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Type to search for People, Research Interests and Universities Searching... 1,345 Gandhi's inaudible last wordsmore by Mark Lindley There is good evidence to suggest that Mahatma Gandhi's last words may have been "Rama, Rahim!". More Info: In Journal of Peace and Gandhian Studies, III/1; = Chapter 4 of "Gandhi and the World Today (1998): An American View" Research Interests: Mahatma Gandhi and Gandhian philosophy,peace and nonviolent reconciliationedit Download (.pdf) Quick view Share Facebook Twitter EditDeleteMove section 1,345 Download (.pdf)

GANDHI' S INAUDIBLE LAST WORDS

Mark Lindley

A few days after Gandhi died, his secretary, Pyarelal, wrote a detailed account of the assassination, including the following: "At the first shot, the foot that was in motion, when he was hit, came down. He still stood on his legs when the second shot rang out, and then collapsed. The last words he uttered were 'Rama 1 Rama'." As everyone knows, a rather different exclamation, "Hey, Ram!", is normally attributed to Gandhi. In the 1960s his niece, Manu, who was near him, recalled his last words as "Hey Ram, Hey Ram".
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According to one of the conspirators who was nearby in the crowd, Gandhi produced only an inarticulate guttural rasp.4 If each of four witnesses to something gives a version contradicting all the other three, the most reasonable conclusion is that it was not readily perceptible. And indeed, Gandhi was frail and old and a bullet had entered his chest. At least some of the witnesses seem to have heard what they expected or wanted to hear. The "guttural rasp" version, for example, might well be dismissed as hostile. However, the fact that two of the other three accounts imply that Gandhi said more than just "Hey Ram" once - which a devout Hindu might be assumed in principle to say - suggests that this version is also incorrect. ("Rama, Rama" would beautifully express surrender to Rama's will; but the same words spoken quickly as "Ram, Ram" could express mere surprise. "Hey Ram, Hey Ram" would most likely express an un-Gandhian sense of helplessness.) In this light it may be of interest that nine months earlier, Gandhi, in one of his talks after a prayer meeting, suggested unequivocally that his last words, if he were assassinated, would be "Rama, Rahim": "Even if I am killed, I will not give up repeating the names of Rama and Rahim, which mean to me 5 the same God. With these names on my lips, I will die cheerfully." The name "Rahim" is derived from an ancient Hebrew word for "womb", of which the plural form means "mercy" or "compassion".6 (Thus one point of invoking Rahim would be to express forgiveness to the assassin.) In Islam this was transformed from an alleged attribute of to a synonym for "Allah"; and Muslims pray daily to Rahim. There is an instructive logical conundrum in Gandhi's remark. If the two names "Rama" and "Rahim" mean the same god, then either one alone will invoke that god, so why use both? In this light we can see that saying "Rahim" would, according to Gandhi's way of thinking, only add a certain resonance to, but not detract from, his devotion to Rama. Was it just a passing remark? That is suggested by the fact that no indication has been published of Gandhi's having made the same assertion on other occasions. And I can see two other substantial arguments against the likelihood that he died saying, or trying to say, "Rama, Rahim". On the one hand, it would have been such a radical innovation that we might doubt he could really have intended to do it. On the other hand, his personal devotion to Rama, going back to childhood days when he first learned

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Gandhi's inaudible last words | Mark Lindley - Academia.edu

http://www.academia.edu/303908/Gandhis_inaudible_last_words

"Ramanama", was deeper than to Rahim. In 1931, for instance, he told some Christian missionaries that whereas the name "God" made no particular appeal to him, "when I think of Him as Rama, He thrills me"; and in 1934 he urged a group of tribals in Bihar to "learn to repeat the blessed name of Rama with such sweetness and such devotion that the birds will pause in their singing to listen to you".7 He did not dwell in such a way upon the name "Rahim". The force of this latter point may be augmented by the common-sense argument that at a moment of suddenly impending death, anyone's actions are more likely to be intuitive than calculated. However, there is some circumstantial evidence suggesting that Gandhi might have kept his "Rama, Rahim" idea in mind and have acted upon it. The evidence can be put under three headings (though some of it actually belongs under two of them at once): (1) a growing willingness, particularly in his very last years, to innovate more radically than he had ever done before; (2) his apparent attitude toward the assassination and, in particular, toward what might be (and to some extent was) achieved by it; and (3) a tendency to take on a broader religious identity and, in particular, to be somewhat Muslim as well as Hindu. Let us consider these in turn.
Spiritual sea-changes late in life

Gandhi's thinking evolved to a remarkable extent during the last 15-20 years of his life. In regard to intermarriage, for instance, for a long time he had considered prohibition or at least self-imposed re8 striction against marrying outside one's own varna to be "essential for a rapid evolution of the soul", but by 1946 he took a very different view: "If I had my way I would persuade all caste-Hindu girls 9 coming under my influence to select Harijan husbands." And, whereas he had previously envisaged "nothing but disaster" following any attempt to advocate Hindu-Muslim marriages so long as the relations between the two religions remain strained, 10 nonetheless by 1947, when those relations were more strained than ever before, he had "come to the conclusion that inter-religious marriage was a welcome event whenever it took place" and he welcomed the institution of civil marriage "as a much11 needed reform to clear the way for inter-religious marriages". He had long abhorred vivisection and declared that "if the circulation-of-blood theory could not have been discovered without vivisection, the human kind could well have done without it".12 But when he had to decide in 1945 whether to allow at Sevagram the vivisection of a frog in order merely to demonstrate in a nurses' class the phenomenon of heartbeat, he said: "Dissect the frog if that is the only way to explain the heartbeat."13 He used to say things like: "An atheist might floor me in a debate, but my faith runs so very much 14 faster than my reason that I can challenge the whole world and say, 'God is, was, and ever shall be'." But in 1945 he privately told an outspoken atheist (of good character, and a dedicated social-worker): "I can neither say my theism is right nor your atheism wrong. We are seekers after truth.... There is no harm as long as you are not fanatical. Whether you are in the right or I am in the right, results will 15 prove"; and, a year later: "I know you are not a fanatic.... It looks as if... you will carry this old man 16 into your camp." (Here I should stress that Gandhi deeply loved religion according to his definition of it as "the quality of one's soul"; he said that it exists among humans "in visible or invisible form", that through it "we are able to know our duties as human beings [and] our true relationship with other living things", that 17 "we should take this discipline from wherever it may be found", and that it should not mean sectarianism but a belief in ordered moral government of the universe.18)

These examples taken together - and others could be cited - show that Gandhi was never more ready to innovate than in his very last years. In this light it could be argued that the idea of invoking Rahim as well as Rama was too radical, not for him, but only for some of his followers who would find it regrettably contrary to his ishtadevan heritage.

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Gandhi's inaudible last words | Mark Lindley - Academia.edu

http://www.academia.edu/303908/Gandhis_inaudible_last_words

Having memorised the Gita, he knew of course that it sanctions the worship of a universal supreme spirit in any form: "Whatever form one desires to worship in faith and devotion, in that very form I make that faith of 27 his secure." He would sometimes mention Kabir in the same breath as his beloved Tulsidas; he is known to have 28 read Kabir in prison in 1922 and again (in Tagore's translation) in 1923; and, Kabir often equated 29 Rama with Rahim - as when he would say: "Rama and Rahim are one and the same." Kabir is thus likely to have been a source for some of Gandhi's own statements along the lines of: "By Ramarajya I do not mean Hindu raj... [but] the kingdom of God. For me Rama and Rahim are one and the same deity."30 The similarity to Kabir should not surprise us, given that Gandhi's mother had belonged to the Kabir31 Panthi sect - which had been, Gandhi said, "looked upon as crypto-Muslims". It was personally important to Gandhi not to infer from the Ramraj slogan a Hindu nation. In 1946 he explained: "'Rama-Rajya' ... is a convenient and expressive phrase, the meaning of which no alternative can so fully express to the [Hindu] millions. When I ... address predominantly Muslim audiences I would express my meaning to them by calling it 'Khudai Raj', while to a Christian audience I would

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Gandhi's inaudible last words | Mark Lindley - Academia.edu

http://www.academia.edu/303908/Gandhis_inaudible_last_words

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Gandhi's inaudible last words | Mark Lindley - Academia.edu

http://www.academia.edu/303908/Gandhis_inaudible_last_words

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Gandhi's inaudible last words | Mark Lindley - Academia.edu

http://www.academia.edu/303908/Gandhis_inaudible_last_words

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