Haas left India for Europe in March 1947. The news of Gandhi's assassination (30 January 1948), reached him in London. Gandhi and the principle of non-violence constituted the second reconstructive chiffre for his affinity to India. Already as a young man he had affirmed a Tolstoyan fundamental pacifism and probably around the First World War he had read Remain Holland's book on Gandhi. As he writes: 'I wanted to see Gandhi's country. And I have seen Gandhi's country.' (LW 266). And it is around the shock of the news of Gandhi's assassination that Haas puzzles out his complex relationship to 'Gandhi's country'.

He remembers holy men who wore masks so that they would not inadvertently kill an insect. He remembers a servant who refused to kill a snake and instead carried it carefully away into a nearby jungle. He also saw a dying, suffering cow that nobody would kill. And one of them had gone and killed the one person who preached the sanctity of life. Clearly, Haas' epiphanic re-discovery of Kipling's Kim, and the shock over the assassination of Gandhi cannot but generate the gesture ot die futility of understanding the 'difference'. Haas ultimately decides in his autobiographical reconstruction to leave the plane of intellectual understanding and analysis. The only satisfactory possibility to demonstrate his empathy for India was to leave the terrain of discursive articulation and situate himself in the epiphany of non-verbal recognition:

Such passages may not be very far from kitsch. But they have been contextualized within a comparative cultural meditation and the metaphor of a 'love' which, as it were, transcends difference, and is none the less, based on a conscious awareness and conceptualization of difference. This aspect is articulated in an essay on 'Indische Probleme' published in 1946 in the famous Die Neue Rundschau, which at that time was still being brought out from Sweden by the Bermann-Fischer Verlag. Here, Haas would speak with the intellectual authority of the former editor of Die liter ariscbe Welt and the political anti-Fascist credentials of a European exile, living in India.

India's crisis, Haas claims- and he was referring to the post-war and pre-independence phase- was not just a political one. To understand it, he stressed that Europeans must demarcate some fundamental concepts which differ essentially between India and Europe as far as their thought content and emotional connotations were concerned. Haas referred to the concept of history, historical action and historical development (understood as progress) (NR81). Haas approached this problem by first referring to the concept of history as he saw it articulated in the Old Testament. The Jewish philosophy and analysis of history are concerned with the history of their sins and penance, virtues and rewards; in other words with divine vengeance. Jewish historical research, therefore, becomes a search for the sin or virtue responsible for unhappiness or happiness respectively. This, Haas asserted was true for Hinduism and its concept of history also, but with a completely different accent and range. Here it is not just a question of man, but of nature in its entirety, whether animate or inanimate. Above this nature there is not just any God, but a precise mechanism of guilt or crime and punishment that is impersonal. For this mechanism does not exclude anything, be it human, natural divine.