New light on Gandhi's love affair

GANDHI REMIX: A new book by Rajmohan Gandhi sheds light on several new aspects of Gandhi's life and beliefs.

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On Monday, a new biography on Mahatma Gandhi called Mohandas - A True Story of a Man, his People and an Empire , written by his grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, was released in New Delhi by UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi. Perhaps no Indian has been written about as extensively as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. So, one would assume that there is very little new to say about him.

But a biography written by his grandson proves that several aspects of his life, personality and beliefs can still be explored further. In a chat with Karan Thapar, Rajmohan Gandhi and Vice-Chancellor, Jamia Millia Islamia, Mushirul Hasan analyse this complex personality.

Excerpts from an interview given to CNBC-TV18

Q: Let's start with the portrait presented on Mahatma Gandhi. You say as a youngster, he was haunted by fears of thieves, ghosts, serpents and robbers. You say he shrank from competitive gains and at one point he goes so far to call him a sad boy - it seems almost as if you are painting a picture of a timid coward?

Rajmohan Gandhi: That is a remarkable thing that despite these timidities and cowardice, he turned out to be the man who gave fearlessness to millions and millions of people. That is the astonishing thing about Mohandas.

Q: To what extent was this timidity and cowardice a result of a very sheltered and protective upbringing and to what extent was it something that he outgrew?

Gandhi: This timidity and shyness was above all a consequence of his awareness of the great task that he had to perform. Even as a young lad, he maybe knew that he would be called to do something quite difficult, quite dramatic, quite major and that is what made him extra shy. Of course, he had an innate shyness, which perhaps he had inherited but he overcame it in a most astonishing way.

Q: How do you respond to that idea that perhaps even the young Mahatma Gandhi had a sort of premonition that he was destined for great things?

Mushirul Hasan: I don’t know if he did but let me just tell you that one of the strengths of the remarkable biography is that it uncovers a facet of Gandhi’s childhood which has not been explored in such great detail. There are hints about these elements in his personality and some other writings - but this is the first time that Gandhi’s childhood has been explored in such detail and with such candidness and there is lot of very interesting information which was not known to professional historians, and that is a major advance in our existing knowledge about the Mahatma.

Q: One of the areas where you shed particular light which I found very fascinating and interesting is Gandhi's obsession with food. He was brought up a vegetarian but I discovered that in London he became a fascist about food and it in a sense opened up avenues for him. It gave him a platform for speaking and writing and as you said, it also helped him end up in politics, did it end up representing much more than just a simple meal?

Gandhi: Of course it did and food for him eventually became food for the starving millions of India and so it became a question of India versus the empire in a big way. To begin with, he rebelled with the vegetarian ideas of his parents, he wanted to become a meat eater. He chose to take the vow of eating meat merely in order to get to India and only after he got to England and he met these British vegetarians, that he became a vegetarian by choice. But afterwards, he also of course became a very good food dietician.

Q: Another obsession we know of was the time he spent experimenting with chastity. How would you view it?

Gandhi:I view it very much in line with Hindu tradition, Jain, Islamic, Buddhist and Christian traditions - all of which emphasized chastity and purity as being of tremendous value and Gandhi accepted chastity and purity as an extremely strengthening value for himself and he also felt for his people. And you are absolutely right that he went through unusual lengths to test his chastity, and it is also worth noting that this was done very much in the open - there is nothing new about it and it is also worth noting that nobody who observed him closely for years and years including the final months of his life when he had these well known experiments - nobody suggested that there was the slightest suggestion of anything improper or hanky-panky about it. It was a genuine chastity experiment and Gandhi said that he gave himself good marks that he had passed that experiment.

Q: On the other hand, Gandhi was incredibly frank and open about sex, he wrote about it fairly freely and yet one gets the feeling that he looked upon it as debilitating if not actually unclean. In a sense, on the subject to sex, would you say that he was a sort of Freudian prisoner of his earlier experience?

Hasan: I would simply suggest that much of the demonstration or the demonstrative effect of all this was probably not very good and I think there were many amongst his very close followers, who were rather disturbed by it, and who have written about not just his views but the kind of public expression that he gave expression to. If you were to read some of the writings of Nirmal Kumar Bose and the relationship that he thought Gandhi had with his nieces and some of his other companions - it had a sort of disquieting effect on many of his followers. I feel a lot of people in fact stated - and stated - very emphatically that they did not necessarily approve of it.

Q: You write about the attachments Mahatma Gandhi formed in 1919-1920, for a lady called Sarla Devi Choudhary. You say and I quote "she conveyed an aesthetic and a political appeal around which egos too might have lurked." Are you suggesting that Gandhi might have been having an affair?

Gandhi: First of all, I want to answer Mushirul’s point. As far as Sarla Devi is concerned, it is absolutely true that in 3-4 months in 1920, when Gandhi was 50 and Sarla Devi was 47, Gandhi had fallen for her, there was no question of any sex in that relationship. Gandhi was already married of course and he had 4 children, he was also committed to chastity, there was no question of any question of sex with Sarla Devi and so he was in a fix.

He had fallen for her but then his son Devdas, his future father-in-law Rajgopalacharya, Gandhi’s secretary Mahadev Desai and Gandhi’s nephew and others challenged Gandhi to return to his commitment and to end this affair that he was having with Sarla Devi. And to Gandhi’s credit, he had the strength to end that relationship, which had seemed a promising one to him and which had an aesthetic element and may also have had a mild erotic element. But Gandhi absolutely and with finality ended that affair and there was no sex in that affair.

But let me also add, as far as the Brahmacharyan experiment - Nirmal Kumar Bose's works are worth studying in that regard. Also worth studying in that regard is what Manu Gandhi - the niece herself had written about it and Manu Gandhi who was a part of that experiment was by no means a damaged personality - she was a tremendously radiant personality who was also enhanced by the experiment.

Gandhi's own biography My Experiments with Truth does not mention the lady Sarla Devi Choudhary. Hasan does find it odd that Mahatma Gandhi does not talk about it in his own book, which is why he finds Rajmohan's book "enhancing as it has a lot of information that we didn't have access to."

On his part, Rajmohan Gandhi believes his grandfather didn't talk about Sarla Devi Choudhary was because he had already hurt her feelings once by rejecting her and he couldn't possibly write about her in his autobiography as she was still alive then.