In August 1906, at Phoenix, South Africa, Gandhi, father of four sons, announced to his wife Kasturba that he had taken the vow of celibacy. Gandhi held to the Hindu view that loss of semen weakened a man. So, celibacy would preserve Gandhi’s strength for "nobler" aims. However, Gandhi developed an unnatural fondness for Hermann Kallenbach, a German Jew. Kallenbach remarked that Gandhi and he lived together, "almost in the same bed." Thus, Lelyveld writes, "that Gandhi, leaving his wife behind, had gone to live with a man." From then on, Gandhi treats his wife Kasturba as a temptation and his sons as spiritual weaklings. When his 18-year-old son Harilal married in Gujarat, Gandhi disowned him and denied him the privilege of studying in England for his "sin" of wedlock. Although Harilal went to jail six times in the Transvaal campaign his father led, he failed to please the old man. In 1911, Harilal returned to India. When his wife died, he visited prostitutes, converted to Islam for a while, and then returned to Hinduism.
However, Gandhi was unable to completely suppress his sexual desires. His most shocking experience occurred on April 14, 1938, when he was almost 70 years old. Gandhi’s celibacy denied him his wife, but allowed other women to perform strange roles. Since 1930s, he had women sleep on separate bedrolls next to him. When Gandhi felt tremors or shivers, they would embrace him until such symptoms subsided. From 1946, he asked Manu Gandhi, daughter of his nephew, to sleep on the same mattress he used. Lelyveld writes, "Perfection would be achieved if the old man and the young woman wore the fewest possible garments, preferably none, and neither one felt the slightest sexual stirring." Others were permitted to live in the same verandah or in the same room. Jawaharlal Nehru saw Gandhi in such a state but made no comments. J B Kripalani, Congress President after Nehru, had brought his wife Sucheta, who shared Gandhi’s bed with Manu. We have no chance of asking Manu, Sucheta, or Gandhi’s secretary Pyarelal, who wanted Manu as his wife, how they felt when Gandhi treated women as mere objects for his experiment.
Lelyveld highlights other failures. In South Africa, Gandhi made the mistake of siding with the Whites against the Zulus. Thus Nelson Mandela remarked years later, "Many of our grassroots African supporters saw Indians as exploiters of black labor in their role as shopkeepers and merchants." Gandhi’s efforts couldn’t produce the results he desired because granting Indians their rights would mean giving the same to blacks, which Jan Christian Smuts, the Defense Minister, would not allow.
In India, Gandhi’s ashrams floundered. His first, the Kochrab Ashram, on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, initially started with about 50 people, mostly his relatives but also followers from South Africa. Members pledged themselves to disciplines like celibacy, control of the palate, non-possession, speaking Indian languages, spinning, and handloom weaving. When Gandhi accepted a tanner (low-caste) in the ashram, all except four left.
Gandhi had his idiosyncrasies. He had stopped drinking cow milk because it aroused him. While recovering from dysentery, Kasturba fed him goat milk, which he readily accepted! After World War II, the Ottoman empire collapsed and with it the caliphate, which had oversight for Mecca and Medina. Gandhi advocated the restoration of the caliphate to win over Indian Muslims. In 1924, Turkey’s West-leaning leader, Mustafa Kemal, known as Atatürk, dissolved the caliphate; and drove the last sultan into exile. While Gandhi advocated Hinduism-Islam unity for others, he advised his second son, Manilal, against marrying his Muslim girl friend.
Reading through Great Soul made me often compare Gandhi with our own Nepali ‘political saint’ Krishna Prasad Bhattarai (who reveals himself in his book Mero Ma). Both had failures in midst of some successes. In their own ways, both deserve the adjective ‘great’.
Gandhi’s inconsistency in caste issues drove Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a Dalit with two PhDs, to despair. Ambedkar announced Swami Shraddhanand, known as Mahatma Munshi Ram, who had long before Gandhi given approval to inter caste dining and marriage, as the real champion of untouchables. Gandhi openly declared his belief in "the four-way division of all Hindus according to their heredity occupations as priests, warriors, merchants, or tillers." Also, his adherence to the divinity of Hindu scriptures, the law of karma, and the certainty of reincarnation made his critics conclude he believed that "the miserable lot of outcastes is punishment for bad behavior in past lives." Gandhi tried to please both Hindus and the untouchables, but alienated both. During the Round Table Conference in London, October 1931, Ambedkar openly declared that Gandhi couldn’t speak as a representative of the untouchables.
Rabindranath Tagore, a Nobel laureate by the time he met the Mahatma in 1915, "asked how he [Gandhi] could justify the bonfires of foreign cloth promoted by his followers in a country where millions were half-clothed." Never having studied fascism, Gandhi blindly praised the Italian dictator Mussolini, advised (through letters) Hitler who asked the British to "shoot Gandhi"; and counseled ignorantly, according to the theologian Martin Buber, on the Palestinian issue. Ambedkar and the British regarded his fasts as the worst form of coercion. In raising funds for the Harijan Service Society, Gandhi pleaded for donations of ornaments from women, who either refused to give or came to his future meetings without wearing them. Gandhi called the 1934 earthquake in Bihar a "divine chastisement for the persistent sin of untouchability" and shocked both Nehru and Tagore.
Neither did Gandhi’s campaign against open defecation succeed. After his permanent return from South Africa, his first meeting with the All India Congress delegates in Calcutta horrified him. Some of them emptied their bowels on the verandah of the lodge, which had just one toilet. Although Gandhi, inspired by Tolstoy, cleared away the droppings then, others didn’t. The villagers in his ashram at Wardha continued to defecate on the paths he took. The Noakhali Muslims, who had butchered Hindus, showed similar resistance. Although Gandhi fought for Hindu-Muslim unity and agreed to the partition to prevent communal riots, what he feared most happened after India gained independence. Thousands butchered each other. Gujarat his home state, turned into a "Hindutva" killing field in 2002, when 2000 Muslims lost their lives and 20,000 their homes.
For various events, Lelyveld sympathizes with Gandhi. In South Africa, Gandhi refuses to remove his headgear in front of the white magistrate. The Anglican Church there doesn’t allow Gandhi in for worship, and gives us a clue to false Christianity the Whites practiced. Gandhi took part in the Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902) by raising volunteers to care for wounded soldiers but couldn’t win the heart of the white government. Still his efforts partially succeeded when the authorities recognized non-Christian marriages too as legal. After the apartheid system collapsed in 1990, Nelson Mandela had four Indian ministers in his cabinet.
Reading through Great Soul made me often compare Gandhi with our own Nepali ‘political saint’ Krishna Prasad Bhattarai (who reveals himself in his book Mero Ma). Both had failures in midst of some successes. In their own ways, both deserve the adjective ‘great’.
Related story
Police detain Indian Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka...
