9 July 2007
Ambivalent Platonics
Mahatma’s sexuality was sublimated, says Bindu Puri
Understanding Gandhi has been an exercise of, erroneously, sifting the public from the private, the Mahatma from the man. Yet the public persona cast long shadows on the private and the man could not, it seemed, be understood separately from the Mahatma. In a sense this is fitting, for Gandhi himself never distinguished between his private and public life, between politics and morality. Even when it came to the brahmacharya experiments, his grappling with women and sexuality, he retained that openness. This disturbed not only his contemporaries and his admirers but also those who tried to understand him, after him.
Girja Kumar explores the relationships Gandhi shared with women at different points in his life. Ranging from Millie Graham Polak and Mirabehn to Ba, Sushila Nayyar and Manu Gandhi. She also speaks about a lesser-known relationship with Saraladevi Chowdharani, who was Rabindranath Tagore’s niece. Though the platonic character of Gandhi’s relationships is well known, the many letters he wrote to his women associates liberally uses a vocabulary of love and effusive praise which leads Kumar to read romance and displaced sexuality into these relationships. She also sees in all of them, except the one with Manu Gandhi, a search for an intellectual companionship that Gandhi was unable to find in Kasturba. The intrusion of sexuality as a motif continued into his latter life. Gandhi sees these experiments as having created a storm in the ashram and amongst his comrades.
Brahmacharya Gandhi & His Women Associates, Girja Kumar,
Vistasta,
Rs 695
This interesting and well-researched appraisal of the personal life of a very public man performs an autopsy that violates both the man and the Mahatma. Though Kumar agrees that Gandhi was very open about the fact that he slept with his granddaughter Manu in the same bed, or that Sushila Nayyar and others assisted him with his bathing rituals, she suggests that he failed to fully understand the importance of that openness. For Gandhi, the search for truth was relentless and needed to be pursued at all cost. Brahmacharya was a fundamental truth about himself and the public validation of his brahmacharya was a maha yagya that he performed at the same time as, for example, he toured riot-ridden Naokhali. This was Gandhi at his multifaceted best. He ran the affairs of nations contemporaneously with the affairs of men. For him, to validate internal truths was the same as to validate external ones like civil disobedience. They were part of his quest for a life of virtue. Gandhi had not displaced but perhaps sublimated his sexuality. This sublimation is the key to understanding his very loving relationships with women.
The writer is a historian
Apr 08 , 2006