In Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles, Mehta has sought to separate facts from myths without denying the Mahatma his greatness. Mehta interviewed many of Gandhi's disciples and relatives and studied his biographies, speeches and writings to discover the real man.
The book offers descriptions of Gandhi's childhood, his student days in England, his struggle for Indian rights in South Africa and his leadership of the national movement in India. More importantly, the book describes aspects not known to the average reader. Mehta is at pains to reveal Gandhi's attitude toward sex, a topic that has previously been handled by Nirmal Kumar Bose in My Days with Gandhi,Erik H. Erikson inGandhi'sTruth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre in Freedom at Midnight and Gandhi himself in occasional public utterances.
Gandhi became a brahamachari (celibate) when he was thirty-six. As a brahamachari, he would normally have been expected to eschew all contact with women, but instead he took naked women to bed with him. Amongst those who slept with him were Sushila Nayar, Sucheta Kriplani, Abha and Manu. Gandhi viewed the practice as an experiment in brahamacharya. For him this was a sure way to test his mastery of celibacy. He believed that if he could succeed in his brahamacharya experiment, he would be able to vanquish Muhammad Ali Jinnah with his spiritual power and foil his plan for India's partition.
During his Noakhali tour of 1946,Gandhi used to sleep with the nineteen-year-old Manu. When Nirmal Bose, his Bengali interpreter, saw this he protested, asserting that the experiments must be having bad psychological effects on the girl. In his BookMyDays with Gandhi, published in 1953 with great difficulty and at his own expense, he offers a Freudian interpretation to Gandhi's experiments.
Gandhi started sleeping with women toward the close of his life. According to Sushila Nayar, he started much earlier. However, at the time he called it 'nature cure.' She told Mehta, 'long before Manu came into the picture I used to sleep with him just as I would with my mother. He might say my back aches. Put some pressure on it. So I might put some pressure on it or lie down on his back and he might just go to sleep. In the early days there was no question of calling this a brahamacharya experiment. It was just part of nature cure. Later on, when people started asking questions about his physical contact with women, the idea of brahamacharya experiments was developed. Don't ask me any more questions about brahamacharya experiments. There is nothing to say, unless you have a dirty mind like Bose.'
No doubt Gandhi's interest in women, whether he called it 'experiments in brahamacharya' or 'nature cure,' was directed at a conscious suppression of his own sexual feelings. The same is confirmed by his close political associate C. Rajagopalachari who told Mehta, 'it is now said that he was born so holy that he had a natural bent for brahamacharya, but actually he was highly sexed.'
Like many, Gandhi was convinced that sex diffuses human energy, which should be conserved and sublimated. He imposed celibacy on all those who lived in his ashram (retreat). J.B. Kriplani and Sucheta Kriplani married against his wishes, but they remained brahamacharyas after their marriage. The imposition of celibacy did not work in all cases. According to Raihana Tyabji, a devout disciple of Gandhi, 'the more they tried to restrain themselves and repress their sexual impulses . . . the more oversexed and sex-conscious they became.'
Gandhi's ideas on sex are certainly outdated. He believed that a woman's interest in sex is submissive and self-sacrificing. He assumed that women derived no pleasure from such activity. When his son failed to live what he considered a moral life, Gandhi felt guilty for what he viewed as the sexual excesses of his married life. When his first child died soon after birth, he felt he was justly punished for his sexual sins. These sins were twofold - he had intercourse with his pregnant wife and he had withdrawn from his ailing father's side to sleep with his wife (his father had died a few minutes later). The guilt haunted Gandhi in his later years until he vowed to lead a brahamacharya life.
Though Gandhi did not lack moral education, he certainly lacked sex education.
