Gandhi's Last Words

In the summer of 1947, Gandhi said in one of his prayer meetings: "It is my constant prayer ... that even if I fall victim to an assassin's bullet I may deliver up my soul with the remembrance of God on my lips."

Gandhi was assassinated a few months later, January 30, 1948. The account of Gandhi's death that is now widely held fulfills his desire: "[Godse] whipped out a black Beretta automatic pistol and fired three shots point-blank at Gandhi. All three bullets penetrated his chest. Crying out "He Ram!" ("O God!"), Gandhi collapsed to the ground, dead."

However, Gandhi's devoted disciple, Pyarelal, wrote: "I am convinced that the last words that issued from Gandhiji's mouth as he lost consciousness were not "Hey Rama!" but "Rama, Rama" -- not an invocation but simple remembrance of the Name. "Hey Rama!" was the expression we inscribed and hung up before Gandiji's seat in the Detention Camp, Poona, during his twenty-one fast in 1943. Substitution of "Hey Rama" for "Rama Rama", the actual words used, is another instance of popular errors getting imbedded in the matrix of history like insects in pieces of amber and staying put there."

And the writer Ved Mehta concluded: "Eyewitnesses have said that Gandhi died instantly, but the myth has grown up that as he was struck down he called out "He Ram! He Ram!""

What were Gandhi's last words? On reflection, it seems unlikely that a seventy-eight year old man, barely recovered from a life-threatening fast, could take three bullets to the chest and still manage to speak. Perhaps his last words were uttered just before he was shot: it could be that he saw Godse begin to draw his gun, realized something was wrong, and blurted out "Rama!" just before the bullet hit.

It's also possible that the assassination happened so fast that Gandhi didn't have a chance to say anything at all. In that case, his last words were spoken to his two closest disciples, his young relatives Manu and Abha. As he made his way to the prayer meeting, supported by Manu and Abha, whom he called his "walking-sticks", he complained: "I am late by ten minutes. I hate being late. I like to be at the prayer punctually at the stroke of five." This is less heroic, but it is quintessential Gandhi. In the tradition of his Banya ("shopkeeper") ancestors, he accounted for everything: every minute of his time, every paisa of the ashram's money, every ounce of his goat-milk curds.

Gandhi's public proclamation that he wished to die with the name of God on his lips only confuses the issue. It meant that his disciples already had an expectation of what his last words should be. Memory is not a tape-recorder: it is a creative act of imposing a coherent narrative on chaotic experience.

Gandhi's last words will never be known beyond any doubt; certainty belongs to some other realm than this one. I close with a verse from the Bhagavad Gita, chanted by Gandhi the morning of his death:

For certain is death for the born

and certain is birth for the dead;

Therefore over the inevitable

thou shouldst not grieve.