A fast for peace (3/3)

August 15, 2023

(The previous installments can be read here: part one, part two)

On August 15, 1947, celebrations across India marked the end of British rule. Mohandas Gandhi, the father of the country, boycotted all of them. Instead, he challenged the nation. “The 15th is the day of our trial. Observe a fast on that day.” As a demonstration that Hindus and Muslims could live together in peace, he shared a home with Shaheed Suhrawardy, a former governor who would soon leave for the new Muslim nation of Pakistan.

Their first night together was disrupted. But when they traveled around the city together, Hindus and Muslims were “meeting together in perfect friendliness.” Gandhi was reminded of the Khilafat days after World War One, when Hindu-Muslim unity was at its peak. His translator, a man named Nirmal Kumar Bose, recalled hearing of World War One’s Christmas truce, which had taken place during the first year of trench warfare.

The fast for peace had worked; the shared self-sacrifice brought people together. “Suhrawrdy has been transformed,” Gandhi reported in a letter the day after the fast. The city had been as well; the siege mentality that had hung over it since Direct Action Day the previous year was gone. People went about their business. Even Gandhi was amazed. “Hindus and Muslims have become friends practically in a day.”

The feeling of friendship would last for weeks, leading the last Viceroy of India to write Gandhi, “In the Punjab we have 55,000 soldiers and large-scale rioting on our hands. In Bengal our forces consist of one man, and there is no rioting…. [I must] pay my tribute to the One-man Boundary Force, not forgetting his Second in Command, Mr. Suhrawardy.”

By the end of August, the violence raging around the rest of the country began to seep into Kolkata, testing Gandhi’s faith in nonviolence. That story continues...

Five years earlier, Gandhi long-time secretary and friend Mahadev Desai had passed away on August 15, in their first week of incarceration at the Aga Kahn Palace. Is there someone whose passing you remember each year?