Gandhi’s admirers perform all sorts of rhetorical contortions to defend some of his more bizarre ideas and practices. One such practice that became public knowledge in the twilight of his life shocked even his most dyed-in-wool devotees.
On the eve of Independence, Gandhi marched through the paddy fields of Bengal on foot with a wooden staff and a train of followers to calm seething Hindu-Muslim hostility with nothing more than the sheer force of his personality. A mobile toilet carried by his admirers along with the more familiar Gandhian prop, the spinning wheel, accompanied the great man during this celebrated journey.
It was during this time that one of Gandhi’s more controversial practices became public knowledge. Ostensibly to test his long-standing vow of brahmacharya (celibacy), Gandhi was found to be in the habit of sharing his bed with young women.
There is no suggestion that Gandhi in any way violated his sleeping partners, many of whom selflessly ministered to his physical well-being and acted as his confidantes. However, the incongruity of the old, ascetic Gandhi sleeping naked with young women scandalised the sensibilities of his puritanical Hindu followers as well as those of more secular bent in the Congress Party.
Gandhi’s achievement in Bengal that year turned out to be nothing short of miraculous. While Punjab and the rest of the Subcontinent was seized by collective madness, with Hindus and Muslims indulging in an orgy of tit-for-tat murders that ultimately claimed millions of lives, Bengal held its peace thanks only to Gandhi’s commanding presence and towering moral authority.
Gandhi camped with his followers in an old, decaying bungalow in a Muslim neighbourhood in Calcutta as Hindu-Muslim tensions threatened to boil over. A Muslim mob moved into the neighbourhood and started to attack Gandhi, hurling stones and abuses and ordering him to move out. Gandhi pacified and won over his attackers by declaring that he would not leave the place as long as a single Muslim in the neighbourhood felt threatened and insecure from Hindus.
Some of Gandhi’s ideas about social reform, such as his rejection of industrialisation in favour of an agrarian utopia that supposedly existed in India’s imagined past or his re-categorization of the Hindu untouchables into ‘Harijans’ (God's people), can be charitably dismissed as quixotic or misguided. If only deep-rooted social evils such as the Hindu caste system could be magically eradicated by re-labelling its victims!
However, Gandhi’s lifelong struggle against injustice and colonialism, first in South African and then in India, justifies his undisputed standing as a giant of the 20th century.
As the British broadcaster Mishal Husain argued in a recent three-part BBC documentary, Gandhi’s admirers do him a great disservice by placing him on a pedestal.
A Gandhian female academic that Husain interviewed in India for the documentary was asked about Gandhi’s controversial practice of sleeping naked with his young female followers.
Instead of admitting the possibility that Gandhi, Mahatma though he was, could have made errors of judgement, the academic trotted out the familiar argument about Gandhi testing his resolve and self-control by sleeping with nubile women. Even more disingenuously, she claimed the women would have been enriched morally by the experience notwithstanding the fact that Gandhi used them as mere foil to his dubious spiritual exercises. In his followers’ eyes, Gandhi could do no wrong and was above reproach.
What if the Mahatma had lost his self-control?
But if we forget Gandhi the legend, there is a lot to like about the man.
Though many know that Gandhi sought solace and inspiration in the ancient verses of the Hindu scripture Geeta, few are aware of the eclectic influences of his youth that shaped his mature worldview.
While studying law in London, he read Geeta for the first time. However, he also read the Sermon on the Mount and Tolstoy, and socialised with Theosophists and London’s vegetarians, giving up meat.
He sailed to London despite threats from his clan elders to strip him of his caste status and its attendant privileges. By sailing to London, Gandhi violated the ancient Hindu taboo against crossing seas. His later attempts to recover his caste status by performing prescribed ceremonies failed, apparently because his clan elders had not forgiven his transgression.
He cut his political teeth by fighting racism against Indians and blacks in South Africa. He mobilised the Indian mass against the British Empire on the principle of non-violence and succeeded to wrest freedom for them.
Just before and in the aftermath of Independence, Gandhi protected Muslim minorities and their properties from murderous Hindu mobs, first in Bengal and then in New Delhi. He paid for his ecumenicalism and vision of universal brotherhood with his life at the hand of a Hindu fanatic.
Gandhi’s puritanism and bizarre spiritual experiments in old age, his insistence on interfaith goodwill to address Muslim minority concerns in place of concrete political concessions, his refusal to support any special treatment to Hindu outcasts, his uncritical apotheosis in modern India, and his stern gaze from the pedestal can be quite off-putting.
However, bring him down from the pedestal and Gandhi, with or without his loincloth, starts to look much more attractive.
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