Gandhi is one of those personalities
whom people completely adore or completely hate. Most of the times, these
extreme feelings are a result of ignorance about the man, the myth and the
legend. His core principles as known by everybody is pluralism and non-violence.
Although these core ideas brought many contemporaries and critics of Gandhi
against him-even murdered him for the former, the most controversial of MKG’s
principles is his adherence to and practice of brahmacharyam or celibacy.
During his early years in India i.e. before the brief, albeit
eventful, stint in South Africa, he was no exception to the erstwhile Gujarati
society. Due to his early marriage and patriarchal mindset, he gave into his
pleasures and hence the episode of lustful sex during his father’s funeral. He
has also confessed his disability to control his sexual passion quite frankly
in his autobiography which he wrote after becoming the Mahatma.
While in his thirties, due to continuous self-introspection
and introduction to varied schools of thought- from Gita to Bible and his
favorite Tolstoy, he made a vow of celibacy in 1906. He thought it necessary
for the work he just started doing- being the Messiah. He thought of
abstinence from passion (for anything) as ammunition for his nonviolent
struggle against oppressors. He stopped dressing up, reduced his food intake
and declared to his wife that he will have no physical passion for her anymore.
As one of Gandhi’s admirers, Nirmal Bose asserted ‘he represented a hard puritanical form of self-discipline,
something we usually associate with medieval Christian ascetics or Jain
recluses’.
Gandhi imposed his vow of celibacy on all who lived with him
in his ashram. It was for him a mark of sacrifice and of moral purity. He
believed with full conviction that these sacrifices are necessary for a life of
service and struggle. His fetish for abstinence made him evangelical that he
imposed strict restrictions on inter-sex communication in his ashram school. He
gave sermons on the importance of being a brahmacharya, mainly to boys.
“As days pass I realize
with increasing clearness that preservation of the vital fluid is imperative if one is to serve the country.”
“I appeal to all
parents and guardians present here to help their boys in every way to conserve
the vital fluid”
Gandhi had numerous
female friends, at the ashram and in political life. He did not show aversion
to women like Buddhist monks did, but was even in a way harmlessly flirtatious.
He also used to stay in homes of women colleagues while on the road. One such time,
in Lahore, was when he met this Bengali woman, striking-looking, with a lush head
of black hair that hung down to her shoulders- it was Sarala Chaudhurani,
daughter of one of Rabindranath Tagore’s sisters. She was a well-born, well-read
lady with an interesting aptitude for non-violent struggle and women’s rights.
He had met her earlier once but staying together under the same roof provided
sufficient time for them to get to know each other.
As things always do, one led to another and they both found
themselves enchanted by each other. Even after he left her house, they had
frequent correspondence through letters
.
“You still continue to
haunt me even in my sleep. No wonder Panditji (her husband) calls you the
greatest shakthi of India. You may have cast that spell over him. You are
performing the trick over me now”
The feeling was mutual and the letters continued for a long
time. Gandhi even went on to declare her his “Spiritual Wife”, whatever that means. He started to yearn for her
letters like a teenage boy with pumping hormones.
“I was certain of a
letter from you yesterday. But none came. Today too there is a blank. I wonder,
however. I know you have not failed me, it is the wretched post”
It is a pity that none of her replies lasted as Gandhi’s
family had it destroyed later. All things considered and to be fair, there was
nothing physical about their relationship, at least not yet. He even thought of
making their relationship public but was stopped by another patriarch whom
Gandhi called his keeper of conscience - it was
Rajaji, his future sambandhi. Rajaji,
a rational man, warned his colleague to stop this nonsense and to focus on the
struggle for independence. Although Gandhi respected Rajaji a great deal, he
would not stop his correspondence with his new found love for a long time until it broke down for various other
reasons. Other reasons included restraint from his marvelous secretary Mahadev
(who is also a rational man), difference in lifestyles of loin-cloth Gandhi and
lavish Sarala and also political differences which grew over time. Gandhi
reflecting on this time later, confesses that he ‘almost slipped’ from his path
of celibacy and brahmacharya.
During the late 1930s, Hindu-Muslim
harmony, one of Gandhi’s core principles, was strained beyond redemption. As
the largest proponent of inter-religious harmony, he was asked my many well
minded citizens to control the widening of the gap between Hindus and Muslims.
To one such letter he replied that it was ‘unfair’ to put the whole ‘burden’ on
him and that he was trying hard to work on that direction, but deep down, he
took the burden and blamed himself for the derailment of Hindu- Muslim
relations.
He pleaded for communal harmony through his newspaper with a
strange preface admitting to personal weakness.
“I seem to have
detected a flaw in me which is unworthy of a votary of truth and ahimsa. I am
going through a process of self-introspection, the results of which I cannot
foresee. I find myself for the first time in the past 50 years in a slough of
despond”
This sense of sudden frailty of the self was not because of
political swamps but because of his personal ‘slip’ of the physical body. Turns
out, one morning in April 1938, he awoke with an erection; and despite efforts to control his excitement, had a
masturbatory experience. Explaining his despair to a fellow ashramite, he wrote
“I was in such a
wretched and pitiable condition that inspite of my utmost efforts I could not
stop the discharge even though I was fully awake”
He continued
“Where am I, where is
my place and how can a person subject to passion represent non-violence and
truth?”
These letters provide valuable insight into how serious he
took celibacy. He genuinely believed the Christian myths of the celibate
messiah and Indian ascetics who withdrew from being householders to enter the
path of dharma towards global good.
He deemed suppression and eventually indifference towards lustful passion as one
of the important traits of a servant in the service of God and mankind. He even
thought of explaining the whole ‘saddening’
experience on his newspaper but was stopped right in time by, again, Rajaji. He
was also most straightforward and brutally honest about his private life so
much that an English Quaker who had interacted with Gandhi for a period of
twenty years pointed out, “Gandhi had no
private life, as we Westerners understand the expression”.
Tagore criticizing Gandhi on an entirely different topic
suggested that Gandhi “is growing
enamored of his own doctrines- a dangerous form of egotism that even great
people suffer from at times”. This comment holds good for all of Gandhi’s
doctrines, including celibacy. Sometimes such extreme adherence to a dogma might
prove to be disastrous, at least to the outside world. His many fasts were
expressions of such extreme dictates of his doctrines.
The strangest of his ‘Experiments
with Truth’ was very late in his life when religious violence increased
manifold and spirits for unity declined steadily. During late December 1946,
Gandhi asked his grand-niece Manu to join him in bed every night. Manu was in
her late teens while the grand old patriarch was approaching eighty. Some of
his close confidantes died, including his wife Kastur Ba and secretary Mahadev,
his spirits were low, so he gave in to one of his irrational beliefs that his
declining influence on the Hindu-Muslim problem was, he doubted, that he was not
brahmacharya enough.
Manu had lost her mother in a very young age so it was Kastur
Ba who brought her up. She grew up in the ashram and had been schooled in the
ashram school. It is safe to assume that she would have been indoctrinated on
the teachings of ahimsa and of brahmacharya. It is said that Pyarelal, Gandhi’s
new secretary had proposed marriage to Manu to which she had out rightly
rejected, as a perfect ashramite would do. So Manu was also motivated to go
through the “severe test” which her
master Gandhi- whom she refers to as mother
(ma Bapu), put before her.
The true Brahmachari, claimed Gandhi, would ‘remain
passionless’ even when faced with ‘the most beautiful damsel on earth’. He was
clear on his objective of this severe
test, testing his brahmacharyam thereby using his powers to control the
religious violence which massacred the streets on Bengal and Punjab. It just
shows the desperate efforts to, one may argue to be back on the public eye as
the messiah, or to really stop the
violence which he abhorred truly. Whichever may be the case, it is not fair to
justify the irrational beliefs the Mahatma
held to satisfy his vanity.
He wrote to his learned colleagues like Vinoba Bhave among
others and everyone advised against it with Sardar Patel being ‘very angry’,
understandably so- considering his political stature. At no point in time did
he actually force or compel her to undergo the tests, this is clear from his
letter to Vinoba Bhave telling that the practice had ended because she stopped
coming after a ‘pathetic’ letter from her father.
To quote himself on the meaning of brahmacharya, he said:
“one who never has any
lustful intention, who by constant attendance upon God has become proof against
conscious and unconscious emissions, who is capable of lying naked with naked
women, however beautiful they may be, without being in any manner whatsoever
sexually excited. Such a person should be incapable of lying, of intending or
doing harm to a single man or woman, is free from anger and malice and detached
in the sense of the Bhagavad Gita. Such a person is a Brahmachari.”
Gandhi has been criticized widely on the question of
celibacy, in a way, his critics are justified, yes. But he did not do anything
that he felt was immoral, in fact, he pushed himself to the extremes of his
doctrines as far as he could during his lifetime. Morality is a hued prism with
each angle reflecting and refracting varied wavelengths of light changing
frequently with place and time. As an admirer of Gandhi myself, I am glad that
he was there when he was, not early not late. Although a major obsession for
him, his other works towards self-rule, eradication of untouchability and village
rehabilitation eclipses this small peck on the large scheme of things.
The more we learn about the man, we will learn to accept the
myth as it is with all his shortcomings and contradictions in creation of the
legend, the most important personality in the history of modern India.
Reference: Gandhi: The years that changed the World- Ramachandra Guha
