ABSTRACT
Gandhi was talking about living for 125 years at least as late as mid-June 1947. This was a full 10 days after a formal agreement for the country’s partition had been reached. The diary of Brij Krishna Chandiwala, who was tending to Gandhi during his last days, gives us an idea of the ordeal the old man was undergoing. Chandiwala writes: Gandhiji heard everything and saw everything. Gandhi’s sorrows were very different from the sorrows of common people. It is not that he was immune to the sorrows that affect common people. But he would not let himself be overwhelmed by them. Gandhi’s biggest sorrow, the source of all his sorrows on the eve of independence, was the failure of ahimsa. Freud has spoken about the ‘revenge of the repressed’. Gandhi, without having read Freud, was filled with a sense of foreboding at the terrifyingx manner in which the violence repressed for long years in people’s hearts could boil over.
