Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  Speaking to Margaret Sanger, Gandhi likewise spoke disparagingly of ‘carnal passion’. Mrs Sanger distinguished between ‘sex lust’, as manifest in men who went to prostitutes, and ‘sex love’, this based on a deep and enduring relation between one man and one woman, as between husband and wife. Mrs Sanger believed that the latter form of ‘sex expression is a spiritual need’. As she pointed out: ‘Women have feelings as deep and as amorous as men. There are times when wives desire physical union as much as their husbands.’ Did Gandhi, she asked, ‘think it possible for two people who are in love, who are happy together, to regulate their sex act only once in two years, so that relationship would only take place when they wanted a child’? This is where contraceptives were useful, necessary, even vital, in enhancing the control of women over their bodies.

  Gandhi, on the other hand, regarded all sex as lust, or, to use a phrase he himself used often, ‘animal passion’. Like most Indian men, Gandhi denied the possibility of women themselves desiring sex. In answer to Mrs Sanger’s question, he did believe it possible to have sex only when husband and wife wanted children. Procreation was the sole legitimate purpose of sexual union. Speaking of his own marriage, he claimed that ‘the moment I bade good-bye to a life of carnal pleasure our whole relationship became spiritual. Lust died and love reigned instead…’ When Mrs Sanger persisted in arguing that sex was necessary and pleasurable, and contraceptives were the only way to prevent unwanted pregnancies, Gandhi made a small concession—instead of encouraging contraceptives, he would urge that sex be confined to the ‘safe period’ of the menstrual cycle. Mrs Sanger was unconvinced, writing later of Gandhi’s ‘appalling fear of licentiousness and over-indulgence’.

  To Mrs Sanger, as to other advocates of birth control, Gandhi argued that the best way was for women to resist their husbands. The American, in reply, asked him to ‘consider the turmoil, the unhappiness it means for the woman if she resists her husband! What if he puts her out of the house? In some states in the United States, a wife has no rights if she resists her husband.’ Surely, the use of contraceptives was a better way of assuring marital concord.3

  Mrs Sanger had hoped to win Gandhi over to the cause of contraception. On a visit to Bombay’s tenements, she had met young women who had five or six children, but were still ‘haunted by the fear of more and more and still more pregnancies’.4 How much could their lives be enhanced if they could use contraception? She left Wardha with warm feelings towards Gandhi himself; as she wrote to him after her return to America, ‘I shall always look upon my visit at Wardha and the delightful walks and talks with you as one of the great privileges bestowed upon me.’5 Yet, she also carried back a deep sense of disappointment at his failure to approve of her campaign. Later, reading Gandhi’s autobiography, and juxtaposing its contents with their conversations, she was ‘convinced that his personal experiences at the time of his father’s death was so shocking and self-blamed that he can never accept sex as anything good, clean or wholesome’.6

  There was a later experience of Gandhi’s which was also critical in shaping his views on the subject. Indeed, he referred to that experience in his conversation with Mrs Sanger. He spoke here of ‘a woman with a broad cultural education’, a ‘woman with whom I almost fell. It is so personal that I did not put it in my autobiography.’ The reference, of course, was to Saraladevi Chaudhurani. When he met and ‘fell’ for this woman, said Gandhi to Mrs Sanger, he asked himself: ‘Could we not develop a close contact?’ He continued: ‘This was a plausible argument, and I nearly slipped. But I was saved, I awoke from my trance….I was saved by youngsters [i.e. Rajagopalachari and Mahadev] who warned me.’7

  As much as the experience of having sex with his wife when his father was dying, it was the near miss in not falling for Saraladevi that lay behind Gandhi’s rejection of contraception. For him, all sex was lust; sex was necessary only for procreation. Modern methods of birth control legitimized lust. Far better that women resist men, and men control and tame their animal passions.

  II

  Shortly after Mrs Sanger left Wardha, Gandhi was diagnosed as having high blood pressure. He was advised bed rest, and told to stop writing altogether. But he was allowed to read, so he went through the draft manuscript of Jawaharlal Nehru’s autobiography, which he liked on the whole. He had one reservation: that Nehru’s ‘attack on the Liberals seems to have been overdone’, and marred ‘the grace and beauty of the narrative’. Gandhi reminded his younger, left-wing compatriot that Liberals such as Gokhale, Sapru and Sastri had ‘served the country in their time according to their lights, and while we may have our serious differences with them we do not exactly serve the cause of the country by publicly pillorying them’.8

  After two months of rest, Gandhi’s health improved, and he was free to meet visitors once more. In February 1936, the black intellectual Howard Thurman came to Wardha with his wife. Thurman had grown up reading about Gandhi in the African-American press. In the 1920s, black newspapers marvelled at Gandhi’s fight against British imperialism; by the 1930s, they increasingly presented him to their readers ‘as one of the foremost sages and seers of human history’. And they asked the question: when, and how, could we have our own Gandhi?9

  With Mrs Sanger, Gandhi had discussed the problem of gender; with Dr Thurman, the equally urgent problem of race. Gandhi asked the visitors whether prejudice on the basis of colour was growing or dying out. They answered that it had declined in some places but was solidly intact in others.

  Dr Thurman and Gandhi discussed the technique of satyagraha. The American asked how they could ‘train individuals or communities in this difficult art’. ‘There is no royal road,’ replied Gandhi, ‘except through living the creed in your life which must be a living sermon.’

  Mrs Thurman then urged Gandhi to visit the United States. ‘We want you not for white America,’ she remarked, ‘but for the Negroes; we have many a problem that cries for solution, and we need you badly.’ ‘How I wish I could,’ answered Gandhi, ‘but I would have nothing to give you unless I had given an oracular demonstration here of all that I have been saying. I must make good the message here, before I bring it to you.’

  Dr Thurman discussed with Gandhi the centrality of Christianity to black politics and spiritual life. His wife then sang, to Gandhi’s delight, two songs illustrating this: ‘Were You There When They Crucified My Lord’ and ‘We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder’.

  As the Thurmans prepared to leave, Gandhi offered them this hopeful prediction: ‘It may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of non-violence will be delivered to the world.’10

  Years later, Thurman remembered how he had been subject to an intense examination by Gandhi: ‘persistent, pragmatic, questions about American Negroes, about the course of slavery, and how we had survived it’. Gandhi was puzzled that in order to escape or defy oppression, the slaves had not converted to Islam, since, as he put it, ‘the Moslem religion is the only religion in the world in which no lines are drawn from within the religious fellowship. Once you are in, you are all the way in.’

  Thurman was impressed both by Gandhi’s curiosity and his range of interests. Gandhi, he recalled, ‘wanted to know about voting rights, lynching, discrimination, public school education, the churches and how they functioned. His questions covered the entire sweep of our experience in American society.’

  As a parting gift, Gandhi handed over to Mrs Thurman a basket of fruit. Thurman boldly asked for something for himself as well. The American said he would love to have a sample of cloth woven from the yarn Gandhi had spun that day. Some months later, a piece of cloth arrived at the Thurmans’ house through the post.11

  III

  After Gandhi moved to his new home in Sevagram, a steady flow of foreigners found their way there. Journalists, missionaries, educationists, all came to interrogate him or seek his counsel. In December 1936, a Polish professor of philosophy descended on the
village. Like so many of his compatriots, he was a devout Catholic. His conversation with Gandhi was mostly on religious matters. At one stage, the Polish scholar remarked: ‘If you became a Catholic you would be as great as St. Francis.’ Gandhi answered with a mixture of humour and exasperation: ‘But not otherwise? A Hindu cannot be a St. Francis? Poor Hindu!’

  The Polish professor was followed by an American clergyman of African extraction. He asked Gandhi for a word of advice to his ‘Negro brethren’. The Indian answered: ‘With right which is on their side and the choice of non-violence as their only weapon, if they will make it such, a bright future is assured.’12 Travelling around the country, the visitor had noticed how Gandhi’s movement had ‘given the Indian masses a new conception of courage’. Perhaps his techniques, when practised by African Americans, could embolden and empower them too.13

  Shortly afterwards, a visitor from Germany arrived who was not merely a bird of passage. As a young man in Nazi Germany, Herbert Fischer had read about Gandhi in a magazine called Tao, published from Switzerland by Werner Zimmermann. Zimmermann was an admirer of Tagore and generally of things Indian, and his journal carried news of the national movement. Fischer was already oriented towards vegetarianism and organic farming, and from what he read in Tao, the Mahatma seemed to combine the simple life with anti-authoritarian politics. In 1935, he wrote a letter addressed to ‘Mahatma Gandhi, India’, asking to be allowed to work with him. A reply came back, explaining the harsh ashram regimen, and adding that he was welcome if he could abide by it.

  When Fischer finally arrived in Sevagram, late in 1936, Gandhi was not at home. He had left with his entourage for the annual Congress meeting being held at Faizpur, in the Khandesh region of Maharashtra. The German found his own way to Faizpur, to be greeted by Gandhi with the words: ‘So you have come.’ He did not speak more, but told Fischer to report to J.C. Kumarappa, the general secretary of the AIVIA. This was the first Congress ever held in a village, to mark which the Gandhians had set up a khadi and village industries exhibition. Fischer worked here by day, and stayed in the dormitories by night. At some point, his jacket was stolen, his passport and papers along with it. The German consulate in Bombay said they would give him a new passport on the condition he returned to his country and joined the military. He refused, returning to Wardha instead.

  For the next year and a half, Fischer worked with the AIVIA. From the beginning, he was treated not as a visitor but a co-worker. Certainly, the colonial police saw him as such, for in a report on Fischer, they noted that ‘he is a regular wearer of khadi’. He often cycled the seven miles from Maganwadi, the AIVIA’s headquarters, to the ashram in Sevagram. There, Gandhi and he had friendly arguments. Gandhi, ever the attentive host, ordered that Fischer be served an egg a day, which he believed necessary for the European body. The visitor demurred, arguing that even cold-blooded Germans could remain vegetarian. A more weighty disagreement was political. Gandhi thought that Fischer should return home and commence a satyagraha campaign against the Nazis. The German answered that Hitler ‘was not Judge Broomfield’ (the English judge who had called Gandhi a saint while being forced to sentence him).14

  After England declared war on Germany in September 1939, Herbert Fischer was declared an enemy alien and imprisoned. When the war ended, he was released and returned to his now de-Nazified homeland. Years later, he wrote a remembrance of his days with Gandhi, which gives a vivid feel of the annual Congress session as held in that party’s pomp: the ‘huts erected from light bamboo mats on bare fields’, the ‘discussions [which] took place in the open on a raised platform’ such that ‘everyone could hear what the leaders said’, and, looming above it all, the presence and personality of the Mahatma:

  After the sessions, during the meals and at other functions, there was always a great rush. A path for Gandhi could be found with difficulty. Everyone wanted to see him from near, or touch him. A man threw himself on the floor to touch his feet, even though he was in danger of being trampled upon by the crowd. Such worship of a living man I had not so far seen. I had to think back to the New Testament for a similar instance.

  On Sunday, their day of rest, the workers at Maganwadi would walk or cycle over to Sevagram, where Fischer studied Gandhi with attention and fascination. He writes that after early morning prayers and the obligatory walk, Gandhi

  withdrew to a corner of his room, the only one in the house which was surrounded on all sides by a two metre wide verandah. The long sides each had two doors, the others one apiece. All six doors were always open and there was continuous coming and going. The other corners were also used. When I once came in, I saw a young man reading aloud from Nehru’s autobiography, which had just been published. In another corner a beginner was playing a musical instrument. Gandhi’s wife came in from time to time to fetch a lid or cooking vessel. All this did not distract him…[H]e sat on the floor on a grass mat covered with a khadi sheet, with a white cushion at the back. On his thigh he held a board which served as writing support. Next to him was a desk barely half-a-metre high, in which he kept paper and writing material. If his secretary or a visitor came, they sat before him. To save time he shaved while talking—naturally without a mirror—or he did his spinning. Only during very important conversations did he content himself with just listening and speaking.

  Gandhi, recalled Fischer, was addicted to argument. ‘For him, a requirement was debate with those of different opinion. This helped him to check his own train of thought.’ Fischer likened him to a chess player. ‘As a chess player considers in advance the opponent’s next move and his own, so it appears to me that Gandhi made his move with reference to the expected answer. He did not play chess or other games for passing time, for time was too precious for him and life itself offered an interesting pastime!’

  Gandhi’s thought, commented Herbert Fischer, was constantly evolving and adapting. In taking a decision to have a poisonous snake in the ashram killed, ‘he did not bind himself in literal interpretations [in this case, of ahimsa], but decided each situation on humanitarian grounds’. Gandhi was often reproached for being inconsistent but, as Fischer noted, ‘there was consistency in his inconsistency, as his words and actions were determined by the prevailing conditions’. He changed his mind as the facts themselves changed.15

  IV

  Herbert Fischer was a new German disciple of Gandhi, and a gentile. In 1937 a very old friend of Gandhi, also German-speaking but a Jew, came on a visit. This was the architect Hermann Kallenbach. Gandhi and Kallenbach had once shared the latter’s spacious home in the upmarket Johannesburg locality of Orchard; now they shared Gandhi’s single-room hut in the village of Sevagram. Kallenbach, wrote Gandhi to Amrit Kaur, ‘has no desire to see anything in India. He has come just to be with me as long as he can.’ Gandhi was pleased that, despite running a successful practice with branches in four cities, and thirty-five architects working under him, Kallenbach was ‘in his personal life just as simple as when I left him in 1914’.16

  Like other Indians in Gandhi’s circle, Mahadev Desai had heard many stories about Kallenbach. Writing about his visit in Harijan, Mahadev described Kallenbach as ‘a princely giver’, who ‘believed in earning in order to give’. The visitor was ‘proud to call himself a Jew, but would prefer not to be known as a German’.

  Reading this description in print, Kallenbach clarified that he was once happy to call himself a German too. But Hitler had compelled him to disavow that affiliation. After the ‘persecution of the Jews’, said Kallenbach to Mahadev, ‘I was ashamed to call myself a German’. His own firm had stopped importing German goods in protest. He was dismayed that so many articles in use in India were made in Germany: knives, paper products, lanterns, among others. ‘Whoever takes German goods helps to consolidate the power of Hitler,’ remarked Kallenbach.17

  In the first week of July, a Nazi journalist and SS officer named Captain Strunk came to Sevagram.
The visitor first asked Gandhi what he meant by independence for India. Gandhi replied: ‘What we mean by independence is that we will not live on the sufferance of any people on earth and that there is a big party in India which will die in vindicating this position. But we will not die killing, though we might be killed. It is a novel experiment, I know. Herr Hitler, I know, does not accept the position of human dignity being maintained without the use of force. Many of us feel that it is possible to achieve independence by non-violent means. It would be a bad day for the whole world if we had to wade through blood.’

  The Nazi journalist then asked why Gandhi was against Western medicine. He answered that he did ‘not despise all medical treatment. I know we can learn a lot from the West about safe maternity and the care of infants. Our children are born anyhow and most of our women are ignorant of the science of bringing up children. Here we can learn a great deal from the West.’

  At the same time, Gandhi continued: ‘The West attaches an exaggerated importance to prolonging man’s earthly existence. Until the man’s last moment on earth you go on drugging him even by injecting.’ The odd thing, remarked Gandhi, was that this desperate desire to prolong life was ‘inconsistent with the recklessness with which they [the West] will shed their lives in war’.

  As Captain Strunk prepared to leave, Gandhi introduced him to Hermann Kallenbach, with these words: ‘Here is a live Jew and a German Jew, if you please. He was a hot pro-German during the War [of 1914–18].’ Gandhi then asked the Nazi: ‘I should like to understand from you why the Jews are being persecuted in Germany.’

  Put on the spot, Captain Strunk tried to explain why his party and government were opposed to Jews. He accepted that they fought for their country during the conflict of 1914–18, but (he claimed) it was ‘the Jews who overran Germany after the War, who ousted Germans from their jobs, and who “guided” the fight against Hitler who were not being tolerated’.