The story of India’s Partition has been told many times, yet it remains incomplete. Historians have long obsessed over causes, while the vast consequences of that decision have been pushed to the margins. Punjab and Bengal became shorthand for Partition’s horrors; Sindh and Bihar barely entered the frame. Millions were uprooted, women brutalised, and the ideal of a humane politics shattered. Amidst this moral wreckage stood a frail, 78-year-old man still clinging to the dream of non-violence. Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee’s Gandhi: The End of Non-Violence is a luminous meditation on that final act of Gandhi’s life, his desperate attempt to salvage the idea of peace from the ashes of freedom.
Bhattacharjee focuses on the turbulent years between late 1946 and Gandhi’s assassination in January 1948, when communal fires raged through Bengal, Bihar, Delhi, and Punjab. These were the years that tested his creed most cruelly. Having once taught India to resist empire through moral strength, Gandhi now found himself pleading with Indians to resist hatred itself. The book traces his lonely pilgrimages through Noakhali’s ravaged villages and Delhi’s burning streets, portraying him as both healer and witness.
What makes Bhattacharjee’s work striking is not the new archival discovery but its interpretative daring. He reads Gandhi through philosophy and literature: Levinas’s ethics of the Other, Heidegger’s ‘being-toward-death’, Foucault’s ‘practices of the self’, even echoes from Kafka and Rushdie. The dialogue between European moral philosophy and Gandhi’s lived ethics reveals that the Mahatma’s experiments were not merely political tactics but existential acts.
Bhattacharjee’s method is to braid three strands: Gandhi’s words, reflections from later scholars, and his own meditative commentary. The result is not conventional history but a philosophical narrative that reads like a series of moral inquiries. The prose flows between documentation and lyric rumination. At the heart of the book lies a paradox. India achieved freedom through a movement that prided itself on non-violence, yet that freedom arrived drenched in blood. Gandhi, who had made ahimsa the cornerstone of national awakening, watched his principle collapse under the weight of religious hatred. Bhattacharjee captures the anguish of this moment with rare poignancy: Gandhi was mourning two things together, the violence of Partition and his own irrelevance.
Equally compelling is Bhattacharjee’s insistence that Gandhi’s interventions were never backed by the coercive strength of the state. He had no army, no police, no political office. Only the moral authority of a conscience. To him, peace enforced by fear was itself a form of violence. He believed that unless people refrained from killing out of love and self-control rather than fear of punishment, society could never be truly non-violent.
The book does not spare Gandhi either. It probes the limits of his vision, his inability to anticipate the political forces that would tear India apart, and the tragic futility of his last campaigns. Bhattacharjee contrasts Gandhi’s relentless self-interrogation with the moral evasions of other leaders. He asks why, while Gandhi risked his life protecting Muslims in Bihar and Delhi, no leader in the newly formed Pakistan rose to safeguard Hindus and Sikhs in Punjab and Sindh. The silence of the Muslim League is treated as an ethical failure.
What gives the book its power is Bhattacharjee’s ability to turn historical fact into a philosophical parable. Gandhi, he suggests, was engaged in a ‘politics of listening’ in an age of oratory. While leaders preached, he heard the cries of both victim and perpetrator, often rebuking them with uncomfortable truths. “He had the moral guts,” writes Bhattacharjee, “to say something harsh even to a victim.”
Gandhi’s last journey, as rendered here, resembles a philosophical pilgrimage. He carried in his satchel the Ramacharitamanas, Bible, and Dhammapada. And in his heart, perhaps, Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You, the book that had once converted him from violence to faith. Yet even he could not redeem his people from themselves. In the final analysis, Bhattacharjee seems to say, Gandhi failed, but he failed better. That failure, illuminated with such tenderness, becomes a kind of moral victory.
The prose, poetic yet precise, makes the past shimmer with unsettling relevance. In a century once again teetering on the edge of ideological hatred, this book reminds us that Gandhi’s final fasts were not only against bloodshed but against forgetfulness itself.