Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  A tall, strapping woman, handsome rather than pretty, Madeline took avidly to the ascetic part of the ashram life. She clung to Gandhi with a ferocity which he found very unsettling, perhaps also because of feelings which her strong need for his physical proximity in turn aroused in him. During the 24 years of their association, Gandhi would repeatedly send her away to live and work in other ashrams in distant parts of the country. She would have nervous breakdowns as a consequence of these separations and ‘struggles of the heart’ (as she called them) or ‘spiritual agony’ (as Gandhi put it), impetuously rush back to wherever Gandhi was only to be again banished from his presence. He tried to redirect her from her single-minded concentration on him as a person to the cause they both served.

  The parting today was sad, because I saw that I pained you. I want you to be a perfect woman. I want you to shed all angularities….

  Do throw off the nervousness. You must not cling to me as in this body. The spirit without the body is ever with you. And that is more than the feeble embodied imprisoned spirit with all the limitations that flesh is heir to. The spirit without the flesh is perfect, and that is all we need. This can be felt only when we practise detachment. This you must now try to achieve.

  This is how I should grow if I were you. But you should grow along your own lines. You will, therefore, reject all I have said in this, that does not appeal to your heart or your head. You must retain your individuality at all cost. Resist me when you must. For I may judge you wrongly in spite of all my love for you. I do not want you to impute infallibility to me.55

  Madeline, now appropriately renamed Mira by Gandhi after the 16th-century Indian woman-saint whose infatuation with Krishna was not much greater than Madeline’s own yearing for the Mahatma, was however a battlefield of forces stronger than those amenable to reason. She was like the women described by the psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson, who come to analysis not to seek insight but to enjoy the physical proximity of the analyst.56 Such patients relate a history of achievement and an adequate social life but an unsatisfactory love life characterized by wishes for incorporation, possession, and fusion. Gandhi’s attitude to Mira, like that of the analyst with the patient, combined sympathetic listening with the frustration of wishes for gratification—a certain recipe, the mandrake root, for intensifying and unearthing ever more fresh capacities for love in her.57 It further enhanced what analysts would call her transference to the Mahatma, a type of intense love felt for people who fulfil a role in our lives equivalent to the one fulfilled by parents in our childhood.

  The presumption that their relationship was not quite one-sided and that Mira too evoked complex ‘countertransference’ reactions in Gandhi is amply supported by his letters to her. Once, in 1927, when Mira had rushed to Gandhi’s side on hearing that he was under severe strain, and had promptly been sent back, Gandhi wrote to her:

  I could not restrain myself from sending you a love message on reaching here. I felt very sad after letting you go. I have been very severe with you, but I could not do otherwise. I had to perform an operation and I steadied myself for it. Now let us hope all would go on smoothly, and that all the weakness is gone.58

  The letter was followed the next day with a post card: ‘This is merely to tell you I can’t dismiss you from my mind. Every surgeon has a soothing ointment after a severe operation. This is my ointment…’59 Two days later, yet another letter followed:

  I have never been so anxious as this time to hear from you, for I sent you away too quickly after a serious operation. You haunted me in my sleep last night and were reported by friends to whom you had been sent, to be delirious, but without any danger. They said, ‘You need not be anxious. We are doing all that is humanly possible.’ And with this I woke up troubled in mind and prayed that you may be free from all harm…60

  From prison, where he was safe from her importunate physicality, Gandhi could express his feelings for her more freely. While translating a book of Indian hymns into English for her, he wrote: ‘In translating the hymns for you I am giving myself much joy. Have I not expressed my love, often in storms than in gentle soothing showers of affection? The memory of these storms adds to the pleasure of this exclusive translation for you.’61 As with his other women, Gandhi could not let Mira get away further than the distance he unconsciously held to be the optimal for his own feelings of well-being.

  Like the child on his first explorations of the world who does not venture further from the mother than the length of an invisible string with which he seems attached to her, Gandhi too would become anxious at any break that threatened to become permanent and would seek to draw the woman closer to him.

  Chi. Mira,

  You are on the brain. I look about me, and miss you. I open the charkha (spinning wheel) and miss you. So on and so forth. But what is the use? You have done the right thing. You have left your home, your people and all that people prize most, not to serve me personally but to serve the cause I stand for. All the time you were squandering your love on me personally, I felt guilty of misappropriation. And I exploded on the slightest pretext. Now that you are not with me, my anger turns itself upon me for having given you all those terrible scoldings. But I was on a bed of hot ashes all the while I was accepting your service. You will truly serve me by joyously serving the cause. Cheer, cheer, no more of idle.

  To this, Mira added the commentary, ‘The struggle was terrible. I too was on a bed of hot ashes because I could feel the Bapu was. This was one of the occasions when, somehow or other, I managed to tear myself away.’62

  In 1936, when Gandhi was recovering from his breakdown and had decided to leave Sabarmati to go and live by himself in a remote village, Mira thought she finally had a chance to fulfil her deepest longing, to live with Bapu in the countryside. Gandhi, however, was adamant. He would stay in the village Mira lived in only if she herself shifted to a neighbouring one. ‘This nearly broke my heart, but somehow I managed to carry on, and when Bapu finally decided to come and live in Seagaon,’ she writes, ‘I buried my sorrow in the joy of preparing for him his cottage and cowshed. For myself I built a little cottage a mile away on the ridge of Varoda village, and within a week of Bapu’s coming to live in Seagaon I departed for the hut on the hill where I lived alone with my little horse as my companion.’63 Even this relative nearness was not to last long as political events inexorably pulled Gandhi away on his travels.

  In 1948, at the time of Gandhi’s death, Mira was living in her own ashram near Rishikesh in the foothills of the Himalayas, devoting herself to the care of cattle in the nearby villages. Starting one ashram after another, deeper and deeper into the Himalayas, she was to live in India till 1958 when she decided to return to Europe, almost 35 years after she had first left home in search of Gandhi. I visited her with a friend in 1964, in the forests above Baden near Vienna where she now made her home in an isolated farmhouse with a dog and an old Indian servant from Rishikesh. Gracious but reserved, she offered us tea and biscuits and perfunctorily inquired about current events in India. She refused to talk about Gandhi, claiming that he did not interest her any longer. What animated her exclusively and what she enthusiastically talked about was Beethoven whom she saw as the highest manifestation of the human spirit. He had been her first love before she read Romain Rolland’s book on Gandhi that was to change her life. Working on a biography of Beethoven and with his music as her dearest companion she had come back to the composer after a 35-year detour with Gandhi. Somewhat disappointed, we left her to her new love. Walking toward our car parked a few hundred yards away from the farmhouse, we saw the servant come running up to us, desperation writ large on his lined face: ‘Sahib, I don’t want to live here. I want to go home. Please take me home.’ I mumbled our apologies for being unable to help and left him standing on the grassy meadow, peering after us in the mild afternoon sun as we drove away.

  To place Gandhi’s sexual preoccupations in their cultural context, we should remember that sexuality, whether in the erotic
flourishes of Indian art and in the Dionysian rituals of its popular religion, or in the dramatic combat with ascetic longings of yogis who seek to conquer and transform it into spiritual power, has been a perennial preoccupation of Hindu culture. In this resides the reason, puzzling to many non-Indians, why in spite of the surface resemblances between Jungian concepts and Indian thought, it is Freud rather than Jung who fascinates the Indian mind. Many modern Indian mystics feel compelled, in fact, to discuss Freud’s assumptions and conclusions about the vagaries and transfigurations of libido while they pass over Jung’s work with benign indifference. Indian spirituality is preeminently a theory of ‘sublimation.’

  Indian ‘mysticism’ is typically intended to be an intensely practical affair, concerned with an alchemy of the libido that would convert it from a giver of death to a bestower of immortality. It is the sexual fire that stokes the alchemical transformation wherein the cooking pot is the body and the cooking oil is a distillation from sexual fluids. The strength of this traditional aspiration to sublimate sexuality into spirituality, semen into the elixir Soma, varies in different regions with different castes. Yet though only small sections of Indian society may act on this aspiration, it is a well-known theory subscribed to by most Hindus, including non-literate villagers. In its most popular form, the Hindu theory of sublimation goes something like this.

  Physical strengh and mental power have their source in virya, a word that stands for both sexual energy and semen. Virya, in fact, is identical with the essence of maleness. Virya can either move downward in sexual intercourse, where it is emitted in its gross physical form as semen, or it can move upward through the spinal chord and into the brain, in its subtle form known as ojas. Hindus regard the downward movement of sexual energy and its emission as semen as enervating, a debilitating waste of vitality and essential energy. Of all emotions, it is said, lust throws the physical system into the greatest choas, with every violent passion destroying millions of red blood cells. Indian metaphysical physiology maintains that food is converted into semen in a 30-day period by successive transformations (and refinements) through blood, flesh, fat, bone, and marrow till semen is distilled—40 drops of blood producing one drop of semen. Each ejaculation involves a loss of half an ounce of semen, which is equivalent to the vitality produced by the consumption of 60 pounds of food.

  In another similar calculation with pedagogic intent, each act of copulation is equivalent to an energy expenditure of 24 hours of concentrated mental activity or 72 hours of hard physical labour.64 Gandhi is merely reiterating these popular ideas when he says that

  Once the idea, that the only and grand function of the sexual organ is generation, posesses men and women, union for any other purpose they will hold as criminal waste of the vital fluid, and consequent excitement caused to men and women as an equally criminal waste of precious energy. It is now easy to understand why the scientists of old have put such great value upon its strong transmutation into the highest form of energy for the benefit of society.65

  If, on the other hand, semen is retained, converted into ojas and moved upwards by the observance of brahmacharya, it becomes a source of spiritual life rather than cause of physical decay. Longevity, creativity, physical and mental vitality are enhanced by the conservation of semen; memory, will power, inspiration—scientific and artistic—all derive from the observation of brahmacharya. In fact, if unbroken (akhanda) brahmacharya in thought, word, and deed can be observed for 12 years, the aspirant will obtain moksha spontaneously.

  These ideas on semen and celibacy, I have emphasized above, are a legacy of Indian culture and are shared, so to speak, by Hindu saints and sinners alike. Indeed, the very first published case history in Indian psychoanalytic literature sounds like a parody of Gandhi.

  The patient is a married young man and is the father of several children. He is of religious bent and his ideal in life is to attain what has been called in Hindu literature Jivanmukti, i.e., a state of liberation from wordly bondages and a perfect freedom from all sorts of passions whether bodily or mental. The possibility of the existence of such a state and of its attainment is never doubted by the patient as he says he has implicit faith in the Hindu scriptures which assert that the realization of brahma or supreme entity, results in such a liberation. (He believes)… that the only thing he has to do is to abstain from sex of all sorts and liberation will come to him as a sort of reward… Since one pleasure leads to another it is desirable to shun all pleasures in life lest they should lead to sex. The patient is against forming any attachment whether it be with his wife or children or friend or any inanimate object. He is terribly upset sometimes when he finds that in spite of his ideal of no-attachment and no-sex, lascivious thoughts of the most vulgar nature and uncontrollable feelings of love and attraction arise in his mind… In spite of his deep reverence for Hindu gods and goddesses filthy sexual ideas of an obsessional nature come into his mind when he bows before these images.66

  The ‘raising’ of the seed upwards,’ then, is a strikingly familiar image in the Indian psycho-philosophical schools of self-realization commonly clumped under the misleading label of ‘mysticism.’ As Wendy O’ Flaherty remarks: ‘So pervasive is the concept of semen being raised up to the head that popular versions of the philosophy believe that semen originates there.’67 The concept is even present in the Kamasutra, the textbook of eroticism and presumably a subverter of ascetic ideals, where the successful lover is not someone who is overly passionate but one who has controlled, stilled his senses through brahmacharya and meditation.68 Indian mythology, too, is replete with stories in which the gods, threatened by a human being who is progressing toward immortality by accruing immense capacities through celibacy and meditation, send a heavenly nymph to seduce the ascetic (even the trickling down of a single drop of sexual fluid counting as a fatal lapse), and thereby reduce him to the common human, carnal denominator.

  Of course, given the horrific imagery of sexuality as cataclysmic depletion, no people can procreate with any sense of joyful abandon unless they develop a good deal of scepticism, if not an open defiance, in relation to the sexual prescription had ideals of the ‘cultural superego.’ The relief at seeing the ascetic’s pretensions humbled by the opulent charms of a heavenly seductress is not only that of the gods but is equally shared by the mortals who listen to the myth or see it enacted in popular dance and folk drama. The ideals of celibacy are then simultaneously subscribed to and scoffed at. Whereas, one the one hand, there are number of sages in the Indian tradition (Gandhi is only the latest one to join this august assemblage), who are admired for their successful celibacy and the powers it brought them, there are, on the other hand, also innumerable folktales detailing the misadventures of randy ascetics. In the more dignified myths, even the Creator is unable to sustain his chastity and is laid low by carnality.

  The heavenly nymph Mohini fell in love with the Lord of Creation, Brahma. After gaining the assistance of Kama, the god of love, she went to Brahma and danced before him, revealing her body to him in order to entice him, but Brahma remained without passion. Then Kama struck Brahma with an arrow. Brahma wavered and felt desire, but after a moment he gained control. Brahma said to Mohini, go away, Mother, your efforts are wasted here. I know your intention, and I am not suitable for your work. The scripture says, ‘Ascetics must avoid all women, especially prostitutes.’ I am incapable of doing anything that the Vedas consider despicable. You are a sophisticated woman, look for a sophisticated young man, suitable for your work, and there will be virtue in your union. But I am an old man, an ascetic Brahmin; what pleasure can I find in a prostitute? Mohini laughed and said to him, ‘A man who refuses to make love to a woman who is tortured by desire—he is an eunuch. Whether a man be a householder or ascetic or lover, he must not spurn a woman who approaches him, or he will go to Hell. Come now and make love to me in some private place,’ and as she said this she pulled at Brahma’s garment. Then the sages bowed to Brahma, ‘How is it that Mohini,
the best of celestial prostitutes, is in your presence?’ Brahma said, to conceal his scheme, ‘She danced and sang for a long time and then when she was tired she came here like a young girl to her father.’ But the sages laughed for they knew the whole secret, and Brahma laughed too.69

  The piece of gossip that Gandhi ‘slept with naked women in his old age’ has therefore resounding echoes in the Indian cultural tradition. It arouses complex emotions in both the purveyor or and the listener, namely a malicious relief together with an aching disappointment that he may indeed have done so.

  The ultimate if ironic refinement of celibacy is found in the tantric version, where the aspirant is trained and enjoined to perform the sexual act itself without desire and the ‘spilling of the seed,’ thus divorcing the sexual impulse from human physiology and any conscious or unconscious mental representation of it. The impulse, it is believed, stirs up the semen in this ritual (and unbelievably passionless) sexual act and evokes energetic forces that can be rechanneled upwards. This and other tantric techniques were familiar to Gandhi, whose own deeply held religious persuasion, Vaishnavism, was pervaded by many such tantric notions. On the one hand, as we have seen, Gandhi often sounds like Chaitanya, the 15th-century ‘father’ of North Indian Vaishnavism, who rejected a disciple for paying attention to a woman, saying: ‘I can never again look upon the face of an ascetic who associates with women. The senses are hard to control, and seek to fix themselves on wordly things. Even the wooden image of a woman has the power to steal the mind of a sage….’70 On the other hand, however, Gandhi in his sexual experiments seems to be following the examples set by other famous Vaishnavas like Ramananda and Viswanatha. Ramananda, Chaitanya’s follower and companion, used to take two beautiful young temple prostitutes into a lonely garden where he would oil their bodies, bathe, and dress them while himself remaining ‘unaffected.’71 The philosopher Viswanatha, it is said, went to lie with his young wife at the command of his guru: ‘He lay with her on the bed, but Viswanatha was transformed, and he did not touch her, as it had been his custom to do. He lay with his wife according to the instructions of his guru…. and thus he controlled his senses.’72