Integrity Score 252
No Records Found
No "saint" is above criticism
But please understand why people do what they do. Don't be an armchair critic
Accept that Mahatma 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, our 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.