[Reader-list] Thrill of the chaste

[Sanjay Kak]

Thrill of the chaste: The truth about Gandhi's sex life

With religious chastity under scrutiny, a new book throws light on
Gandhi's practice of sleeping next to naked girls. In fact, he was
sex-mad, writes biographer Jad Adams

Wednesday, 7 April 2010

It was no secret that Mohandas Gandhi had an unusual sex life. He
spoke constantly of sex and gave detailed, often provocative,
instructions to his followers as to how to they might best observe
chastity. And his views were not always popular; "abnormal and
unnatural" was how the first Prime Minister of independent India,
Jawaharlal Nehru, described Gandhi's advice to newlyweds to stay
celibate for the sake of their souls.

But was there something more complex than a pious plea for chastity at
play in Gandhi's beliefs, preachings and even his unusual personal
practices (which included, alongside his famed chastity, sleeping
naked next to nubile, naked women to test his restraint)? In the
course of researching my new book on Gandhi, going through a hundred
volumes of his complete works and many tomes of eye-witness material,
details became apparent which add up to a more bizarre sexual history.

Much of this material was known during his lifetime, but was distorted
or suppressed after his death during the process of elevating Gandhi
into the "Father of the Nation" Was the Mahatma, in fact, as the
pre-independence prime minister of the Indian state of Travancore
called him, "a most dangerous, semi-repressed sex maniac"?

Gandhi was born in the Indian state of Gujarat and married at 13 in
1883; his wife Kasturba was 14, not early by the standards of Gujarat
at that time. The young couple had a normal sex life, sharing a bed in
a separate room in his family home, and Kasturba was soon pregnant.

Two years later, as his father lay dying, Gandhi left his bedside to
have sex with Kasturba. Meanwhile, his father drew his last breath.
The young man compounded his grief with guilt that he had not been
present, and represented his subsequent revulsion towards "lustful
love" as being related to his father's death.

However, Gandhi and Kasturba's last child wasn't born until fifteen
years later, in 1900.

In fact, Gandhi did not develop his censorious attitude to sex (and
certainly not to marital sex) until he was in his 30s, while a
volunteer in the ambulance corps, assisting the British Empire in its
wars in Southern Africa. On long marches in sparsely populated land in
the Boer War and the Zulu uprisings, Gandhi considered how he could
best "give service" to humanity and decided it must be by embracing
poverty and chastity.

At the age of 38, in 1906, he took a vow of brahmacharya, which meant
living a spiritual life but is normally referred to as chastity,
without which such a life is deemed impossible by Hindus.

Gandhi found it easy to embrace poverty. It was chastity that eluded
him. So he worked out a series of complex rules which meant he could
say he was chaste while still engaging in the most explicit sexual
conversation, letters and behaviour.

With the zeal of the convert, within a year of his vow, he told
readers of his newspaper Indian Opinion: "It is the duty of every
thoughtful Indian not to marry. In case he is helpless in regard to
marriage, he should abstain from sexual intercourse with his wife."

Meanwhile, Gandhi was challenging that abstinence in his own way. He
set up ashrams in which he began his first "experiments" with sex;
boys and girls were to bathe and sleep together, chastely, but were
punished for any sexual talk. Men and women were segregated, and
Gandhi's advice was that husbands should not be alone with their
wives, and, when they felt passion, should take a cold bath.

The rules did not, however, apply to him. Sushila Nayar, the
attractive sister of Gandhi's secretary, also his personal physician,
attended Gandhi from girlhood. She used to sleep and bathe with
Gandhi. When challenged, he explained how he ensured decency was not
offended. "While she is bathing I keep my eyes tightly shut," he said,
"I do not know ... whether she bathes naked or with her underwear on.
I can tell from the sound that she uses soap." The provision of such
personal services to Gandhi was a much sought-after sign of his favour
and aroused jealousy among the ashram inmates.

As he grew older (and following Kasturba's death) he was to have more
women around him and would oblige women to sleep with him whom –
according to his segregated ashram rules – were forbidden to sleep
with their own husbands. Gandhi would have women in his bed, engaging
in his "experiments" which seem to have been, from a reading of his
letters, an exercise in strip-tease or other non-contact sexual
activity. Much explicit material has been destroyed but tantalising
remarks in Gandhi's letters remain such as: "Vina's sleeping with me
might be called an accident. All that can be said is that she slept
close to me." One might assume, then, that getting into the spirit of
the Gandhian experiment meant something more than just sleeping close
to him.

It can't, one imagines, can have helped with the "involuntary
discharges" which Gandhi complained of experiencing more frequently
since his return to India. He had an almost magical belief in the
power of semen: "One who conserves his vital fluid acquires unfailing
power," he said.

Meanwhile, it seemed that challenging times required greater efforts
of spiritual fortitude, and for that, more attractive women were
required: Sushila, who in 1947 was 33, was now due to be supplanted in
the bed of the 77-year-old Gandhi by a woman almost half her age.
While in Bengal to see what comfort he could offer in times of
inter-communal violence in the run-up to independence, Gandhi called
for his 18-year-old grandniece Manu to join him – and sleep with him.
"We both may be killed by the Muslims," he told her, "and must put our
purity to the ultimate test, so that we know that we are offering the
purest of sacrifices, and we should now both start sleeping naked."

Such behaviour was no part of the accepted practice of bramacharya.
He, by now, described his reinvented concept of a brahmachari as: "One
who 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, without
being in any manner whatsoever sexually excited ... who is making
daily and steady progress towards God and whose every act is done in
pursuance of that end and no other." That is, he could do whatever he
wished, so long as there was no apparent "lustful intention". He had
effectively redefined the concept of chastity to fit his personal
practices.

Thus far, his reasoning was spiritual, but in the maelstrom that was
India approaching independence he took it upon himself to see his sex
experiments as having national importance: "I hold that true service
of the country demands this observance," he stated.

But while he was becoming bolder in his self-righteousness, Gandhi's
behaviour was widely discussed and criticised by family members and
leading politicians. Some members of his staff resigned, including two
editors of his newspaper who left after refusing to print parts of
Gandhi's sermons dealing with his sleeping arrangements.

But Gandhi found a way of regarding the objections as a further reason
tocontinue. "If I don't let Manu sleep with me, though I regard it as
essential that she should," he announced, "wouldn't that be a sign of
weakness in me?"

Eighteen-year-old Abha, the wife of Gandhi's grandnephew Kanu Gandhi,
rejoined Gandhi's entourage in the run-up to independence in 1947 and
by the end of August he was sleeping with both Manu and Abha at the
same time.

When he was assassinated in January 1948, it was with Manu and Abha by
his side. Despite her having been his constant companion in his last
years, family members, tellingly, removed Manu from the scene. Gandhi
had written to his son: "I have asked her to write about her sharing
the bed with me," but the protectors of his image were eager to
eliminate this element of the great leader's life. Devdas, Gandhi's
son, accompanied Manu to Delhi station where he took the opportunity
of instructing her to keep quiet.

Questioned in the 1970s, Sushila revealingly placed the elevation of
this lifestyle to a brahmacharya experiment was a response to
criticism of this behaviour. "Later on, when people started asking
questions about his physical contact with women – with Manu, with
Abha, with me – the idea of brahmacharya experiments was developed ...
in the early days, there was no question of calling this a
brahmacharya experiment." It seems that Gandhi lived as he wished, and
only when challenged did he turn his own preferences into a cosmic
system of rewards and benefits. Like many great men, Gandhi made up
the rules as he went along.

While it was commonly discussed as damaging his reputation when he was
alive, Gandhi's sexual behaviour was ignored for a long time after his
death. It is only now that we can piece together information for a
rounded picture of Gandhi's excessive self-belief in the power of his
own sexuality. Tragically for him, he was already being sidelined by
the politicians at the time of independence. The preservation of his
vital fluid did not keep India intact, and it was the power-brokers of
the Congress Party who negotiated the terms of India's freedom.

Gandhi: Naked Ambition is published by Quercus (£20). To order a copy
for the special price of £18 (free P&P) call Independent Books Direct
on 08430 600 030, or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk