Md. Taqi Yasir
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had an unusual sex life. He spoke constantly of sex and gave detailed, often confrontational, instructions to his followers as to how to they might best monitor chastity. And his views were not always popular; abnormal and unnatural was how the first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, described Gandhi’s advice to newlyweds to stay celibate for the sake of their souls.
But was there something more intricate than a pious plea for chastity at play in Gandhi’s beliefs, preaching and even his unusual personal practices which included, alongside his famed chastity, sleeping naked next to nubile, naked women to test his restraint. In the course of researching my new book on Gandhi, going through a hundred volumes of his entire works and many volumes of eye-witness material, details became apparent which add up to a more atypical sexual account. Gandhi was born in the Indian state of Gujarat and wedded at 13 in 1883; his wife Kasturba was 14, not early by the standards of Gujarat at that time. The young duo had a usual sex life, sharing a bed in a disconnected room in his family home, and Kasturba was pregnant.
As he grew older and following Kasturba’s death he was to have more women around him and would oblige women to sleep with him whom – according to his segregated ashram rules – were forbidden to sleep with their own husbands. Gandhi would have women in his bed, engaging in his “experiments” which seem to have been, from a reading of his letters, an exercise in strip-tease or other non-contact sexual activity. Much unambiguous material has been destroyed but tantalising remarks in Gandhi’s letters remain such as: “Vina’s sleeping with me might be called an accident. All that can be said is that she slept close to me.” One might assume, then, that getting into the spirit of the Gandhian experiment meant something more than just sleeping close to him. Even in the case of family, it was a scandal, when he used to sleep with his grandnephew’s wife. Eighteen-year-old Abha, the wife of Gandhi’s grandnephew Kanu Gandhi, rejoined Gandhi’s entourage in the run-up to independence in 1947 and by the end of August he was sleeping with both Manu and Abha at the same time. When he was assassinated in January 1948, it was with Manu and Abha by his side. Despite her having been his steady cohort in his last years, family members, tellingly, removed Manu from the scene.
*This piece of writing wasn’t intended to offend anyone. It was just an information based write-up.*