Gandhi's life-long quest to eliminate all sexual desire from his
being prompted him to try experiments which even troubled his
followers. For instance, while touring Noakhali to calm
Hindu-Muslim communal passions, Gandhi shared his bed every night
with his 19-year-old great-niece and constant companion, Manu.
This greatly shocked his followers and one of them, Nirmal Kumar
Bose, who worked closely with Gandhi during the months of 1946-47,
mentioned this in a letter he wrote to another troubled associate.
Bose wrote: "When I first learnt in detail about Gandhi's prayog or
experiment, I felt genuinely surprised. I was informed that he
sometimes asked women to share his bed and even the cover which he
used, and tried to ascertain if even the least trace of sensual
feeling had been evoked in himself or his companion.
"Personally, I would never tempt myself like that; nor would my
respect for a woman's personality permit me to treat her as an
instrument of an experiment undertaken only for my own sake. But
when I learnt about this technique of self-examination employed by
Gandhiji, I felt that I had discovered the reason why some regarded
Gandhiji as their private possession, this feeling often leading
them to a kind of emotional imbalance. The behaviour of A, B, or C,
for instance, is no proof of a healthy psychological relationship.
"Whatever may be the value of the prayog on Gandhiji's own case, it
does leave a mark of injury on the personality of others who are
not of the same moral stature as he himself is, and for whom
sharing in Gandhiji's experiment is no spiritual necessity."
These paragraphs come from a book. My days with Gandhi, that Bose
wrote in 1953. But before mailing this letter, Bose showed it to
Gandhi and Gandhi replied that his self-examination was part of his
dharma. It lid not imply any assumption of a woman's authority.
Gandhi replied to Bose thus: "I believed in a woman's perfect
equality with man. My wife was 'inferior' when she was the
instrument of my lust. She ceased to be that when she lay with me
naked as my sister. If she and I were not lustfully agitated in our
minds and bodies, the contact raised both of us ...
"I do hope you will acquit me of having any lustful designs upon
women or girls who have been naked with me. .
A campaign of calumny began against him and news of his sleeping
with Manu spread intense shock among Congress leaders in Delhi
waiting to begin their critical talks with India's new Viceroy.
Gandhi remained untroubled. He calmed his immediate followers in
Noakhali, but when he sent his views to his newspaper, Harijan,
about why Manu shared his bed, the storm broke out again. Two of
Harijan's editors quit in protest. Its trustees, fearful of a
scandal, did something they had never dreamed of doing before. They
refused to publish the text written by the Mahatma.
Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre record in Freedom at Midnight
that a series of emissaries discreetly asked Gandhi to abandon his
relationship with Manu. But he refused. He had to leave for Bihar
and he said he would take Manu along with him. Finally, Manu
herself suggested to Gandhi that they suspend the practice.
Gandhi's association with young women in his last years has been
documented by several writers. One of them was Margaret
Bourke-White, a photographer of Life magazine, who spent several
months in India in the tumultuous months before Independence. In
her book, Halfway to Freedom, Bourke-White wrote that in 1946,
Gandhi used to receive daily two-hour massages from Sushila or one
of his other women in his ashram. A few decades later, American
writer Ronald Segal wrote in is book, Criss of India, that Gandhi's
close association with women was frequently harmful to them. Many
of them became neurotic, few of them married or even led normal or
apparently contented lives. One of them, according to Bourke-White,
was Raj Kumari Amrit Kaur, India's first health minister, who left
her home at a young age to spend the next 30 years around the
Mahatma. A woman friend of Raj Kumari told Bourke-White that Raj
Kumari's first meeting with Gandhi "almost made a slave of her".
Source - Many
