Probed by Mott on God’s interventions in his life, Gandhi spoke of his being enabled to survive assaults in South Africa, the money he received at moments of greatest need for his struggles, the inspiration that he felt led to the nationwide 1919 hartal, and the ‘voice’ that directed the fast of May 1933. Mott next asked about the place of silence in his life. Replied Gandhi:
It has now become both a physical and spiritual necessity for me. Originally it was taken to relieve the sense of pressure. Then I wanted time for writing. After, however, I had practised it for some time I saw the spiritual value of it. It suddenly flashed across my mind that that was the time when I could best hold communion with God (74: 270-7).
Crying out to God? Yet, in his case, communion with God only rarely meant (or produced) a cry for relief, help or a miracle. He sought strength and wisdom but did not spare himself in his division of labour with God. As Gandhi saw it, his burden was chiefly for himself to carry.
Mott (in December 1936): What affords you the greatest hope and satisfaction?
G: Faith in myself born of faith in God.
M: In moments when your heart may sink within you, you hark back to this faith in God?
G: Yes. That is why I have always described myself as an irrepressible optimist.
M: So am I. Our difficulties are our salvation. They make us hark back to the living God.
G: Yes. My difficulties have strengthened my faith which rises superior to every difficulty, and remains undimmed. My darkest hour was when I was in Bombay a few months ago. It was the hour of my temptation. Whilst I was asleep I suddenly felt as though I wanted to see a woman.
Well, a man who had tried to rise superior to the sex instinct for nearly forty years was bound to be intensely pained when he had this frightful experience.
I ultimately conquered the feeling, but I was face to face with the blackest moment of my life… Many Christian friends are jealous of the peace I possess. It comes from God who has blessed me with the strength to battle against temptation.
M: I agree. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’ (report of meetings on 13-14 December in Harijan, 26 Dec. 1936; 70: 79-80).
Thus his response to temptation is shock and a resolve for greater personal strength, while conceding that such strength ‘comes from God’. Human striving is what he has practised over a lifetime, but he is more than familiar with the view that without God’s grace nothing is possible. He accepts this truth, has indeed experienced it.
But he has also, in one part of him, resisted this truth. While his Christian friends equated grace with Christianity, many Hindus had made grace an excuse for inaction. He answers faith in Jesus, and Hindu fatalism, with faith in his discipline. Christian friends marvel at his commitment to what they see as Christian morals, while Hindus think of him as one of their faith’s most effective modern exemplars.
On his part he never forgets the warning of his Christian friends, which is also the teaching of the Bhakti poets he loves, including Tulsidas and Narsi Mehta, that freedom from sin is impossible without divine intercession. Time and again, in the Autobiography and elsewhere, he records the warning. Yet crying out to God is only rarely his style; if it occurs, it does so behind the scenes, unrecorded. Otherwise, each crisis is primarily a signal for greater self-effort, and he seems convinced of God’s blessings if he but obeys his mind-cum-conscience.
SHIVERING AND AN UNUSUAL REMEDY
All the same, turmoil—physical and emotional—stalked the Gandhi of the late 1930s in Sevagram.
There the Gandhis’ hut was largely Kasturba’s, for he usually slept in the open, with two or three of his aides, generally women, sleeping near him. Not enjoying any exclusive relationship with her husband, Kasturba was remarkably friendly to the women assisting him. One of them, Prabhavati Narayan, would recall:
During winter days in Sevagram, I used to go into Ba’s room after the early morning four o’clock prayer. And Ba always insisted: ‘Prabha, go and sleep for some time.’ Even in freezing weather Ba used to sweep the room; then she would heat water for the bath, and after the cleaning and dusting were over she would come to wake me up. Warm water was always ready for my bath.47
When, at some point in 1937, doctors ordered an ill Gandhi to sleep indoors, Kasturba at once announced, ‘Bapu will sleep in my hut.’ Sushila has recalled the occasion:
Ba’s room was small. There were one or two other persons who used to sleep near Gandhiji. Ba vacated the room for Bapu and his companions and she slept on the verandah with her little grandson Kanu (Ramdas’s son). She never for a moment grudged making room for others beside her own husband.48
Gandhi felt guilty the next morning and said:
Poor Ba has never had a room to herself. This hut I had constructed specially for her use and I myself supervised all the details. I thought she should have some comfort and privacy in her old age and now I have taken possession of it.49
More than that, Gandhi had begun or would soon begin an unusual practice. Assailed by fits of trembling, he would find relief through one of his women aides lying down beside him.
‘If Gandhi got the shivers on wintry nights, why not reach for an extra blanket instead of a girl?’50 We have no direct answer from Gandhi to the obvious question that William Shirer would ask after Gandhi’s death. Yet the curious remedy was not, in history, an unprecedented recourse.
As Erikson notes, the Bible speaks of King David who was unable to feel any warmth though covered at night with many clothes, whereupon a young woman called Abishag ‘was brought to the king’. She ‘cherished the king and ministered to him, but the king knew her not’ (Kings 1: 3,4).
We have seen that trembling and shaking marked Mohandas from his boyhood. In April 1939 Pyarelal would write in Harijan that the shaking was, ‘an old symptom that seizes him whenever he receives an acute mental shock’ and that it was usually set off ‘by a sudden attack of sharp pain near the waist’.51
We do not know what contributed to the shivering in 1937, or whether or not it was a medical condition, or related to the violence he had received over the years,52 misery over Harilal, the size of what he had taken on, or whatever. Nor do we know whether Gandhi was aware of the David precedent.
In retrospect we mark a natural progression: someone long dependent on the physical touch has his young aides first sleep near him and then right up against him. No matter what its immediate or longer-term cause, the shivering was answered by a woman aide lying down beside him—with Kasturba’s full knowledge.53
‘Whatever I used to do, Ba knew everything,’ Gandhi would claim in 1947, in a letter to Harilal’s son Kanti.54 There is no record of her opposition to the ‘remedy’.
Not only did the practice continue for several weeks during the 1937-38 winter, Gandhi began to defend it as an experiment in chastity and indeed as a means for enhancing it, in himself and in the companion. Perhaps he was rationalizing an embarrassing ‘remedy’ that had become a need. Yet there was no suggestion or allegation from anyone involved, then or later, that open or concealed lust was at work. As far as he knew himself, he said, the practice was lust-free.
He had a shock, however, on the night of 7 April 1938. (This was within days of Mahadev saying he wanted to leave, and while Gandhi was exploring a meeting with Jinnah.) While he and his aides, including Prabhavati, who was thirty-two, and Sushila, twenty-four, slept in the open in Sevagram, he experienced an involuntary emission. A week later, on 14 April, he experienced a discharge again. In a private note written for co-workers (2 June), he would say:
I felt ashamed. After the experience [of 7 April] I hardly slept that night. I was restless. I walked about on the terrace and calmed myself a little… I felt that I was not fit to accept service from Sushila and Prabhavati who slept close to my bed.
After the [pre-dawn] prayer, I first recounted to them what I had been through and then told them that I would not be taking service from them. But both took this decision very badly.
Within twelve hours I reviewed my decision and continued to take service from them.
But my distress did not cease. On the 14th I had another type of experience which increased my shame and added to my anguish… While I was caught in that whirlpool, I had to meet Mr Jinnah… I had lost my self-confidence…
But a doubt arose after my experience of the 7th April… Why have my thoughts and my mind not become purer and purer?.. Could the contact with women have obstructed my path in some subtle way? Who can answer that question? The only solution is that unless God Himself answers it, I should try to shun all physical touch and understand my own mind and conquer it…
I should not have undertaken the experiment if it was so terrible. If it was worth undertaking, I should have encouraged all my colleagues to pursue it on my condition. My experiment was a transgression of the limits prescribed by brahmacharya…
Only he who can observe complete brahmacharya can give complete training in non-violence…
After a great deal of thought I have [decided that] I should not take any service from women which involves physical contact, unless it is absolutely unavoidable… I must not touch them in jest or in affection…
Before I took the vow of brahmacharya and after, I touched numerous women in a light-hearted way or in affection. I have not experienced any adverse effect thereby and have not known any woman who may have been sensually aroused.
Who can say where the future will lead me? My strongest desire is to submit lovingly to God and let myself be driven whither He wills.
It was my clear duty to convey this much to my co-workers. I assume that any co-worker who wishes will let me know his reactions and point out any error he may find in my thinking (note of 2 June 1938, marked ‘Unrevised’; 73: 214-15).
The note is full of doubt and inconsistency. He links his ‘fall’ to the liberties he had taken, but ‘who can answer’ for certain? Curbing his freedom ‘might’ strengthen him; his decisions are final but also alterable, for instance if women like Sushila and Prabhavati are upset; he is not really sure what God wants or ‘where the future will lead me’. The experiment is over for now but not necessarily for ever.
Learning of his ‘fall’, Mira suggested at the end of April that Gandhi should reduce or end physical contact with women. We may observe that she was never part of the ‘experiment’. In respect of Mira, Gandhi always spoke of himself as a father, as a male, never claiming (as he did with other women aides) that he was their ‘mother’ or ‘sister’, and perhaps, too, he felt unsure about Mira’s brahmacharya in any ‘experiment’ involving the two of them.
In his reply (3 May 1938) to Mira, Gandhi wrote disapprovingly of the traditional Hindu notion of ‘nine fortifications’ against the charms of women. Parts of the letter are quite moving:
I like your letter for its transparent love… The problem however is not so simple as you have put it… What is the value of the species that requires the nine fortifications? You are quite right in describing my experiment as new. So is my experiment in ahimsa. The two hang together.
Remember that my experiment has natural limitations. I may neither tempt God nor the Devil… In your next letter you must tell me in concrete terms what definite changes I should make so as to fit in with your idea. Should I deny myself the service rendered by Sushila? Should I refuse to have malish (massage) by Lilavati or Amtul Salaam for instance? Or do you want to say that I should never lean on girls’ shoulders?
Needless to say you won’t pain me at all by telling me frankly whatever you think I should do to get out of the terrible despondency. Just now I am most in need of support from those who surround me with service and affection, undeserved as it seems to me, for the time being.
In guiding me remember that what I am doing I have done all my life you may say. And my brahmacharya has become firmer and more enlightened… I felt I was progressing. That degrading, dirty, torturing experience of 14th April shook me to bits and made me feel as if I was hurled by God from an imaginary paradise where I had no right to be in my [uncleanness].
Well, I shall feel pride in my being parent to so many children, if any of them will give a lifting hand and pull me out of the well of despair (73: 41-2).
Apparently disagreeing with Mira, Sushila (who was a doctor) protested at Gandhi’s word that he would not touch her. The note of 2 June was a response to conflicting advice, and to the conflict in his own mind.
The uncertainties were repeated in several letters he wrote at this time to Pyarelal, Sushila, Mira, Mahadev and others. Relationships among his co-workers and theirs with him seem tense and breakable at this point. In some letters he implores Pyarelal and Sushila not to leave him, says his own imperfections lay behind a wrong accusation he seems to have made (in respect of Sushila’s behaviour towards Mahadev), and at times uses a tone, extremely rare in him, of plaintiveness. He also thanks Sushila for ‘your resolute stand’. ‘Even though you came to me as a daughter, you have acted like a mother’ (73: 211).
On 1 June he wrote to Sushila: ‘Now I have more or less (emphasis added) decided that with the exception of Ba I will not accept from any other woman any service involving physical contact’ (73: 210). Two days later, however, he wrote to Pyarelal: ‘When she (Sushila) comes on her own I shall of course embrace her in spite of my having stopped taking service from women’ (Letter of 3 June 1938; 73: 219-20).
The service he was speaking of included preparing and serving his meals, assisting with his bath and giving him an oil massage.
In a letter (11 June 1938) to another co-worker, Balwantsinha, Gandhi said that his 1935 decision not to place his hands on the shoulders of women did not ‘mean that I would never place my hand on the shoulder of any girl whatsoever’. Stating, further, that he was used to bathing in the nude in the presence of some women, Gandhi added:
From the very beginning I have regarded Sushilabehn in the same way as Ba, as an exception… I would like to give up physical contact even with these two if it were possible, but I have no desire to do so at the cost of the deep hurt which I would be causing them while my heart feels no sin in the contact of these two.
I have caused Ba much pain. I still occasionally do, but I have no courage nor any desire to inflict any further pain on her…
Once I intended to give up all personal services from Sushila but within twelve hours my soft-heartedness had put an end to the intention. I could not bear the tears of Sushila and the fainting away of Prabhavati. I did not even want to…
Sushila has been present in the bathroom while I have bathed in the nude and in her absence Ba or Prabhavati or Lilavati have attended on me… Pyarelal has been in attendance occasionally but I have never felt any embarrassment in being seen naked by a woman… whose relations with me cannot come under any kind of suspicion (73: 235-6).
Co-workers were indeed troubled. A colleague from 1915, Amritlal Thakkar, who had given himself to work for Harijans and tribals and was called Thakkar Bapa, was ‘pained’, Gandhi was informed (73: 267). Mahadev too seemed perturbed.55
However, if some associates, and also part of his mind, asked Gandhi to give up closeness with women, that advice was resisted by an unwillingness to break what had become a dependence, which would also mean breaking hearts in a close circle of women. This was not a closed circle: some left while others joined. In the late 1930s, it included Lilavati Asar from Bombay (who was only fourteen in 1938), Prabhavati Narayan, Amtus Salaam, a faithful Muslim from Patiala state in eastern Punjab, and Sushila Nayar.
Kasturba, special in the circle but not perhaps critical to it, had learnt to tolerate other women sharing the space and chores around Gandhi, and grew close herself to some of them. At least once, and possibly oftener, she insisted that her husband should ‘take service from the girls’.56
Oddities and all, there was remarkable trust, respect and affection between the two. We should note here, too, that the honest account that Gandhi gave in the Frontier Province of his harshness to Kasturba was o
ffered immediately after the turmoil of the 1938 summer.
Striving to be womanlike (as well as manlier than anyone else), Gandhi too felt part of this intimate, feminine circle, where he found the love that helped him fight his outer battles.
Yet perhaps we should at least register Gandhi’s claim that also at work was his sense of how a nonviolent general’s power is acquired or lost, and of his personal calling. The thought that he was a pioneer in chastity as much as in satyagraha clashed with the advice against closeness with women, which was ended only to be resumed, suspended, revived, extended…
What is beyond doubt is his dependence on physical closeness and contact. This closeness (as he claimed to Mira) had precise limits, yet it solaces, comforts, renews him. It recalls his mother, who loved him and believed in him as no one else ever did in his boyhood, and whom, as he thought, he loved as no one ever loved a parent. He seeks and offers at night a mother’s warmth, and is ready before every dawn to fight every battle thrown at him, to fight it with greater virility than any other Indian.
Sense of duty. Trembling (or the remedy for it) did not affect Gandhi’s sense of duty. Not harboured for long, ‘loss of confidence’ was never allowed to paralyze him. In 1938 he made two visits to the NWFP and one to eastern India; and in 1939 he went to Gujarat, UP, Calcutta, Bihar and the Frontier province.
Every day, whether travelling or in Sevagram, and including when he felt trapped in a Slough of Despond, he wrote dozens of letters and gave of himself to several callers. The routine of waking at 3.30 a.m., praying twice a day, spinning for an hour or more, and spending time with the sick did not change. Every week he wrote for Harijan, now a political as well as a social reform journal, offering advice to Congress ministries and to his non-political followers. And whenever necessary he intervened in Congress affairs: his role over the Subhas Bose presidency was not an isolated case.
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 57