Vinay Lal Gandhi Nakedness

Nakedness, Nonviolence, and Brahmacharya: Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality Author(s): Vinay Lal Source: Journal of the History
of Sexuality, Vol. 9, No. 1/2 (Jan. - Apr., 2000), pp. 105-136 Published by: University of Texas Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3704634 . Accessed: 30/12/2013 14:48
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
University of Texas Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the History of Sexuality.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 68.63.150.1 on Mon, 30 Dec 2013 14:48:15 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Nakedness, Gandhi's
Nonviolence, Experiments in
and
Brahmacharya: Sexuality
Celibate
VINAY Department University
LAL
of History Los Angeles of California,
o f Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is certainly as well docu? as any life of modern times. There are nearly a thousand biographies of him in English alone, and Gandhi himself was extraordinarily prolific, judging from the one hundred volumes of his collected writings. Given the monumental nature ofthe record of his life, and the scrutiny to mented which most it has been subjected, it is all the more surprising that one of the from a certain standpoint among the most disturbin what is otherwise seen as a saintly life should have received ing?events critical?and so little attention.
Th e life
In the last few years before his assassination in January 1948, but mo$t certainly no earlier than the death of his wife in 1944, Gandhi took to the practice of taking naked young women to bed with him at night. Gandhi, who never wore many clothes to begin with, would himself be naked on such occasions. Three women?his grandnieces Abha in? and Manu and his personal physician of sorts, Sushila Nayar?were in brahmacharya, which with erroneous simvolved in this "experiment" plicity has been rendered as 'celibacy'. Gandhi described brahmacharya as and thus, in its most ordinarily ac? the "search [for] Brahma [truth]," cepted sense, the "control in thought, word and action, of all the senses at all times and in all places."1 Brahmacharya, the elimination of all desire,
Gandhi, "What is Brahmacharya?,"Young India (June 5 1924), reprinted in M. K. Gandhi, The Law of Continence: Brahmacharya,Pocket Gandhi Series, no. 7, ed. Anand T. Hingorani (Bombay: BharatiyaVidya Bhavan, 1964), p. 18.1 have not italicized commonly used Sanskritwords such as satya (truth), ahimsa (nonviolence), satyagraha(the name given to Gandhi's strategy of nonviolent resistance), and brahmacharya,all of which are an indispensable part of any lexicon of Gandhian thought. 2000 Vol. 9, No. 1-2, January/April Journalofthe HistoryofSexuality, of TexasPress,P.O. Box 7819, Austin,TX 78713-7819 ? 2000 by the University 105
106
VlNAY Lal
was to be obtained
by diving into, and realizing, the inner self: and it is this spiritual discipline that furnished the nonviolent resister with true armor. "Without Brahmacharya the Satyagrahi will have no lustre," wrote
Gandhi, "no inner strength to stand unarmed against the whole world. . . . His strength will fail him at the right moment."2 Many years after Gandhi's death, Sushila Nayyar provided an account It is she who first shared Gandhi's of Gandhi's brahmacharya experiments. bed, but as she was to recall, she never experienced any sexual desire, and felt as she would with her mother. At the outset it was no more than a part of Gandhi's program of "nature cure." Gandhi might ask her to lie on his back if his back ached, and Nayyar reports that Gandhi would even go to more often than sleep while she was perched on his back. Subsequently, first Manu it shared Gandhi's bed. At had slipped was Manu who not, "was with her clothes and covers under the on, snoring within apparently minutes of getting into his bed." Then, Nayyar says, Gandhi told Manu that their purity had to be subjected to the "ultimate test," and they were to offer the "purest of sacrifices." He suggested that they "now both start sleeping naked."3 Manu, reports Nayyar, readily consented. that Gandhi made improper advances There was never any suggestion Manu or the other two women who on occasion had slept with him, or that the encounter was in the remotest matter sexual, or even that towards Manu and the other he had entertained "impure" thoughts towards women. Gandhi himself eventually made this matter public knowledge on the nature of his experiment, and was to write voluminously though in on his this matter there appears to have been some unusual dissimulation
part, insofar as initially he kept the matter of his sharing a bed with a fully clothed woman a secret. "She often used to sleep with me to keep me warm," Gandhi said of a fellow ashramite woman by the name of Prabhavati, He may "even before I was conscious that I was making an experiment."4 have suspected that this narrative would seem quite implausible to others, as indeed it did, the common rejoinder being that Gandhi had merely to take recourse to more blankets to keep himself warm. Later, Gandhi would admit that he had erred only in not publicly divulging his practices: by not discussing them, he not only had allowed others to place on his actions whatever constructions they thought desirable, but he had also violated the principle that the seeker of truth can have nothing to hide.5
Quoted by Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: TheLastPhase, Vol. I, Book Two (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1956; 2d ed., 1966), p. 210. Ved Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 203. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi [hereafter cited as CWMG], 100 vols. (New Delhi: Government of India, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Publications Division, 1954-1995), 79: 213. SCWMG,87: 90; cf. 86: 423.
Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality
107
In late 1946, then, when Gandhi's brahmacharya experiment came to the fore, he was seventy-seven years old, and it had been forty years since he with any woman, his own wife not had engaged in a sexual relationship was on the horizon, and Gandhi had already been excepted. Independence not merely of the assimilated in the minds of some into the pantheon but of renowned saints and even gods. It is not for nothing immortals, a Mahatma that he had been christened by his great countryman, Tagore, three decades previously; and, as the eminent phicritic Ananda Coomaraswamy reminds us, Mahatand cultural losopher mas or "Great Souls" are those who, though having become liberated in this life, jivan-mukta, undergo acute suffering to bring succor to ordinary men and women.6 Yet, in the waning years of his life, as he was receiving some of the greatest accolades that had ever been showered on him, and Rabindranath as he honorably attention ofthe stood aside from the struggles for power that engaged the political leaders who were about to condemn the country Gandhi was prepared to face the public ignominy that knowl?
to vivisection, was bound to produce. Indeed, in an inedge of his sexual experiments stant he lost many of his friends, and many of his most trusted disciples and colleagues were to forsake him. Many Indian women, who have ex? pressed intense admiration for Gandhi, construe the Mahatma's practice of taking naked young women to bed as an unaccountable blot on an otherwise noble life, and he has not been forgiven this massive indiscretion. The author of the earliest, and what remains to this day the most exhaustive, account of Gandhi's experiments in sexuality was to note much as "after later that he had to publish his account at his own expense, to all further discussion ofthe death wanted everyone suppress Gandhiji's brahmacharya experiments."7 of recent years have nothing monograph to explore Many ofthe acclaimed biographies of Gandhi to say of this matter,8 and the most detailed relations with women, though authored
Gandhi's
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, "Mahatma," in Mahatma Gandhi: Essaysand Reflections on His Life and Work,ed. S. Radhakrishnan (London: George Alien & Unwin, 1939; 2d enlarged ed., 1949), 63-67. As Coomaraswamy pointedly notes, Mahatma (from the Sanskrit maha = great + atma = soul) is rendered literally as 'Great Soul', but that is far from the meaning it truly implies. A Mahatma is "one who is 'in the spirit', and more than man"; such a Mahatma abandons the 'petty selP and lives only in his 'great self (p. 64). Nirmal Kumar Bose, as quoted in Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles,p. 193. Even the biography by Catherine Clement, a French feminist and psychoanalyst, devotes just two sentences to this matter. The caption accompanying a photograph of Gandhi with Manu and Abha, who were his constant companions after Kasturba's death, states: "He had brought up the two orphans and shared a bed with Manu, his favorite, as a way of testing their virtue. The ensuing scandal was deeply mortifying to Gandhi." See her Gandhi: Father ofa Nation (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), p. 113. The English translation ofthe French original of 1989 appearsin a series called "New Horizons." The most notable exception to the silence on this matter is William L. Shirer's Gandhi: A Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 230-38, though Shirer's account is largely descriptive.
108
Vinay
Lal
by an Indian woman activist and scholar,9 is stunningly silent on this ques? tion while being quite profuse in its delineation and critique of Gandhi's views on sexuality and sexual conduct. One might have expected that Gandhi's detractors,10 of whom there are many, would have pounced upon the Mahatma for harboring sexual fantasies in the ripe years of his life while proclaiming himself to be a celibate, for the lives of very young women, and for exploiting the vastly compromising that obtained between him and the young iniquitous power relationship women. However, even his critics, whether it be the Marxists, Indian liberals, or Hindu militants such as his assassin, Nathuram Godse, have always understood that though agreement with Gandhi's political and economic views was never to be expected, and that his political conduct may be open to question, his personal life was unimpeachable.11 Gandhi would appear to an to his in his death, as much but critics, present extraordinarily easy target as in his life, he continues to confound his opponents regardless of the shade of their opinion. Indeed, neither Gandhi's advocates nor his detrac? tors have had an easy time with him. The upholders of tradition thought to violent revolutionary they had found in Gandhi, who was opposed follower ofthe sanatan dharma, change and even declared himself to be a or the eternal faith, a reliable ally. But Gandhi had little use for institutional declared religion, paid little or no heed to caste practices, and unequivocally that the authority ofthe scriptures was to be abrogated whenever the scriptures advocated positions reprehensible to the conscience.12 It is Gandhi's contribution to social reform, his efforts to improve the position of women classes," and his advocacy of religious harmony that endeared him to the modernizers; and yet these very modernizers are com? his to to Gandhi for refusal endorse modern industrial civipelled castigate his of his the naivete about nature of lization, scientism, supposed critique the modern world and realpolitik, and his seemingly ineffective and conciland "backward Madhu Kishwar, "Gandhi and Women," Economicand Political Weekly 20, nos. 40 and 41 (1985), reprinted as Gandhi and Women(Delhi: Manushi Prakashan, 1986). Gandhi has had many detractors and critics over the years, among them Marxists, liberals, Dalits, Hindu militants, and modernizers. The best treatment of this subject, though still quite inadequate, is to be found in B. R. Nanda, Gandhi and His Critics (Oxford: Delhi University Press, 1985). The real exception here would be American and English critics such as Richard Grenier and Michael Edwardes to whom Gandhi was not merely an eccentric, but a "humbug" and, in the words of the popular English historian Paul Johnson, a "consummate sorcerer's apprentice." See his article "Gandhi Isn't Good for You," Daily Telegraph(April 16,1983). On Edwardes, see Mark T. Berger, "Gandhi and the Guardians?Michael Edwardes and the Apologetics of Imperialism," Bulletin of ConcernedAsian Scholars(1989). M. K. Gandhi, "Why I am a Hindu," Toung India (October 20, 1927), also anthologized in Raghavan Iyer, ed., TheMoral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. I: Civilization, Politics, and Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 26-7'.
Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality iatory insistence on persuasion, faith, discipline, and the adherence for radical change. violence and truth as the preconditions To modernizers such as his own "disciple" Jawaharlal Nehru Nobel
109 to nonand the
laureate Amartya Sen, Gandhi has too much resemblance to a relic of some bygone age.13 His opposition to industrialization and his purported defense ofthe bourgeois order always made him an abhorrent figure to the Marxists,14 but lately Indian Marxists are discovering that Gandhi was more attuned to the problems of caste and class in India than their own revolutionary theorists, and that India's deeply syncretistic traditions may be more effective in combating the resurgence of Hindu militant ideologies than secularism ofthe Western variety. This same dilemma has confronted feminists. While berating Gandhi for holding to conventional views about the relative duties of men and women, for his failure to recognize female sexu? ality, and for his apparent willingness to have women confined to the prescribed mental dian feminists realms of marriage, wifehood, and domesticity, In? motherhood, nonetheless concede that Gandhi was, paradoxically, instruin bringing women into the nationalist movement and allowing
them a significant public space. They likewise recognize that he assisted in for the Indian women's movement by stressing the laying the groundwork equality of men and women, rendering respectable the decision of women to forgo marriage for other ends, and holding men to the same standards of moral conduct and responsibility to which women were bound.15 has never been, in consequence, easily appropriable, and both his admirers and critics have found that wrestling with the Mahatma generates acute anxiety. What is, in many respects, the most extraordinary epiGandhi it produces sode in his life must present even graver problems of interpretation, just as a great deal of unease. That, however, can be no warrant for not its political consequences examining the nature of Gandhi's experiment, and moral implications, informed his practices. and the complicated cultural history and logic that It is not pleasing to the self-appointed guardians of
Nehru's profound unease with Gandhi, commingled with intense admiration for the "miracles" that Gandhi was able to work in India, is palpable in all his writings on Gandhi: a good example is his autobiography, TowardFreedom(1941; reprint ed., Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), pp. 47-53, 65-85, 309-26; for Amartya Sen's predictable and rather impoverished reading of Gandhi, see "Tagore and His India," New TorkReview of Books(June 26, 1997), pp. 55-63. 14 For critical Marxist views of Gandhi, see M. N. Roy, Selected Writings ofM. N. Roy, 3 vols. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 2: 152-7, 180-4, 310-15; 3:457-8, 566-71; and Against the Stream: An Anthology of Writings of Saumyendranath Tagore, 2 vols., ed. Sudarshan Chattopadhyaya (Calcutta: Saumyendranath Memorial Committee, 1975). See Kishwar, Gandhi and Women,passim, and Ketu H. Katrak, "Indian Nationalism, Gandhian 'Satyagraha,'and Representations of Female Sexuality,"in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger (London: Routiedge, 1992), pp. 395^06.
110
VlNAY LAL
his memory and reputation, particularly those who have devoted their lives to what they perceive to be Gandhian causes or have long been associated that Gandhi should be associated with institutions, what some judge to be unsavory incidents; his status as "Father ofthe Na? tion" also appears to demand that only a hagiographic portrait be allowed to circulate. One American journalist who knew Gandhi well maintains, with various Gandhian "probably we shall never know the whole truth about Gandhi's 'experiments' with lying naked with naked women in the evening of his life,"16 while a renowned Indian scholar who was Gandhi's associate in 1946-1947 feels that the wall of silence will never be brought down, as "the wish to be died in our country with Gandhiji. It was never very strong, even his among disciples."17 As Gandhi himself argued, it is not given to humanof an understanding kind ever to know the "whole truth"; nonetheless, Gandhi's experiment in what may be called "celibate sexuality" allows us to truthful with Indian sexual, political, and spiriprobe the extent of his engagement tual traditions, and to consider how far his insights into sexuality extend beyond parameters that have seldom been conceived even by the proponents of free love. As I will argue, Gandhi takes us into that realm ofthe and in politics ofthe body where 'woman' and 'man' must be reconfigured, postmodern this sense he provides a striking is already prefigured illustration of the manner in which the in the premodern.
I: The Vow
of Brahmacharya
and the
Company
of Women
Kasturba Gandhi died in the Aga Khan's Palace in On February 22,1944, of Poona as a prisoner under British custody. A well-known photograph the Mahatma taken at this time shows a forlorn and utterly dejected Gandhi the enormity sitting by his wife's deathbed, almost unable to comprehend a and at first tumultuous of of his loss.18 Through long sixty-two years and political married life, the two had developed a friendship, association, unusual in the annals of Indian marriage. Their early years companionship to pursue his studies of married life were spent largely in separation, as Gandhi left for London and then took up a career in South Africa. NevertheShirer, Gandhi, p. 238. Nirmal Kumar Bose, as quoted in Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles,p. 194. Gandhi was never addressed as Gandhi except by British officials, newspaper editors, and strangers.To most Indians he was "Bapu,"or Father;and then he was "Bapuji,"the suffix "ji" being an honorific. At other times he was "Mahatmaji."He is now spoken of as "Gandhiji." This photograph is reproduced in, among other works, Clement, Gandhi, p. 99; Rob? ert Payne, TheLife and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (1969; reprint ed., New York:Smithmark Publishers, 1995), following p. 416; and D. G. Tendulkar, Mahatma: TheLife ofMohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 8 vols. (new ed., New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of In? formation and Broadcasting, Government of India), Vol. 6, between pp. 32 and 33.
111
less, five years after his marriage at the age of thirteen, Gandhi was already a father; and over the course of the next thirteen years, Kasturba was to give birth to three more sons. In 1906, when he was thirty-seven years old, Gandhi, the father of four children, took a life-long vow to abjure from all sexual relations with his wife or any other woman. He had first decided upon this course of action in his reason for 1901, and it may have been, as one scholar has conjectured, not wanting Kasturba and their children to join him in South Africa upon his return to that country.19 The presence of his wife, Gandhi might have felt, would weaken his desire to abjure any sexual contact with her. But Gandhi was unable to keep to his resolve, and at least intermittently must have continued to maintain as he was about to launch rassing and degrading subject,20 Gandhi decided Gandhi's sexual relations with Kasturba. Finally, in 1906, a major nonviolent campaign to resist the "harestrictions in South Africa" to which Indians were to embrace brahmacharya, or complete celibacy. that Kasturba was of the same mind as
autobiography suggests her husband, but it is not quite clear how far Kasturba was consulted before decision. He might not have thought her Gandhi reached his monumental to his decision critical, as at this point in his life he appears to acquiescence have held the view that "husband and wife do not have to obtain each other's consent
for practising brahmacharya": "mutual consent is essential for intercourse, but no consent is necessary for abstention."21 The author of an eight-volume biography of Gandhi, who aims at sketching a hagiographic profile ofthe Mahatma as the man who was destined to free India from the servitude of British rule, is extraordinarily laconic about Gandhi's assump? tion of celibacy. He notes that Gandhi discussed "the vow of brahmacharya and conveyed his resolution to Kasturbai." with his intimate co-workers that Gandhi would discuss the matter with One might have thought insofar as it had to be conveyed to and convey his resolution, His biographer workers. adds: "Thus to his fellow else, anyone had been which Gandhi 'willynilly' since 1900 brahmacharya observing was sealed with a vow in the middle of 1906."22 An American biographer Kasturba states, likewise, that Gandhi told Kasturba of being "irrevocably determined
19 Sudhir Kakar, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1989), p. 94. 20 Tendulkar, Mahatma, 1:75. CWMG 30: 143. Much later in life, Gandhi held a contrary view: responding to a query from a married man who wished to observe brahmacharyain opposition to his wife's wishes, he said, "A husband or wife can strive for any aim which was not present in the minds of both at the time of marriage, only with the consent of the other party. In other words, a husband cannot take the vow of brahmacharyawithout the consent of his wife." See CWMG 66: 70. Tendulkar, Mahatma 1: 77.
112
Vinay
Lal this decision as she
to live in perfect chastity. An obedient wife, she accepted accepted all the other demands he made on her."23 Gandhi's autobiography close association itself furnishes with his wife would to her husband's a remarkable forms. Kasturba never acceded
henceforth
take different
wishes easily, and Gandhi's testimony to her tenacity and
of judgment, and the sharp disagreements she came to have independence with him when, in the first two decades of their marriage, he unreasonably sought to bring her under his control.24 But Kasturba gave Gandhi her and political equality for Indians support in his quest for social, economic, in South Africa and India, and she was among the first ofthe satyagrahis, or nonviolent decision resisters, sent from Phoenix into the Transvaal to protest the ofthe South African government to declare all non- Christian mar-
riages null and void.25 After their permanent return to India in 1914, and Gandhi's entry into the Indian political scene in 1917, Kasturba was to even more of a political actor. She would take his place at political which he was unable to attend and was particularly active in the In time she acquired a political long periods of his various imprisonments. of her in a short introduction Gandhi provided own,26 personality though become meetings to a biography of Kasturba after her death, he described the "root cause which attracted the public to Kasturba" as her ability to lose herself in him. Gandhi says that he "never insisted on this self-abnegation. She developed this quality of her own. At first I did not even know that she had it in her. According to my earlier experience, she was very obstinate. In spite of all my pressure she would do as she wished. This led to short or long periods of estrangement between us. But as my public life expanded, my wife bloomed forth and deliberately lost herself in my work." Most significandy, Gandhi was to add: "What developed the self-abnegation in her to the highest level was our Brahmacharya." Gandhi says that he made a resolve to become a brahmacharya "and Ba, as she was affectionately called, accepted it as her own"; indeed, he admits, brahmacharya was "more natural for her than for me," and so he arrives at the formulation of "our brahmacharya." Payne, Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 160. 24 Writing to a European woman on March 12, 1928, Gandhi had this to say about his treatment of Kasturba:"But I thought that if people recognize me as a gentie peace-loving man, they should also know that at one time I could be a positive beast even though at the same time I claimed to be a loving husband. It was not without good cause that a friend once described me as a combination of sacred cow and ferocious tiger." See Iyer, ed., Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, 1: 28-9. 25Ibid.,pp. 256-8. The memory of Kasturbain modern India is, unfortunately, confined to the handful of octogenarians and others who were active in the freedom movement. It is not that her slide into relative oblivion was inevitable, owing to the much greater presence of her husband; rather, it is the other Gandhis, Indira and her clan, who were to monopolize the public space with the name of Gandhi.
113
It is from this time that they became "true friends" and ceased to live as a sense of the term; and, correspondmarried couple in the conventional ingly, Kasturba "had no other interest in staying with me," says Gandhi, to help me in my work."27 Though Gandhi took the vow of brahmacharya, he did not thereby cease to mix in the company of women. Quite to the contrary, he adored their presence and was almost always surrounded by many women disciples and "except number a female entourage and conducted be understood as "platonic" relation? ships. After Madeleine Slade, the daughter of an English admiral, arrived in India in 1925 to serve Gandhi and, in her words, "the cause of oppressed initiates. Gandhi of what in the West would had a considerable
be India," she rapidly assumed Kasturba's duties and would henceforth Gandhi's cook, nurse, and helpmate.28 It was Madeleine, or Mirabehn as she was called,29 who accompanied Gandhi on his trip to London in 1931 to attend the Round Table Conference, and who ministered to his daily Mirabehn needs. was exceedingly possessive of the Mahatma, demanded his constant all times. attention, and felt a need for close physical proximity to him at Gandhi often had to send her away and described the many missives they exchanged during these periods of separation, which Mirabehn found agonizingly painful and which Gandhi himself described as "love as on one occamessages" full of "spiritual agony."30 Gandhi recognized, sion in 1927, that he had been "very severe" with Mirabehn, but said he I had to perform an operation and I steadied "could not do otherwise. for it." In the same vein, he wrote a few days later: "I have never myself been so anxious as this time to hear from you, for I sent you away too quickly after a serious operation. You haunted me in my sleep last night and were reported by friends to whom you had been sent, to be delirious, but without any danger."31 Mira was to write in her autobiography that "the of our would not leave but while me," Gandhi, pain parting acknowledging that she was beside herself with the pain of separation, nonetheless insisted Introduction by M. K. Gandhi to Sushila Nayyar, Kasturba: Wife of Gandhi (Wallingford, Pennsylvania: Pendle Hill, 1948), [p. 9]. Madeleine Slade, The Spirifs Pilgrimage (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc, 1960). Her description of her first meeting with Gandhi is priceless: she was ushered into Gandhi's presence, and was "conscious of nothing but a sense of light." Madeleine fell to her knees; then hands gently raised her up, and a voice said: "You shall be my daughter" (p. 66). Madeleine was renamed Mira in emulation ofthe great Mirabai, the sixteenth-century female saint who imagined Krishna as her lover, and whose rapturous devotion for Krishna took the form of ecstatic bhajans or devotional songs, which have ever since been consid? ered one ofthe greatest treasures of Awadhi-Bhojpuri-Hindi literature. Gandhi's letters to Mira were published in the United States as The Love Letters of Mahatma Gandhi. See also Mira Behn, ed., Bapu'sLettersto Mira (1924-1948) (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1949), p. 42. Mira Behn, ed., Bapu's Letters to Mira, pp. 42-3.
114
Vinay
Lal
woman":
cultivate the detachment that would make her a "perfect "You must not cling to me as in this body. The spirit without the body is ever with you. And that is more than the feeble embodied imprisoned spirit with all the limitations that the flesh is heir to. The spirit without
that she should
the flesh is perfect, and that is all we need. This can be felt only when we This you must now try to achieve."32 practice detachment. women In staking the position that a detached and yet intense relationship with in his married state constituted no abrogation of his conjugal vows, and that a true spiritual relationship could not be predicated on the ephemof the flesh, Gandhi was doubtless also drawing on the of the Bhagavad Gita, which dwells on the manner in which the teachings soul merely inhabits the body and counsels the cultivation of a frame of mind whereby one renounces not so much action as the fruits or rewards of eral attachments actions.33 A man aspiring to master his senses and conquer the ego, re? nounces not so much women, which would have been the way of Indian sages, as that attachment to sex which makes impossible the selfless passion of which the Gita sings. Mirabehn was only one of many women with whom Gandhi, a married man, had an extraordinarily close relationship. The In? dian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar has described the intensely possessive feel? ings towards Gandhi entertained by another young woman, Prema Kantak, who came in her twenties to stay in Gandhi's ashram. Kakar hazards the among women for Gandhi's opinion that "in the ashram, the competition attention was as fierce as it is in any guru's establishment today."34 But with women can by no means be confined to this Gandhi's relationships category of experience. His personal physician for some years was another Sushila Nayyar: she was to be a party to his woman, the aforementioned One of his closest political associates, and perhaps the future experiments. only friend who took the liberty of playfully mocking Gandhi, was Sarojini him Naidu. It is she who, adverting to Gandhi's long ears, nicknamed Mouse"35 and coined the famous quip, "it takes a great deal of to keep Bapu living in poverty."36 Thus, though as his wife Kasturba clearly stood apart from all the other women in Gandhi's life, such women as Mirabehn and Sushila Nayyar were no less dear to him, and in certain "Mickey money respects they occupied a niche in Gandhi's life that no one else could fill. How soon after Kasturba's death in February 1944 Gandhi commenced from his experiments in brahmacharya remains uncertain. The photographs Slade [Mira Behn], The Spirifs Pilgrimage, pp. 92-3. M. K. Gandhi, Gita According to Gandhi or the Gospelof SelflessAction, ed. Mahadev Desai (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1946). Kakar,Intimate Relations, p. 111. Payne, Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 277. Geoffrey Ashe, Gandhi (New York: Stein and Day, 1969), p. 267.
115
the last four years of his life show his two grandnieces, Abhabehn and the One (particularly latter), to be his constant companions. year before her death, Kasturba induced the prison governor at the Aga Khan's Palace in Poona to allow Manu, then fifteen years old and suffering a term of imprisonment in Nagpur for her part in the "Quit India" move? Manu arrived at the palace ment, to join Kasturba as her nurse companion. in March 1943 and soon established her place as the devoted servant to Manubehn As Kasturba lay dying, she entrusted Manu to care.37 Six weeks after Kasturba's death, Gandhi himself fell seriously ill, prostrated by a serious attack of malaria. Kasturba's death had debilitated him: as Gandhi himself put it, "I cannot imagine life without Ba. . . . Her passing has left a vacuum never to be filled. . . ."But Manu was there to nurse Gandhi back to health; and she came to have a special place Gandhi's In a touching and remarkable testament that Manu penned a few years later, she described the manner in which Gandhi brought her up as his daughter and the interest he took in her mental growth, health, nutritional needs, and physical and spiritual development. Gandhi washed and oiled her hair, taught her spinning, and even cooked for her, though he himself usually ate little more than nuts, fruits, and boiled vegetables. Manu, let it be noted, called her little testament Bapu?My Mother.38 in his affections. both Kasturba and Gandhi.
II: Sleeping
with
the
Virtuous
Manu was eighteen years old when, in early December 1946, she joined Gandhi in the remote villages of Noakhali in East Bengal. The tortuous road that led Gandhi to Noakhali cannot be traced here, but it suffices to note that some of its Muslim Noakhali empty later, the Hindu is another story.) The massacres in Noakhali commenced 1946, and slowly the stories of the orchestrated orgies inhabitants had taken it upon themselves to of its minority Hindu population. (In Bihar, not much would mindlessly enact its revenge, but that community
on October 10, of violence, the brutal murder of men, the abduction and rape of women, and the torching of entire villages made their way into the media and the portals of of power in Delhi. No sooner had Gandhi received reliable information these monstrosities than he decided to make his way to Noakhali. That mantra, "Do or Die," which he had given to the nation launched the final movement against British rule in India, him to proceed to the violence-torn and malaria-stricken demonstration of his deeply held belief that Hindus and perfectly capable of living together in harmony. His fellow in 1942, as he now beckoned Noakhali in a Muslims were satyagrahis and
Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles,p. 197. Manubehn Gandhi, Bapu?My Mother(Ahmedabad:NavajivanPublishing House, 1949).
116
Vinay
Lal
to various Muslim villages to take up resiwere dispatched companions dence there, and Gandhi, after moving from village to village, set himself up in the village of Srirampur. this time unusually small, consisted of Parasuram, Gandhi's entourage, who served as his typist, and Nirmal Kumar Bose, a Bengali scientist on the faculty at Calcutta University. For some years, Bose had been interested in Gandhi's work and thought, and had been waiting for an oppor? tunity to observe him firsthand; Gandhi, on his part, required the services of Bengali. Bose also of an able interpreter, as he was without knowledge came to serve as Gandhi's secretary and personal assistant, and it was he who prepared Gandhi's meals, helped him bathe and shave, and attended Gandhi had never to all his other personal needs. As Bose understood, been "physically so alone" since his return to India in 1915: he was with? out trusted friends and associates, his wife had passed away, and his female companions were scattered in Noakhali and elsewhere. To Bose it appeared as though "Gandhiji was bent upon putting up with as much inconvenience as possible, if thereby he could somehow gain access into the hearts for India's ofthe Muslim peasantry of Noakhali."39 Now, as negotiations were taking place, Gandhi might well have thought that his independence teachings had been abandoned and that his trust in the efficacy of nonviolence was highly misplaced. A month after Gandhi's arrival in Srirampur on November 20, 1946, however, Manu came to join him40 and started sleeping in Gandhi's bed at once. for December Bose had taken to keeping a diary, and recorded the following entry 20: "When I reached Gandhiji's room even before 4 in the
I heard him talking to Manu in a low voice in his own bed, morning, where she had gone to sleep at night."41 Bose reports Gandhi as telling Manu that "he personally felt that he had reached the end of one chapter in his old life and a new one was about to begin. He was thinking of a bold whose 'heat will be great.'"42 One can reasonand original experiment, Gandhi meant his ably surmise that by the "bold and original experiment" recourse to testing himself as a brahmachari. Before long Parasuram had Gandhi to unburden his mind on "certain private matters," approached and Bose likewise discussed with Gandhi his relations with women. On December Bose that it was "indeed true that he 31, Gandhi informed
Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi (Calcutta: Nishana, 1953), p. 55. Gandhi himself released a statement to the press on November 20 in which he described himself as placed in the midst of "exaggeration and falsity," "unable to discover the truth," and faced with "terrible mutual distrust." To test his belief in satya and ahimsa, Gandhi added, "I am going to a village called Srirampur,cutting myself away from those who have been with me all these years, and who have made life easy for me." See CWMG 86: 138. 40 Bose, My Days with Gandhi, p. 113. 41Ibid.,p. 115. 42Ibid.,p. 116.
Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality permitted women workers tual experiment at times." to use his bed, this being undertaken Even if there were
117
as a spiri?
no trace of passion in him of which he was conscious, it was not unlikely that a residue might be left over, and that would make trouble for the girls who took part in his experiment. He had asked them [the he had been responsible for evoking the girls] if, even unconsciously, least shade of evil sentiment called in their heart. This 'experiment', as he to by distinguished co-workers like it, had been objected Narahari (Parekh) and Kishorelal and one of the (Mashruwala); grounds of their complaint had been based on the possible repercussions which the example of a responsible leader like him might have upon other people.43 As this excerpt from Bose's diary shows, a number of Gandhi's assoand expressed their view that ciates were unhappy with his 'experiment', someone in Gandhi's position should have shown a keener sense of moral Gandhi's stenographer, Parasuram, evidently found it imresponsibility. possible to stay any longer with him, for on January 2 Gandhi wrote a brief reply to what must have been a very lengthy letter: "I have read your letter with great care. I began it at 3 a.m.; finished reading it at 4 are dangerous." While complimenting and boldness," Gandhi averred that Parasuram his opinions for so long; had wronged him and the girls by suppressing would not prevent him a "conflict of Gandhi as there was and ideals," In keeping from exercising his wish to be relieved of his responsibilities. a.m. It contains him on his "frankness was in no manner compatwith his view that the practice of nonviolence ible with secrecy, Gandhi told Parasuram that he was "at liberty to publish whatever wrong you have noticed in me and my surroundings."44 The same day, Gandhi dictated another letter to Mirabehn, who appears the spiritual meaning to have sent him an anxious query, adumbrating he told Mira, of his experiment. and context "Everything depends," "upon one's in its widest headache. objective condition and deed, using the word 'purity' be no cause for even so much as a may fact." Gandhi described his hold of this fundamental Only get as wanting to "empty" himself "utterly," and thus achieve the purity in thought, sense. Then there word half truths which
whereby God would then "possess" him. In the most telling will come true passage, Gandhi wrote: "Then I know that everything have reduced when I shall but it is a serious question myself to zero. whole have the and 'O' in Think of T and problem of you juxtaposition life in two signs."45 Ibid., p. 134. ACWMG86: 299-300; also published in Bose, My Days with Gandhi, pp. 135-6. 5CWMG 86: 314.
118
Vinay
Lal
left him, Gandhi wrote to a friend, because "he did not in ideals. . . . The immediate cause I think was that Manu shared believe my that Manu was like a grandthe same bed with me."46 While recognizing daughter to Gandhi, and that their relationship was nothing but innocent, Parasuram thought that the impropriety ofthe action lay in that it constiParasuram a bad example for other men, who were without Gandhi's purity, of purpose, and spirituality of discipline. His departure did not "fresh from pouring in, and now some of Gandhi's prevent objections" tuted nobility closest and most respected associates stepped up their criticism.47 Kishorelal who was then editing Gandhi's weekly magazine, Harijan, Mashruwala, "[His] agony is difficult relinquished charge, and Gandhi acknowledged, wondered to bear. He is so upset that he is on the verge of breaking down."48 Gandhi whether the women at his ashram in Sevagram were "sufferbut in Noakhali he was unable to see any signs ofthe women having ing," been affected. As he admitted, "Maybe that prevents me from feeling the full impact of people's reactions." Yet his own resolve had become "firmer than ever," for that which required hedges, he was to write to his disciple and fellow brahmachari Vinoba Bhave, could not be "true brahmacharya."49 over the course ofthe next two months, Gandhi entered Nonetheless, into a conversation with many of his friends and relatives over the issue of his experiment vein apprised the audiences at his and in a characteristic ofthe fact at his was sharthat, behest, his granddaughter prayer meetings his bed with him. On the of the at ing evening February 1, 1947, village of Amishapara, he referred to the "small-talks, whispers and innuendoes" of which he had become aware. Saying that he did not wish "his most innocent acts to be misunderstood and misrepresented," he averted to the Prophet's saying that he wanted not those eunuchs in his service who had become so by an act of operation, but those who became such by prayer to God. Gandhi described this as his aspiration: "It was in the spirit of God's eunuch that he had approached what he considered was his duty. It was an integral part of the yajna he was performing and he invited them to bless the effort. He knew that his action had excited criticism even among his friends. But a duty could not be shirked even for the sake ofthe most intimate friends."50 The same day, in a letter to his son Manilal, Gandhi described his ahimsa, or belief in nonviolence, as "being severely tested" and pleaded with him to remain indifferent to the public criticism of Gandhi's actions: "Do not let the fact of Manu sleeping with me perBose, My Days with Gandhi, p. 136. 47Ibid.,p. 154. 48Gandhi,letter to Vinoba Bhave, February 10, 1947, in CWMG 86: 452. 49 Ibid. 50CWMG86: 420; see also Pyarelal, TheLast Phase,Vol. I, Book II, pp. 219-20; Bose, My Days with Gandhi, p. 154; Harijan, February 23, 1947.
119
turb you. I believe that it is God who has prompted me to take that step. If, however, you cannot understand, do not get upset and bear with me."51 In the meantime, and it is only as Gandhi continued with his experiment, on February 25, 1947, between an unexpected sequel to a conversation Indian social reformer Gandhi and Amritlal Thakkar, a very prominent whose advice Gandhi often sought, that Manu ceased to go to bed with Gandhi. Thakkar appears to have convinced Manu that, while he did not doubt her "perfectly innocent and undisturbed sleep" as she lay besides Manu consented Gandhi, it would be prudent to give up the experiment. and with the understand? to Thakkar's request, provided Gandhi agreed, surrendered not an nothing, ing that in doing so, "she had renounced was only to the feelings and sentiments of those who his (Gandhiji's) stand and might need time for new ideas to sink into their minds."52 Thereafter, Gandhi appears to have susand though Manu and Abha would continue to pended his experiment, be by his side for the remainder of his life, being his constant companions and serving as his 'walking sticks',53 it is possible that he never went to bed with either of them again, or indeed with any other woman. iota. The concession could not understand
III: Continence Gandhi's
and the
Blot
of Lust
experiment in "sexual celibacy" or "celibate sexuality" paves the of his relations with way, as I shall argue, for an enhanced understanding reliance on, and defiance of, Indian traditions of women, his simultaneous sexuality and sexual potency, his advocacy of androgyny, and his articulato sexual conduct. Though it would tion ofthe relationship of nonviolence be wholly erroneous to speak ofthe sexlessness of Gandhi, who appeared to many of his friends, associates, and visitors as possessed of a "strong sexuality,"54 the ideal of to cultivate it is quite clear that he sought of its and more celibacy?undercomponent specifically brahmacharya, from sex?while abstinence stood as voluntary decrying the tendency, those with spiritual aspirations, to segrerelished the company of women, and his
among particularly pronounced gate the sexes. Gandhi evidently
Letter to Manilal Gandhi, 1 February 1947, in CWMG 86: 415. 52Pyarelal,The LastPhase, Vol. I, Book II, p. 226; CWMG 87: 14-16. Gandhi leaned, in the last years of his life, on the shoulders of Manu and Abha, who walked and stood on either side of him. Nathuram Godse, Gandhi's assassin, pushed aside the two girls when he shot the Mahatma point-blank. Manu died in 1969, the centenary year of Gandhi's birth. Abha is still alive: a recent, albeit short, account of her life with Gandhi and her activities is found in S. Theodore Baskaran,"Witness to history," TheHindu (January 29, 1995, Sunday Magazine), p. II. I am grateful to my friend Henry Ranjeet of Kolam Travels, Madras, for bringing this article to my attention. 54 Shirer, Gandhi, p. 230.
120
Vinay
Lal
reject varying suade women dermined experiment
to his emphatic willingness to life and writings are a striking testimony standards of sexual mores for men and women and to perto give up false standards of modesty which ironically unthe true capacities of feminine power. Gandhi's brahmacharya also enables us to pose some questions, which have been most of power, his under? addressed, about Gandhi's renunciation inadequately in the of twentieth ofthe nature century, and his standing political power
ofthe female is superior to that ofthe male. view that the ontology wrote T. K. Mahadevan "The core of the Gandhian teaching," seminal
in a
"consists of one piece? piece on Gandhi's political philosophy, and no other. It is truth."55 The primacy of satya, or truth, in Gandhi's thinking is widely accepted, and Mahadevan was surely right in pointing to the folly of ascribing greater interpretive importance to ahimsa, or nonthe Prophet of Nonvioviolence. Gandhi is, in the popular conception, lence, and it is the various nonviolent campaigns which he waged in the struggle to free India from British rule that have won him a place in the of non? But Gandhi himself termed his movement popular imagination. violent resistance satyagraha, the force of truth, and as Mahadevan has so persuasively argued, he can be located within an Indian tradition which has accorded an extraordinarily privileged place to the quest for truth. "He is a satyagrahi," Gandhi was to say, "who has resolved to practice nothing but truth, and such a one will know the right way every time."56 Though the cardinal principle in Gandhi's thought may well be satya, it is nonetheless revealing that Mahadevan should not have considered the place of brahmacharya, of alongside satya and ahimsa, in Gandhi's conception the ethical and political life. To a very large extent, his views on sexuality to his admirers, while and brahmacharya have been an embarrassment
"I cannot imagine a thing as provoking outrage among his detractors. ugly as the intercourse of man and woman,"57 averred Gandhi with scarcely a trace of any misgiving, and such frequently voiced sentiments, though less harshly expressed in his later years, were not calculated to earn him of those who took a more 'modern' and 'healthy' view of the goodwill sex. Having taken the vow of brahmacharya, which is commonly understood as abstinence from sex, Gandhi counseled others to become celibate as well; moreover, celibacy was to be observed, not merely by the young and the unmarried, but also by married couples. Though sexual inter? course outside marriage was unpardonable, even within marriage it had no place, in Gandhi's view, except as a regrettably unavoidable means to
T. K. Mahadevan, "An Approach to the Study of Gandhi," in Gandhi, Theoryand Practice, ed. S. C. Biswas (Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1969), p. 46. Ibid., p. 49, citing a letter by Gandhi, June 9, 1914. 57 CWMG 23: 102.
Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality create
121
of celibacy among the unmarried was progeny. The observance a matter for for Gandhi held that the true mean? scarcely congratulation, ing of celibacy could only be realized within a marriage. The institution of of man and marriage provided a legal sanction to the sexual intercourse as a woman, husband and wife, and celibacy could only be constituted as a natural worthy sacrifice when sexual intercourse, though construed could legitimately be sought, right and a pleasure in which indulgence was forsaken. commanded married people to behave as Brahmacharya were unmarried.58 though they While some of Gandhi's associates took heart in his teachings and emu-
lated their leader, the greater number of men and women who worked his views, in the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, "unwith him considered Gandhi "has gone to the extreme limit of his argu? natural and shocking." the validity or added prosaically, "and does not recognize of time for the sake the sexual act at of children; he any except necessity refiises to recognize any natural sex attraction between man and woman." ment," Nehru Gandhi as "absolutely wrong in this matter," Nehru thought Describing it likely that his advice, if followed, could only lead to "frustration, inhibition, neurosis, and all manner of physical and nervous ills."59 More recent assessments, scholarly and journalistic alike, adopt almost entirely the same to a Gandhi for subscribing thus Bhikhu Parekh, critiquing argument: be? that made him hold steadfast to the distinction "dualist ontology" tween the "physical" and the "spiritual," finds Gandhi incapable of mak? ing a distinction between the sexual act involved in rape and the sexual act that takes place between loving spouses.60 Gandhi's "ideas and preachments" on the subject of sex seemed to one of his most intense admirers and Nehru appears to have enand almost inhuman," to be "outlandish capsulated a fairly common view that Gandhi was "obsessed" with sex.61 Insofar as Gandhi's espousal of brahmacharya has been taken seriously, then, it is deemed to be nothing more than a zealous advocacy of celibacy, Gandhi, Law of Continence, p. 55. JawaharlalNehru, Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), pp. 316-17. Bhikhu Parekh, "Gandhi's Theory of Non-violence: His Reply to the Terrorists," in Terrorism,Ideology and Revolution, ed. Noel O'Sullivan (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), pp. 193-94. This is also the opinion of Gandhi's respected biographer Geoffrey Ashe, who attributes Gandhi's shortcomings on the subject of sex to the inability of Hindus through the centuries to strike a "balance." Gandhi "never grasped," says Ashe, "that a sexual companionship might be ennobling and generous. Myopia in this quarter was his tragic flaw, all the more tragic because he was free from vulgar prudery." Ashe views Gandhi's position on sex, having in it the "shadow of something pallid and life-denying," as unfortunate, more particularlyas it obfuscates his otherwise extraordinary insights into human nature (Gandhi, pp. 181-82). Shirer, Gandhi, p. 119; Nehru, TowardFreedom,p. 317.
122
Vinay
Lal
and Gandhi's insistence on recommending celibacy even to married couples insensiis construed as evidence of his irrational and almost monstrously of nature." The most tive view "human generally accepted interpretation with sex and his refusal to recognize of Gandhi's acute difficulties any sexual desire traces the origins of Gandhi's "legitimate" tous incident that took place in the early years of his counted by Gandhi himself, he was sixteen years old, indeed on the verge of death. Gandhi was bedridden, views to a calamimarriage.62 As reand his father was one of his father's
principal attendants, and every night he massaged his legs, gave him medication, and ministered to all his needs. "I loved to do this service," Gandhi his life he was to retain this extraordinary capacity wrote, and throughout for nursing sick people lenged to demonstrate and animals to health: long before men were chaltheir feminist credentials by showing themselves and caring, Gandhi was an avid male nurse and femi-
capable of nurturing nine healer. One evening
as he was nursing his father, Gandhi was confor sumed by lust Kasturba. Though she was pregnant, Gandhi could not his desire?as he contain himself and left his father's side to consummate adds, "that too at a time when religion, medical science and commonsense alike forbade sexual intercourse." Gandhi had not been with Kasturba, rudely awakened from her sleep, for more than "five or six minutes" when a servant announced that Gandhi's father was dead. Had not "animal passion" blinded him, Gandhi wrote, he would have been by his father's side in the last moments of his life: he should have been rendering his father in "carnal desire." The "shame" of his "wakeful service," not indulging and in his autobiography of 1927, Gandhi desire was not to be forgotten, it as characterized a blot I have never been able to efface or forget, and I have always thought that, although my devotion to my parents knew no bounds and I would have given up anything for it, yet it was weighed and found unpardonably wanting because my mind was at the same mo? ment in the grip of lust. I have therefore always regarded myself as a lustful, though a faithful, husband. It took me long to get free from the shackles of lust, and I had to pass through many ordeals before I could overcome it.63 The child born of that lustful moment, moreover, else could be expected": days of birth. "Nothing was to die within a few the laws of compensa-
Shirer, Gandhi, p. 232; Kakar,Intimate Relations, pp. 86-91; see also Lynne Shivers, "An Open Letter to Gandhi," in Pam McAllister, ed., Reweaving the WebofLife: Feminism and Nonviolence (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1982): 181-94, esp. pp. 189-91. M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiographyor TheStoryofMy Experimentswith Truth,trans. from Gujaratiby Mahadev Desai (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1927; reprint of 2d ed., 1959), Book I, Ch. IX, "My Father's Death and My Double Shame," pp. 21-3. Since there are many editions ofthe autobiography, references to book and chapter are provided.
Gandhi}s Experiments in Celibate Sexuality tion cannot
123
be arrested, and Gandhi added for good measure: "Let all those who are married be warned by my example." Though Gandhi's own assessment of the ineffaceable shame left by his "carnal desire" is not to be doubted, it behooves the imagination to supa as that Gandhi's view of psychoanalyst, pose, might brahmacharya was an incident from his adolescent years, and that henceshaped primarily by forth he was to construe material existence. and widely sexual intercourse titioner the sexual life as distasteful, merely a form of gross Gandhi had, almost from the outset, found the narrow of brahmacharya as the abstinence from accepted conception
woefully inadequate, and he did not think that the pracof brahmacharya could be judged by the moral conventions ofthe day. No one who desired but merely failed to realize the desire could be is there, one celibate: "So long as the desire for intercourse considered be said to have attained brahmacharya. Only he who has burned away the sexual desire in its entirety may be said to have attained control over his sexual organ."64 As Gandhi was to stress repeatedly over the course of many years, "Brahmacharya means control ofthe senses in thought, word and deed."65 Brahmacharya did not mean that one could not touch a
cannot
"in any circumstances whatsoever." But, in so touching a woman, it was not implied "that one's state of mind should be as calm and unruffled during such contact as when one touches, say, a piece of paper. . . . He [the brahmachari] has to be as free from excitement in case of contact with the woman on earth, as in contact with a dead body."66 Gandhi had so averred in 1926, but this formulation late in his life must have appeared to him as somewhat tentative, for in a letter to his female friend Amrit Kaur on fairest damsel March women 18, 1947, the capacity to partake ofthe private company of naked was to constitute an integral part of his definition of brahmacharya. thus: "One who Gandhi now described the "meaning of brahmacharya" never has any lustful intention, who by constant attendance upon God has become proof against conscious or unconscious emissions, who is capable of lying naked with naked women, however beautiful they may be, without being in any manner whatsoever sexually excited." The richer meaning of being able to lie "naked with naked women" without having any sexual thoughts would then flower into the more sublime teachings ofthe scriptures: a "fiill brahmachari," Gandhi noted, is "incapable of lying, incapable of intending or doing harm to a single man or woman in the whole world," and such a person remained "free from anger and malice and detached in Gandhi's definition of brahmacharya in an the sense ofthe Bhagavadgita." and a brahma? instant takes us away from celibacy towards self-realization, who is is described as a "person chari correspondingly making daily and M. K. Gandhi, Key to Health (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1948), p. 44. Gandhi, Law of Continence, p. 45; cf. also p. 21, 53, 56, 58, passim. Navajivan, February 26, 1925, in Gandhi, The Law of Continence, p. 25.
124
Vinay
Lal
steady progress towards God and whose every act is done in pursuance of that end and no other."67 No less important than that dark night of his youth when Gandhi abandoned his dying father for his pregnant wife (and so, on a different read? ing, embraced life over death) was an experience from the eve of his life where he was awakened to the possibility that his spiritual discipline was seriously wanting. One evening in 1936, as he was recovering from a physi? induced by long hours of work, Gandhi was given a jolting of his brahmacharya, which he and painful reminder of the inadequacy said he had been "trying to follow . . . consciously and deliberately since an 1899." He dreamt of a woman and, as a consequence, experienced cal breakdown There had been only "one lapse" in his effort" to re? constant and conscious previously "thirty-six years' main pure in thought and deed, he wrote, and only on that occasion had he experienced such "mental disturbance." He felt utterly "disgusted" erection with his "attendants and the medical himself, and at once acquainted friends" with his "condition." But this was a matter where others could only be sympathetic listeners: "They could give no help. I expected none." he adds, "the confession ofthe wretched experience brought Nonetheless, relief to me. I felt as if a great load had been raised from over me. It enabled Gandhi wards me to pull myself together before any harm could be done."68 doubtless took the view, not uncommon in India, that a true no sexual passion even in the dream state.69 To? brahmachari experiences which caused a seminal emission.
the end of the year, he was to advert to this matter again in his this time in more characteristically ominous weekly newspaper, Harijan, and even apocalyptic tones. He says that his "darkest hour" came to him when, in his sleep, he felt as though he wanted a woman. That was not pleasing to him, for to experience the body of
a man who had tried to rise superior to the instinct for nearly forty years was bound to be intensely pained when he had this frightful experience. I ultimately conquered the feeling, but I was face to face with the blackest moment of my life and if I had succumbed to it, it would have been my absolute undoing.70 The "path of self-purification," as Gandhi would readily concede in his is "hard and steep," and from his own standpoint he had autobiography, Letter to Amrit Kaur, March 18, 1947, in CWMG 87: 107-8. Gandhi, "Nothing Without Grace," Harijan (February 29, 1936), reprinted in Tendulkar, Mahatma 4: 52. The previous "lapse" was in 1924: see CWMG 40: 312. CWMG 62: 247; cf. Sarasi Lal Sarkar, "A Study ofthe Psychology of Sexual Absti? nence from the Dreams of an Ascetic," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 2Al(1943): 170-75 atp. 170. Harijan (December 26, 1936), cited by Shirer, Gandhi, p. 233, and in part by Ashe, Gandhi, p. 329.
Gandhi3s Experiments in Celibate Sexuality
125
faltered once too often. His political triumphs seemed rather easier than and he acknowledged that since his of "subtle passions," the conquest of the dormant passions lying return to India he had had "experiences hidden within [him]."71 In May 1924, Gandhi had reported having had "bad dreams,"72 but the intensity of his wet dream of 1936, a recurrence on April 14, 1938, once again left him shocked and repulsed,73 him hold that Gandhi other reasons for alarm. Many commentators gave in ascribed to the view, said to be especially prominent India, that a man must preserve his 'vital fluid', most particularly because, as common wisof which dom had it, semen is not easily formed: indeed, as the anthropologist Morris Carstairs framed the widely-held belief of his informants, "it takes forty days, and forty drops of blood to make one drop of semen."74 The longings of Yogis who seek to conquer and transform" sexuality "into spiritual power," opines Kakar, "has been a perennial preoccupation of Hindu culture,"75 and Erik Erikson thought that Gandhi's conduct late in his life could be reasonably rooted in a "deeply Indian preconception with seminal continence and mental potency."76 Writing on sexual matters for his newspaper, in 1936, pursuant to his own nocturnal Harijan, himself Gandhi adverted to a discussion ofthe "vital fluid," introubles, that of it other than for the purpose of procreation any expenditure sisting constituted and woman" a "criminal waste," the "consequent excitement being an "equally criminal waste of precious caused to man "ascetic
energy." "It is now easy to understand," wrote Gandhi, "why the scientists of old have put such great value upon the vital fluid and why they have insisted upon its strong transmutation into the highest form of energy for the benefit of "If man a controls his semen except on the occasion of such society."77 Gandhi, Autobiography, "Farewell," p. 371. 72 Ashe, Gandhi, p. 254. 73CWMG62: 30. 74 Morris Carstairs, The Twice-Born(London: The Hogarth Press, 1968), p. 83; see also Bhikhu Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi's Political Dis? course(New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1989), pp. 177-8. The fear of semen loss is described by some scholars as being particularlyprominent in India: see Joel Paris, "Dhat: The Semen Loss Anxiety Syndrome," Transcultural PsychiatricResearchReview 29, no. 2 (1992): 109118, and A. Bottero, "Consumption by semen loss in India and elsewhere," Culture, Medi? cine and Psychiatry15 (1991): 303-20. An Indian psychiatristreports a belief held by many of his patients that 40 meals produce one drop of blood, 40 drops of blood are required to produce one drop of bone marrow, and 40 drops of bone marrow yield one drop of semen: consequendy, it requires no great imagination to surmise why the preservation of semen should so forcefully be insisted upon! See S. Akhtar, "Four culture-bound psychiatric syndromes in India," International Journal of Social Psychiatry34 (1988): 70-74. Kakar, Intimate Relations, p. 118. Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins ofMilitant Nonviolence (New York: W W Norton and Co., 1969), p. 404. Tendulkar, Mahatma, 4:59.
126
VlNAY Lal
Gandhi wrote elsewhere, "he is as good as an cohabitation," purposeful avowed brahmachari," but for "an avowed brahmachari" of his aspirations no such indulgence was permitted.78 To this one can add the observation, whose more extended and ripe meanings cannot here be explored, that in both mythological and folkloric Indian traditions, the semen retained by a is to turn into milk, and such a yogi is said to develop breasts. yogi thought "The yogi thus becomes," writes Wendy O'Flaherty, "like a productive female when In various he reverses Indian the flow of his male fluids."79 of spiritual ecstasy encapsulated under the term 'tantrism', or in otherwise obscure religious cults, the retention of semen is considered vital as well, and one scholar has argued that Gandhi his experiment commenced "only a few years" after he had read Sir John Woodruffe's writings on the tantra tradition.80 In all other respects, how? schools to the theories of tantra, doctrines bear little resemblance tantra's advocacy of pashave unequivocally condemned sionless sexual intercourse as a means of attaining spiritual prowess. Gandhi was not his chosen but sexual intercourse was nothing if not passionate, ever, Gandhi's and he would medium tween and such anxiety theory of sublimation, and social about the loss of semen as has been recorded by psychologists in is however India,81 workers, commonly experienced in other pronounced as well. More to the point, the belief that loss of semen weakens the male, depriving him of the energy required to sustain the family and Britain, and some uplift society, was widely prevalent in nineteenth-century cultures scholars have been inclined to the view that Gandhi's stance on sexuality may also have been shaped by what purport to be Victorian norms,82 and most certainly by some loathing for the body. Thus some feminists, while admiring Gandhi's efforts to bring women into the political life of the CWMG 62: 247. 79 Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Women,Androgynes, and OtherMythical Beasts(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 44. Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, p. 200. Gandhi's secretary in later years, Pyarelal, says that Gandhi recommended the study of tantra: Gandhi, TheLast Phase, 2 vols. (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1956), 1: 589. This appears to be corroborated by Gandhi's remarks to his interlocutors on March 15-16, 1947, that he had read works on tantra (CWMG 87: 91). Cf. James W. Edwards, "Semen Anxiety in South Asian Cultures: Cultural and Transcultural Significance," Medical Anthropology7, no. 3 (Summer 1983): 51-68 For a brief comparison between Victorian and Gandhian ideas of sexuality, see Pat Caplan, "Celibacy as a solution? Mahatma Gandhi and Brahmacharya,"in Pat Caplan, ed., The Cultural Construction of Sexuality (London: Tavistock, 1987): 271-95 at pp. 278-9, 286-7. It is no longer widely accepted that there was nothing much more to Victorian sexual mores than repression, and Foucault's hypothesis that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries share an uncommon concern for sex has been influential. See Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). to express his eroticism. Gandhi's ideas and Freud's There are also evident similarities be?
127
that Gandhi's relations with Kasturba may have country, have thought been informed by this disgust for the body, and that had he shared a more equitable life with Kasturba, he would have learned from her that "our bodies are gifts, not hindrances."83
IV: Gandhi's Whatever
Vagina:
A Political
Account
of Semen
Gandhi's own pronouncements about the imperative to preserve which fixates on this aspect of his the "vital fluid," any interpretation or on what is taken to be his troubled view of the body as an thought,
does not offer a compelling insight into obstacle to spiritual enlightenment, the more striking relationship between Gandhi's advocacy of brahmacharya, his political life, and his espousal of femininity. For even as enthusiastic and careful a student of Gandhi's life as the Indian political scientist Bhikhu Parekh, the whole matter of Gandhi's "bizarre" sexual life can virtually be that his "theory of sexuality rested on a dismissed with the observation primitive approach to semen." Working almost entirely within a positivist framework, Parekh has nothing much to say except that Gandhi's ideas of semen were "untrue," and the "production and accumulation" that the old man was "wrong" to "mystify" semen by ascribing it with "lifegiving power," just as he was "wrong to associate it with energy"; indeed, about "the very concept of ojas or spiritual energy is largely mystical and almost certainly false." Yet, as is amply clear, there are innumerable mystical traditions and sexual practices around the world for which there is no "evi? dence" or "basis in facts,"84 and this ought not to compel us to confine our explorations supposition any person loathing, Gandhi's to the most common forms of heterosexual love. Likewise, the that to Gandhi his own body was a "foreign" object, for which of intense spiritual inclination could have nothing but fear and
can scarcely be reconciled with everything else we know about relation to his body. Few men could have been as finely attuned to the rhythms of their bodies as Gandhi was with his, and accounts of ashram life suggest his remarkable ease with his nakedness. Far from avoiding all with women, as we have previously observed, Gandhi reveled in their company, and it is preeminently through the sense of touch that he consorted with the men and women around him. He would dictate letters to his secretaries or conduct other important business while his body was contact being massaged, and he thought nothing of putting his arms around the shoulders of friends, associates, and even visitors. He kept a careful record ofthe food he ingested, and his bowel movements were of as much concern Judy Costello, "Beyond Gandhi: An American Feminist's Approach to Nonviolence," in McAllister, ed., Reweaving the WebofLife, p. 179. Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, p. 182.
128
VlNAY Lal
for Indian independence. Gandhi's attenand the of presentation hygiene, nutrition, the body was his way of injecting the body into the body politic, and nowhere does he show the Brahmin's disdain for the polluting body or the tiveness to him as were the negotiations to matters of sexuality, modesty regarding one's own body which he decried in the Indian female If the physiological account of semen loss has little to commend to our we can attention, profitably render what we might call a political account of semen? In his next life, Gandhi had often said, he would like to be as an untouchable, the most exploited element of Indian society, times he gave the impression of wanting to be reborn as a woman. In either case, one would be positioned to gain a more complex reborn and numerous ofthe nature of oppression. In his arphenomenological understanding duous quest for mastery over his sexual desires, Gandhi appears to have found masculinity a nearly insuperable obstacle, and he may have thought that women had, in this respect, an enviable advantage. It is almost plausible to speak of Gandhi's psychoanalytical gest, the idea is prevalent that "as long as the penis remains, one cannot be a true ascetic."85 It is not sufficient to curtail the activities ofthe penis or to prevent it from achieving a state of excitability; it must be made to disappear within the body. When the sexual passions are subdued, and the mind is prepared by means of a rigorous discipline for the exercise of ab? stinence, the penis begins to shrink; gradually it becomes inverted and "draws itself within the body in such a way that its very root enters into the body. By this process its appearance becomes that of a female sexual of the male sexual organ from organ, while really it is the disappearance outside the body."86 In their own perverse way, Gandhi's militant detractors?such as his assassin and members ofthe Hindu paramilitary organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), who held him responsible for to protect partition and the inability of the Indian government Hindus even in the nation's capital?may have been signifying their fear that Gandhi was not quite a man when they threw at him the epithet hijra, India's which in common parlance stands for a castrated or intersexed man who takes on the identity of a woman.87 Though it cannot be known how the women who partook in Gandhi's his body, the preponderant experiment "experienced" portion ofthe bioand anecdotal literature graphical suggests that the women who were inti? mate with him may have ceased to think of Gandhi as a man. Manu's aptly named book, Bapu?My Mother, points to that as much as the frequently Sarkar,"A Study ofthe Psychology of Sexual Abstinence," p. 174. 86Ibid.,p. 175. See Vinay Lal, "Hijras in India: Gender-Bending and the Cultural Politics ofSexual? ity," Suitcase 3, nos. 1-2 (1998): 60-73. vulva envy. Among Indian renunciates, as the one of Indian brahmachari's dreams investigations sug?
Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality noted observation that women
129
felt entirely at ease in his company. Consequently, when Manu, Abha, and Sushila Nayyar agreed at various times to share Gandhi's bed with him, there is no reason to suppose that they felt they were lying besides anyone other than a woman, sharing as Indian No one so far has vendo a bed amongst themselves. commonly tured to suggest that Gandhi was in this manner another Ramakrishna,88 was striking, but this may Indian saint whose androgyny an unlettered who immersed him? that someone to concede from a reluctance be only in politics as did Gandhi could have been so suffused with men that they were to "assume the counseled Ramakrishna spirituality. if they wished to conquer passion.89 It is said of attitude of women" Ramakrishna that from his childhood he could take on, whenever he willed, of the female sex. He was allowed in the company of the characteristics women not merely because he could readily assume a woman's voice: as self as much devotees was later to write, "To us [women devotees] did not usually seem to be a man at all. It seemed that he was one of us. That is why we did not feel the slightest shyness or hesitation in his presence, as we normally do in the presence of men."90 When he assumed the madhura bhava, or the position of the lover as she apone of his women Sri Ramakrishna proaches feminine accounts sorbed God, Ramakrishna behavior: he would would dress in feminine attire and imitate be the Radha to Krishna. Witnesses furnished he would sit in samadhi, ab"menstruating":
women
of Ramakrishna in the divine, and blood would ooze from the pores of his skin.91 "As soon as he was dressed as a woman," writes his biographer Christo-
pher Isherwood, mind became more and more deeply merged in the Those who saw him were amazed at the physi? of womanhood. cal transformation which seemed to take place; walk, speech, gestures, even the smallest actions were perfectly in character. Sometimes, Ramakrishna's mood Ramakrishna would go to the house in the Janbazar district which had belonged to Rani Rasmani and live there with the women ofthe family, as a woman. They found it almost impossible to remember that he was not really one of themselves.92 Of all his biographers, Ashe comes closest to viewing Gandhi as akin to Ramakrishna, though he ultimately disavows any such comparison: see his Gandhi, pp. 130-32, 260-63. Mahendranath Gupta [known as "M"], The GospelofSri Ramakrishna, trans. Swami Nikhilananda, 2 vols. (Mylapore: Sri RamakrishnaMath, 1980), 2: 595. Swami Chetanananda, ed. and trans., Ramakrishna as WeSaw Him (St. Louis: Vedanta Society, 1990), pp. 357-9. Swami Saradananda, Sri Ramakrishna the Great Master, trans. Swami Jagadananda (Mylapore: Sri RamakrishnaMath, 1952), pp. 233-4. Christopher Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1950; reprint ed., New York: Simon and Schuster/Touchstone Books, 1965).
130
Vinay
Lal
Gandhi may not have been similarly merged into womanhood, but it is in this spirit that we should take his oft-expressed remark that he was "half a woman"; and if the testimony of his women associates and friends is any reliable guide, other women. themselves they expressed themselves before him as they would before if Manu and other female devotees had placed Moreover, under his tutelage, Gandhi might also have thought of his ob-
to bring them to that point of ligation to train them as brahmacharis, concentrated awareness where they ceased to think of themselves as inof the a woman.93 habiting body In his aspiration to embody femininity, then, Gandhi may have been though it is instructive relying upon familiar idioms of Indian thought, how far he departed from Indian textual and customary traditions as well. He roundly ignored those traditions which enjoined upon their male fol"A brahmachari, it is lowers to keep at a physical remove from women. said," wrote Gandhi in 1938, "should never see, much less touch a woman. Doubtless a brahmachari may not think of, speak of, see or touch a woman one finds in books on brahmacharya is men? lustfully. But the prohibition tioned without the important adverb," that is "lustfully." Recognizing of brahmacharya was difficult "when one freely mixes that observance with the world," Gandhi nonetheless added that "it is not of much value if it is attainable only by retirement from the world."94 In all domains of life, ofthe sexes, even preferring (unusual for Gandhi rejected the segregation schools to single-sex schools. He thought Indians of his time) coeducational that Indian women's refusal to be attended by male gynecologists or surof from a false sense he that shame, though geons originated recognized who took advantage of their pathere were "unscrupulous doctor[s]" tients.95 Writing to the young Muslim daughter of a friend on the subject of an enema, in whose efficacy Gandhi reposed much trust, he put the matter quite candidly: "Whether the person who helps you with the en? ema is a man or a woman, it should make, and I am sure it will make, no difference to you at all."96 To a brahmachari, in the event, this could be no important consideration. Most tellingly, though, Gandhi appears to have found some sustenance in certain strands of Vaishnava theology and literature. During the course of his views on brahmacharya, of one long exposition Gandhi had remarked: "When the Gopis were stripped of their clothes by Krishna, the legend says, they showed no sign of embarrassment or sex-consciousness
Harijan, November 14, 1936; C. Shukla, ed., Gandhi As WeKnow Him (Bombay: Vora and Company, 1945), p. 47. 94CWMG, 67:194-5. 95 Joshi, Gandhi on Women,pp. 209-11. 96Letterto Amtul Salaam, January 2, 1947, in CWMG 86: 300.
131
but stood before the Lord in rapt devotion."97 Subsequent to disclosures about his experiment, this story was to find its way into his public speeches. The reference here is to a famous scene in Krishna's life where the gopis or cowherdesses, having stripped at the banks ofthe river Yamuna to take a are to emerge from the water when they find their garments about bath, When missing. they look around them, they find Krishna dangling them from a tree upon which he is perched; the gopis implore him to return their clothes, while Krishna reminds them that since each of them had set their hearts on him, uttering a prayer that would grant them Krishna as their husband, they should be prepared to walk into his presence without a trace of shame. The Bhagavata Purana, the preeminent text of Krishna devotion, states explicitly that "bashfully they [the gopis] looked at each other and smiled, but none came out ofthe water." When eventually they do so, notwithstanding their most earnest pleas that they should be spared this indignity, they cover "their private parts with the palms of their hands." But Krishna is not so easily appeased: since in entering the water in a naked state after a transgression, taking a religious vow the gopis had committed they were to expiate their sin by raising their folded palms to their heads and proson the ground. Each gopi attempts to comply with trating themselves Krishna's injunction by raising one of her hands, while her other hand continues ofthe tion that such a mode to cover her genitals; this only provokes Krishna to the observaof rendering obeisance constitutes a gross violation
ethics of worship, and that the Lord cannot be satisfied other than by a complete fulfillment of religious observances. In this manner the gopis, now aware ofthe nature of their transgression, submit in a state of com? plete nudity, and their clothes are returned to them.98 Their obeisance has been rendered, and now they can reasonably await its fulfillment: it is also the longing each gopi has for characteristic of Krishna that, recognizing each one us has to the that of be merged into the absolute him, longing and to receive the favors ofthe divine lover, he exercises the power within him to satisfy each gopi. Thus, in the received versions of the Krishna though each gopis simultaneously, legend, he can be with nearly 20,000 lives in the illusory state that she alone is the object of his affections.99 Yet this "satisfaction" course: indeed, has no necessary, or even any, referent to sexual inter? one of Krishna's myriad names is Aeyuta, "the one whose
Pyarelal, The Last Phase, 1: 224. Ganesh Vasudeo Tagare, trans. and ed., The Bhagavata Purana (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1978), Part IV, Book X, Chapter 22, pp. 1395-99. 99 The amorousness and frivolity of Krishna do not sit easily with many modernizing Indians, obsessed as they are with demonstrating that Krishna, much like Muhammad or Christ, was a historical, rational, and somber figure. Typical of this profound unease is Asha
132
Vinay
Lal
seed does not fall," since once sexual orgasm has been achieved, the erotic echoed in a Hindi provis unequivocally play is over.100 This interpretation erb, where it is said of Krishna, aSolah sahasra nariphir bhi brahmachari" [He has sixteen thousand women but still remains a celibate.] It is perhaps to his disagainst this backdrop that we should view Gandhi's comment with in innocent manner an Bhave: mind Vinoba daily sleeps "My ciple millions of women, and Manu also, who is a blood relation to me, sleeps with me as one of these millions."101 that the liberty Gandhi appears to have taken in suggesting in a state of Krishna in before no embarrassment showed appearing gopis in which Gandhi the manner illustrative is what is nakedness, particularly sought to deploy the trope of nakedness in the service of a philosophical of "truth." Though no detailed thoughts can be and political conception Whatever entertained the course here over Gandhi's sartorial politics, of a lifetime Gandhi came increasingly to early years of his youth, as a law student in Britain, he had endeavored and it was not until he thrust himself into dress as an English gentleman, the struggle to procure Indians' political rights in South Africa that he move? simplified his dress. It was around the time ofthe noncooperation ment of 1920-1922, regimen of spinning by which time Gandhi had already initiated a daily and also urged it upon the nation as part of a prothat he further shed his clothes, choosing gram of national rejuvenation, a shawl thrown over his chest to move around only in a simple loincloth, This is the winter months.102 the image with which he would henceduring forth be associated, captured perhaps nowhere better than in his remark about whether he to an English reporter in 1930, as he was questioned His Royal Highto have tea with proposed to go dressed in this manner was wearing enough ness at Buckingham Palace, that the King-Emperor for both of them. In a similar vein, while taking note of Churchill's insultbetween the British ing remark that the prospect of direct negotiations it is germane that over to shed clothes. In the
Goswami's Krnsa-Katha and Allied Matters (Delhi: Y. R. Publications, 1994), where the author remarks that the Puranic and epic accounts of Krishna's 16,108 wives ought to be discounted, since Krishna "surely could not have been so fickle and frivolous about his marriage which in fact is a very important social event in human life" (p. 174). The temple-dancers of Orissa, tlie subject ofa study by the anthropologist Frederique Marglin, offered her an extended account of why Krishnamust not spill his seed: see "Types of sexual union and their implicit meanings," in J. S. Hawley and D. M. Wulff, eds., The Divine Consort:Radha and the Goddesses of India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982): 298-315 at pp. 306-7. The god Shiva, who is often represented as a yogi, likewise has the ability to hold an erection without spilling his seed, and indeed his erect phallus is symbolic not only of his power to impregnate but also of his chastity. See O'Flaherty, Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts, esp. II.2.B. to Vinoba Bhave, February 10, 1947, CWMG 86: 453. 101Gandhi 102Gandhi,"My Loin-Cloth," The Hindu (15 October 1921), reprinted in CWMG, 21:225-7.
133
and a "half-naked seditious fakir ofa type well known in the government to be contemplated, Gandhi had expressed Orient" was too nauseating naked. the hope that he might become completely
V: Naked
Before
God:
The
Infinite
Play
of Sexuality
Gandhi had set for himself the ambition to appear naked before God, come face which for him was nothing other than Truth, and consequently to face with the "Truth." At this particular juncture, when India was al? he was tormented most on the verge of independence, by the awareness that his teachings on ahimsa had been less successful than he had hoped. as The tone of his statement released to the press on November 20,1946, he was about to proceed to the village of Srirampur in Noakhali district, "I find myself in the midst of exaggeration reveals his deep foreboding: and falsity. I am unable to discover the truth. . . . Truth and ahimsa by sustained me for sixty which I swear, and which have, to my knowledge, the attributes I have ascribed to them."103 He seem to fail to show years, had striven to maintain Hindu-Muslim to his health) with grave consequences and no issue since the mid-1920s recrudescence of communal violence, had occupied more of his attention; and yet, well more than twenty years he now seemed to have little con? of Mahatmahood, of events. This is scarcely to say that Gandhi be? trol over the unfolding conferred on him powers which were rightlieved that his Mahatmahood that his word should have had, as it apparently once did, the or his, fully after his attainment force of law. If his utterances that was a no longer commanded obedience, sure sign that his voice did not carry very far into the public sphere. How? in Gandhi's own philosophical ever, everything leanings, and most par? him to the belief that the vio? his of truth, disposed conception ticularly some the public domain were reflections of in his own practice of ahimsa and shortcomings profound him? carries within that the individual brahmacharya. Satyagraha implies self or herself the burden of social failings, and that one reads from social which pervaded developments tices. "Ever since harmony, whenever even fasted (oftentimes there had been a major
lence and untruth
as from a mirror the history of one's own thought and prac? Gandhi reported to Bapa my coming to Noakhali," Thakkar in 1947, in his endeavor to explain why he commenced upon his 'What is it that is "I have been asking myself the question experiment, choking the action of my ahimsa? Why does not the spell work?' May it 104 If in the matter of brahmacharya." not be because I have temporized his teachings of ahimsa had failed to avert communal rioting, Gandhi was amiss in his own profoundly prone to think that there was something
CWMG 86: 138. 4CWMG 87: 14.
134
Vinay
Lal
practice of ahimsa. "There must be some serious flaw deep down in me which I am unable to discover," he wrote, and again he added with insistent, even compulsive force: "There must be something terribly lacking in which all is responsible for this."105 my ahimsa and faith flaw" deep down inside him which he had "failed to dis? have set Gandhi on the trajectory of the last great?albeit of his life, but in this trajectory of reasoning there troubled?experiment That "serious might cover" appears at first sight to be more than a faint trace of an almost furtive attempt to recoup the power that he had exercised with unrivaled authority for over two decades. While profoundly committed to the democratic ethos, to the point where he refused to distinguish between intellectual elites and workers, much as he thought the labor ofthe hands to be at least as productive and worthy as the labor ofthe mind, Gandhi's methods were nonetheless often autocratic. In 1939, for example, he had suffered an undefeat when his candidate for the presidency ofthe Congress precedented common received fewer votes than Subhas Chandra Bose, who was later to flee India and offer Germany and Japan the services of the Indian National Army. Not accustomed to having his wishes defied, Gandhi made it impossible for Bose to function as president and within a few months had procured his
his experiments in brahmacharya someresignation. When he commenced he had to make some effort to time after his release from jail in mid-1944, reestablish his preeminent presence on the Indian political scene, and in the for independence he was only one of several leaders with whom negotiations the British parleyed; at the same time, witnessing the communal carnage? which would accelerate gready in the last year before his death?his loss of moral authority must have struck him with even greater force. In consonance with Indian teachings, one of his biographers suggests, Gandhi was under the circumstances particularly prone to accept the view that his power if he could test himself as a to influence events would be enhanced brahmachari.106 Stretching this argument yet further, it appears not unreasonable to conclude that, forsaking the position that Gandhi had advocated since his early days in South Africa that the ends never justify the means, he was even prepared to make the young women who idolized him the instrument of his quest for political power. as I have throughout been endeavoring to arAny such interpretation, gue, cannot really be sustained. That Gandhi would now resort to the vulCWMG 86: 302. On January 10, 1947, Gandhi addressed his son Ramdas on the same subject, and after informing him ofthe experiment he had undertaken of sharing his bed with Manu, added: "I am still surrounded by darkness. I have no doubt whatever that it indicates a flaw somewhere in my method. Take it as though I had confined myself to this place [Noakhali] to detect that flaw. It must lie somewhere in my practice of ahimsa. Could it be that I am nurturing only weakness in the name of non-violence!" (CWMG 86: 335). Ashe, Gandhi, p. 377.
135
notion that any means were permissible gar, not to mention reprehensible, in order to enhance his political fortunes can scarcely be reconciled with anything we know of Gandhi's political philosophy, his decisive rejection of instrumental rationality, his practices of satyagraha, and?as even his critics concede?his willingness to endure the most dangerous risks to his own life in his resolve to bring the violence to an end. Alone among Indian leaders, Gandhi entirely repudiated the trappings of power and understood that in the visible sovereignty and display of power reside the seeds of its destruction. He was more attuned to the nature of power in the modern age than the politicians who more than fifty years after his death consider the num? ber of security guards attached to them as the index of their power and even after an By this yardstick, Gandhi, who refused protection attempt on his life, was a mere commoner.107 It is instructive that he never held office after having established a decisive moral authority over the Con? gress in 1920, and that from the mid- 1920s onwards he was not even a prestige. of the party over whose destiny he presided and which had been with liberating India from British rule. Gandhi was most certainly perturbed, indeed mortified, by the communal violence that had broken out, but this in no manner leads inescapably to the conclusion that unable charged to accept the loss of his influence, he was now prepared to abandon his and the principles of satyagraha in the pursuit of his political convictions in his own language, "Himalayan blunders" ambitions. He had committed, most move? before,108 particularly during the 1920-1922 noncooperation ment which he had felt compelled to suspend when it had degenerated into violence, and his political difficulties from 1945 to 1947 can easily be overstated. Then, in 1922, he had faced with remarkable equanimity a prison term designed to prevent him from preaching sedition, and had so embraced a form of powerlessness that would have the curative and rejuvenative effect of launching him into the next stage ofthe struggle for India's spiritual, political, and social revival. In the last years of his life, Gandhi again seems to have been seized with the desire to be stripped clean, and such was his disdain for power that he was altogether prepared to face As a brahmachari, he had put limits upon him? calumny and opprobrium. self with respect to "contacts with the opposite sex," but these limits now struck him as unacceptable, ment with the truth.109 as constraints placed upon his constant engagemember
On more than one occasion Gandhi had described his life's endeavor as nothing but a concerted effort to reduce himself to "zero." This is the note For a more detailed discussion, the reader is referred to Vinay Lal, "The Security Fantasies of the Indian Nation-State: Black Cat Commandos, Gunmen, and Other Terrors," South Asia 20, no. 2 (December 1997): 103-38. Payne, Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 333. 109CWMG 67: 194-8.
136 on which before Then
Vinay
Lal
his autobiography of the mid-1920s, and a year in his death he was to put the matter similar terms in a letter to "If I succeed
he concludes
in emptying myself utterly, God will possess me. that everything will come true but it is a serious question when I shall have reduced myself to zero. Think of T and 'O' in juxtaposition and you have the whole problem of life in two signs."110 To empty Mirabehn: I know oneself is not only to render oneself a vehicle for something else, to become capable of being possessed, but to lead life to the fullest. Gandhi's nakedno adornment, and any adornment would have been an efto his nakedness. frontery Appearing naked before the world, Gandhi would have yet scarcely championed nudity: he had no "private parts," not even, a his (near) androgyny, penis-vagina. Having renounced sex, Gandhi despite had by no means abjured sexuality; quite to the contrary, he was to embrace ness needed it in the amplest measure. In the language of James Carse, Gandhi was an exponent of infinite rather than finite sexuality. Where players at the finite game of sexuality view persons as the expressions of sexuality, Gandhi was interested in sexuality as the expression of persons; and where finite players relate to the body, infinite players relate to the person in the body. "Finite sexuality is a form of theater in which the distance between persons is regularly reduced to zero," writes Carse with extraordinary prescience, "but in the other." Gandhi had not the power of touch, for he was no miracle-maker, but he had the vision of touch: "Finite players within adds boundaries," Carse, but "infinite players play with boundplay of infinite aries"; players sexuality play not within sexual boundaries, as do but with sexual bound? heterosexuals, bisexuals, lesbians, and homosexuals, aries.111 Gandhi, who abhorred the game of sexuality. sex, was yet the most consummate player at
which neither touches
U0CWMG86: 314; Autobiography,p. 371: "Farewell." James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987), pp. 12, 91-103.

Vinay Lal Gandhi Nakedness

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Vinay Lal Gandhi Nakedness

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Vinay Lal Gandhi Nakedness

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Nakedness, Nonviolence, and Brahmacharya: Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality Author(s): Vinay Lal Source: Journal of the History

VINAY Department University

of History Los Angeles of California,

Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality

109 to nonand the

Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality

Lal this decision as she

wishes easily, and Gandhi's testimony to her tenacity and

Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality

that she should

Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality

Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality

III: Continence Gandhi's

among particularly pronounced gate the sexes. Gandhi evidently

reject varying suade women dermined experiment

Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality create

capable of nurturing nine healer. One evening

Gandhi}s Experiments in Celibate Sexuality tion cannot

Gandhi3s Experiments in Celibate Sexuality

Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality

IV: Gandhi's Whatever

Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality noted observation that women

Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality

Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality

lence and untruth

CWMG 86: 138. 4CWMG 87: 14.

Gandhi's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality

136 on which before Then

which neither touches

You might also like