We are excited to announce that AFSEE Fellows, Appu Suresh and Priyanka Kotamraju have written a book investigating the murder of Mahatma Gandhi. The book titled ‘The Murderer, The Monarch and The Fakir: A New Investigation of Mahatma Gandhi's Assassination’ was published by Harpercollins India in October 2020. We interviewed the authors to celebrate the launch of the book.
1. What inspired you to write a book on this topic and how did you end up writing it together?
The book has been almost eight years in the making. We are not talking about the writing process, rather the information gathering process. The influences, inspiration, and information to write this book also have come from over the years from various places; from formative college years at St Stephen's college to careers as investigative journalists. Appu has written about this journey in the prologue of the book - St. Stephen’s college, his alma mater, has been an important site of history, especially leading up to India’s independence in 1947. Mahatma Gandhi’s association with the college goes back to 1913 when C F Andrews convinced Gandhi to return to India from South Africa on the backing of the college principal, Sushil Kumar Rudra. S.K Rudra not only played host to Gandhi on his visits, but his home was the centre of anti-colonial activities and thinking in Delhi at the time. When the Gandhi Study Circle, a student society, was revived during Appu’s time, he and fellow students brought in Gandhian scholars to address them. A particularly important conversation with professor K P Shankaran somehow came to shape the foundational inquiry of the book - which Gandhi was murdered? Gandhi, the father of the nation; Gandhi, the apostle of non-violence; or Gandhi, the economic thinker who wanted to dismantle elite formations (princely states) at the time of independence.
Being an investigative journalist, it was part of Appu’s job to look beyond the government records that were publicly available. Especially while reporting on a series on communal riots in northern India, he came across bits and pieces of information in local police departments in mofussil towns, away from Delhi. In the prologue, Appu also talks about conversations with a bureaucrat source who told him that he believes the gun that killed Gandhi came from the armoury of the then princely state of Alwar. This piqued his interest and he started investigating a bit more closely. The Alwar rumour turned out to be false. But it sparked a long interest in piecing together details about perhaps the most important political assassination in the history of modern India. Priyanka’s involvement came in a bit later when a broader picture began to emerge of the reasons behind the assassination.
As we say in the book, we are not historians. We wanted to look at the assassination of Gandhi closely, investigate all the evidence that is publicly available and go beyond that to look at fresh evidence that is not yet in the public domain. Arguably the most important political assassination in the history of modern India is a mere footnote in our school curricula. If you are not a student of history, the murder of Mahatma Gandhi is a fading memory, embellished with little information.
2. Can you tell us about the book?
The Murderer, the Monarch and the Fakir is a fresh investigation into Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, which is arguably the most controversial political murder in contemporary history. Why was Gandhi killed; in our view, the accused - Nathuram Godse, Narayan Apte, Digambar Badge, Vishnu Karkare, Gopal Godse, Madanlal Pahwa, Shankar Kistayya, and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar - would have had answers to this question. As they did to an extent in their statements to the court at the Red Fort Trial. We also thought the people who could come closest to the truth (other than the accused) were the investigators of the murder. So, we pieced together the sequence of events leading up to the assassination on January 30, 1948, from police interrogation reports, case diaries, intelligence notes, and statements of the witnesses and accused.
The Red Fort trial sentenced Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte to death, however, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was acquitted. In a subsequent inquiry into the assassination, the Jeevanlal Kapur Commission admitted evidence from two witnesses who did not appear in the trial and concluded that V D Savarkar, the father of Hindutva, and his group of acolytes were involved in the conspiracy to murder Gandhi. Our book places on record further evidence to support this conclusion.
The first part of the book is about the assassination, whereas the second part is about all the various actors involved in the conspiracy. We examine and provide evidence of the role of princely states in the assassination of Gandhi, about which not much is known. The final part of the book looks at the Hindutva nation, as conceptualised by V D Savarkar and espoused by his acolytes, vis a vis Gandhian thought on nation and state.
3. Why is Gandhi’s assassination still relevant over 70 years later?
At the time we set out to write this book, it seemed to us as the political past had come to haunt the present. The idea of India, the idea of a nation has come under violent contestation, and we are seeing a resurgence of Savarkarite ideas of India, as Gandhi’s ideas of India have quietly retreated. The Gandhian character of nationalism predicated on the unwavering pursuit of ethics and welfare through truth and non-violence, satya and ahimsa, has dissipated, giving way to an anxious, antagonistic nationalism bequeathed by Savarkar, that is powered by a sense of opposition to the other. We wanted to revisit Gandhi’s assassination because it appears that we have become preoccupied with either vigorously opposing or enthusiastically supporting the rehabilitation of Vinayak Savarkar or Nathuram Godse, whereas our real aim should be the rehabilitation, critically and empathetically, of Gandhian thought.
We also think it is important as a matter of historical record. The Gandhi assassination was not a hastily contrived response to his last satyagraha, as is popularly understood. It was a premeditated plan that was put into action as early as August 1947, before independence.
4. How did your AFSEE experiences help you in your book writing journey?
Both of us were part of the first cohort of AFSEE, in 2017-18. In our view, it was a tumultuous time for the world. The seemingly unthinkable had happened - Donald Trump was elected as the president of the US, Brexit seemed inevitable, it seemed like the many parts of the world had taken a turn towards conservative, in some cases authoritarian regimes. India had suffered the shock of demonetisation and a build-up of communalism in its national discourse. In our view, perhaps, variations of the narrative of ‘Hindu khatre mein hai’ (Hindus are in danger) were exploited by regimes for political gains, like in the US and the UK. At AFSEE, we were exposed to and learned much about inequalities that shaped these political choices and fuelled these narratives. Understanding inequality also gave us a framework to understand the formation of elite interest at the time of India’s independence.
5. Where can we purchase the book?
The book was published by Harpercollins India in October 2020. For now, it is only available in India for circulation. An e-copy, via Kindle, is available on Amazon.
The book was launched at an event on Thursday 27th of January 2022, hosted by the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity and the LSE International Inequalities Institute.