Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  For an explanation of his ‘failures’ and sense of despair, Gandhi would characteristically probe for shortcomings in his abstinence, seeking to determine whether the god of desire had perhaps triumphed in some obscure recess of his mind, depriving him of his powers. Thus in the midst of human devastation and political uncertainty, Gandhi wrote a series of five articles on celibacy in his weekly newspaper, puzzling his readers who, as his temporary personal secretary, N.K. Bose, puts it, ‘did not know why such a series suddenly appeared in the midst of intensely political articles.’40

  But more striking than this public evidence of his preoccupation were his private experiments wherein the aged Mahatma pathetically sought to reassure himself of the strength of his celibacy. These experiments have shocked many and have come to be known as ‘having naked young women sleep with him when he was old,’ although their intent and outcome were far removed from the familiar connotations of that suggestive phrase. In the more or less public sleeping arrangements of his entourage while it rested in a village for the night, Gandhi would ask one or another of his few close women associates (his 19-year-old grandaughter among them) to share his bed and then try to ascertain in the morning whether any trace of sexual feeling had been evoked, either in himself or in his companion.41 In spite of criticism by some of his close coworkers, Gandhi defended these experiments, denying the accusation that they could have ill effects on the women involved. Instead, he viewed them as an integral part of the Yagna he was performing—the Hindu sacrifice to the gods—whose only purpose was a restoration of personal psychic potency that would help him to regain control over political events and men, a control which seemed to be so fatally slipping away. Again he exploits his desires (and, admittedly, women) for the sake of his cause—the prideful vice of an uncompromisingly virtuous man.

  Two Women

  In his middle and later years,, a number of young women, attracted by Gandhi’s public image as the Mahatma, his cause, or his fame, sought his proximity and eventually shared his ashram life. These women, who in many cases had left their well-appointed middle-and upper-class homes to take upon themselves the rigors of an ascetic lifestyle, were all else but conventional. Some of them were not only ‘highstrung’ but can fairly be described as suffering from emotional crises of considerable magnitude. Like their counterparts today who seek out well-known gurus, these women too were looking for the therapist in Gandhi as much as the Mahatma or the leader embodying Indian national aspirations. If toning down the intensity of a crippling emotional disturbance and awakening latent productive and creative powers that neither the individual nor the community ‘knows’ he or she possesses is the mark of a good therapist then, as we shall see later, Gandhi was an exceptional one. From women who were a little more than emotional wrecks, he fashioned energetic leaders directing major institutions engaged in the task of social innovation and actively participating in the country’s Independence movement.

  Gandhi’s relationships with these women are fascinating in many ways. First, one is struck by the trouble he took in maintaining a relationship once he had admitted the woman to a degree of intimacy. Irrespective of his public commitments or the course of political events, he was puncitilious in writing (and expecting) regular weekly letters to each one of his chosen women followers when they were separated during his frequent visits to other parts of the country or his lengthy spells of imprisonment. Cumulatively, these letters build up a portrait of the Mahatma which reveals his innermost struggles, particularly during the periods of heightened emotional vulnerability, and the role played therein by Woman, as embodied in the collectivity of his chosen female followers.

  At their best, the letters are intensely human, full of wisdom about life and purpose. Even at times of stress, they are invariably caring as Gandhi encourages the women’s questions, advises them on their intimate problems, and cheerfully dispenses his favorite dietary prescriptions for every kind of ailment. As he writes to one of them: ‘Your diagnosis is a correct one. The pleasure I get out of solving the ashram’s problems, and within the ashram those of the sisters, is much greater than that of resolving India’s dilemmas.’42

  The second striking characteristic of these letters is what appears to be Gandhi’s unwitting effort simultaneously to increase the intimacy with the correspondent and to withdraw if the woman wished for a nearness that crossed the invisible line he had drawn for both of them. The woman’s consequent hurt or withdrawal is never allowed to reach a point of breakdown in the relationship. Gandhi employed his considerable charm and powers of persuasion to draw her close again, the hapless woman oscillating around a point between intimacy and estrangement, nearness and distance. The emotions aroused, not only in the women (who were also in close contact with each other) but to some degree in Gandhi, simmered in the hothouse ashram atmosphere to produce frequent explosions. In accordance with our narrative intent, let us look at the stories of two of these women, making of them brief tales rather than the novel each one of them richly deserves.

  Prema Kantak belonged to a middleclass family from a small town in Maharashtra. She was still a schoolgirl when she heard about Gandhi and the wonderful work he had done for the cause of Indians in South Africa. An only daughter among five sons, she was a favourite of her father and enjoyed more than the usual freedom for a girl of her class and times.

  As Prema grew into youth, she was gripped by the fervour of nationalist politics and agonized over personal spiritual questions, interests which Gandhi too combined in his person. Had he not maintained that ‘politics without religion is dangerous?’

  Her first encounter with the great man took place when Gandhi came to address students of her college at Poona. After the talk, she remembers going up to the platform where he was sitting so as to touch his feet in the traditional Indian gesture of respect. Since Gandhi was sitting cross-legged, his feet were tucked under his body. Prema reports:

  Without any mental reservations I touched his knee with my finger and saluted him. With a start he turned to look at me, reciprocated the greetings and looked away. If he but knew that by touching him my heart had blossomed forth with incomparable pride! With the pure touch an electric current ran through my body and I walked home lost in a world of bliss!43

  Sensitive and emotional, intelligent and idealistic, Prema refused to follow the traditional life plan of an Indian girl and get married, perhaps also because of a problematic (most analysts would say ‘classically hysterical’) attitude toward sexuality. ‘Once, when I was 16, I was reading the Bhagavata,’ she writes, ‘when I came to the conversation between Kapila and Devahuti,d I learnt how babies come into world. I remember that my hair stood up on end. I visualised my own conception and was seized with disgust toward my parents and my body! My life seemed dirty! This disgust remained with me for may years.’44 After a bitter quarrel between the daughter and her beloved father, Prema left home to live in a women’s hostel. She earned her livelihood by tutoring children while she continued her studies toward a Master’s degree.

  Prema’s fascination for Gandhi and her decision to go and live with him in the ashram is quite understandable. In the very nature of the ashram life and its ideals, there is a promised protection from disgusting sexuality. In her wishful imagination Gandhi looms up as the ideal parent who will soothe the hurt caused by the disappointment in the real-life one. He is also tthe admired mentor for Prema’s political and spiritual interests, who is capable of comprehending the deeper needs of her soul.

  At the age of 23, then, bubbling with innocent enthusiasm, Prema found herself in Ahmedabad in the Mahatma’s presence. As was his wont, at first Gandhi discouraged her. He described to her in detail the hard physical work, the chores of cutting vegetables, grinding grain, cooking meals, cleaning utensils and toilets which awaited her if she adopted the ashram life. Prema, exultant in her youthful vitality and idealism, dismissed his cautions as trifles. ‘I want to do something tremendous!’, she exclaimed on one of her very firs
t nights in the ashram. With wry humour, Gandhi tried to temper her exuberance without crushing her spirit. ‘The only tremendous thing you can do just now is go to sleep,’ he said.45

  At the start of her stay, when Gandhi was out of town for a few days, Prema had the following dream. She is a little girl reclining in Gandhi’s lap. From his breast, a stream of sweet, good milk is flowing straight into her mouth. Prema is drinking the milk and the Mahatma is saying, ‘Drink, drink, drink more.’ Prema is replete but the milk continues to flow and Gandhi keeps insisting that she drink more. Prema’s clothes and body are thoroughly soaked in milk but the stream is unending. She wakes up in alarm.46

  On narrating her dream to Gandhi and asking for an interpretation, Gandhi replied, ‘Dreams can have the quality of purity (sattvik) or of passion (rajasik). Your dream is a pure one. It means that you feel protected with me.’47 From the orthodox Freudian view, the interpretation cannot be faulted. An instinctive psychoanalyst, Gandhi provides reassurance to the patient and encourages her to give him her trust at this stage of their relationship. Unwittingly following the technical rule of proceeding from the surface to the depths, his interpretation could have been as easily made by an analyst who, for the time being, would have kept his hypotheses on the deeper imports of the dream images—of the symbolic equivalence of milk and semen, Prema’s greedy voraciousness, her possible fantasy regarding the persecuting breast and so on—quietly to himself.

  In the ashram, the competition among women for Gandhi’s attention was as fierce as it is in any guru’s establishment today. When he went for his evening constitutional, Gandhi would walk with his hands around the shoulders of the ashram girls. There was intense jealousy among them as each kept a hawk’s eye for any undue favouritism—the number of times a girl was singled out for the mark of this favour, the duration of time a girl had Bapu’s hands on her shoulder and so on. At first Prema felt aggrieved when other girls teased her, ‘Prema—ben, Bapuji does not put his hands on your shoulders!’ ‘Why should he? I am not like you to push myself forward!’ Prema would reply spiritedly. ‘No, he never will. The ashram rule is that he can keep his hands only on the shoulders of girls who are younger than 16.’48

  Prema felt her deprivation acutely and approached Gandhi who asked her to get the ashram superintendent’s permission if she wanted him to treat her like the younger girls. Prema’s pride was hurt and she responded angrily, ‘Why should I hanker after your hand so much that I have to go and get permission?’ and stalked off. One night, however, Gandhi had gone to the toilet since he was suffering from diarrhoea because of one of his food experiments. He had fainted from weakness and Prema, who had heard him fall, reached his side. Gandhi walked back leaning his body against her for support and she even lifted him onto the bed. From that night onwards she often accompanied him on his evening walk, with his hand on her shoulder, while she, I imagine, looked around her with the pride of the chosen one, a victor in the secret struggle among the women. In her elation at being closer to him, she tells us, she once kissed his hands saying. ‘The hand that has shaken the British throne is resting on my shoulders! What a matter of pride!’ Gandhi had laughed, ‘Yes, how proud we all are!’ and, clowning, he threw out his chest and strutted about in imitation of a stage emperor.49

  In 1933, when she was 27 years old, Gandhi begged Prema to give him as bhiksha (meritorious alms) a lifelong vow of celibacy. Prema wrote back that there was no difficulty in her compliance with his wish as celibacy was in any case her ideal. In unreflected arrogance she added, ‘I may sleep with any man on the same bed during the whole night and get up in the morning as innocent as a child.’ Touched on a sore spot, Gandhi reprimanded her on a pride unbecoming a celibate. From mythology he gave examples of those whose pride in their celibacy had gone before a grievous fall. She was no goddess (devi), he said, since she still had her periods. For Gandhi believed that in a really celibate woman menstruation stopped completely, the monthly period being but a stigmata of vikara, of the sexual distortions of a woman’s soul.50

  Gradually, Prema was trusted with greater and greater responsibilities in running the ashram, though her constant struggle, like those of most other women, was for an intimate closeness with Gandhi. He would try to turn her thoughts toward the ashram community, instruct her to regard herself as belonging to the community and vice versa. ‘You are dear to me, that is why “your” ashram is dear to me. Love wants an anchor, love needs touch. It is human nature that not only the mind needs an anchor but also the body and the sense organs,’ she would argue back.51 He would ask her to sublimate her emotions, affectionately call her hysterical, explaining that by hysterical he meant someone under an excessive sway of emotions. He would berate her for her lapses and then coax and cajole her back if she showed any signs of withdrawal. Prema felt that the ‘Old Beloved,’ her affectionate name for him, had ensnared her. Gandhi replied,

  I do not want to snare anyone in my net. If everyone becomes a puppet of mine then what will happen to me? I regard such efforts as worthless. But even if I try to trap someone you shouldn’t lose your self-confidence. Your letters prove that you are on guard. Yes, it is true that you have always been fearful of being caught in my net. That is a bad sign. If you have decided (to throw in your lot with me) then why the fear? Or perhaps it is possible that we mean different things by the word ‘ensnare’?52

  Feeling trapped—by the frustration of her own unconscious wishes in relation to Gandhi, the analyst would say—Prema sought to detach herself from him. She fought with him on what in retrospect seem minor issues. Remaining a devoted follower of Gandhi and his ideals, she was aware of a degree of estrangement from the Mahatma. Prema finally went back to Maharashtra in 1939 and set up an ashram in a small village. It was devoted to the fulfilment of Gandhi’s social agenda—uplift of the poor and the untouchables, education of women, increasing the self-sufficiency of the village community, and so on. Like the portentous dream after their initial meeting, the separation too is the occasion for a significant dream. In this dream Prema is alone on a vast plain which meets the sky at the horizon. She is sitting in a chair in the middle of this plain with green grass all around her. Behind the chair, she senses the presence of a man. She cannot see him but has no doubt that the man is her protector and her companion. Suddenly four or five beautiful, well-dressed boys come running up to her with bouquets of flowers in their hands. She begins to talk to the boys. More and more children now appear with bouquets. From the sky, flowers begin to rain down upon her. She wakes up with a start. After waking up, when she thinks of the dream, she is convinced that the man standing behind her is Gandhi and that his blessings will always remain with her.53

  As I reflect on the dream and its context, I cannot help musing (which is less an interpretation of the dream than my associations to it) that perhaps the dream fulfils some of Prema’s contradictory wishes. Once again restored to the centre of her world with Gandhi, from which she has been recently excluded, she is the celibate devi of Hindu mythology on whom gods shower flowers from heaven as a sign of their approbation and homage. On the other hand, she has also become the life-companion of the Mahatma, bearing him not only the four sons Kasturbai had borne but many, many more adoring and adorable children.

  Since it was the man rather than what he stood for who was the focus of her emotional life, Prema gradually drifted back to her earlier spiritual interests after Gandhi’s death. As she consorted with yogis and mystics, the memory of the Mahatma and the years she had spent with him would become locked up in a comer of her mind, to be occasionally opened and savoured privately, a secret solace in times of distress.

  In many ways, Madeline Slade was one of the more unusual members of Gandhi’s female entourage. Daughter of an admiral in the British Navy who had been a commander of the East Indies Squadron, she was a part of the British ruling establishment, which both despised and feared Gandhi as an implacable foe. Brought up in the freedom of an upper-class English home of the
era, Madeline had been dissatisfied and unhappy for years, and tells us that everything had been dark and futile till she discovered Gandhi and left for India when she was in her early 30s.54 A great admirer of Beethoven—she had thought of devoting her life to the study of his life and music—her plans underwent a drastic change after she read Romain Rolland’s book on Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi, 1924). Not wishing to act hastily, she first prepared herself for the ordeal of ashram life in India. Madeline went about this task with her usual single-minded determination. She learned spinning and sitting cross-legged on the floor; she became a teetotaller and a vegetarian and learned Urdu. She then wrote to Gandhi expressing her wish and received a cordial reply inviting her to join him.