Chapter 14
The Fire of Freedom
The Prophet (Sallalaho-Alehe-Wasallam) faced many handicaps, but he
never gave up hope, and finally triumphed. He has left that lesson
behind, and if we face our difficulties in the same spirit, I do not
see why we should ever fail, the cause of freedom is always just and
the fight against slavery is always noble.
ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, the armies of Nazi Germany rolled across the
Polish borders. The next day the British Government in London
declared war on Germany-as did Lord Linlithgow, the viceroy, in
Delhi. Without their consent or even consultation, three hundred
million Indians woke up that September morning to find themselves at
war on the other side of the world.
Two weeks later the Congress Working Committee declared that while
it condemned fascist aggression, the Congress would assist the
British war effort only on one condition: “A free democratic India
will gladly associate herself with other free nations for mutual
defense against aggression.” Indian had to be free before it would
fight for the Empire. What did the British intend to do?
They could not say, Linlithgow answered, at least not until the war
was over. There would be time enough then to discuss India’s future.
For now, the government said, fight with us-for the Empire.
Six days later the Congress Working Committee voted not to aid the
British unless they made their plans for India clear. They
instructed all the Congress ministers, including Dr. Khan in the
Frontier, to resign in protest. After seven years of peace between
Congress and the Raj, battle lines were being drawn.
Meanwhile, another and more instructable battle line had been
cutting through the heart of practically every village and province
in the subcontinent. It was between India’s two largest religious
populations, the Hindus and the Muslims. After centuries of living
together in relative peace, the two communities were feeling the
effects of the long-held British policy of Divide and rule.
As early as 1859 Mount Stuart Elphinstone, Governor of Bombay, had
instructed his subordinates: “Divide et Impera was the old Roman
motto, and should be ours.” In spite of many differences of custom
and manners, Hindus and Muslims in India had shared a common history
for more than five centuries. Within a given province like Bengal
they dressed the same and shared a common language. To an untrained
eye, they seemed indistinguishable. But to the British rulers, their
differences were an irresistible weak point to exploit.
The Muslim league had been formed in 1909 and gained strength during
the Muslim renaissance that followed World War I. After working
together during the noncooperation movement of 1920, the League and
Congress had become political rival Congress advocating independence
and noncooperation with the British, the League opting for dominion
status within the Empire and the support of the Crown. Khan’s Khudai
Khidmatgars was the only major Muslim organization to oppose British
rule after 1920.
In the late thirties, as independence began to look inevitable, the
idea f a separate Muslim nation gained momentum. In March 1940, at
Lahore, the Muslim League officially demanded a Muslim state,
“autonomous and sovereign.” The League’s president, Muhammad Ali
Jinnah, declared that the Muslims were a nation unto themselves and
that they must have “their homelands, their territory and their
state.” The proposed Pakistan would be made up of the Provinces in
the north where Muslims formed a majority: Bengal, Kashmir, Assam,
the Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan, and the North West Frontier
Province. The League asked Khan and his Khudai Khidmatgars to join
them in their fight against what they called “Hindu rule.”
Khan refused. He argued that the real enemy of Muslims was not the
Hindus but the British. After the British left, he countered Muslims
and Hindus could continue to live together in a united India as they
had for so many centuries. He asked the League to join the Congress
in its fight against British tyranny.
The offer was rejected. The League would have nothing to do with the
Hindu-dominated Congress. It began to call Khan a Hindu. The rift
between the Congress and the League, between Hindus and Muslims,
widened.
In June 1940, France fell to the Germans. Britain would be next. The
Congress Working Committee debated how India should respond in the
event of an attack. Should their defense be nonviolent or not?
Gandhi and Khan argued that there was no issue. Nonviolence was not
an expedient that could be dropped once a goal had been reached; it
was a way of life, a code of conduct. It has to be consistent in all
aspects of life if it was t be effective in any. India could not
hope to win her freedom nonviolently if, at the same time, she
prepared to defend her freedom with arms.
The Committee disagreed. For the first time in twenty five years,
Nehru, Patel, Azad, and Rajagoplachari-all veterans of the
movement-broke with Gandhi’s leadership. Nonviolence could bring
them freedom, they argued, but it could not protect their freedom
from outside aggression. With real grief, the working committee
resolved that they were “unable to go the full length with Gandhiji.”
Gandhi asked to work along his own lines, separate from the
Congress. He would support them wherever they adhered strictly to
nonviolence. It was a gentlemen’s agreement to disagree. Khan,
however, stiffened. He did not want any part of the Congress if it
moved away from nonviolence and Gandhi. Even in principle. He knew
too that if he gave even an inch on the matter, the combustible
Frontier-with Hindu-Muslim tensions simmering might well go up in
flames.
“It is difficult for me to continue in the Committee,” he announced,
And I am resigning from it. I should like to make it clear that the
nonviolence I have believed in and preached to my brethren of the
Khudai Khidmatgars… affects our life, and only that has permanent
value.
The Khudai Khidmatgars must, therefore, be what our name
implies-servants of God and humanity-by laying down their own lives
and never taking any life.
In July 1940, the Congress repeated its offer to London. It was
ready to trough its full weight behind the British war effort,
enlist Indians in the army, and fight as one of the allies, if the
British granted self-government.
Churchill said no. he was prime minister now, as imperial and
eloquent as ever. He had “not become the King’s First Minister in
order to preside at the liquidation of the empire.” But he was
looking backward. The days of imperial glory would never return. The
Battle of Britain had begun on August 8, and Great Britain was
fighting for its life.
Churchill’s dogged defense of imperialism drove an embittered and
chastened-Congress back to Gandhi. Both he and Khan rejoined the
Working Committee, which now asked Gandhi to lead the country in
another Satyagraha. He replied that he would have to think about it.
He did not know if Indians were ready.
Khan, for his part, continued to stay out of politics, devoting his
energies to the arduous daily challenge of lifting his people out of
poverty and apathy.
From his stay at Wardah and his long conversations with Gandhi, Khan
now understood how the Constructive Program, aimed at building a
self- sustaining village economy, could eliminate the exploitation
and greed responsible for poverty, violence, and war. He opened his
center for village service near Utmanzai and built himself a small
thatched hut which became his headquarters. There he could work
quietly, out of the public eye. He continued to press for rights and
involvement of women. “When freedom has been won,” he told a group
of women near Kohat,
You will have an equal share and place with your brothers in this
country. We are like the two wheels of a big chariot, and unless our
movement have been mutually adjusted, our carriage will never move.
Khan also started holding weeklong camps-his own innovation-to train
Khudai Khidmatgar volunteers in the constructive program. Mary Barr,
an English missionary teacher who came under Gandhi’s influence,
attended a camp in the early forties and has left a very personal
description:
After a hot drink-very welcome in the frosty early morning there was
village cleaning for two hours, Bapu’s [Gandhi’s] teaching about
sweeping having at last borne fruit. One Pathan told me with glee
that the batch he had been with had even cleaned up the police
station in the village he went to. The rest of the day went in
spinning, drills, flag ceremonies, meetings, and two hefty meals of
large flat rotis [flatbread] and dal, with no trimmings.
In addition to the four hundred “Red Shirts” there were about a
hundred visitors, mostly from Baluchistan, Kashmir and the Punjab.
Then Khan came into the big tent where we were all gathered. He
stood for what seemed a long time, looking round solemnly, even
sternly, on the assembled campers. There was a pen-drop silence from
the moment of his entry, and when he began to speak in a quit voice,
all listened earnestly, but now and then responded by a unanimous
shout to something he had said.
But a Pathan training camp had its own style, in contrast to the
more sober atmosphere of Gandhi’s ashram:
More dancing this evening-great fun! The band seemed to enter into
the dance as much as the others, swaying about in time with the
music. One drummer in his excitement threw his drum six feet up into
the air, caught it again and went on with his rhythm.
After visiting the camp, Mary Barr went on to one of the schools
Khan had established in Utmanzai-a girl’s school, “a rare thing in
the Muslim North.” Then Khan invited her to spend a few days with
his family at their home in Utamnzai. She stayed in the large
farmhouse, walking the fields and hillsides, and talked with Khan’s
son, Wali. “I asked him whether he remembered the early days,” she
writes.
He said that he had been too young to know anything about the
terrorizing in the early twenties, but it was bad enough in 1931-32…
He remembered the way they had been besieged in Utmanzai, when if
even a cow wandered out it was shot or bayoneted. No one could go
out into the fields, with consequent harm to the crops and cattle,
while dirt piled up in the village. He told of beating-one of which
he experienced himself until he became unconscious….
The next morning, Mary Barr says, Khan was up and busy before the
rest of the household,
Working with the servants sweeping and clearing up, both outside and
inside the house…
Then Khan spent an hour spinning before going to work in the garden.
He confessed to me to hear about the camp, and while chatting helped
in whatever work was in progress out of doors.
In the evening the sons took me for a walk, and I asked them whether
their father had always been as peaceful as now. Ghani said, “No, he
used to beat me terribly when I was young, and thrash and jump on
anyone he thought was a badmash…”
The words throw suggestive light on the kind of transformation that
must have taken place in Khan’s early years. He was twenty three
when Ghani was born. We have similar glimpses into Mahatma Gandhi’s
life in his twenties and thirties-heated quarrels with his wife,
instances of an imperious temper; nothing more, but enough to hint
at a human side of the man which we can recognize. “As a young boy,”
Khan openly admitted, “I had had violent tendencies-the hot blood of
the Pathan was in my veins.” Gandhi’s ideas and influence had made
all the difference had made all the difference: “They changed my
life forever.” Like Gandhi, Khan was not born nonviolent: was a
Pathan. He had had to remake himself.
Lesser transformations must have taken place a thousand times over
during the years of Khan’s work among the Pathans. Even Murtaza
Khan, the outlaw of Utmanzai that Ghani Khan wrote of, actually
became a commander in the Khudai Khidmatgars after serving his
prison sentence for killing Atta Khan. His transformation was not
permanent like Badshah Khan’s-he “found it hard to be a saint and a
Khan at the same time.” Nonetheless, this violent Pathan whose life
had known mostly robbing, killing, and the inside of a Frontier jail
underwent a change of heart and action that lasted for four years
and left a permanent impression on his life.
Ghani asked Murtaza how nonviolence could have become the creed of a
former outlaw. The plainspoken reply offers an insight into the
dynamics of Satyagraha, soul force, which taps the hidden potential
of the human spirit. “I was a little saint for those four years,” he
told Ghani. “I tried to live up to my dreams instead of my desires.
It was great, it was a miracle. I refused fortunes for a hope and
spared lovely girls because they trusted me and looked up to me.” In
his unintended way, Murtaza reveals the infectious power of
nonviolence- love in action. “You cannot help loving those that love
you,” he told Ghani, “and you cannot hurt those that trust you. I
tried to live up to what the people thought I was.” Thus the
grizzled outlaw went to prison again-but this time as a “servant of
God” in the cause of his people’s freedom.
Khan’s period of peaceful work did not last long. In December 1941
the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and began a swift advance across
Southeast Asia. Malaya fell, then Singapore; then, in March 1942
Rangoon. The Japanese were within reach of India’s border.
The British government tried again to enlist congress support for
the war, but no agreement could be reached. Congress, mindful of
India’ treatment after the last world war, insisted on certain
rights immediately; and Churchill was not about to give India away.
Pressure built for renewed struggle. In July 1942, Gandhi proposed
an all –out campaign to rid India of British rule. Previous civil
disobedience movements had been aimed at a particular law or issue.
This one, Gandhi decided, would make one sweeping demand of the
British: “Quit India.” Nothing could be clearer.
The British got the message. On August 9, 1942, Gandhi and the rest
of the congress Working Committee were arrested, along with hundreds
of Congress leaders across the country.
On the Frontier, Khudai Khidmatgar volunteers entered government
offices and courts carrying the congress flag and chanting
anti-British slogans-criminal acts under the Frontier Crimes
Regulations. The government cordoned the buildings and beat
volunteers who tried to enter. Dr. Khan Saheb, who had relinquished
his premiership in 1939 to protest British policies, now put on his
red shirt and walked into the headquarters of the Indian Civil
Service-under his command only three years before-to deliver a
speech denouncing the war effort.
Ghaffar Khan too courted arrest, but each time he went out to a
village the government simply picked him up in a patrol car and
returned him to Peshawar. Frustrated, Khan led a group of fifty
volunteers from Charsadda to “raid” the court of Mardan. When they
saw a phalanx of uniformed police in front of them, they locked arms
and kept walking. The police beat them to the ground with lathis,
four-foot staffs with steel tips, breaking two of Khan’s ribs in the
process. He was arrested and sent to the Haripur jail, usually
reserved for hardened criminals.
By the end of the year, sixty thousand Indians were in jail. The
government, already panicky due to wartime conditions and threatened
now by the Japanese in Burma, used tear gas, lathi charges, and
bullets to break up Indian demonstrations. With Gandhi and the
entire congress leadership in jail, violence erupted all over India.
Police stations, post offices, railway stations-symbols of British
Authority-were bombed and telegraph and telephone wires cut.
The British responded with massive force. “The number of white
troops in that country,” Churchill admitted, “is now larger than at
any time in the British connection.”
Miraculously, however, the Frontier remained nonviolent. The
picketing and “raids”-continued, but there was no sabotage. When
some volunteers asked Khan if they could cut a few communications
lines-it wouldn’t harm anyone-he told them to go ahead, so long as
they turned themselves in to the police afterwards. “This would add
to the moral courage of the worker,” he added drily. They shook
their heads at the unrelenting nonviolence of their Badshah.
For the rest of the war all of India’s political figures were kept
in jail, while intense repression kept the freedom movement at bay.
As the war neared its conclusion, however, Britain’s attitude
towards India began to soften. Public sentiment turned in favor of
Indian independence, and by the summer of 1945, all political
prisoners had been released. A Labour government which promised to
grant India its freedom was elected in the autumn and Churchill was
retired as prime minister. In March 1945, Dr. Khan Saheb again came
into power as chief minister of the Frontier Province when the
Muslim League ministry suffered a vote of no confidence.
Immediately after the surrender of Japan, the new government in
London announced its intention of “an early realization of self
government in India.” Freedom had effectively been won. The question
that remained was, to whom should power be transferred? The question
was scarcely academic, since congress and the Muslim League had been
unable to form a coalition government. The Muslim League demanded
that it be designated the sole representative of Indian Muslims. But
Congress, whose membership was only three percent Muslim, refused;
it stood for a united India of Hindus and Muslims together. The
League wanted a wholly Muslim state and would have no part of a
coalition in which British rule, as they argued, would be replaced
by Hindu rule.
When an interim government was finally formed without the Muslim
League, the league called for a boycott. It declared August 16,
1946, Direct Action Day, on which Muslims were to express their
dissatisfaction.
That day northern India exploded. In Calcutta riots broke out
between Hindus and Muslims. Hoodlums from both communities took over
the city, burning shops and killing thousands. The police were
helpless. After four days the city was calmed, but only after deeply
felt emotions had been stirred. Once released, they proved
impossible to contain.
In Noakhali, in East Bengal, the Muslims took revenge. Hindus were
beaten and killed or forced to convert to Islam. Gandhi watched the
violence build. He was seventy six years old and his health was not
good, but he could not stand by passively. He announced he was going
to Noakhali. “All I know,” he told Congress leaders who feared for
his life, “is that I won’t be at peace with myself unless I go
there.”
Gandhi had no plan. He entered the ravaged areas of Noakhali with no
protection except the love in his heart. “I am not going to live
Bengal until the last embers of the trouble are stamped out,” he
told a prayer meeting. “If necessary, I will die there.”
In the next flare-up it was the Hindus’ turn to take revenge. In
Bihar they descended upon the minority Muslims with a fury that
almost destroyed them. Gandhi, “burning the candle at both ends” in
Noakhali, asked Khan to go to Bihar in his stead. Armed with the
same weapons, love and nonviolence, the gentle Pathan entered the
firestorm. “You are right,” he wrote Gandhi. “Our nonviolence is on
test.”
Where thousands of police and soldiers had been unable to check the
violence, the love of the two Gandhis began to work its magic.
Gandhi, staff in hand, walked through some fifty villages in
Noakhali. At each village he stayed in the home of a Muslim family,
ate their food, and joined them in prayer. In the evenings, the
villagers gathered at his prayer meetings-at first only a few
Hindus, but gradually Muslims too. He spoke constantly of the unity
underlying all religions. God was the same, he reiterated, whether
he was called Rama or Rahim. By March, Noakhali was calm. Hindus who
had fled felt safe enough to return to their villages.
In Bihar, Khan poured out his heart. “India seems an inferno,” he
told the villagers. “My heart weeps to see our homes set on fire by
ourselves.” The terrorized Muslims had fled in such panic that many
had left their family savings buried underneath their homes. They
were too frightened to return, and not even Muslims Government
officials were willing to risk entering the areas to help. “I’ll go
with you,” Khan promised, and he led them to their ravaged villages.
With Noakhali quite, Khan asked Gandhi to join him in Bihar. They
stayed in Patna, driving out into the villages every day in old car.
Between stops the aging Mahatma often napped, his head in the lap of
his niece, Manu, and his feet on Khan’s lap. While Gandhi slept,
Khan massaged his feet. In each village Gandhi gathered the shamed
Hindus and told them to give him their weapons and pledge never to
raise hands against their Muslim brothers and sisters again. Often
he told them how the silent Muslim giant next to him had transformed
the dreaded Pathans of the Frontier with nonviolence-the nonviolence
of the fearless and strong that he wanted Hindus to emulate.
And he would pray. When a Hindu extremist objected to the Koran
being recited at the prayer meeting, Gandhi retorted: “You are doing
no good to Hinduism by your unreasoning fanaticism. Here is Badshah
Khan, a Muslim and a man of God, every inch of him-if you want to
see one in the flesh. Have you no respect even for him?”
But the two Gandhis could not be everywhere. In the Punjab, aroused
and alarmed by extremists of both religious, Hindus and Muslims
began to terrorize each other. The violence infected the Frontier.
When Hindus in Peshawar were threatened, Dr. Khan called in ten
thousand Khudai Khidmatgars. Muslims everyone, armed with nothing
but their courage and faith, these rid shirted Pathans protected the
Hindu and Sikh minorities and helped restore peace to the city.
But communal violence continued to spread. As independence
approached, India was drifting toward Civil war. Under great
pressure, fearful of seeing all they had worked for destroyed,
Congress leaders finally decided to acquiesce to the demands of the
Muslim League for a separate Muslim state.
On March 22 Lord Mountbatten arrived in Delhi, the twentieth and
last viceroy of the Indian Empire. His task was a swift and orderly
transfer of power. The year before, after extensive investigation, a
British cabinet mission had recommended against a divided India. But
the violence was spreading swiftly, and no one knew how to stop it.
After long meetings with leaders of both Congress and Muslim League,
Mountbatten concluded that the only way to complete his mission
successfully was to partition India into separate Hindu and Muslim
states. He drafted a plan which worked out the details of the idea
proposed by the Muslim League: in principle, those states with a
Muslim majority would become part of Pakistan; those where Hindus
were numerically superior would remain part of India.
For Gandhi the partition of India seemed a grave error, worse even
than civil war. The violence of tearing India apart, he left, would
be as fearful as war and leave much deeper wounds. He drafted an
alternative plan which invited the Muslim League to protect Muslims
interests to the extent of naming an all-Muslim cabinet. But the
plan got virtually no support, not even from the League. On March
31, 1947, the Congress leadership accepted Mountbatten’s plan in
principle. India would be divided.
Only Khan and Gandhi objected. Gandhi argued that Hindus and Muslims
could work out their differences in a united India once the British
had left. Partition, he argued, would not resolve communal violence.
It would only worsen the problem as it would leave millions of
Hindus in Pakistan and millions of Muslims in India.
He proved to be right. When partition took place in August 1947,
Hindus remaining in Pakistan and Muslims in northern India fled
their communities in the larges migration of peoples in the world’s
history. Fifteen million people left their homes and in the chaos
that followed, over five hundred thousand lives were lost. In Bengal
and the Punjab, torn down the middle, partition left a legacy of
violence and fear that continues to this day.
For Khan, partition would mean abandonment. It would place the
Frontier Province under the governance of the Muslim League, which
had battled Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgars for a decade. Khan and
his compatriots had cast their lot with Gandhi and the Congress,
often in opposition to the League. Now partition would leave them in
the hands of Muslim League ministers, many of whom resented Khan’s
influence and opposition.
Gandhi assured him that he and India would not abandon them. “It is
many intention to go to the Frontier as soon as circumstances
permit,” he told Khan. “I shall not take out a passport because I do
not believe in division. And if as a result somebody kills me, I
shall be glad to be so killed. If Pakistan comes into being, my
place will be in Pakistan.”
Gandhi confessed later that he could not bear to see a Khan’s grief.
“His inner agony wrings my heart. But, if I gave way to tears, it
would be cowardly, and stalwart Pathan as he is, he would break
down. So I go about my business unmoved. That is no small thing.”
“We shall be outcastes in the eye of both,” Khan told friends in
Delhi. But he did not fear the future; Gandhi had promised to
protect them. “I do not worry,” he told his colleagues, “so long as
Mahatmaji is here.”
May 1947 in Delhi was hot. It would be another month before the
summer monsoon began to cool the air. Khan and Gandhi had come to
the Capital to meet with the Congress Working Committee about
partition. Gandhi had talked several times with the viceroy, trying
to persuade him to leave India undivided. Mountbatten replied that
he too preferred a united India, but he was helpless under the
circumstances. Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim a League would
accept nothing less than partition.
On May 7, to the displeasure of extremist Hindus, Gandhi went to
Jinnah’s home. The two leaders talked in friendly way, but there was
no giving in on the idea of Pakistan. The two of them would ever
agree on India’s future. Personally, Gandhi said in a sad, firm
voice, he could not bear the thought of partition. It was wrong for
both Muslims and Hindus. And as long as he was convinced tat it was
wrong, he could not possibly give his assent.At this evening
prayer meeting, Gandhi pleaded with those who complained of his
going to Jinnah’s. What was the harm? They were fellow Indians. They
had to live in the same land. He refuted the argument that the Koran
was bad because some Muslim fanatics had done evil deeds in Bengal
and the Punjab. The Hindus had gone made in Bihar, but that did not
diminish the greatness of the Gita. Not to read from a scripture
because hatred for its adherents filled your heart was the negation
of true religion. Far from protecting Hinduism, he stated flatly, it
was the fastest way to destroy it.
Gandhi looked grave. The day had been a long one and his talk with
Jinnah, though cordial, had been a disappointment. He closed his
eyes. Then his lips began to move. “O God,” he prayed in a strong
voice, “I begin every task wit the remembrance of Thyname.” It was
the first line of a prayer that he used every day in his
meditation-and it was from the Koran:
Thou art the Compassionate and the Merciful.
Thou art the creator of the universe.
Thou art Lord and master.
I praise Thee alone and desire only Thy help.
Show me the right path,
The path which Thy saints have taken….
Khan was staying with Gandhi and was sick with a fever. But he
did not want to take any medicine, and he could be as obstinate as
Gandhi. When his Hindu friends told him not to overstrain himself he
turned his bearded face towards them. “Before long we Pathan shall
become aliens in India,” he said, “away from Bapu, away from India,
away from all of you. Twenty-five years-and the end of our long
fight shall be to pass under the domination of Pakistan. Who knows
what the future holds for us?”
The next day Gandhi was living for Calcutta. There is was no way to
know when-or if –Khan would see him again. Every evening during his
stay, Khan had massaged Gandhi’s legs. This time, however, seeing
Khan’s pale, feverish face, Gandhi tried to persuade him to rest
instead. Khan looked into the face of his teacher and kindred
spirit, whose word was law to him. “Let me do it,” the soft voice
pleaded. “It is your last night.” He added gently, “It will make me
well.”
Gandhi told his niece, “He is a true fakir. Independence will come,
but the true Pathan will lose his. It is a grim prospect,” he added,
“but Badshah is a man of God.”
The next day Gandhi left for Calcutta on the train. Khan accompanied
him to the station. “Mahatmaji,” he told him as they parted, “I have
full faith in you. I look for no other support.”
The two aging warriors stood for a long time on the platform and
looked at each other: the Hindu Mahatma and the Muslim Fakir joined
in a union of sacrifice and service.
What needed to be said? Their understanding had long ago passed
beyond words. Their spirit met for above language. They did not know
when they would meet again-they did not need to know. They were
Khudai Khidmatgars, servants of God. They would serve-and God would
decide where and how.
Khan watched the express pull out of the station in a burst of steam
and clatter. Hundreds of robed and saried figures swirled around and
past him toward the door of the big terminal-and toward freedom. And
his Pathans? They would prevail. If they could find out their true
strength, it would not matter whether they were part of India or
Pakistan. As for himself, Khan was at peace. His surrender long ago
to the will of God shielded him like armor from these setbacks. He
had not looked for rest in this life, and he would not start looking
now. There was work to do.
Khan glanced up at the large board near the top of the terminal: the
days arrivals and departures. He smiled. An express left for the
Frontier in two hours. It was time he got back to his people.
He stepped through the rush of the travelers toward the ticket
window. The plum orchard behind the farmhouse would have exploded in
pink by now, he thought. Its splendor would not last much longer. It
was time to go
AUGUST 15 TH , 1947
Epilogue
I consider it a crime to be a slave. Therefore, until we establish
in this country a true people’s government under which every
community secures equal opportunities for expansion, you will Wind
me struggling for freedom, no matter who dominates the scene.
AS MIDNIGHT PASSED, the earl Mountbatten of Burma spent the first
hour of India’s freedom clearing away the vestiges of the British
Raj from his office in the vice regal palace in New Delhi. He wanted
the new leaders to begin with a clean slate, and all articles that
bore the symbol of British rule were being carried unceremoniously
away. “There was an air about him serenity, almost detachment,” his
aide, Alan Campbell-Johnson, recalled. “The scale of his personal
achievement was too great for elation… at this historic moment, when
the old and the new order were reconciled in himself…”
As servant shuttled silently in and out, Rahendra Prassad, president
of the new crated Constituent Assembly, and Jawaharlal Nehru,
India’s prime minister, entered Mountbatten to continue to serve the
republic as its first governor-general.
“In the little scene that ensured,” Campbell-Johnson recalled,
“friendship completely burst the bounds of formality.” Mountbatten,
of curse, had already been approached privately on the question and
had given willing consent, but still he was freshly touched by the
magnanimity of the gesture. He accepted gladly, adding that he would
serve India “as if he were himself an India.” Then the new earl-he
had just learned that he had been elevated a rank in the peerage by
George VI for his conduct in India- poured out port for his guests
and raised his glass in a toast. “To India,” he offered, turning
toward Nehru, whom he had come to admire deeply. Nehru returned the
gesture, raising his own glass in a spontaneous gesture of
friendship. “To King George VI!”
Later that day, in the opulent Durbar Hall where twenty British
viceroys had held audience, Lord Mountbatten, the great-grandson of
Queen Victoria, took a solemn oath “to become the humble and
faithful first servant of an independent India.” Then he swore in
the ministers of the new government-Nehru, Patel, Azad. Men who,
Mountbatten observed had all served time in British prisons.
As a twenty one gun salute boomed in the back ground, Lord and Lady
Mountbatten stepped into a state carriage and proceeded out into the
streets of Delhi toward the palace. The carriage passed through a
sea of cheering, waving Indians, former subjects and long time
opponents of the British, who were now reaching with affection and
gratitude to grasp the outstretched hand of their new
governor-general. All the way back to the palace, the last
representative of the Raj which had ruled Indians for three
centuries-not without harshness-heard with pleasure the cries that
burst from the huge crowd: “Mountbatten ki jai! Long live the
Mountbatten’s!”
It was a remarkable, even unprecedented scene, yet it marked the
general tenor of the day throughout India as power finally passed
from British to Indian hands. No one could have expected the
outburst of mutual good will that was expressed in countless ways
between former rulers and subjects; it was unique in colonial
history. “No power in history but Great Britain,” K. M. Munshi wrote
that day, “would have conceded independence with such grace, and no
power but India would have so gracefully acknowledged the debt.”
The Mountbatten deserves great credit for the courage, warmth, and
style with which they carried out their mission, affecting the
transfer with uniform dignity and respect for the citizens of their
former colony. To this day they are remembered in India with deep
affection. But the overwhelming sense of amity that enveloped
British and Indian alike at the moment of independence came as a
direct and logical consequence of the unique revolution Indians had
waged against their former masters. They had chosen to resist
nonviolently, to defy the will of the Empire and accept, without
retaliation, the consequent suffering. The good will of that
decision continues to the present time.
For this, of course, the credit is Gandhi’s. never hating his
enemies, seeking compromise at every turn, insisting that Indians
respect and even love their rulers even while they defied their
rule, Gandhi set the stage for a remarkable triumph. Indians had
fought against the greatest empire in world history, without weapon,
and they had won their freedom. At the same time, they had won Great
Britain’s admiration and affection. Of all the transition from
colony to nation that would take place over the following decades,
none would approach the tenor of fellowship that accompanied the
Brutish as they left India.
For the Indians, the changing were sweeping and abrupt. Indian
officers found themselves suddenly in charge of an army they had
never before been allowed to command. The few Indian members of the
Indian Civil Service found themselves overnight in control of the
heartbeat of a large, teeming nation. And for those who had led
freedom moment, independence brought sudden power and
responsibility. Nehru became prime minister; Sardar Patel, deputy
minister. Change- sweeping, abrupt, and unpredictable-would
characterize the country for some time to come.
For the two Gandhis, however, independence only brought more of the
same opportunities to serve and to suffer in the cause of truth.
These two servants of god were called upon to bear witness to
enormous suffering and to stand, in the darkness that engulfed the
country, as lamps of light and truth. For when independence came to
India and Pakistan, it did not bring peace. Hundreds of thousands
died in the conflagration of communal violence that followed
partition. Unable to reach his people in any other way, Gandhi
finally undertook a “fast unto death” in January 1948, to be broken
only if he could be assured that the slaughter had stopped and that
it would never be provoked again. In the anguishing days that
followed, all eyes in India turned toward this frail, beloved old
man. Fear of losing him finally brought an end to a seizure of
communal madness that no amount of police action had been able to
touch.
Following his fast, Gandhi wanted to go to Pakistan. Jinnah, now
governor –general, agreed to his coming. Still masterful in riveting
the attention of his countrymen on a particular problem, Gandhi
decided e would walk-directly through the Punjab, which had
experienced the worst of the communal violence. His mere presence
would do much to salve the deep wounds left by the riots.
Gandhi was almost eighty and still suffering the effects of his last
fast, but he was feeling buoyant. Indians and Pakistanis alike had
responded to his fast with an immense outpouring of sincerity and
affection, and he felt the promise of greater things to come. Also,
of course, Badshah Khan was in Pakistan now. Gandhi still had much
to say to the Khudai Kidmatgars-and he had made them a promise which
he wanted to fulfill, although he did not yet know how.
But he never got his chance. Mahatma Gandhi’ died shortly after five
o’clock on the afternoon of January 30, 1948, blessing with the name
of God the man who had just fired three shots into his frail body.
The assassin, a fanatical Hindu, was angered because Gandhi kept
giving away too much to the Muslims-among other things; he had just
pressured the Indian government to make good its debt of 550 million
rupees to Pakistan as part of the partition settlement. He believed
the Mahatma was pro-Muslim.
With Gandhi’s death, his promise of protection for the Khudai
Khidmatgar evaporated amidst the animosity that broke out between
India and Pakistan over the disputed territory of Kashmir. But it is
doubtful what even Gandhi could have done. Badshah Khan’s sacrifice
had already been made. He had accepted Pakistan.
By the logic of the Mountbatten plan, the Frontier would have
remained with India. Though almost entirely Muslim, it had chosen
khudai khidmatgar representatives over the Muslim league. But the
league would not have Pakistan without the Frontier. Finally
Mountbatten had insisted on another election-a referendum to choose
between Pakistan and India. It is difficult to exaggerate the horror
of the communal violence that surrounded those times. Badshah Khan,
like Gandhi, felt he was watching the cause he had given his life
for go up in flames. If he pressed his case the Frontier would
explode in violence like the rest of northern India-but among
Pathans, that violence would tear villages and families apart for
generation. Everything he had helped his people gain in unity and
self respect would be undone. In an agonizing act of renunciation,
Badshah Khan finally urged the Khudai Khidmatgars to abstain from
voting in the referendum. The rest of the Frontier, in that climate
of communal hatred, voted for Pakistan.
The consequences followed swiftly. One week after independence, Dr.
Khan Saheb’s government in the Frontier was disbanded and replaced
by a Muslim League ministry.
Shortly thereafter, a large gathering of Khudai Khidmatgars met at
Sardaryab and resolved that “the Khudai Khidmatgars regards Pakistan
as their own country,” pledging to “do their utmost to strengthen
and safeguard its interest ad make every sacrifice for the cause.”
At the same time, Khan asked for a united Pathan province within
Pakistan, in which all Pathan would be reunited under “rule of the
Pathans, by the Pathans, and for the Pathans.” In this scheme, all
five major peoples of Pakistan would have their own semiautonomous
provinces. Like Bengalis in East Bengal, Sindis in Sindh, Punjabis
in the Punjab, and Baluchi in Baluchistan, Khan argued, Pathans
deserved Pushtunistan, the “land of the Pathans.”
The rest of this life would be devoted to realizing this dream.
Khan toured the Frontier and spoke out boldly for his plan and the
democratic rights of his people. The government, at war with India
over Kashmir, claimed he was disloyal and in league with India. On
June 15, 1948, he was arrested for “fomenting open sedition” and
sentenced to three years’ rigorous imprisonment. The Khudai
Khidmatgars were banned and their headquarters razed. More than a
thousand of them went to jail. The Pushtun, Badshah Khan’s journal,
was silenced forever.
Thus, within less than a year of the night that Mountbatten handed
over the reins of power to India and Pakistan, Mahatma Gandhi had
been assassinated by a Hindu who feared he was pro-Muslim and
Badshah Khan had been jailed by an Islamic government that claimed
he was pro-Hindu. The Irony could not have been more complete. Two
of India’s foremost men of God had been sacrificed in the name of
religion.
So began Khan’s second long ordeal in the cause of freedom. His
sentence was extended twice, so that he actually served seven years
before being released-only to be imprisoned again the following
year. During the first three decades of Pakistan’s existence, he
would spend fifteen years in prison and seven years in exile, while
Pakistan itself labored much of the same time under military
dictatorships and martial law.
Whenever he was out of prison, Khan continued to plead for a united
Pathan province and the rudiments of democracy for his people. In
1956, he and tree other leaders founded the National Awami
(People’s) Party, the first social-social democratic party in
Pakistan, which functioned as the major opposition party through the
sixties and seventies with Khan’s son Wali as its Frontier leader.
Badshah Khan was jailed several more times “for antistate
activities.” Since he refused to be silenced, his life since
partition was a history of prison terms broken occasionally by
interludes of freedom.
Counting from 1910, with the opening of his first school in Utmanzai,
Badshah Khan went on serving, reforming, and resisting tyranny for
almost eighty years. I cannot imagine finding anywhere in the
world’s history a life of more unbroken service in the cause of
freedom.
Despite his thirty years in jail-the equivalent of every third day
of his life-Badshah Khan never ceased to stand by the principles of
love and service with which he began his mission. As one biographer
wrote, “He will not bend.” Through all the suffering and setbacks,
he remained a dedicated servant of God, compassionate, forgiving,
and resilient-and as dogged as ever.
Pyarelal, Gandhi’s last personal secretary, visited Badshah Khan in
Kabul in 1965, when khan was a state guest of the Afghanistan
government while in exile. He left us a vivid personal description
of Khan’s character that still stands today.
Pyarelal found his friend seated in front of his residence, “a
lovely villa, roomy and well furnished, with every modern
convenience,” surrounded by a score of visitors. He looked much the
same as when Pyarelal had seen him last, before independence:
“Bare-headed, with graying hair, and in sandals, he was wearing his
flowing blue-dyed shirt and pajamas as of yore.” The two veteran
soldiers of nonviolence listened to the news on the radio and then
ate a simple dinner: Khan had declined the sumptuous meals the
government wanted to provide for him. After dinner the two went for
a walk. “For all his seventy-five years,” Pyarelal wrote,
He seemed, indeed, extraordinarily fit. He walked with a firm,
steady step… The countenance bore marks of intense suffering but the
eyes beamed deep compassion and an air of kindliness surrounded him.
Even more striking was the complete absence of rancor or bitterness
on his part after all that he and his people had suffered as a
result of India’s partition and a result of their subsequent
neglect. It speaks volumes for his large heartedness that he retains
his regard and affection for his friends, Congress colleagues and
the people of India, unaffected by all that he has been through…
As I took leave of Badshah Khan, the feeling uppermost in my mind
was one of wonder and amazement at the unconquerable spirit of this
man of God, who, having watched from behind the prison bars [as] the
things he had given his life to [were] broken, had now, in the
evening of his life, set about undeterred by the overwhelming odds
arrayed against him, to build them up…
Badshah Khan said many times that he would not seek rest in this
life. Certainly he found little. Yet his long years of suffering
seem only to have enlarged his sweeping spirit and magnified his
strength and capacity to love. “One learns a good deal in the school
of suffering,” he once said with more than a touch of Gandhi. “I
wonder what would have happened to me if I had had an easy life and
had not had the privilege of tasting the joys of jail and all it
means.”
Judged by the normal standards of human affairs, the lives of men
and women of God may look overburdened with suffering, and even
inconclusive. This would have seemed true of St. Francis of Assisi,
with whom I have compared Badshah Khan’s beginnings. In his latter
years, Frances watched helplessly while the institutions he had
built faltered and languished. But the profound currents he released
into the stream of history were already stirring the Western world
at the time of his death, and they continue, a thousand years later,
to be felt today.
It was the same with Gandhi. Today, fifty years after his death and
the partition of his country that he so strongly opposed, the impact
of his ideas is being felt more, by a larger part of the world, than
at any time during his life. His influence grows year by year,
informing the visions of seekers in many parts of the world fail to
grapple with the monstrous problem of violence, more and more people
I both East and West will be examining his nonviolent alternative.
And so with Badshah Khan. It is only a matter of time before his
special light will begin to shine in many corners of the earth. For
his contribution to the legacy of nonviolence has special
significance today, when so many countries of the Islamic world are
torn by violence. Just as Gandhi reminded Indians of their
long-forgotten legacy of truth and nonviolence, it has been given to
Badshah Khan to perform the same great service for Islam. His life
is a perfect mirror of the profound values of love, faith, and
selfless service embedded in Islam since its inception. His
nonviolent “army of God” stands as a beacon to all Muslims who seek
an alternative to the self-destructive violence of our times.
Like Gandhi in Hinduism and Martin Luther King Jr. in Christianity,
Badshah Khan demonstrated conclusively that nonviolence love in
action-is in perfect harmony with a vigorous, resurgent Islam.
Khan’s simplicity, deep faith, and selfless service represent the
Islamic tradition at its purest and most enduring.
But Khan’s message is scarcely limited to Islam. It can help the
non-Muslim world to understand the true greatness of Islam, but more
than that, it should help all nations to understand their own
potential for love in action. If Badshah Khan could raise a
nonviolent army out of a people so steeped in violence as the
Pathans, there is no country on earth where it cannot be done. The
message he sent for this book is simple and urgent: “The present-
day world can only survive the mass production of nuclear weapons
through nonviolence. The world needs Gandhi’s message of love and
peace more today than it ever did before, if it does not want to
wipe out civilization and humanity itself from the earth’s surface.”
The world may yet come to know of this simple, courageous,
nonviolent freedom fighter and his eloquent message of love in
action.
AFTERWORD
The Good Fight
BY TIMOTHY FLINDERS
NONOVIOLENT MUSLIMS . Nonviolent Muslim Pathans in an “army of God”
sworn to lay down their lives in the cause of freedom, without
fighting back.
Once could be forgiven a stir of doubt, some puzzlement.
Yet when Mahatma Gandhi first heard of the nonviolent resistance of
Badshah Khan’s Pathan tribesmen during the salt Satyagraha of 1930,
though he may will have been surprised, even awed, he would not have
been puzzled. No doubt Pathans seemed to the rest of India like a
kind of eastern Mafiosi-ruthless, clannish, vengeful, without
scruple. But to Gandhi, who understood better than anyone else the
inner dynamics of Satyagraha, Khan’s “miracle” was entirely
consonant with his idea of nonviolence. In fact, Gandhi had been
looking for a decade for the Pathans-or someone like them-in order
to make a point.
Gandhi’s search went back to the Kaira struggle of 1918, during
which he had led Indian peasants in a nonviolent revolt against
unfair taxes. The Kaira peasants won the struggle, but in the
process they unmasked a truth about their nonviolence which Gandhi
found disturbing. They had taken to nonviolence which Gandhi found
disturbing. They had taken to nonviolence, they admitted, only
because they lacked the courage to fight with violence. “With me
alone and a few other co-workers,” Gandhi reported, “[nonviolence]
came out of our strength and was described as Satyagraha, but with
the majority [of resisters] it was purely and simply passive
resistance, which they resorted to because they were too weak to
undertake the methods of violence.”
This was not Gandhi’s idea of nonviolence. True nonviolence did not
issue from weakness but from strength. It was a matter of the
powerful voluntarily withholding their power in a conflict, choosing
to suffer for the sake of a principle rather than inflict
suffering-even though they could. Gandhi called this the
“nonviolence of the strong,” as opposed to the “nonviolence of the
weak” that he had found in his Kaira peasants. “My creed of
nonviolence is an extremely active force,” he insisted. “It has no
room for cowardice or even weakness.”
After much about the implications of the peasants’ admission, Gandhi
stunned his colleagues by starting a recruiting campaign in Kaira to
raise an army of Indians to fight for the Empire in the First World
War. If Indians were afraid of violence, he argued, and then they
should first learn to fight so that they could renounce fighting. “I
do not infer from this that India must fight,” he explained. “But I
do say that India must know how to fight.” To perplexed colleagues
who thought he had lost his way, Gandhi gave a simple explanation:
“A nation that is unfit to fight cannot from experience prove the
virtue of not fighting.” True Satyagraha required fighters,
fearless, impassioned, and dogged. If he could not find natural
fighters, he decided, he would create them, even if it meant sending
them to war.
Gandhi’s recruitment campaign of 1918 proved a failure. The majority
of Indians were not prepared to take up arms. “But do you know that
not one man has yet objected [to recruitment] because he would not
kill?” Gandhi wrote a colleague. “They object because they fear to
die. The unnatural fear of death is ruining the nation.”
When the war ended, so did his recruiting campaign. But Gandhi never
stopped looking for those born fighters who would prove to the world
that nonviolence was especially meant for the strong. “There is hope
for a violent man to be some day nonviolent,” he insisted, “but
there is none for a coward.”
In 1930 Gandhi heard about the heroics of Badshah Khan’s Khudai
Khidmatgars, and he must have known that he had found what he was
looking for. Pathans knew how to fight. They were an unlikely lot,
to be sure. But the Hindus, image of the menacing Pathans was
incomplete: they were vengeful and they could be ruthless, but they
were not without scruple. Honor was every thing. They were capable
of self-discipline and temperate in their habits. Raised with a
Spartan abandon for comfort, they lived with a deep running faith in
God and legendary contempt for fear and cowardice: “The coward
dies,” we read “but his shrieks live on. So [the Pathan boy] learns
not to shrieks.” Gandhi could not have invented a people better
fitted to his radical notion.
But he did not have to invent them. More than that, he did not even
need to transform them: Badshah Khan had done for him. Khan’s
genius, as Easwaran has pointed out, was to sense the underlying
nobility of the Pathan temperament-with its profound and compelling
passion- and to tap it for a high purpose/ “Being fighters,” Khan
explains, “they had learnt discipline. All that he had to do was to
give it nonviolent turn.” And to every one’s amazement-except
Gandhi’s-it worked: Khan’s Pathans became, we read, “the bravest and
most enduring of India’s [non violent] soldiers.”
Even Khan was baffled at the extent of his success. “I started
teaching the Pathans nonviolence only a short time ago,” he told
Gandhi once. “Yet in comparison, the Pathans seem to have learned
this lesson and grasped the idea of nonviolence much quicker and
much better than the Indians….How do you explain that?”
Gandhi, almost laconic in his self-assurance, told the Pathan
leader: nonviolence is not for cowards. It is for the brave, the
courageous. And the Pathans are more brave and courageous than the
Hindus. That is the reason why the Pathans were able to remain
nonviolent.”
Thus the unique place of Khan’s Khudai Khidmatgars in the history of
nonviolence. They proved Gandhi’s claim that none violence is meant
for the strong-no insignificant matter in today’s world, where
violence is seen almost as a natural response to conflict and
nonviolence is dismissed as a refuge of those who are too weak or
too fearful to fight with guns.
But Gandhian nonviolence has another side to it: a side more
personal than political, which aims at transformation. We can call
this “transformative” nonviolence, to distinguish it from the more
overt political forms. Here nonviolence is used as a tool to reform
and regenerate human personality. The story of Khan’s movement among
the Pathans demonstrates the power of nonviolence to harness the
negative forces in personality and use those same forces to
transform an individual, a community, or even a society.
Transformative nonviolence could find a special place in the
regeneration of our own postindustrial democracies, wherever
political tyranny has been replaced by subtler forms of oppression
meaninglessness, alienation, pervasive dissatisfaction, ennui.
Like Gandhi, Khan was essentially a reformer. He first seized upon
nonviolence not as a political weapon-he was forced into politics by
British suppression, he claimed-but as an antidote to the violence
which had long paralyzed his vigorous but indiscriminate people. His
first concern was not British repression, but the Pathan cult of
violence and revenge. Khan found that Gandhi’s nonviolence had the
power to recast their Pathan temperament into a potent, positive
force without diminishing its vigor.
“To me nonviolence has come to represent a panacea for all the evils
that surround my people,” Khan said. “Therefore I am devoting all my
energies toward the establishment of a society that would be based
on its principles of truth and peace.” In his “Servants of God” Khan
released a powerful, socially benign force equal but opposite to the
destructive forces embedded in the Pathan temperament and culture.
In doing so, he was following almost to the letter the powerful
dynamics of transformative nonviolence that Gandhi had discovered
twenty-five years earlier in South Africa.
Dissatisfied with the hopeless inadequacy of the phrase “passive
resistance” to describe the innate power of nonviolence, Gandhi
coined his own term in 1996: Satyagraha. Satya means truth in
Sanskrit, and agraha come from a Sanskrit root meaning “to hold on
to,” which Gandhi used as a synonym for “force.” Thus Satyagraha
carries a double meaning: it signifies a determined holding on to, a
grappling with truth; while at the same time it implies the force
that arises from that grappling, what Gandhi called “soul-force.”
Satyagraha stands for both the means and the ends, the struggle and
the force that is generated in that struggle.
As heat is generated by friction, Gandhi contended, power is
released from within the depths of the human spirit in its struggle
toward truth. The raw material for this power is passion. “I have
learned through bitter experience,” Gandhi explained, “the one
supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is
transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be
transmuted into a power which can move the world.” In this “truth
struggling” nothing is lost or repressed; energy is conserved and
transmuted. Thus in its transformative aspect nonviolence is not
nonviolence at all, but violence transmuted, harnessed, used. We
could more properly call it transviolence, where the power of
passions like anger, hatred, and fear is reshaped into a potent
fighting force.
With this truculent, explosive Pathans, Khan had an abundance of raw
material to work with. Because of their powerful tendencies toward
violence, they had great potential for nonviolence. Their grappling
toward nonviolent truths sometimes provoked excruciating suffering,
and required a demanding psychical and emotional about face. A
Khudai Khidmatgar who took Khan’s oath renounced not just violence
but the code of revenge itself, badal, the cornerstone of his value
system and the cult of the heroic Pathan. “To bear this zulum
[tyranny] without retaliation is hard indeed,” we read one villager
telling Verrier Elwin at the height of the British repression in
1932.
“But do you still believe in nonviolence?”
“With all our hearts.”
Because of their demanding inner struggle, Pathans under Khan’s
leadership were able to invoke resources of courage and will that
far exceeded their known limits, and came into possession of that
inner strength-“soul-force”-which Gandhi claimed we all possess but
do not know about. It is a power released from within the depths of
the human spirit. Gandhi called it the strength of God.
When he visited the Frontier in 1938, Gandhi made clear the
profoundly spiritual nature of transformative nonviolence. “To
realize nonviolence means to feel within you it’s
strength-soul-force-to know God.” At Utmanzai he told Khan’s
red-shirted officers, “If the Khudai Khidmatgars really felt within
themselves an upsurge of soul-force as a sequel to their renouncing
arms, they would have the strength of God behind them.” Call it what
you will, there is no denying the display of this power in the lives
of both Gandhi and Badshah Khan, or in the collective force of
Khan’s Khudai Khidmatgars.
It is tribute to the Pathans’ capacity for faith, as much as to
their bravery, that they could so genuinely accept such a foreign
code of conduct and use it to work the reversals of thinking and
action we read of here. Their transformation were not always
complete or permanent, as in the case of the outlaw Murtaza Khan,
but they were often profound, and even in Murtaza Khan’s example
they left permanent marks.
The full effect of Khan’s movement on the progress of his people can
never be measured. What remains unmistakable in the story of the
Khudai Khidmatgars is that nonviolence, properly undertaken, recasts
and empowers the human personality, very little is known about this
kind of transformation. While some attention has been given by
scholars to nonviolence’s a political weapon, virtually nothing
exists in the literature regarding the effects of nonviolence upon
those who practice it. Since we are dealing with such intangibles as
“soul-force,” faith, and “conscious suffering”-difficult qualities
to quantify and observe-these dimensions of nonviolence may well lie
outside the scope of traditional scholarship.
And perhaps this is as it should be. For in the lost analysis, such
nonviolence-this “truth-grappling”-is a private affair carried out
mostly within the human mind and heart. To move it into a wider
sphere of acceptance, what is needed is not study so much as
committed individuals ready to undertake its disciplines.
The lack of work on this subject does not mean that we must proceed
alone or unguided. There was Gandhi, after all, and now there is
Badshah Khan to throw some light across the path. It is especially
fitting in this regard that Khan’s story is being presented to
western audiences by Eknath Easvaran, for his primary interest in
both Khan and Gandhi has been their personal transformations from
flawed human personalities to permanent forces for good. This is not
the place to enter into detail abut the exact nature of the
disciplines that nonviolence requires; Eastwaran has done this
exhaustively in other books. But to those who would follow in Khan’s
footsteps, the extraordinary story of his courage and doggedness in
his fight against tyranny leaves no illusions about what is
required.
Nonviolence, whether political, social, or persona, is a battle,
an unflagging engagement of the will against tyranny using the
weapons of fearlessness, love, and faith. As Khan told his Khudai
Khidmatgars, “You have to be against all tyrants, whoever they may
be; whether individuals or nations…you will oppose them” –even, we
can assume, if the tyranny is found to be those turbulent forces of
the soul which tyrannize from within the recess of one’s own heart.
Those who would take up this call step into the stream of an ancient
tradition of fighters that includes the Buddha and Jesus, continues
through St. Francis, and is passed on today, among others, by
Gandhi, Martin Luther King jr., Mother Teresa, and Badshah Khan. The
fight, as Khan says, “Is always noble,” and those who make the
attempt to enter its “holy edifice” will find their powers on the
rise. The world needs such men and women. May they flourish-or as
Badshah Khan himself might say to them, Stremashe: may they never
grow tired. |
