'A little old man who has renounced personal possessions, walking with bare feet on the cold earth in search of a great human ideal'

Phillips Talbot, South Asia correspondent of the Chicago Daily during Independence, was an eyewitness to history. He traveled to Noakhali, West Bengal, and spent time with Mahatma Gandhi during the communal violence there.

In a fascinating letter to a friend in New York, he conveyed his impressions of his encounter with Gandhi. Currently president emeritus at the Asia Society, New York, Mr Talbot granted Rediff On The NeT permission to use this letter from his archives in the Freedom section.

22 Ferozshah Road
New Delhi, India
February 16, 1947

Mr Walter S Rogers
Institute of Current World Affairs
522 Fifth Avenue
New York 18, New York

Dear Mr Rogers,

Two weeks ago I traveled for five days in order to walk for an hour with Gandhi.

The journey was worth the effort. It was revealing to watch Gandhi throwing himself during this critical season into the remoteness of East Bengal's Noakhali district for a barefooted village-to-village pilgrimage in search of Hindu-Muslim amity. Here was a 77-year-old ascetic, rising above the physical ordeal, immersed in a peculiarly Indian approach to the cleavage that threatens the country.

The region in which Gandhi has secluded himself is deep in the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta; one of the least accessible flat lands of India. To reach his party, I traveled by air, rail, steamer, bicycle, and on foot.

Hardly a wheel turns in this teeming, jute-and-rice-growing delta. I saw no motorable road. The bullock cart, one of India's truest symbols, does not exist here. The civilisation is amphibious, as fields are always flooded between April and October. In the wet season little remains above water except occasional ribbons of bund and isolated village clumps marked by coconut palms, bamboos, and betel trees. People stay at home or, at best, move about in hand-hewn skiffs. Though some of their crops grow under water, they farm mostly in the winter dry season.

Here, in an entirely rural area about forty miles square, are jammed nearly two and half million people: 1,400 per square mile or more than two per acre. Eighty per cent of these peasants are Muslims. Apart from a few wealthy families they "have nothing but their numbers", in the words of one senior Muslim official.

Impoverished cultivators racially indistinguishable from their Hindu neighbors, they suffered severely in the 1943 Bengal