He received many angry and hurt letters which poured upon him “the lava of their unmeasured and acrimonious criticism". This confession and his insistence that his act should be perceived as pure ahimsa perturbed many. In the Gujarati original, he had used “dharma" and “ahimsa". “In these circumstances, I felt that humanity demanded that the agony should be ended by ending life itself." The term “humanity" seeks to render two terms far more significant than their English rendering. The suffering was so great, Gandhi narrated, that it could not even be turned to its side without excruciating pain. Whatever care, nursing, and treatment could be provided was given to the calf.
The surgeon who treated it declared that the condition was past any hope. It had been maimed and lay in agony for days. Gandhi described the condition of the calf. Gandhi, borrowing a line from the eighteenth century Gujarati poet Pritam, wrote a confession in the Navajivan titled Pavak Ni Jwala which Pyarelal translated in Young India as Fiery Ordeal. Sometime between 25th and 30th September of 1928, in the presence of Gandhi, and at his instance, a doctor administered a quietus by means of a poison injection to a terminally-ill calf at the Satyagraha Ashram in Ahmedabad. This episode is not mentioned in the history of Gujarati Literature, where the period from 1915 until independence is called the Gandhi Yug-the age of Gandhi. One way to deal with embarrassment is forgetting, or as French writer Milan Kundera would say: laughter and forgetting.
By 1936, the Parishad was somewhat, just somewhat, embarrassed by its earlier choice. The literary classes of Gujarat had preferred an officer of the Baroda State, Hargovinddas Kantawala, to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Neither the literary figures nor the wealthy merchant capitalists who had gathered at the Parishad were oblivious to the fact that, in 1917, Gandhi had been frustrated in his attempt to be chosen as the president of the Parishad. In 1925, he had resolutely declined to accept the same responsibility. It had required strenuous persuasion for Gandhi to assent to be the president of the parishad’s 12th session. On 31 October that year, he had presided over the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad, a body that formally came into existence in 1905.
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