Sex and the Saint

PUPUL JAYAKAR’S BIOGRAPHY OF INDIRA Gandhi mentions a 1979 letter to a friend, Fori Nehru, immediately after the death of Jayaprakash Narayan, the catalyst behind opposition unity and who finally got her out of power after Emergency. Indira wrote in it, ‘Poor old JP! What a confused mind he had, leading to such a frustrated life! He was a sufferer of what I can only call Gandhian hypocrisy. Not that Bapu was hypocritical, but he did not prevent its breeding all around him, by forcing people to take vows which they could not possibly fulfil and standards which they had no intention of living up to… I suppose you know that when JP and Prabha went to seek Bapu’s blessings immediately after their wedding, Bapu made Prabha swear to Brahmacharya (celibacy). This was just too much for J. That and jealousy of my father probably conditioned the rest of his life.’

It was an uncharitable thing to say but consider the unmentioned subtext of it—that JP had been psychologically scarred by Gandhi and that this was at the root of his opposition to Indira herself.. By enforcing celibacy on JP, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had thus, three decades after Independence and his death, indirectly led to the formation of the first non-Congress Government in India. As it turns out, Indira’s version of events is only half true. JP’s wife did take brahmacharya under the influence of Gandhi but Rajmohan Gandhi in his book, Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, his People and an Empire, gives a slightly more detailed account which brings in a different light. He writes: ‘The ashram’s espousal of celibacy also raised issues. For instance, Prabhavati, daughter of Bihar Congress leader, Brajkishore Prasad, and married in 1920 (at the age of fourteen) to Jayaprakash Narayan, had lived in the ashram from 1922, when her husband left to study in the USA. Close to both Kasturba and Gandhi and looked after by them, Prabhavati had become a wholehearted ashramite and taken the celibacy vow, as had some other ashram women. She had done so in her teens and in her husband’s absence, though Gandhi asked her not to confirm the vow until Jayaprakash approved.’

Instead of Gandhi making Prabha swear to celibacy in a split second after their marriage, the decision was arrived at through a process and, importantly, at her own insistence. The episode is illustrative of Gandhi’s ideas on celibacy continuing to be interpreted and, as many of his followers think, twisted in a manner that his other ideas aren’t. It is also an example of how the legacy of India’s greatest modern saint and politician has been chased by the shadow of his obsession with brahmacharya and, by extension, sex. You could take the same set of events and ideas related to sex from Gandhi and arrive at diametrically opposite conclusions, ranging from dirty old man to saint who was uncompromising in his pursuit of truth within himself.

Jad Adams, a historian and biographer who wrote a biography in 2010 titled Gandhi: Naked Ambition, charted in it Gandhi’s progression through life where his attitude to sex changed radically. It was only in 1900 after having fathered four children that Gandhi began to consider celibacy. But even then it was not until six years later, in 1906, that he finally took the vow of brahmacharya. He never had sex again in his life. From then on, he began to be increasingly extreme in his views on celibacy, his influence pervading over followers too. Adams writes over email, ‘When he returned to India he set up a new ashram in 1915 in which vows of poverty and chastity had to be strictly observed. He had been refining his proscription of sex to include married couples, now advising husbands should not be alone with their wives, and that they should sleep in separate rooms.’ Towards the end of his life, an entirely new dimension took over, which made even many of his close followers uncomfortable. Adams says, ‘After the death of his wife in 1944 he stepped up what he called ‘experiments’ by engaging young women to sleep with, including his 18 year old grand-niece (Manu) and his grand-nephew’s 18 year old wife (Abha), both singly and together, clothed and naked.’

HIS VOW OF CELIBACY WAS NEVER broken but there were moments of involuntary failings, like stray erotic thoughts and wet dreams that came unbidden making him recoil with anguish. Adams recounts an episode in April 1938 where Gandhi was about to meet Muhammad Ali Jinnah to try to revive Hindu-Muslim unity. ‘However, as he lay with his aides on 7 April Gandhi had an involuntary ejaculation. He was horrified by this as he felt he had by now completely controlled his sexual nature and because of his almost magical belief in seminal fluid. ‘One who conserves his vital fluid acquires unfailing power’ he said. He wrote ‘For the first time in my public and private life I seem to have lost self-confidence. I do not consider myself fit for negotiations or any such thing at the moment.’ The meeting did go ahead, but was unproductive,’ Adams says.

Historian David Hardiman, professor at the University of Warwick and author of Gandhi in His Time & Ours—The Global Legacy of His Ideas, says that Gandhi’s practice of testing his celibacy through close contact with young women has Tantric elements to it. ‘Gandhi believed that a person who was enthused with such soul-force could become invincible. There are non-Hindu inputs here—as with much of Gandhi’s thought. This idea of a heroic figure who puts his or her stamp
on history came from Thomas Carlyle, whom Gandhi had read. Carlyle was influenced by German Romantics and American Transcendentalists. He was also influenced by evangelical Christians of the Esoteric Christian Union—whose writings he was exposed to in his South African years—who preached the need for a spiritual regeneration in a materialistic and soul-less modern world. This involved liberation from the power of the senses and bodily urges. Such a liberated person, it was held, would have Christ-like powers,’ says Hardiman over email.

Brahmacharya, to Gandhi, was also the foundation for his politics. Hardiman says he believed it was key to India gaining freedom. ‘Gandhi linked brahmacharya to the practice of ahimsa, or nonviolence. The ideal practitioner of ahimsa would be celibate. It was necessary for those who wanted to maintain the courage and strength to take on the British in the nationalist struggle through nonviolent resistance to retain their celibacy. Adopting a male-centred view of the ideal nationalist, Gandhi held that ejaculation progressively weakened the mind and the body, and those who were sexually active would lack this strength,’ he says.

Nineteen years ago, Vinay Lal, professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a Gandhi scholar, wrote a paper titled ‘Nakedness, Nonviolence, and Brahmacharya: Gandhi’s Experiments in Celibate Sexuality’ wherein he explored this aspect of Gandhi’s life. The trigger for the paper was the befuddlement among even admirers of Gandhi, such as Lal’s mother: “My mother would always tell me she had heard of these so-called experiments. She couldn’t understand why someone like him would do something like that. It seemed to her and others that I had spoken to that this was something of a blot on Gandhi’s name and reputation. I had been studying Gandhi for years. So I thought that this is something that I had to look into.”

Lal argues that it is only when you look at Gandhi’s life and philosophy in their entirety that you can understand his actions. Also ideas of sex and sexuality must be separated. Lal’s paper termed it ‘celibate sexuality’. “Gandhi disavowed the sexual act. And in fact, there are times when he says that there is nothing as ugly as the intercourse between a man and his wife. He was of the opinion that most sexual acts, in fact, really do constitute a form of violence. However, he did not disavow sexuality, which is a different thing,” he says.

Unlike mythological Indian sages whose brahmacharya makes them keep away from women, Gandhi was, on the contrary, constantly surrounded by them. “We’re speaking about Mirabehn, Sushila Nayyar, Sarojini Naidu. These women were all very close to him. They were around him a good portion of the time. Gandhi was someone who had a kind of view of sexuality which was so much richer than the idea that it can be reduced
to sexual intercourse,” says Lal.

His sleeping with his grandniece Manu Gandhi in 1946 to test his celibacy also needs to be put in the context of the times, says Lal. “What is happening in 1946? You already have riots in Noakhali. There is enormous communal disturbance over there. Gandhi’s view is that nonviolence is perfect. If the practitioner understood and applied it perfectly, it will never fail. In other words, now he sees the violence around him, and he sees that he’s unable to control it. Therefore, he thinks that it’s his shortcoming. What relationship does that have to sexuality, to his experiment, is that Gandhi was of the view that external disturbances mirror the disturbance within an individual so to speak. So he has to test himself. Now, this therefore becomes a yajna. He calls it a yajna, a great sacrifice. In a way, a great experiment he’s going to undertake. He wants to test his resolve. Because if he is sexually aroused, this would be an indication of the fact that he has failed, his understanding of ahimsa is incorrect, inadequate, and so on. So it is in that sense a quest for truth,” says Lal.

THERE IS HOWEVER NO GETTING around the fact that he co-opted others into his experiments. Hardiman says, ‘Gandhi failed entirely to understand that this might affect the young women in psychologically harmful ways. He was acting in a shamefully self-centred way, and we must condemn him for this. At the time—once knowledge of this practice became widespread in 1946-47—he was condemned, even deserted, by several of his erstwhile admirers. Others went to him and told him to stop such experiments forthwith. He did not do so. In many respects, he was redeemed for many of such followers only by his heroic sacrifice in Delhi in 1948.’

What redeems Gandhi in some measure is transparency about what he was doing. The idea of coercion was alien to him, and the women in his experiments did so with consent and also stopped participating of their own volition when they felt like. No one ever suggested even the remotest impropriety on his part. His followers were free to criticise him. The centrality of truth to him prevents his actions related to celibacy tarnishing an extraordinary spiritual and political legacy. Next year, the second volume of Manu Gandhi’s diaries will be published and they will include the period when she took part in the experiment along with Gandhi. She looked upon Gandhi as a mother and did not ever see anything remiss in her participation. And yet, no matter what she would have had to say in her diaries, the debate will be reignited on Gandhi and his experiments. Most people would be disturbed by it because these are actions incomprehensible to a regular mind. Adams believes that Gandhi was self-deluded. He says, ‘He failed to recognise what all the more worldly people around him did: that seeing, touching and sleeping with naked women really was sex, not its negation.’

Lal, however, thinks that Gandhi cannot be evaluated like ordinary men. He says, “There is a philosopher of religion who had this idea of what he called finite and infinite games. The vast majority of people basically play finite games. In other words, what we do is we experiment within boundaries. Gandhi experimented with boundaries. In every domain of life, he was a player of infinite games and, therefore, his worldview becomes, in some ways, quite inaccessible to us. We have to remember that one of the litmus tests of Gandhi, and he’s absolutely firm about it, is that you never do anything to someone else that you do not first do to yourself. You never make a demand of someone else that you do not first make of yourself. So in every respect, Gandhi tested himself before he went and did an experiment that included others. It is within that
totality that we have to understand what this really amounted to.”

About The Author

Madhavankutty Pillai

Madhavankutty Pillai has no specialisations whatsoever. He is among the last of the generalists. And also Open chief of bureau, Mumbai  

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