolstoy was with his idea of peasants and peasantry, he remained, to his core, a believer in the power of human reason. Gandhi carried into his peace campaigns something of his Master’s belief in reasonableness. It appeared, after all, to have worked. The British, so long stubbornly holding on to an Empire which had only grown up, as one of the Victorians had observed, in a fit of absence of mind, were eventually persuaded that a vast land mass such as India could not be governed by a few white men from far away. Though Africa, where Gandhi’s political awakening had occurred, still remained part of the Empire, it would as surely go the way of India and Palestine—Israel.
When an assassin tried to kill him with a bomb, Gandhi replied: ‘This is not the way to save Hinduism. Hinduism can only be saved by my method.’22 But just as Tolstoy’s reasonable Christianity had depended upon removing many of that faith’s core elements – such as a belief in the miraculous, the Resurrection and so on – so for many Hindus, the Mahatma, with his wish to do away with the caste system and to pray with Muslims, Sikhs and Christians, was anathema. Figures such as Madan Lal and Nathuram Vinayak Godse, Hindu refugees from the Punjab, were incensed by Gandhi’s willingness to have the Koran read at Hindu prayer meetings and by his urging upon the newly formed government of Nehru a policy of conciliation with the Pakistanis who had murdered or dispossessed so many of their co-religionists. Godse later testified: ‘I sat brooding on the atrocities perpetrated on Hinduism and its dark and deadly failure if left to face Islam outside and Gandhi inside.’23 Godse was facing up to a challenge which still haunts the world: what is the appropriate response to Islam in its militant and aggressive form? In common with many Western politicians today, he believed that Gandhi’s policy of conciliation was essentially impossible. He said at his trial that he bore Gandhi no ill will. He took a small pistol, and waited for Gandhi to emerge, in the early morning of 30 January 1948, from his joint prayer meeting. He bowed to the Mahatma because he felt genuine reverence for a man who was visibly holy, and trying to do right. Then he fired. Gandhi’s last word was Rama, one of the incarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu.
The funeral of the holy man attracted over a million people. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsees assembled, with many British, by the banks of the Jumna river to witness the burning of the cortege. They cried out ‘Mahatma Gandi ki jai’ – Long Live Mahatma Gandhi. To keep the peace among the peace-lovers, the commander in chief of the Indian army (an Englishman, General Roy Bucher, who had served in India since 1918, had been appointed to the role by Nehru) deployed four thousand soldiers, a thousand airmen and a thousand policemen. Three Dakota aircraft incongruously did a fly-past over the burning pyre whose flames rose into the sky for fourteen hours as the entire text of the Gita was chanted.
Nehru began his panegyric by saying that a light had gone out and then corrected himself – ‘For the light that shone in this country was no ordinary light. The light that has illumined this country for these many years will illumine this country for many more years …’ And so on.24
The pious Sir Stafford Cripps, a devout Christian Socialist, wrote: ‘I know no other man of any time or indeed in recent history who so forcefully and convincingly demonstrated the power of spirit over material things.’25
Certainly there are few human beings of the twentieth century more impressive than Gandhi. But half a century after his death, his desire that religious fanaticism should give place to a spiritual calm, and his wish that we should settle our differences by prayer and not with guns, seems as impracticable as it did in 1948. And the word which came so aptly to his dying lips, that of the ineffable, all-holy and ever-merciful Rama, remains, like Allah, or Yahweh, as difficult to understand.