GANDHI'S INAUDIBLE LAST WORDS

Mark Lindley

A few days after Gandhi died, his secretary, Pyarelal, wrote a detailed account of the assassination, in-
cluding 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
Rama'."1

As everyone knows, a rather different exclamation, "Hey, Ram!", is normally attributed to Gandhi.2
In the 1960s his niece, Manu, who was near him, recalled his last words as "Hey Ram, Hey Ram".3
According to one of the conspirators who was nearby in the crowd, Gandhi produced only an inarticu-
late 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 quick-
ly 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
the same God. With these names on my lips, I will die cheerfully."5

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 argu-
ments 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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"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 to-
ward 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 re-
striction against marrying outside one's own varna to be "essential for a rapid evolution of the soul",8
but by 1946 he took a very different view: "If I had my way I would persuade all caste-Hindu girls
coming under my influence to select Harijan husbands."9 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 much-
needed reform to clear the way for inter-religious marriages".11
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
faster than my reason that I can challenge the whole world and say, 'God is, was, and ever shall be'."14
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
prove";15 and, a year later: "I know you are not a fanatic.... It looks as if... you will carry this old man
into your camp."16
(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
"we should take this discipline from wherever it may be found",17 and that it should not mean sec-
tarianism but a belief in ordered moral government of the universe.18)

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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.

His attitude toward the assassination

Gandhi knew that the assassination was coming, and yet did nothing to prevent it. The story has been
told so many times, it needn't be reviewed here.19 Given his remarkable depth of political insight into
India, it seems likely that he expected his assassination to fulfil, as indeed it did, one of his dearest
wishes in his last years, which not even his heroic walking-tours and fasts could fulfil: to mitigate the
mutual hatred of Hindus and Muslims far more than anyone else at that time could imagine possible.
During the last few years of his life Gandhi had for the most part lost his former wish to live out the
theoretical full Hindu, 125-year life-span;20 and this welcoming of death had in recent months become
stronger, as when he wrote to a friend, toward the end of November 1947: "Now we are daily growing
more and more barbarous.... That is why I am praying within, 'O Rama, now take me away soon'."21
Earlier in 1947, however, he had told a friend:

"I do not want to die ... of a creeping paralysis of my faculties.... An assassin's bullet may put an
end to my life. I would welcome it. But I would love, above all, to fade out doing my duty with
my last breath."22

On the morning of day he was killed, he expressed unmistakably his doubts as to whether he would
survive that particular day.23
Since he had this premonition and was a remarkably thoughtful and utterly dedicated politician, it
seems reasonable to suppose that he would give careful thought to the matter of what his last words
should be. And since he was an extraordinarily disciplined person, he might even say what he planned
to say (whereas most people would probably be unable to carry out such a plan). The purpose of
preparing his last words would be to make the most effective contribution to "the service of my
country and therethrough of humanity".24
He knew from experience that to harp explicitly upon such an idea as dying with an invocation of
Rahim on his lips would mainly just annoy the fanatics. Yet even they must, he might hope, come to
their senses if he were to proclaim it at the very moment of his death. Reflections in this vein might
cause him, once the idea had occurred to him, to keep it to himself until that moment. This hypothesis
provides a special explanation for why he did not mention his beloved Rama when he said, just a few
hours before his assassination (though not on the same day), "If someone were to end my life by put-
ting a bullet through me - as someone tried to do with a bomb the other day - and I met his bullet
without a groan and breathed my last taking God's name, then alone would I have made good my
claim [to be a man of God]."25

His broadening religious identity

Already in 1909 in South Africa, Gandhi had argued, in regard to some Hindu-Muslim riots in Cal-
cutta, that overseas Indians "must not support either side" but instead should "pray to Khuda-Ishwar" -
that is, to a deity at once Muslim and Hindu - "in mosques and in temples to grant that there
might be an end to the disputes ... between our two communities."26

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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
his secure."27

He would sometimes mention Kabir in the same breath as his beloved Tulsidas; he is known to have
read Kabir in prison in 1922 and again (in Tagore's translation) in 1923;28 and, Kabir often equated
Rama with Rahim - as when he would say: "Rama and Rahim are one and the same."29 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 Kabir-
Panthi sect - which had been, Gandhi said, "looked upon as crypto-Muslims".31
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 alterna-
tive 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
describe it as the Kingdom of God on Earth. Any other mode would, for me, be self-suppression and
hypocrisy."32 This was to some extent like regarding all religions as equal - which in 1932 he had de-
scribed as an idea of his own devising:
"Probably this view of mine about equality of all religions is a new idea. If other people also have
thought about the matter along similar lines, I am not aware of the fact. For me at any rate, the idea
is original and it has given me the purest joy."33

His religious observances included non-Hindu prayers and hymns. On the last day of a fast in 1933,
for instance, he told his secretary, "Better fix up the plan for tomorrow. Dr. Ansari will read something
from the Koran; we might have a Christian hymn, and then our song of the true Vaishnava."34 The ten-
dency was particularly strong in regard to Islam. A visitor around 1920 recalled, years later: "Gandhi-
ji's prayers included readings from the Gita and the Koran. To these were later added verses from the
Bible and recitations from Parsi, Sikh, and Buddhist prayers, as well as the singing of hymns from
various religions."35
Everyone knows how in January of 1947 (a year before his death) Gandhi adopted an uncommon vari-
ant of the Ramdhun prayer, with the words "Ishwar Allah tere nam" ("'Ishwar' and 'Allah' are Thy
names") replacing "Patita pavana Sita Ram" for the second verse.36 By now he was saying to his
Muslim listeners: "If Muhammed came to India today, he would disown many of his so-called
followers and own me as a true Muslim."37 And to the Hindus: "Anyone who says that I cannot go and
offer my prayer before the Muslims does not know Gandhi.... I am ashamed of this [Hindu] gentleman
who ... is so terribly ignorant. When the ocean catches fire, who can extinguish it?"38
Gandhiji himself? But how?
Any devotee of truth ought to admit that we shall never know which were his last words. They were
inaudible. It would be worthwhile, however, to take seriously the possibility that they may have been
the ones that he said they would be. Even without being able to determine what he said, we can draw a
lesson from the evidence in regard to "Rama! Rahim!".

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 NOTES

1. Harijan, 15 February 1948, p.1. Pyarelal was not there but his account is surely based on first-hand
reports.
2. An American scholar has suggested that this version is due to a businessman who was there, Gurbadu
Singh. (Martin Green, Tolstoy and Gandhi, New York, 1983, p. 281, and Gandhi, Voice of a New Age
Revolution, New York, 1993, p. 386.)
3. Gandhiji at Delhi (in Gujarati; Ahmedabad, 1964), II, p. 428.
4. Green, Gandhi, Voice of a New Age Revolution, p.386.
5. See Harijan, 20 April 1947, p. 118. This was noticed more than thirty years ago by someone at the
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in New Delhi (Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity)
who prepared, for the celebrations of the centenary of Gandhi's birth, a portable exhibition package entitled
"Mahatma Gandhi in the Service of Humanity". In that package, sheet no. 64 has the following captions:
"THE CONSUMMATION. LAST DAYS. ON THE WAY TO THE PRAYER GROUND, JANUARY 29, 1948. THE DAY BEFORE......
'EVEN IF I AM KILLED, I SHALL NOT GIVE UP REPEATING THE NAMES OF RAMA AND RAHIM, WHICH MEAN TO ME THE SAME
GOD......'."
Then on the 50th anniversary of Gandhi's death, which was also Ramzan in 1998, the The Hindu
(perhaps stimulated by having received in the post a draft of the present essay) published at the top of its
front page a photograph of Gandhi, with the following caption: "The day before: 'Even if I am killed, I
shall not give up repeating the names of Rama and Rahim, which mean to me the same God....' Mahatma
Gandhi with his associates on his way to the prayer ground in Delhi on January 29, 1948, the day before he
was assassinated." By omitting the second sentence of the citation ("With these names on my lips, I will
die cheerfully"), these editors focused exclusively on the basic point that Gandhi equated Rama and
Rahim; and prefacing their selected excerpt with the tag, "the day before", they implied (misleadingly) that
Gandhi made the remark on 29 January 1948.
6. Exodus, XXXIII, 19; Deuteronomy, XIII, 17-18; Isaiah, IX, 17, XIV, 1 and LXIII, 7-15; Psalms, LXXVII,
9, LXXIX, 8 and XIX, 77; etc. See J. C. Manalel, "Bible and Women's Liberation" (Vol. XXI, No. 122 of
Jeevadhara; Kottayam, 1991), p. 109.
7. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, XLVIII, p. 127 and LVII, p. 446.
8. Ibid., XXI, p. 247 and LV, p. 61.
9. Harijan, 7 July 1946, p. 213. A detailed account is in a booklet entitled "How Gandhi Came to Believe
Caste Must be Dismantled by Intermarriage", available (for Rs.10) from the Centre for Gandhi Studies,
University of Kerala, Trivandrum - 695 034. (A Hindi translation is available for Rs.20 from the National
Gandhi Museum, Rajghat; New Delhi - 110 002.)
10. Gandhi, Collected Works, XLVI, 303.
11. Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi, the Last Phase, 1st edition, vol. I (Ahmedabad, 1956), p. 558, or 2nd edition
(1966), vol. I, bk. 2, p. 199.
12. Gandhi, Collected Works, XXIX, p. 325.
13. Gora, An Atheist with Gandhi (Ahmedabad, 1951), p. 40.
14. Gandhi, Collected Works, XXIX, p. 411.
15. Gora, op. cit., p. 44.
16. Ibid., p. 49.
17. See S. N. Hay, "Jain Influences in Gandhi's Early Thought", in Sibnarayan Ray, ed., Gandhi, India, and the
World (Melbourne, 1970), p. 35.

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18. Harijan, 10 February 1940, p. 445.
19. Some good narratives are in Pyarelal, op. cit., vol. II (1958) and in Robert Payne, The Life and Death of
Mahatma Gandhi (London, 1969).
20. In Gandhi's Collected Works, see for instance LXXXV, pp. 205, 370 and 455, and LXXXVII, p. 522.
21. Ibid., XC, p. 83.
22. Pyarelal, op. cit., 1st ed., vol. I, p. 562, or 2nd ed., vol. I, bk. 2, p. 202.
23. "Bring me all my important letters. I must reply to them today, for tomorrow I may never be" (K. P. Go-
swami, Mahatma Gandhi, A Chronology, Delhi, 1971, p. 239). "Who knows what is going to happen
before nightfall or even whether I shall be alive?" (Pyarelal, op. cit., II, p. 767).
24. Gandhi, Collected Works, XXIII, p. 349.
25. Pyarelal, op. cit., II, p. 766.
26. Gandhi, Collected Works, IX, p. 134.
27. Gita, VII, 21.
28. Gandhi, Collected Works, XXIII, pp. 150 and 179.
29. G. N. Das, tr., Mystic Songs of Kabir (Delhi, 1996), p. 18.
30. Gandhi, Collected Works, XLI, p. 374.
31. Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi. The Early Phase (Ahmedabad, 1965), p. 214.
32. Gandhi, Collected Works, LXXXV, p. 135.
33. Ibid., LI, p. 317.
34. Tendulkar, Mahatma. Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Delhi; 2nd ed., 1962), III, p. 206. (Verrier
Elwin had encouraged Gandhi to include something Christian each Friday; see, for instance, in Gandhi's
Collected Works, L, p. 34.)
35. V. L. Pandit, The Scope of Happiness. A Personal Memoir (Delhi, 1979), p. 66.
36. Manubehn Gandhi, op. cit. (in note 3 above), I, p. 121; Pyarelal, Last Phase, 1st ed., I, p. 515, or 2nd ed.,
I/2, p. 158.
37. Harijan, 17 November 1946, p. 405.
38. Gandhi, Collected Works, LXXXVII, p. 431.