The day Gandhi died my father spent a sleepless night worrying not about the future of India but about the identity of the assassin. His great fear was that he would turn out to be a fellow Bengali, a province which had been cruelly divided between India and Pakistan and where Gandhi’s attempts to bring peace between Hindus and Muslims had been seen as a great betrayal of the Hindus. Ironically when Godse – the assassin – turned out to be a Maharastrian from western India (the part of India we lived in), my father found that for some people Godse was something of a hero, or at least not irredeemably criminal.

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