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man as kind-hearted as Wavell, the viceroy whom Louis Mountbatten was destined to succeed, detested him as a "malevolent old politician . . . Shrewd, obstinate, domineering, double-tongued," with "little true saintliness in him."
    Few of the English who had negotiated with Gandhi liked him; fewer still understood him. Their puzzlement was understandable. With his strange blend of great moral principles and quirky obsessions, he was quite capable of interrupting their serious political discussions with a discourse on the benefits of sexual continence or a daily salt-and-water enema.
    Wherever Gandhi went, it was said, there was the capital of India. Its capital this New Year's Day was the tiny Bengali village of Srirampur, where the Mahatma lay under his mudpacks, exercising his authority over an enormous continent without benefit of radio, electricity or running water, thirty miles by foot from the nearest telephone or telegraph line.
    The region of Noakhali in which Srirampur was set, was one of the most inaccessible in India, a jigsaw of tiny islands in the waterlogged delta formed by the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers. Barely forty miles square, it was a dense thicket of two and a half million human beings, 80 percent of them Moslems. They lived crammed into villages divided by canals, creeks and streams, reached by rowboat, by hand-poled ferries, by rope, log or bamboo bridges swaying dangerously over the rushing waters pouring through the region.
    New Year's Day, 1947, in Srirampur should have been an occasion of intense satisfaction for Gandhi. He stood that day on the brink of achieving the goal he had fought for for most of his life: India's freedom.
    Yet, as he approached the glorious climax of his struggle, Gandhi was a desperately unhappy man. The rea-
    sons for his unhappiness were everywhere manifest in the little village in which he had made his camp. Srirampur had been one of the unpronounceable names figuring on the reports arriving almost daily on Clement Attlee's desk from India. Inflamed by fanatical leaders, by reports of Hindus killing their coreligionists in Calcutta, its Moslems—like Moslems all across Noakhali—had suddenly turned on the Hindu minority that shared the village with them. They had slaughtered, raped, pillaged and burned, forcing many of their neighbors to eat the flesh of their sacred cows, sending others fleeing for safety across the rice paddies. Half the huts in Srirampur were blackened ruins. Even the shack in which Gandhi lay had been partly destroyed by fire.
    The Noakhali outbursts were isolated sparks, but the passions which had ignited them could easily set the whole subcontinent ablaze. Those horrors, the outbursts which had preceded them in Calcutta and those which had followed to the northwest in Bihar, where with equal brutality a Hindu majority had turned on a Moslem minority, explained Attlee's anxiety with the man he urgently wanted to dispatch to New Delhi as viceroy.
    They also explained Gandhi's presence in Srirampur. The fact that, as their hour of triumph approached, his countrymen should have turned on one another in communal frenzy, broke Gandhi's heart. They had followed him on the road to independence, but they had not understood the great doctrine that he had enunciated to get them there, nonviolence. The holocaust that the world had just lived through and the specter of nuclear destruction now threatening it were to Gandhi the conclusive proof that only nonviolence could save mankind. It was his desperate desire that a new India show Asia and the world a nonviolent way out of man's dilemma. If his own people turned on the doctrines he had lived by and had used to lead them to freedom, what would remain of Gandhi's hopes? It would be a tragedy that would turn independence into a worthless triumph.
    Another tragedy too threatened Gandhi on New Year's Day, 1947. To tear India apart on religious lines would be to fly in the face of everything Gandhi stood for.