On this day Amrita Bazar Patrika, a newspaper published from Calcutta, carried a report on the German writer Thomas Mann paying a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, who was assassinated on January 30, 1948.

“Mr. Thomas Mann, the German Novelist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929, has paid a tribute of profoundest reverence to ‘India’s Sainted Martyr’, as he described Mahatma Gandhi,” the report said.

“…he gave the following message to Dr Amiya Chakravarty of Calcutta University who is now in the United States and whom he invited last week to his home in the Pacific Palisades, California,” it added.

“Gandhi Mahatma has died, but he has not died to millions of mankind who need him in order that human civilisation can be saved on this planet. They have not killed him in India, some violent men who belong to no country, but they have demonstrated to all of us that he cannot be touched…,” the report quotes Mann.

“In his discussion with Dr Chakravarty, Mr Mann also referred to Poet Rabindranath whom he met in Munich, and said that the true internationalism of Tagore, based on the spiritual sense of human unity, was missing today among narrow intellectual forms of world organisation,” the report concluded.

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