ABSTRACT
Mahatma Gandhi is quite convinced of his own irrelevance to the new age that has dawned with India's independence and the Partition of the country. Gandhi is also increasingly aware of his sense of helplessness, the waning of his ability to influence policy or change the way the new governments of India and Pakistan behave. As he said to Kripalani, 'if normalcy is restored in Delhi I would like to go and die there'. In the context of the violence of Partition, Gandhi believed that a certain kind of noble death was better than either cowardly victimhood or cowardly brutality. In a letter written on 2 January 1948, he offered yet another iteration of his view of life and death, before offering up his own life to bring about communal harmony:No one can harm another. He began to reduce his reliance on human and worldly agencies, placing his trust entirely in God.
