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By Sangeeth Sebastian
When you have spent your life venerated as a ‘Mahatma’ (great soul) by hero-worshipping followers, historians and biographers often tend to overlook the personal eccentricities of an individual.
It makes sense too. Because when you are Mohandas Gandhi, “modern India’s most extraordinary figure”, who not only spent a life-time fighting against colonisers but also became a martyr in the process, who really cares if had turned his home into a lab for live human experiments in celibacy with reluctant and often unwilling women.
Yet famous personalities and their eccentric philosophies, no matter how flawed or harmful they are, tend to exert an outsized influence on the public, long after they are dead and gone. Like Thomas Edison, the father of the light bulb, who promoted a cult of sleep deprivation in America, effects of which lingers even to this day, Gandhian philosophy on sexual repression, remains very much intact and influential, in a land that elevated kama (sex) into a life-goal along with dharma (religion) and artha (money) for a healthy and happy living.
In his so-called experiments with Brahmacharya, which literally means “moving infinity”, not celibacy, as it is widely misunderstood, at his Sabarmati ashram, Gandhi invented strange practices
that had no sanction either in Hindu religious scriptures or social conventions.
Gandhi went to the ridiculous extent of sleeping with naked women to prove his self-control in bed, even as it proved distressing to the women involved, and repugnant to many of his close friends and associates, including Jawaharlal Nehru.
Gandhi’s life-long self hatred and obsession with sex stemmed from the fact that his father had to die unattended while he was enjoying sex with his wife Kasturba.
From then on, for him, sex became a three letter word to be banished, not cherished, as advocated by Hindu erotic and religious traditions, which sought a healthy co-existence between eroticism
and asceticism.
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The writer is Founder & Chief Evangelist Vvox