Brahmacharya Gandhi and his women associates

 

 

 

Beautiful, intelligent and wild, Nilla Cram Cook, a 20-something New Yorker, was quite bowled over by the middle-aged Mahatma “in spite of his doubts about her character”. He paid her the highest compliment of calling her a sannyasin for “all intents and purposes” which, however, came with a corollary. “Therefore,” Gandhiji told her after she came to live in Sabarmati Ashram, “you have to remove hair from your head and have a close crop almost amounting to a shave.” Besotted as she was, Cook obliged, though she hated to look into the mirror after that. Gandhiji patted his “Nilla Nagini” on the back, saying, “I said you’d do it” and advised her to tie a wet rag around her shaven head to escape the sun.

 

The hardships of being one of Gandhi’s women were many. They had to be celibate (even if it meant, as in the case of Jayaprakash Narayan’s wife Prabhabati, permanent discord with her husband), clean toilets (save Saraladevi Chowdharani, Gandhi’s “spiritual wife” and Rabindranath Tagore’s niece, who flatly refused and was allowed to get away with it), face Kasturba Gandhi or Ba’s hostility (“Ba had virtually thrown Esther [Faering] out of the kitchen — she was waging a war against her husband by proxy”), sniping and gossiping from other jealous ashramites, and accept gracefully the inevitable marching orders that followed as soon as the Mahatma found them too demanding.

 

But Girja Kumar, who has recorded their relations with the Father of the Nation in prurient detail over 400-odd pages in Brahmacharya Gandhi and His Women Associates, has no patience with them. In his eyes they are all like Lola who wrapped herself around Oscar in the Shark’s Tale only when he became a “somebody”. In Kumar’s words, “To shine in Gandhiji’s reflected glory was an attractive proposition for several of his associates who joined his bandwagon…They took note of Gandhiji because thereby they came to be noticed by others.”

 

But then, Kumar’s interest in these women is only so far as they help to answer the question: “Did the man who led a movement that brought political freedom for so many go wrong on the issue of personal freedom? Do we need to re-evaluate the Mahatma in this light?” And his answer is a resounding YES. In fact, Kumar casts doubts on one of Gandhiji’s core beliefs, brahmacharya, finding merit in Vinoba Bhave’s quip, “In case Gandhiji was a perfect brahmachari, he did not require his credentials to be tested. And if he was an imperfect brahmachari, he should have avoided the experiment like the plague.” According to Kumar, “In fact, kama was never subdued by him entirely… It is an occasion for celebration, because Gandhiji has proved to be one of us by joining in tribute to sensuality through his abiding love of womanhood.”

 

Having brought the Father of the Nation down to his own level, Kumar gloats that Gandhiji was “a failed hero who was too obsessed with the sexuality issue” and enjoyed controlling every aspect of the lives of these women but refused to concede that he used them for purposes of his own. For instance, the “whirlwind romance” with Saraladevi, who “had everything Ba lacked”, says Kumar, happened because Gandhiji was then “peaking in his political career and this was precisely the opportunity he was looking for to have a companion fitting his contemporary status in the public eye.” Trite explanations of a conventional, unimaginative mind wholly unequipped to delve into the complexities of someone as unusual as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

 

Neither the information nor the insight, such as it is, that Kumar dishes out are new. Erik H Eriksson psychoanalysed the personal and the political in Gandhi at much greater depth in his classic Gandhi’s Truth way back in 1969. In Kumar’s hands it has turned into what Gandhi called Katherine Mayo’s book on India: “A drain inspector’s report.” Adding insult to injury are the numerous subbing flaws that range from misplaced and missing definite and indefinite articles to calling the Anushilan Samiti the Anushan Samiti, Maharshi Devendranath Tagore Devendra Maharishi, a salon a saloon… To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, this is not a book to be cast aside lightly, it is to be thrown away with great force.