Living in the Light of Little Gandhis: Muslim Predicament and Hope in Mohinder Singh Sarna's “The Minor Gandhis”

Abstract

This article analyses Mohinder Singh Sarna's Punjabi short story "The Minor Gandhis", a narrative that refuses the familiar grammar of partition violence and chooses instead to tell a quieter, more intimate story about the fragile but persistent ember of hope that kept alive, for India's Muslims, the possibility of staying and belonging. Set against the backdrop of riot-ridden Delhi of 1947 and Gandhi's remarkable intervention, his fast unto death that brought the violence to a sudden halt and revived the possibility of peace and communal amity, the story captures, through the ordeal of one poor Muslim woman, the existential predicament of an entire community suspended between belonging and exile. Placing the story in its historical and political context, this article argues that it is Gandhi, and the countless little or minor Gandhis inspired by him, who gave Muslims in post-partition India the confidence and assurance to continue calling India their home.