After passing through Bihar, Gandhi arrived at a friendly ashram in a north Kolkata suburb. With India’s independence only days away, he was preparing to mark August 15, 1947 in Noakhali, inside the new nation of Pakistan. However, Muslim community leaders, including a former mayor of Kolkata, arrived to ask him to stay in the the country’s largest city and help keep religious tensions in check.
Eventually, Gandhi agreed under two conditions. First, they must all contact their counterparts in Noakhali and ensure the peace there. Second, the former governor, Shaheed Suhrawardy, must live with him. One Hindu, one Muslim, they would share a home and meet India’s independence together. Suhrawardy agreed to consider it.
Community leaders were concerned because of religious riots one year earlier. Many people in Kolkata believed Shaheed Suhrawardy was responsible for the local destruction, which had left thousands dead in the streets over a three-day period. (He had taken credit publicly for getting civil servants, including police and soldiers, the weekend off.)
Suhrawardy lived a life that was very much the opposite of Gandhi’s. He was a career politician who was in it for himself. As a government official, he made exorbitant profits stealing and reselling grain during the famine a few years earlier while millions, literally millions, of his countrymen starved. He slept with as many women as his wealth gave him access to; he drank alcohol with disregard to his professed Muslim faith; he ate prodigiously and weighed three times as much as Gandhi.
And now Suhrawardy was about to walk away from India. Although the new national boundaries wouldn’t be revealed until after independence, he would live in the Muslim-majority region that was expected to be East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), while Kolkata, with its Hindu majority, would remain part of India.
Gandhi had known Suhrawardy for more than two decades; they’d met at a national conference in 1925. He was aware of the man’s history, and the proposal of sharing a house was with the stated goal of “work[ing] till every Hindu and [Muslim] in [Kolkata] safely returns to the place where he was before.” Gandhi asked Suhrawardy to consult his daughter before making a decision, because the “implication” of his proposal was that “the old Suhrawardy will have to die and accept the garb of a mendicant (fakir).”
On August 13, Gandhi arrived at “an old abandoned Muslim house in an indescribably filthy locality.” Would Suhrawardy accept the opportunity to be transformed and join him in a fast for peace?
For those interested in practicing transformation in the present day, the next 30-day Gandhi challenge starts August 15. Besides abstaining from recreational intoxicants for a month and observing the fast for peace in August and September, optional challenges include a 3-day fast over Labor Day weekend, and a goal of complimenting one stranger every day.
If you shared a house with someone the complete opposite of you, what do you think you would learn from the experience?