by Robert Payne
At intervals the door would open, and a new visitor would slip quickly into the room—a Congress member, a journalist, a writer, a high officer in a provincial government. Usually they all behaved in the same way. They would bend forward very low as they came across the room, running toward him, and then they would fall on their knees and kiss his feet, and then sit back on their knees, with their hands folded on their laps. Gandhi professed to dislike these ceremonial greetings. It was not only the peasants who kissed his feet; nearly everyone saluted him in this way; and although he sometimes remonstrated good-humoredly, saying he was unworthy, he never categorically forbade it.
All day the door would open and close, and the visitors would ask him careful questions—they had previously been warned not to take up much of his time—and he would answer quickly and decisively. In theory he had retired from politics, but many of these questions were devoted to political matters and his replies, as he knew, would have political consequences. Some came simply to adore him, to bask in his darshan, and some to receive a blessing. Others came on urgent errands, or to offer advice on the solution of India’s problems, but these were rare, for it was generally assumed that Gandhi was in no need of advice. But nearly all came with their short, carefully prepared questions, receiving answers which were nearly always human, down to earth, clear-cut and simple. He had a gift for going to the heart of a problem.
So the visitors came all morning and afternoon, while he struggled with his correspondence, his pamphlets and his articles, and in the evening there was always a prayer meeting, which would be announced by the striking of a gong. Then from all round people would come and sit on mats, and an old musician would begin to tune up his sitar in preparation for the hymns and the readings from the Bhagavad Gita, and then there would be the inevitable sermon about the Harijans, or about some passage in a holy text, or about sanitation.
Although his strength had returned as a result of the walking tour, he was still vulnerable. Unexpected shocks, which other men might be able to take in their stride, had a shattering effect on him. He lived on his nervous energy, and he had few reserves. Two shocks, one delivered by an American woman and the other by his son, brought about a complete breakdown.
A Meeting with Margaret Sanger
ON JANUARY 13,1936, a distinguished visitor arrived at the railroad station at Wardha. She was Margaret Sanger, the authority on birth control, and Gandhi had agreed to meet her after receiving a telegram from Dr. John Haynes Holmes, a man of deep religious convictions who believed that a confrontation with Miss Sanger could do no harm and might perhaps do good. Dr. Holmes had a considerable admiration for Miss Sanger and an unlimited reverence for Gandhi.
At the railroad station she was met by a tonga, a simple peasant cart with steps leading up to it, but there were no seats and so she sat down in the bottom of the cart, which was drawn by a cream-colored bullock. In this leisurely fashion she made her way to the ashram where Gandhi was waiting for her, sitting cross-legged on the floor and enveloped in an enormous white shawl. As she entered the room clutching an armful of books, magazines, flowers and gloves, Gandhi rose to greet her, and they were both smiling as they made an effort across the books and flowers to clasp each other’s hands. It was an auspicious beginning for an exhausting and troubling conversation, which failed to bring birth control any closer to the Indian peasants, but which had some remarkable consequences.
Miss Sanger had opened her first birth-control clinic in January 1917, exactly nineteen years before, and she was now a veteran of many years of struggle. As a visiting nurse in the slums of New York she had been horrified by the results of ungoverned fertility, and she carried on a campaign to enable working-class women to obtain information about birth control so relentlessly that both the Puritans and the Catholics were up in arms against her. “A woman’s body belongs to herself alone,” she wrote; in defense of birth control she was imprisoned, defamed, and hounded by the police. Yet she did not in the least resemble the conventional portrait of the fanatical feminist. When she entered Gandhi’s ashram, she was wearing a print dress and looked half her age, and she resembled a young matron from suburbia with a good deal of Irish charm and the manner of a woman capable of firm decisions. Her mission was to bring birth control to India and she half hoped to receive the seal of Gandhi’s approval.
But this was Monday, Gandhi’s day of silence, meditation and prayer, and therefore there could be no discussion that day. For a little while they smiled and nodded pleasantly to one another, and then Miss Sanger was escorted along a gravel path to the guest house, a small, whitewashed, four-roomed house with an uneven stone floor and the look of a house which is rarely lived in. There were some cots without mattresses, and serving as a chair or a table was a low circular shelf built around the roof-pole.
Miss Sanger was not entirely captivated by her new surroundings. Gandhi was cultivating village industries, and as she examined the oil press and the wooden wheels used for irrigation, she wondered why he was deliberately turning his back on modern machines. She felt that she had entered a small feudal kingdom ruled by a man determined to make everyone work in order to have a reason for existence. Yet she was favorably impressed by Gandhi, although his ears seemed to be far more prominent than they appeared in the photographs and his shaven head was unnaturally sleek and shiny. She observed that he took great care of himself, observed rules of health, and ate according to a strict regimen. There was a “luminous aura” about him, and once you became aware of it, then his ugliness faded and it was possible to glimpse the spiritual essence of the man. He was good-humored and very hospitable, and she began to hope that they might come to some kind of agreement.
The next morning she accompanied him on his daily walk, observing how men, women and children sometimes prostrated themselves as he passed. They wandered out into the open fields where families huddled in small huts surrounded by their dogs and goats. At eleven o’clock in the morning they took breakfast, and as soon as breakfast was finished she settled down to the task of convincing him of the necessity of birth control. He refused to be convinced. As one argument was put forward, he would knock it down; he had a single guiding principle, and all her arguments failed in the light of this principle. In Gandhi’s eyes sexual union was sinful except for the purpose of procreation; to encourage birth control was therefore to sin against God. In the course of a couple’s entire married life there should ideally be sexual union only three or four times, because only three or four children were needed in a family. There was only one sure and efficacious method of birth control—husband and wife should live in perfect continence except when they genuinely desired children.
He spoke in a low, carefully modulated voice, at ease among words. Miss Sanger was a little disturbed by his fluency and wondered whether his mind was really gripping the argument. “I felt his registering of impressions was blunted,” she wrote later. “While you were answering a question of his, he held to an idea or a train of thought of his own, and as soon as you stopped, continued as though he had not heard you.” Although he claimed to be open-minded, he was a man of principle who never altered his opinions.
Inevitably Gandhi probed into his own life in order to discover the sources of his attitude toward birth control. He remembered the storm of emotions in 1906 which culminated in his adoption of brahmacharya, and thought deeply about his relations with his wife. The physical apparatus of birth control horrified him, because he felt it was unnatural, a deliberate tampering with nature, but he was equally horrified by the sexual license of the people who coupled for their own enjoyment. Between obstructing nature and nature’s teeming fertility he could find no foothold except a stern asceticism. When Miss Sanger suggested that there were perfectly natural means to prevent childbirth—lemon trees grew at Wardha, and so did cotton, and a swab of cotton dipped in lemon juice served as an easily available contraceptive—Gandhi objected strongly, saying that a cotton swab was an unnatural interference in the pro
cesses of nature and only continence was natural. Women must learn to “resist” their husbands, and if necessary they should abandon their husbands.
Among those who were present at the after-breakfast discussion was Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, the saintly princess who was regarded by Gandhi as one of his most critical followers. She remembered how the discussion grew tense and strangely exciting, as though long-buried trains of thought were suddenly emerging to the surface. Gandhi claimed to know women well and to be in sympathetic accord with them; he spoke at length of his relations with them, and he was convinced that they were the unwilling instruments of their husband’s lusts. He said:
My wife I made the orbit of all women, and in her I studied all women. I came in contact with many European women in South Africa, and I knew practically every Indian woman there. I tried to show them they were not slaves either of their husbands or parents, not only in the political field but in the domestic as well. But the trouble was that some could not resist their husbands.
The remedy is in the hands of women themselves. The struggle is difficult for them. I do not blame them. I blame the men. Men have legislated against them. Man has regarded woman as his tool. She has learned to be his tool and in the end found it easy and pleasurable to be such, because when one drags another to his fall the descent is easy. I have felt that during the years still left to me if I can drive home to women’s minds the truth that they are free we will have no birth control problems in India. If they will only learn to say “no” to their husbands when they approach them carnally, I do not suppose that all husbands are brutes and if women only know how to resist them all will be well. I have been able to teach women who have come in contact with me how to resist their husbands. The real problem is that many do not want to resist them.
There was a good deal more in this vein, for Gandhi had devoted a great deal of thought to the necessity of chastity. It had become one of his obsessions, to be pondered daily with a kind of relish, forthrightly, never avoiding the main issue, the evil inherent in sex, the horror of it. Thirty years before he had written that nearly all sex, even sex between married couples, was adultery, and now he could tell Miss Sanger that food taken for pleasure was lust. Pleasure was the enemy, and anyone eating chocolates was merely pandering to his senses.
Sometimes Miss Sanger found herself wondering what lay at the root of Gandhi’s ruthless determination to destroy pleasure wherever he saw it. Why did he speak of chocolates and sex in the same breath? Was it to be expected that two people happily in love should unite sexually only when they wanted a child? Did he really think it was possible?
Gandhi replied: “I had the honor of doing that very thing, and I am not the only one.”
He was referring to the conception of his youngest son, the only one of his sons whose conception was deliberately willed. The three others were all born in lust, and he despised himself for it.
“So it means,” Miss Sanger said, “that sexual union when children are desired is love, and when they are not desired it is lust?”
“Exactly so,” Gandhi replied, and he described how he had often sought carnal pleasure with his wife even when she was unwilling, and it was through her unwillingness that he had learned the redeeming lesson that only when the life of carnal pleasure is abandoned can a man learn to love his wife. “Lust dies, and love reigns instead,” he said, and there was a note of triumph in his voice.
“Then throughout a whole lifetime you expect the sexual union to take place only three or four times?”
“Yes,” said Gandhi. “People should be taught that it is immoral to have more than three or four children, and after they have had these children they should sleep separately. If people were taught this, it would harden into custom. And if the social informers cannot impress this idea on people, why not a law?”
He did not pursue the idea of the law against sexual union except at stated intervals, but left it hanging in the air as a portent of future judgments on mankind. At the very most he would accept the possibility that there was no very great sin in performing the sexual act during “safe periods”; it was at least more tolerable than contraceptives; and the “unsafe periods” demanded from the married couple a proper measure of self-control.
Miss Sanger was shocked by his vehemence, his assumption that sex was degrading and always evil except when progeny were desired. She had read his autobiography, and she concluded that his attitude to sex arose from the overwhelming sense of guilt experienced at the time of his father’s death. Gandhi, in turn, was shocked by her “dreadful earnestness.” When the long conversation was over, he was drained of energy. He had been defending brahmacharya, the very essence of his life, against a redoubtable opponent, and he was deeply troubled.
After leaving Wardha, Miss Sanger continued her lecture tour across India, finding few people as intolerant of birth control as Gandhi. Rabindranath Tagore welcomed her with open arms. She was the guest of the Maharajah Gaekwar of Baroda and of Nehru’s sister. The problem was seen to be a serious one, not to be dismissed lightly by appeals to the ancient sages. In the end Miss Sanger’s doctrine prevailed, for after Gandhi’s death the Indian government, fearful of overpopulation, advocated the use of contraceptives on a nation-wide scale.
Gandhi was so exhausted by the strenuous conversation with Miss Sanger that it was decided to remove him to Bombay for a general physical examination. He was in a state of collapse when he arrived at the hospital. The Bombay doctors examined him, found nothing organically wrong with him, and concluded that he was suffering from overstrain and perhaps from a deficiency of proteins and carbohydrates. His remaining teeth had been troubling him, and they were removed. This was a major operation, and it left him weaker than ever. He was recovering from the operation when there occurred an event which shook him to the core. Twice during the year he referred to this shattering event in articles in Harijan, and both times he wrote like a man who has been struck by lightning out of a clear sky. Writing in December, he still trembled with the agony of his “darkest hour.”
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 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 and if I had succumbed to it, it would have meant my absolute undoing.
These words were written by a man of sixty-seven who had attempted to remain chaste since 1899, a period of thirty-seven years. In 1906 he had taken an absolute vow of chastity. For many years he had thought and believed that he was in full command of his body, but it was not so. In an article in Harijan, written at the end of February, he spoke of the thoughts which passed through his mind while he was undergoing this trial:
I was disgusted with myself. The moment the feeling came, I acquainted my attendants and the medical friends with my condition. They could give me no help. I expected none. I broke loose after the experience from the rigid rest that was imposed upon me. The confession of the wretched experience brought relief to me. I felt as if a great load had been raised from over me. It enabled me to pull myself together before any harm could be done.
But, as he well knew, the harm had been done and there was no relief from the haunting fear that it might happen again. According to his interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita, only the chaste were strong. He had therefore lost his physical and spiritual strength, and only some extreme act of penance would enable him to recover his purity.
Gandhi gave many reasons for his adoption of a code of chastity. He would say that he adopted chastity because he wanted no more children; at another time he would say that sexual lust was an insult committed on a woman’s body; and then again he would say that carnal love and affectionate love stood at poles apart, and he loved his wife more because he no longer felt any sexual passion for her. B
ut these were merely decorations on a major theme which runs through ancient Indian legend and codes of conduct. In the Mahabharata the theme is stated in three words: “Brah-macharyam paro dharma” “Chastity is the highest law.” Again and again those who renounce sexual pleasures are offered the greater rewards of power and dominion over their fellow men. Thus we find the dying Bhishma, a great king, teaching Yudhishthira how to become invincible: “He that on earth from birth to death observes chastity, for him there is nothing beyond reach, know this, O herdsman of men. Many tens of millions of Rishis live in the world of Brahma who take their pleasure in the Truth, even bridle their senses and keep wholly continent. Continence that is practiced bums up evil.”
Gandhi was deeply impressed by the words of Bhishma. He believed in the literal truth of the law that chastity is power. He believed that though the body of a chaste man will wither in due course like the leaves of a tree, his mind will remain as young and fresh as ever. To conserve the youthful mind, to possess even in old age powers of decision and domination, it was necessary to remain chaste. What occurred during the night of January 18, 1936, was therefore an intimation that he might no longer possess the power to dominate events.
During the following weeks he wrote many articles on sex, precisely because the subject had become painful to him. He raged against the middle-class male population of India, “which has become imbecile through the abuse of the creative function.” The horror of sexuality continued to oppress him. Correspondents asked for clarifications, and he gave them readily; the function of the organ of generation is merely to generate, those who indulge in sex for pleasure might just as well indulge in unnatural vices, and contraceptives are merely the vehicles of lawlessness. “Sex education,” he wrote, “must have for its object the conquest and sublimation of sexual passion.”