Gandhi the Man — Every Personal Charge — How India Became Free: Part 11 of 12

1The Experiments With Manu and the Women of the Ashram

What brahmacharya meant to him

Gandhi took a vow of brahmacharya in 1906, at thirty seven, while still in South Africa. In ordinary usage the word means celibacy. He meant something wider and stranger: he broke it intobrahma, meaning truth or God, andcharya, meaning conduct, so brahmacharya was for him the whole conduct that leads to God, of which sexual abstinence was one part.

Crucially, he did not think abstinence was achieved by avoiding temptation. He thought it was achieved only when temptation had no power at all. A man who was pure only because he stayed away from women was not pure, he was merely absent. So the proof of the vow required the presence of the thing renounced.

That is the logic. Whether one finds it profound or a rationalisation, it is what he said, consistently, for forty years.

What he actually did

The practice went through phases. Women, including Sushila Nayar, who was his doctor, slept near him or shared his bed at various points from the 1930s. The phase that caused the crisis was in 1946 and 1947, during and after the Noakhali walk described in Part 8.

In that period he had Manu Gandhi, the granddaughter of a cousin and therefore his grand niece, then about eighteen, sleep naked beside him, and he slept naked or nearly so himself. He described this openly as a yajna, a sacrifice or test, of his own purity and of hers. He did not conceal it. He wrote and spoke about it, discussed it with colleagues, and referred to it in his prayer meetings.

His stated reason in that specific period is important and is often left out. He had concluded that the massacres of 1946 and 1947 were continuing because his own nonviolence was imperfect, and that the imperfection lay in some residue of impurity in himself. If he could establish that he was completely pure, his moral force would be complete and the killing would stop. That is the reasoning. It is the reasoning of a man of seventy seven under unbearable strain, watching a country burn and holding himself responsible for it.

Who objected, and what happened to them

This is the part that settles the argument, in my view, because the objections did not come from his enemies. They came from the people closest to him, at the time, and he lost several of them over it.

R. P. Parasuram, a young man from Kerala who had been his personal secretary and typist for two years, wrote him a sixteen page letter setting out his distress at what he had seen, and listed five conditions concerning Gandhi's physical conduct with women in the ashram on which he would be willing to continue. On 2 January 1947Gandhi replied that he could not concede the demands, that since such was his opinion and there was a conflict of ideals, Parasuram was at liberty to leave him that day. Parasuram left.
Nirmal Kumar Bose, the anthropologist who served as his Bengali interpreter in Noakhali, objected in writing. His argument was that Gandhi should not have Manu sleeping in his bed until he had explained the practice publicly and the public had been brought to understand it, and he was troubled by the effect on the women involved. He left, and later wrote about the whole episode in My Days with Gandhi, published in 1953.
Two editors of Harijan, his own weekly paper, resigned rather than print the material about the experiments.
Sardar Patel and Acharya Kripalani, among the most senior Congress leaders, criticised him over it.

He did not stop. He did not concede a single one of Parasuram's five conditions.

Testing the charge

Was there sexual intent?

There is no evidence of it, and the manner in which he conducted the practice, openly, publicly, in a household full of people, discussed in letters and prayer meetings, is not the behaviour of a man concealing sexual conduct. Nobody involved ever alleged intercourse. On that specific accusation the answer is that it is not supported.

Was it an abuse of power?

Yes, and here is why I think that conclusion is unavoidable.

Consider the position of an eighteen year old grand niece in his household in 1946. He was the most revered man in India, the head of her extended family, her guardian in a violent district far from home, and the person on whose approval her standing entirely depended. He framed participation as a spiritual test that she could pass or fail. Refusal was not a neutral option available to her.

That is a power differential so total that consent cannot be meaningfully given. And this is not a modern standard imposed retrospectively. His own secretary said so in writing in 1946, his own interpreter said so, his own editors resigned, and two of the most senior men in his party told him to stop. He was told, clearly, by the people who loved him most, and he refused.

Does it change the political verdict?

Not directly, and I want to be careful here in both directions. A man's conduct towards women in his household does not determine whether his analysis of separate electorates was correct. Nothing in this chapter alters the findings of Parts 3 to 10.

But it does bear on one thing, and it is the thing he cared about most. His entire political method rested on the claim that a man who had perfected himself acquired moral authority over others. This episode shows that claim operating in the way such claims always eventually operate: as a justification for doing what he wished to do, over the objections of people with less power than him, on the ground that his purposes were higher than their comfort.

VerdictTrue, And The Defence Does Not Work

TRUEthat from 1946 he had young women, including his eighteen year old grand niece Manu, sleep naked beside him, that he described it as a test of his purity, and that he continued after being asked to stop by his own secretary, his own interpreter, the editors of his own paper and senior colleagues. NOT SUPPORTEDthat there was sexual contact or sexual intent. No participant ever alleged it. MY CONCLUSION:the absence of sexual intent does not settle it. The power imbalance was absolute, refusal was not a real option for the women concerned, and he was told so at the time by people who had no motive except concern for him. Calling it an experiment is a way of not looking at it. It was wrong, it was wrong by the standards of his own household in 1946, and his refusal to concede a single point when challenged is the least defensible thing in his personal record. And it should be said in the same breaththat he documented it himself. A man who leaves ninety eight volumes of collected works including the material that damns him is not the same as a man who hides. That is not a defence. It is a fact about why we know.

What people say

"Gandhi's wife was dying and the doctors said penicillin would save her. He refused to allow it because it was a foreign medicine, and she died. Six weeks later he caught malaria and immediately took quinine, a foreign medicine, to save himself. He killed his wife with his principles and then abandoned those principles for his own life."

2Kasturba, Penicillin, and the Quinine Six Weeks Later

What actually happened

Kasturba Gandhi had been detained with her husband at the Aga Khan Palace in Poona since August 1942, after the Quit India arrests. She was in her seventies and her health broke down there. She had bronchitis, then pneumonia, then a series of heart attacks in December 1943 and January 1944, and her kidneys were failing.

Their son Devdasobtained penicillin from Calcutta. Penicillin in February 1944 was an extremely new drug, barely available anywhere in the world, and its use was still largely experimental outside military hospitals.

Gandhi refused to allow it. She died on 22 February 1944.

About six weeks later Gandhi contractedmalaria. He resisted quinine for around three weeks while his doctors pressed him. He then agreed to take it and recovered.

The parts the accusation leaves out

Four things, and they do not all point the same way.

His stated objection was to the injection, not to the medicine.His long standing position was against injections specifically, as an invasion of the body, and this was consistent with a lifetime of published views on medicine.
The doctors themselves were doubtful. Accounts indicate that her physicians did not consider penicillin likely to help, because what was killing her was kidney failure, which penicillin does not treat. If that is right, the premise of the accusation, that a drug would have saved her and was withheld, is not established.
He asked her.His account, and those of others present, is that Kasturba herself did not wish to be given injections in her final days and wanted to die in her husband's presence rather than be treated experimentally. Whether an exhausted, dying woman of seventy four in the presence of an overwhelming husband can be said to have chosen freely is a fair question, and readers may weigh it as they did Chapter 1.
He resisted the quinine too, for three weeks.The image of a man refusing medicine for his wife and then instantly taking it for himself is not accurate. He fought his doctors about his own treatment as well, and lost.

And the part that survives

Being fair does not mean acquitting him. Two things stand.

He did repeatedly accept modern medicine for himself.He had an appendectomy performed by a British surgeon in Poona in January 1924. He took quinine in 1944. He accepted treatment on other occasions. Whatever the doctrinal distinction about injections, a man whose principles bend for his own appendix and his own malaria and did not bend for his wife's pneumonia has a question to answer.

And the power question from Chapter 1 applies here too.The decision was taken by him, about her body, in a household where his word was final.

VerdictMostly True On The Facts, Misleading In Its Force

TRUEthat penicillin was obtained, that he refused it, that she died, and that he took quinine for himself about six weeks later. MISLEADINGthat a cure was available and withheld. Penicillin in February 1944 was new and scarce, and her doctors are reported to have doubted it would help against kidney failure. The claim that it would have saved her is an assumption, not a finding. MISLEADINGthat he switched principles instantly for himself. He resisted quinine for about three weeks before yielding. WHAT SURVIVES:he did accept surgery and drugs for himself on several occasions across his life. The inconsistency is real, even if the specific accusation of killing her with dogma is not sustainable. And the deeper charge, that he made a final decision about another person's body in a relationship of absolute authority, is the same charge as Chapter 1 and it stands.

What people say

"Gandhi told Hindus that if Muslims came to kill them they should die without anger and without resisting. He asked an entire community to submit to slaughter for the sake of his principles."

3"Let Hindus Die": What He Actually Said, and to Whom

Did he say things like that?

Yes. He said, many times and to many audiences, that the nonviolent way to face a murderous mob was to die without hatred rather than to kill. In the aftermath of the 1946 and 1947 killings he said versions of it to Hindus in Bengal and Bihar. The sentiment is genuinely his and nobody needs to fabricate it.

Now apply Rule 3: who else did he say it to?

This is where the accusation collapses, because he said the same thing to every group he ever addressed, including groups facing far worse than Indian Hindus faced.

When	To Whom	What He Advise D
1938	German Jews, in Harijan	That they should offer nonviolent resistance to the Nazi state, and that suffering voluntarily undergone would rouse the conscience of the world. This is the most criticised thing he ever wrote. Martin Buber and Judah Magnes replied to him publicly and devastatingly, and he was on any reasonable view catastrophically wrong.
1940	The British, facing German invasion	That they should lay down arms and let Hitler occupy their island rather than fight, offering nonviolent non cooperation instead. He published this while Britain was expecting invasion.
1946 and	Hindus and	That they should face death without killing.
1947	Muslims in Bengal and Bihar
Throughout	Himself	He faced mobs personally in Noakhali, Calcutta and Delhi, unarmed and unguarded, and was killed doing it.

A doctrine that a man applies to Jews facing Hitler, to Britons facing invasion, to Muslims, to Hindus and to his own body is not a communal instruction to one community. It is a universal position, and it is a position for which he can fairly be called a fanatic and unfairly be called a partisan.

The quotation that is always omitted

And then there is this, which is systematically left out of the accusation and which he repeated for nearly thirty years.

Note

"I do believe that where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence I would advise violence... I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honour than that she should, in a cowardly manner, become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonour."

He held that position consistently. He said that a man who ran away and left his family to be butchered was worse than a man who fought and killed. He praised those who died defending others. His hierarchy was: nonviolent courage first, violent courage second, cowardice last and worst.

Anybody quoting him telling Hindus to die without anger, while omitting a position he printed in 1920 and repeated for the rest of his life, is not reporting his views. They are constructing them.

VerdictTrue In The Words, False In The Meaning

TRUEthat he advised facing death without hatred rather than killing, including to Hindus in 1946 and 1947. FALSEthat this was advice given to Hindus specifically or because they were Hindus. He gave identical advice to German Jews in 1938 and to the British in 1940, and applied it to himself until he was shot. FALSE BY OMISSIONin almost every version I have seen, because he also held, in print from 1920 onward, that where the only choice is between cowardice and violence, violence is better. What is fairly criticised:that his doctrine was impossible for ordinary people, that his 1938 advice to Jews was appalling and was demolished at the time by Jewish thinkers, and that a principle which cannot be followed by a frightened family in a burning village is not much use to them. Those are serious criticisms. "He was on the other side" is not one of them.

4Was He Pro Muslim? Ten Cases, Tested

The way to answer this is not with adjectives. It is with a list of occasions and a column for which way each one cuts.

Word	What it means
Khilafat, 1919 to 1924	Took the Congress into alliance with a Muslim religious cause and asked nothing in return.	Supports the charge
Malabar, 1921	Praised the rebels' courage and religious sincerity while they were killing and forcibly converting Hindus, and told Hindus they were partly to blame. Part 3 examined this fully and found the charge of imbalance sustained.	Supports the charge
Kohat, 1924	Fasted for twenty one days over the killing and expulsion of Hindus and Sikhs from Kohat, in the house of Maulana Mohammad Ali.	Against the charge
Noakhali, November	At seventy seven, walked barefoot through about forty seven	Strongly against
1946 to March 1947	villages for four months, for Hindu victims of Muslim violence, staying in the district when nobody else would.	the charge
Bihar, March 1947	Went from Noakhali to Bihar and told Hindus that what they had done was worse than Noakhali because they claimed to be avenging it. Threatened to fast to death if it did not stop.	Supports the charge, as a pattern
Calcutta, August and	Spent independence day in a poor Muslim locality and fasted to	Neutral to
September 1947	stop the killing. The city stayed quiet. Mountbatten called him a one man boundary force.	against, since it protected both
Delhi, September	Visited Muslim refugee camps at Purana Qila and worked to stop	Supports the
1947 onwards	the expulsion of Muslims from the capital.	charge
The 55 crore, January	Supported payment of a contractual obligation to Pakistan. As Part	Supports the
1948	8 showed, his fast's stated conditions were about Delhi, and the payment was released during it rather than being its object.	charge, partly
Hindu refugees, 1947	Told Hindu and Sikh refugees in Delhi that they should return to	Supports the
and 1948	Pakistan when conditions allowed, rather than occupy Muslim homes. To people who had lost everything this was unbearable.	charge
Temple entry and	Spent decades attacking a Hindu practice, at physical risk,	Shows the
untouchability	including a bomb thrown at his car in Poona in 1934.	method, not a loyalty

Reading the table

A pattern is visible and it should be conceded honestly. Across thirty years, Gandhi wasconsistently harder on Hindus than on Muslims. He criticised Hindu conduct in language he did not use about Muslim conduct. When he asked for restraint, he asked it more often and more sharply of his own community.

Now the question is what that pattern means, and there are two available explanations.

The first is loyalty:that he favoured Muslims, for reasons of vote banks, sentiment or a desire to be seen as above communal politics.

The second is method,and it is what he said himself, repeatedly, from the 1920s onward. His position was that a reformer's authority runs only over his own community, that he was a Hindu speaking to Hindus, and that a man who lectures another community while excusing his own is not a moral teacher but a politician. On this reading the asymmetry is not favouritism, it is the deliberate discipline of always attacking your own side first.

VerdictHalf True, And The Usual Word For It Is Wrong

TRUEthat there is a consistent asymmetry, that he applied harsher standards to Hindus, and that this had real costs which Hindu refugees in 1947 paid. FALSEthat he was indifferent to Hindu suffering. Kohat in 1924, Noakhali in 1946 and 1947 and Bihar's condemnation are not the record of a man who did not care. Nobody spent four months walking through Noakhali on behalf of Muslims. The accurate statement:it was a method rather than a loyalty. Whether the method was right is a genuine argument. A man who is always hardest on his own people will be trusted by everybody else and resented by his own, and that is exactly what happened, and it is why he was killed by a Hindu and not by a Muslim.

5Money, Family, and the Hypocrisy Charge

Who paid for him

Gandhi's ashrams, newspapers, travel and campaigns were funded by wealthy Indian industrialists, above all G. D. Birla,Jamnalal Bajajand Ambalal Sarabhai. He stayed in Birla's houses, including Birla House in Delhi where he was killed. Sarojini Naidu's famous joke, that it cost a great deal of money to keep Gandhi living in poverty, was made to his face and he enjoyed it.

Verdict: true, and he never denied it.What has to be added is the other half. He took no salary, held no office after 1934, owned almost nothing at his death, and did not enrich his family. His sons received no positions. He refused to let Congress funds be used for his family. The money funded a movement rather than a man, and by the standards of political leadership anywhere in the world this is an unusually clean record.

The fair criticism is different and sharper:the dependence shaped his politics.His attachment to the doctrine of trusteeship, the idea that the rich should hold wealth in trust for society rather than be dispossessed of it, is a convenient doctrine for a man funded by mill owners. Whether he believed it independently or arrived at it comfortably is unanswerable, and it is what the socialists in his own party, and Bhagat Singh, said at the time.

Harilal

This is the hardest chapter of his personal life and I am not going to soften it.

Harilal Gandhi was his eldest son, born 1888. As a young man he wanted the English education and the professional career his father had had. Gandhi refused to arrange it, on the principle that he would not use his position to advantage his own children when other young men had no such advantage, and sent another young man abroad instead. Harilal never recovered from it.

His life afterwards was one of alcoholism, debt, business failure and estrangement. He converted to Islam in 1936, taking the name Abdullah, in what was widely understood as an act aimed at his father, and returned to Hinduism afterwards. He appeared at his father's meetings drunk. He died in June 1948, four months after his father, in a Bombay hospital, of tuberculosis, alone.

Verdict:the principle Gandhi applied was defensible in the abstract and was applied by a man who had the power to choose the principle and a boy who did not. He was, on the evidence of his own letters, a rigid and demanding father who could not separate his public standard from his private duty. Kasturba's letters to Harilal are far warmer than his. This is a real failure and no political achievement cancels it.

The lifestyle charges

Third class travel:he travelled third class, and at various periods a compartment was reserved so that he could work and rest. Both facts are true. Presenting either alone is dishonest.
The ashrams:he imposed a severe regime at Sabarmati and Sevagram, on himself as much as on others, and the discipline was hard on families, on children and above all on women, who carried most of the labour.
Kasturba:his own autobiography is the most damaging source on his early treatment of her, including his account of ordering her out of the house over cleaning a latrine, and of taking his vow of celibacy in 1906 which ended their marital life. He wrote it himself, as a confession, which is why we know.

The charge is that he defended the caste system. The answer is that he did, and then stopped, and the change took twenty five years.

Period	Position
1920s	Defendedvarnashrama, the fourfold order, as a natural law of division of labour, while condemning untouchability as a later corruption and a sin. He also, at this stage, defended restrictions on inter dining and inter marriage.
1932 to	The Poona Pact and its aftermath. Founded the Harijan Sevak Sangh, launched Harijan, and toured
1934	for nine months against untouchability, during which he faced organised orthodox Hindu opposition and a bomb was thrown at his car in Poona.
Late	Moved to the position that varna meant only equal duties and equal status, which empties the
1930s	traditional idea of its content, and increasingly refused to defend hereditary occupation.
1940s	Declared that he would attend no wedding that was not between a so called caste Hindu and a so called untouchable. He now regarded inter caste marriage as the test.

6Caste: What He Said Early and What He Said Late

VerdictHe Changed Enormously, And It Came Late And Under Pressure

TRUEthat he defended the varna order in the 1920s, and that this was incoherent, as Ambedkar told him: you cannot condemn the fruit while protecting the tree. ALSO TRUEthat he moved further than almost any leader of his generation, at real physical risk, and ended in a position on inter caste marriage that most of his own supporters did not share. And it must be saidthat the pressure which moved him was Ambedkar's. The credit for the change belongs substantially to the man who forced it, and Ambedkar never received it in Gandhi's lifetime.

Short, because Parts 3 and 7 did most of this work. But it belongs here, next to the charges.

7What He Got Right That His Critics Never Mention

He built the organisation that received power in 1947.Part 7 showed why this mattered more than anything else, and why India got out without an anti colonial war when Indonesia, Indochina, Algeria and Kenya did not.
He made untouchability a national political issuewhen no other political body in India had done so, however inadequate his answer was.
He brought women into public lifeon a scale no other movement in the world matched at that time. The picketing campaigns of 1930 and 1932 put hundreds of thousands of women into political action, and it changed what was possible for the next generation.
He never held office, never took a salary, and left no property.After leading a national movement for thirty years, and being offered the government of a country, he took nothing.
Noakhali and Calcutta.At seventy seven and seventy eight, unarmed and unguarded, he walked into districts where people were being killed for their religion and stayed. Calcutta, which everyone expected to be the worst place in India in August 1947, stayed quiet because of it.
And he was killed for protecting Muslims.Whatever else is argued about him, the reason a Hindu nationalist shot him in January 1948 was that he had just spent five days fasting to protect Muslims in Delhi. That is the last fact of his life and no account of him is complete without it.

830 January 1948, and Godse's Statement Examined

What happened

On 30 January 1948, at about 5. 17 in the evening, Gandhi walked to his prayer meeting in the grounds of Birla House in Delhi.Nathuram Vinayak Godse, a thirty seven year old from Poona, editor of a Marathi newspaper and formerly associated with the Hindu Mahasabha and, in his earlier years, the RSS, stepped forward, bowed, and fired three shots into his chest and abdomen at point blank range. Gandhi died within minutes.

It was the second attempt. On 20 January 1948a bomb had been set off at the same prayer ground by Madanlal Pahwa, a Punjabi refugee, who was caught. The information he gave was not acted upon effectively, and the security failure over those ten days remains one of the worst in Indian history.

The conspirators tried were Godse,Narayan Apte, Gopal Godse, Vishnu Karkare, Madanlal Pahwa, Shankar Kistayya, Dattatraya Parchure and, as an accused,V. D. Savarkar. Digambar Badge turned approver. Godse and Apte were hanged on 15 November 1949.Savarkar was acquitted for want of corroborating evidence.The Kapur Commission, reporting in 1969 with material not available at the trial, took a considerably harsher view of the contacts between Savarkar and the conspirators, but he was tried and acquitted and this book will not describe him as convicted of something he was not convicted of.

Godse's statement

Permitted to argue his own case, Godse read a ninety two page handwritten statement to the court on 8 November 1948, and a further statement to the Punjab High Court on appeal in May 1949. It has circulated ever since. Here are its main claims, tested by the method used throughout this book.

Godse 's Claim	Test
That Gandhi fasted to	MISLEADING.Part 8 established the record. The payment was a contractual
force the government to	obligation under the partition financial settlement, of which Rs 20 crore had
pay Rs 55 crore to	already been paid. Nehru and Patel had agreed to the settlement and Mountbatten
Pakistan.	held that withholding it was dishonourable. The fast's stated conditions were about the safety of Muslims in Delhi and the restoration of mosques, and it ended on 18 January on those undertakings, three days after the payment was announced.

Godse 's Claim	Test
That Gandhi was	FALSE.Part 8 established the order. Patel accepted Partition first, in the winter of
responsible for Partition.	1946 to 1947. The Congress Working Committee demanded the partition of Punjab on 8 March 1947. Nehru followed. Gandhi opposed it for seven years, proposed handing the government to Jinnah rather than divide the country, boycotted the independence celebrations, and asked the AICC to accept the resolution only in June 1947 after he had lost the argument inside his own party.
That Gandhi always	HALF TRUE AS A PATTERN, FALSE AS STATED.Chapter 4 conceded the
appeased Muslims and	asymmetry. But Godse's version requires the erasure of the twenty one day fast
never spoke for Hindus.	over Kohat in 1924, the four month Noakhali walk in 1946 and 1947 for Hindu victims, and the condemnation of Muslim conduct in Bihar and elsewhere.
That Gandhi's fasts were	A FAIR CRITICISM, AND THIS BOOK AGREES WITH IT.Part 4 reached the
coercion dressed as	same conclusion about the fast of September 1932 against Ambedkar. A criticism
morality.	being fair does not make a killing justified, and Godse's own statement moves without pause from the criticism to the killing.
That Gandhi dominated	HALF TRUE.Part 5 found that Bose was squeezed out by exactly such means in
the Congress	1939, and Part 9 recorded the 1946 presidency going to Nehru over twelve
undemocratically.	provincial committees' choice of Patel. This is a real criticism of the man's methods inside his party.

The reasoning at the centre of it

Notice what the table shows. Godse's statement is not pure invention. Two of its five main political claims are criticisms this book has independently reached and endorsed. That is precisely why the statement has had the afterlife it has: it is a mixture of accurate criticism and factual distortion, and the accurate parts carry the false parts.

The two central factual claims, on the 55 crore and on responsibility for Partition, are the ones on which the whole justification rests, and both fail. A man was shot for a fast whose object he had misdescribed and for a Partition he had opposed.

VerdictReal Criticisms Wr A Pped Around Two False Foundations

What is fair in it:that Gandhi used fasts coercively and that he dominated the Congress by means that were not democratic. This book agrees with both, on evidence gathered independently in Parts 4, 5 and 9. What is false in it:the two claims that carry the justification. Gandhi did not fast to force money to Pakistan, and Gandhi did not cause Partition. Both are refuted by the documentary record set out in Part 8. And the point that no amount of political argument touches:a seventy eight year old unarmed man walking to a prayer meeting was shot three times in the chest by a man who had made his own private judgement. Political criticism, however sharp and however partly justified, is not a defence for that, and a country that cannot say so plainly has not understood what happened to it.

The Last Fact

The fast that Godse gave as his final provocation was the fast of 13 to 18 January 1948, whose stated conditions were the safety and free movement of Muslims in Delhi, the return of their homes and the restoration of their mosques. The last political act of Gandhi's life was to nearly starve himself to death so that Muslims could live in the capital of India. Twelve days later a Hindu shot him for it. Whatever any reader concludes about the man from the eight chapters above, that sequence is the record.

The Ledger on the Man

Eight chapters, and the honest summary is that he does not come out of them as a saint or as a fraud.

The charges that stand:the conduct towards Manu and the women of the ashram, which was an abuse of position and was called so at the time by his own staff. The coercive use of fasting, above all against Ambedkar in 1932. His treatment of Harilal. The consistent asymmetry in how he judged Hindus and Muslims, whatever its motive. And a self assurance about his own purity that made him unable to hear people who told him he was wrong.

The charges that fail:that he killed his wife with dogma. That he told Hindus to submit because they were Hindus. That he caused Partition. That he fasted for Pakistan's money. That he enriched himself. That he did nothing for the freedom of India.

And the thing that should be said last,because this part has been hard on him and fairness requires it: almost everything damaging in this chapter is known because he wrote it down himself. The experiments, the treatment of Kasturba, the failures with Harilal, the doubts, the mistakes. Ninety eight volumes, published, indexed and free to read. There is no other leader of the twentieth century who left his prosecutors so much material and so little cover.

Part 12 closes the book. Every blunder examined with the question of who actually decided it. What would probably have happened without Gandhi, without Jinnah and without the war. A guide to the fake quotations that circulate about all of these people, and how to check any quotation yourself in two minutes. And one master table with a verdict on every claim tested across the twelve parts.

Dat E	Event
1906	Takes the vow of brahmacharya in South Africa, at thirty seven.
11 August 1920	"The Doctrine of the Sword" in Young India: violence is preferable to cowardice.
January 1924	Appendectomy performed by a British surgeon at Poona.
September 1924	Twenty one day fast over the Kohat killings.
September 1932	Fast against the Communal Award. The Poona Pact. See Part 4.
1933 to 1934	Nine month anti untouchability tour. Bomb thrown at his car in Poona.
1936	Harilal converts to Islam. Gandhi publishes his advice to German Jews in 1938.
1940	Advises the British to meet German invasion with nonviolence.

Dat E	Event
August 1942	Detained with Kasturba at the Aga Khan Palace, Poona.
22 February 1944	Kasturba dies. Penicillin obtained by Devdas had been refused.
April 1944	Gandhi contracts malaria, resists quinine for about three weeks, then takes it.
November 1946 to March	Noakhali. The brahmacharya experiments with Manu Gandhi.
1947
2 January 1947	Refuses Parasuram's five conditions. Parasuram leaves. Nirmal Kumar Bose also leaves.
August and September 1947	Calcutta. The one man boundary force.
13 to 18 January 1948	Last fast, in Delhi, for the safety of Muslims and the restoration of mosques.
20 January 1948	Bomb attempt at Birla House by Madanlal Pahwa.
30 January 1948	Assassinated by Nathuram Godse at Birla House, Delhi.
June 1948	Harilal Gandhi dies in Bombay.
8 November 1948	Godse reads his ninety two page statement to the court.
February 1949	Judgment. Savarkar acquitted. Godse and Apte sentenced to death.
15 November 1949	Godse and Apte hanged.
1969	Kapur Commission reports.

The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, ninety eight volumes, for his own accounts of the brahmacharya vow, the experiments, Kasturba's illness, and his correspondence with Parasuram of 2 January 1947.
Nirmal Kumar Bose,My Days with Gandhi, 1953, available on the Internet Archive.
R. P. Parasuram's letter to Gandhi, December 1946, and Gandhi's reply.
The diaries of Manu Gandhi, held by the National Archives of India and published in translation.
Gandhi,An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, for the early treatment of Kasturba and the 1906 vow.
Gandhi, "The Doctrine of the Sword",Young India, 11 August 1920.
Gandhi's articles on the German Jews,Harijan, 1938, and the published replies of Martin Buber and Judah Magnes.
Contemporary accounts of Kasturba Gandhi's final illness at the Aga Khan Palace, February 1944.
Judgment of the Special Court, Red Fort, in the Gandhi murder trial, February 1949, and the Punjab High Court appeal, 1949.
Nathuram Godse's statement to the court, 8 November 1948, full text.
Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Conspiracy to Murder Mahatma Gandhi, the Kapur Commission, 1969.

Author's Note