by Sudhir Kakar
If one
Ponders on objects of the senses there springs
Attraction; from attraction grows desire,
Desire flames to fierce passion, passion breeds
Recklessness; then the memory—all betrayed—
Lets noble purpose go, and saps the mind,
Till purpose, mind, and man are all undone.
‘These verses,’ he says, ‘made a deep impression on my mind, and they still ring in my ears.’7
The other stream is his obsession with food, an obsession that was to remain with him for the rest of his life. Page after page, in dreary detail, we read about what Gandhi ate and what he did not, why he partook of certain foods and why he did not eat others, what one eminent vegetarian told him about eggs and what another, equally eminent, denied. The connection between sexuality and food is made quite explicit in Gandhi’s later life when his ruminations about his celibacy would almost invariably be followed by an exhaustive discussion of the types of food that stimulate desire and others that dampen it. Again, we must remember that in the Indian consciousness, the symbolism of food is more closely or manifestly connected to sexuality than it is in the West. The words for eating and sexual enjoyment, as A.K. Ramanujan reminds us, have the same root, bhuj, in Sanskrit, and sexual intercourse is often spoken about as the mutual feeding of male and female.8
On his return to India, Gandhi was faced with the necessity of making a living as a lawyer, a task for which he found himself both professionally and personally ill-equipped. A section of his caste was still hostile to him, having never forgiven him for his defiance of its mandate not to go abroad. There were further difficulties in his adjustments to the norms and mores of life in an Indian extended family—and in the family’s adjustments to the newly acquired habits and values of its somewhat Anglicized member. Today, with infinitely larger numbers of people moving across cultural boundaries and back again, the urbane Indian might indulgently smile at the tragicomic aspects of this reverse cultural shock. Tea and coffee, oatmeal porridge and cocoa were introduced to the breakfast table of the Gandhi household. Boots, shoes—and smelly socks—were to be worn in the burning heat of Kathiawar. Indeed, as a colonial subject, his indentification with the British overlord was so strong that when some years later he was to sail for South Africa, he insisted on his sons being dressed like English public school boys with Etonian collars and ties. Poor Kasturbai was to dress up as a British lady—corset, bustle, high lace collar, laced shoes, and all. Her vehement protests and perhaps the absurdity of it all made him finally relent, though Kasturbai still had to dress up as a Parsi lady, a member of the community most respected by the British.
The marriage was still tempestuous, his driven genital desire the cause of these storms. His stay in England had neither reduced the strength of Gandhi’s jealousy nor put an end to the nagging suspicions about his wife’s fidelity. At the egging on of his old friend Sheikh Mehtab, Gandhi went so far as to break Kasturbai’s bangles—to an Indian girl the dreaded symbol of widowhood—and to send her back to her parents’ house. It took him a year before he consented to receive her back and over four years before his suspicion was stilled.9 Purists can be cruel, especially to those dependent women who threaten to devour their virtue.
Economic, social, and familial conflicts, besides the perennial erotic one, seem to have spurred Gandhi’s travels on the spiritual path. In this journey he now acquired a guide, Raichandra, a young jeweller. Raichandra was a man after Gandhi’s own heart, more interested in moksha (the release from the cycles of birth and death which Hindus believe govern the wandering of the individual soul) than in diamonds. The two men met often to discuss spiritual topics and the depth of Raichandra’s sincerity, purpose, and knowledge of Hindu thought and scriptures made a deep impression on Gandhi’s mind. Of the three men, he says, who had to greatest influence on his life (the others were Tolstoy and Ruskin), Raichandra was the only one with whom he had a long personal asociation. Indeed, the young jeweller who talked so eloquently about moksha was the nearest Gandhi came to having a guru, and ‘In my moments of inner crisis, it was Raichandra with whom I used to seek refuge.’10
Unforunately, in spite of the vast amount written on his life (over 400 biographical items), and the wealth of material contained in the 90 volumes of Gandhi’s collected works, we know very little of the subjects of these talks, the letters they exchanged, or the kind of guidance Gandhi sought for his inner turbulence. From the available references, scattered in Gandhi’s writings, it is evident that a central concern of their earnest exchanges was the relationship of sexuality to ‘salvation,’ the transformation of sexual potency into psychic and spiritual power—the core issue, in fact, of much of Hindu metaphysics and practice. Gandhi notes that the idea that ‘milk gives birth to sexual passions is something which I first learnt from Raichandrabhai,’ and he ascribes to the jeweller the predominant role in his decision to become a celibate.11
In 1893, at the age of 24; Gandhi left for South Africa where he had been engaged as a lawyer by an Indian businessman. With brief interruptions for home visits, he was to stay there for the next 22 years.
Gandhi’s years in South Africa, especially from 1990 to 1910, roughly spanning the fourth decade of his life, were crucial for the formation of Gandhi’s historical persona. During these years Gandhi remade himself in that final image which is now evoked by his name. The first great nonviolent political campaigns for the rights of Indians living in South Africa, which introduced and refined the instrument of Satyagraha (literally, insistence on truth), took place during this period, at the end of which the would become well-known in many parts of the world. Equally important for our purposes is the fact that it was also during these years that he defined for himself the kind of personal life he would lead, and developed his ideas on the desired relationship between the sexes which would form the foundation for his own marriage with Kasturbai.
Founding and living in communes with disciples and seekers who shared his vision, radically experimenting with food and alternative systems of healing such as nature cure, generally embracing an ascetic lifestyle, the cornerstone of his personal life was brahmacharya or celibacy. Indeed brahmacharya was one leg of a tripod of which the other two were nonviolence (ahimsa) and truth (satya), which he adopted as the conscious basis for his adult identity and about which he would later write: ‘Nonviolence came to me after a strenuous struggle, brahmacharya I am still struggling for, but truth has always come naturally to me.’12
The decision for sexual abstinence was taken in 1901, the year in which Raichandra died and in which Gandhi had just become a father for the fourth time (Devdas, the youngest son, was born in 1900). Both these circumstances must have contributed to Gandhi’s resolve to renounce sexuality. The birth of the son, as we know from the account of the fateful night of the father’s death and the newborn who did not survive because of his father’s accursed lust, was a reminder of Gandhi’s despised genital desires and therefore a stigma. To give them up was an offering made at the altar of Raichandra’s (and, we would conjecture, his father’s) departed soul. Kasturbai had not been consulted and Gandhi confesses that for the first few years he was only ‘more or less successful’ in his practice of self-restraint.13 Gandhi had left for India with his family in November 1901 and returned to South Africa the next year after promising his wife that she would soon follow. Yet once he was back in South Africa, Gandhi was reluctant to have Kasturbai join him. Paramount in his decision must have been the fact that his resolve to abstain from sexual intercourse was still fragile. The monetary argument he advances in the letters to his relatives, where he asks their help in persuading his wife to remain behind for two to three years, namely, that the savings he could make in South Africa would enable her and the children to lead an easy life in India,14 neither jibes with the realities of running a household alone nor with Gandhi’s character and temperament. Only a few months earlier, while leaving for India, he had gifted all
the gold and diamond jewellery presented to him by a grateful Indian community to a trust, maintaining, ‘I feel neither I nor my family can make any personal use of the costly present,’ and that what he valued was their affection and not money.15
Gandhi finally took the vow to observe complete celibacy in 1906 when he was 37 years old, on the eve of his first nonviolent political campaign in South Africa. The preceding five years of attempted abstinence he felt, had only been a preparation for what would amount to a total and irrevocable renunciation of sexuality. The example of Tolstoy further deepened his resolve. As he writes in 1905, ‘He (Tolstoy) used to enjoy all pleasures of the world, kept mistresses, drank and was strongly addicted to smoking…. He has given up all his vices, eats very simple food and has it in him no longer to hurt any living creature by thought, word or deed.’16 Tolstoy’s ideas on chastity, not only for the unmarried but also for the married, outlined in the Kreuzer Sonata (1889), were combined with the Hindu notions on brahmacharya to form Gandhi’s own vision of the ‘right’ relationship between men and women. More than a. personal code of conduct, these ideas regulated the life of all those who lived with him in his various communes (ashrams) in South Africa and India. Briefly summaried in his own words, this doctrine on the relationship between a couple holds that
The very purpose of marriage is restraint and sublimation of the sexual passion. Marriage for the satisfaction of sexual appetite is vyabhichara, concupisence…if they come together merely to have a fond embrace they are nearest the devil.
The only rule that can be laid down in such instances (if a child is not conceived) is that coitus may be permitted once at the end of the monthly period till conception is established. If its object is achieved it must be abjured forthwith.
There is not doubt that much of the sensuality of our nature, whether male or female, is due to the superstition, having a religious sanction, that married people are bound to share the same bed and the same room. But every husband and wife can make a fixed resolution from today never to share the same room or same bed at night, and to avoid sexual contact, except for one supreme purpose which it is intended for in both man and beast.17
Whatever its other consequences, there is little doubt that Gandhi’s vow of celibacy distinctly improved his marriage, perhaps because poor Kasturbai was no longer perceived as a seductive siren responsible for his lapses from a longed-for ideal of purity. Ever since they had been in South Africa, there was much bickering and quarreling between the two. They had fought over her desire to keep her ornaments while Gandhi sought to convince her of the virtues of nonpossession. There was a major explosion, in which Gandhi almost turned her out of the house, over his wish that she clean up after an untouchable Christian visitor, a task abhorrent to a traditional Hindu woman with her deeply ingrained taboos about pollution There was a running battle between the couple over their eldest son Harilal’s wish that he grow up like other boys of his age and be allowed to avail of formal schooling. Gandhi’s radical views on education would not allow the son to be sent to school, while Kasturbai was obstinate in the advocacy of her firstborn’s cause.
From all accounts, before the vow of brahmacharya, Gandhi was an autocrat with his wife, ‘completely steel,’ as he tried to bend her to his will and get her to embrace what must have appeared to her as eccentric notions that endangered the present and future welfare of the family.
After 1906, their relationship improved steadily and Gandhi could write with some justification that ‘I could not steal into my wife’s heart until I decided to treat her differently than I used to do, and so I restored to her all her rights by dispossessing myself of any so-called rights as her husband.’18 In their later years, though there were occasional disagreements, generally with respect to the children and Kasturbai’s discomfort with the many women in the various ashrams who jostled each other to come closer to Gandhi, the marriage was marked by deep intimacy and a quiet love which impressed everyone who witnessed the old couple together.
For Gandhi, celibacy was not only the sine qua non for moksha, but also the mainspring of his political activities. It is from the repudiation, the ashes of sexual desire, that the weapon of nonviolence which he used so effectively in his political struggle against the racial oppression of the South African white rulers and later against the British empire, was phoenix-like born. As Gandhi puts it:
Ahimsa (nonviolence) means Universal Love. If a man gives his love to one woman, or a woman to one man, what is there left for the world besides? It simply means, ‘We two first, and the devil take all the rest of them.’ As a faithful wife must be prepared to sacrifice her all for the sake of her husband, and a faithful husband for the sake of his wife, it is clear that such persons cannot rise to the height of Universal Love, or look upon all mankind as kith and kin. For they have created a boundary wall round their love. The larger their family, the farther are they from Universal Love, Hence one who would obey the law of ahimsa cannot marry, not to speak of gratification outside the marital bond.19
As for those who are already married,
If the married couple can think of each other as brother and sister, they are freed for universal service. The very thought that all women in the world are his sisters, mothers and daughters will at once enable a man to snap his chains.20
The truth of Gandhi’s assertion that sexual love limits rather than expands personal concerns and that the narrow role of a husband is antithetical to the larger identity of one who would husband the world is not at issue here. Our intention for the moment is to elucidate Gandhi’s conflict in the way he viewed it—in this case, the imperatives of desire straining against the higher purpose of unfettered service to community. Yet another of his pansexualist formulations of the conflict has it that the gratification of sexual passion vies with a man’s obligation to enhance personal vitality and psychic power. ‘A man who is unchaste loses stamina, becomes emasculated and cowardly,’21 is a sentiment often echoed in his writings as is the reiteration that his capacity to work in the political arena was a result of the psychic power gained through celibacy. Still another, later formulation is put in religious and spiritual terms—sexuality compromises his aspiration to become ‘God’s eunuch.’ Reminiscent of Christ’s metaphors of innocent childhood to describe would-be entrants to the kingdom of heaven and Prophet Mohammed’s welcoming of ‘those made eunuchs,’ not through an operation but through prayer to God, Gandhi too would see sexual renunciation as a precondition for self-realization and, Moses-like, for seeing God ‘face to face.’
Like his communes, which are a combination of the ashrama of the ancient sages described in the Hindu epics and the Trappist monastery in South Africa which so impressed him on a visit, Gandhi’s views on the importance and merits of celibacy too seem to be derived from a mixture of Hindu and Christian religious traditions. Where Gandhi proceeded to give these views a special twist, going much beyond the cursory juxtaposition of sexuality and eating made in his culture, was in emphasizing, above all, the relation of food to the observance of celibacy. Experiments with food, to find that elusive right combination which would keep the libido effectively dammed, continued right through to the end o fhis life. In South Africa, as reported by an admiring yet detached disciple, there were months of cooking without salt or any condiments. Another period witnesses the absence of sugar, dates, and currants being added for sweetening purposes. This was followed by a period of ‘unfired’ food served with olive oil. ‘Food values were most earnestly discussed, and their effect upon the human body and its moral qualities solemnly examined. For a time a dish of raw chopped onions, as a blood purifier, regularly formed part of the dinner meal…. Ultimately Mr Gandhi came to the conclusion that onions were bad for the passions, and so onions were cut out. Milk, too, Mr Gandhi said, affected the “passion” side of human life and thereafter milk was abjured likewise. “We talk about food quite as much as gourmands do,” I said on one occasion to Mr Gandhi “I am sure we talk about food more t
han most people; we seem to be always thinking of the things we either may or may not eat. Sometimes, I think it would be better if we just ate anything and did not think about it at all.”22 But for Gandhi food was a deathly serious business.
Control of palate is very closely connected with the observance of brahmacharya (celibacy). I have found from experience that the observance of celibacy becomes comparatively easy, it one acquires mastery over the palate. This does not figure among the observances of time-honoured recognition. Could it be because even great sages found it difficult to achieve. Food has to be taken as we take medicine, without thinking whether it is tasty or otherwise, and only in quantities limited to the needs of the body…. And one who thus gives up a multitude of eatables will acquire self-control in the natural course of things.23
The above passage is reminiscent of St Augustine who, too, would take food as physic, strive daily against concupiscence in eating and drinking, and assert that “the bridle of the throat then is to be held attempered between slackness and stiffness.”24 St Augustine’s attitude toward food, though, is part of his attempt to gain a general freedom from the grip of sensuality, including ‘the delights of the ear (that) had more firmly entangled and subdued me.’25 Augustine treats imbibition as he does all sensory input. Gandhi, on the other hand, makes of food a primary regulator of the genital impulses. ‘A man of heightened sexual passion,’ he writes, ‘is also greedy of the palate. This was also my condition. To gain control over the organs of both generation and taste has been difficult for me.’26
A radical cure for his epicurean disease is, of course,. fasting, and Gandhi was its enthusiastic proponent ‘As an external aid to brahmacharya, fasting is as necessary as selection and restriction of diet. So overpowering are the senses that they can be kept under control only when they are completely hedged in on all sides, from above and from beneath.’27 Remembering Gandhi’s great fasts during his political struggles, we can see how fasting for him would have another, more personal meaning as a protector of his cherished celibacy and thus an assurance against the waning of psychic, and, with it, political power.