The facts are that after his wife, Kasturba, died in 1944, Gandhi began the habit of sharing his bed with naked young women: his personal doctor, Sushila Nayar, and his grandnieces Abha and Manu, who were then in their late teens and about 60 years younger than him.
Gandhi hadn’t had a sexual relationship with a woman for 40 years. Nor, in any obvious way and so far as anyone can tell, did he begin one now. His conscious purpose in inviting naked women to share his bed was, paradoxically, to avoid having sex with them. They were there as a temptation: if he wasn’t aroused by their presence, he could be reassured he’d achieved
brahmacharya, a Hindu concept of celibate self-control. According to Gandhi, a person who had such control was “one who never has any lustful intention, who by constant attendance upon God has become proof against conscious or unconscious emissions, who is capable of lying naked with naked women, however beautiful they may be, without being in any manner sexually excited”. Such a person, Gandhi wrote, would be incapable of lying or harming anyone.
Why was this so important to Gandhi at that time? Because he believed – fantastically, egotistically – that the Hindu-Muslim violence then sweeping
India had some connection to his own failings. He had come round to the view, as Guha writes, “that the violence around him was in part a product or consequence of the imperfections within him”. And those imperfections, which he scrupulously recorded and publicised, included the “nocturnal emissions” (wet dreams) that had occurred in the years 1924, 1936 and 1938 to spoil a record of celibate living that began in South Africa in 1906, and which led each time to bouts of self-disgust.
He believed sex existed only to procreate and never to enjoy, a view that his political ally Jawaharlal Nehru found “unnatural and shocking”. Lust was the enemy; that lesson was learned when, as a married 16-year-old, he had left his sick father’s bedside to be with his wife and, as they made love, his father had died. As to any unconscious motivation for bed-sharing, who knows? As one of the world’s most famous men, a magnetic celebrity, he rarely hesitated to exploit his attraction to women in order to benefit from the help and care they offered. In his ashram, the psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar has written: “The competition among women for Gandhi’s attention was as fierce as it is in any guru’s establishment today.”
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