Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948

by Ramachandra Guha

At hand, to see and record the violence slowly ebb away and finally end, was Horace Alexander. In Calcutta on the 15th, he wrote: ‘The fears and enmities of yesterday seemed to have vanished like a black cloud or a hideous nightmare. The dawn of freedom was also the dawn of goodwill. Freedom and peace had kissed each other. Hindus and Muslims crowded into lorries together, waved the new tricolour flags and shouted “Jai Hind” all over the city. In “Bustees”, where for months people had not dared to cross a road separating one community from the other, and where the women had kept indoors, men and women were fraternising.’ What explained this transformation? As Alexander saw it, the change from fear and dread to joy and peace was so sudden as to seem spontaneous. Probably the truth is that the common people were all longing for peace and reconciliation. But someone had to touch the hidden spring. Only a great soul could do that. The Mahatma’s decision to take Suhrawardy into close and affectionate partnership was the symbolic act that touched the spring. But he knows better than any man that the work of reconciliation is only just begun. The partners must strive day by day to consolidate the ground they have won.37 The new governor of West Bengal, C. Rajagopalachari, told the city’s Rotary Club that ‘Mahatma Gandhi has achieved many things in his lifetime, but I do not think he has achieved anything so great, so grand, as he has achieved in Calcutta’.