WAS GANDHI A TANTRIC?
Nicholas F. Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho
First presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy,
Asilomar Conference Center, Monterey, California, 11 June 2006
Second presentation at Rice University, Department of Religious Studies,18 November, 2006
Forthcoming in Gandhi Marg 28 (2007), but without Sections IV & V
Good evening
My meaning of brahmacharya is this: “One who never has any lustful intention, who . . . has become capable of lying naked with naked women . . . without being in any manner whatsoever sexually excited.” –M. K. Gandhi[1]
The greater the temptation, the greater the renunciation –M. K. Gandhi[2]
I threw you in the sacrificial fire and you emerged safe and sound–Gandhi to his grandniece Manu Gandhi[3]
I can hurt colleagues and the entire world for the sake of truth. –M. K. Gandhi (letter to Sushila Nayar)[4]
[Gandhi] can think only in extremes—either extreme eroticism or asceticism. –Jawaharlal Nehru[5]
The professional Don Juan destroys his spirit as fatally as does the professional ascetic, whose [mirror] image he is. –Aldous Huxley[6]
Some scholars believe that it is unseemly to write about the sex lives of great thinkers. William Bartley, for example, has been criticized for documenting, quite successfully in my opinion, Ludwig Wittgenstein‘s homosexual encounters,[7] information that helps us better understand his life and work. If we use this information in an ad hominem attack against these thinkers’ worldviews, then we have indeed erred and done them an injustice. Full and accurate biographies, however, are essential for those of us who wish to capture the full measure of a person’s life and character. It is therefore unfortunate that D. K. Bose, Gandhi’s faithful secretary and interpreter in Bengal, was forced to self-publish his book My Days with Gandhi. He only thought that he was being truthful, but many considered him an apostate, and Sushila Nayar, one of Gandhi’s female initmates, thought he had “a dirty mind.”[8]
Jeffrey Kripal, author of Kali’s Child,[9] has also been condemned for taking Sri Ramakrishna’s failed Tantric initiation seriously and for interpreting his interactions with his male disciples as homoerotic encounters. Most people would rather not hear about Martin Luther King’s extramarital liaisons, but they remain embarrassing facts, along with the plagiarized passages in his doctoral dissertation, that must be integrated into our understanding of this great saint of nonviolence. King confessed that what he did was wrong and he sought forgiveness from his wife and sought repentance. Sadly, I do not think that we can say that same thing about Gandhi’s response to those who criticized his intimate relations with young women. Furthermore, King did not defend his actions by saying that they were part of his spiritual development, something that Gandhi of course did.
It is now widely known that Gandhi shared his bed with young women as part of his experiments in brahmacharya, a Sanskrit word usually translated as “celibacy,” but generally understood as the ultimate state of yogic self-control. Gandhi believed that Indian ascetics who sought refuge in forests and mountains were cowards, and he was convinced that the only way to conquer desire was to face the temptation head-on with a naked female in his bed. I take Gandhi at his word that he did not have carnal relations with these women—his sleeping quarters were open to all to observe—so he was not among the left-handed Tantrics who engaged in ritual sex with their yoginis. At the same time, Gandhi’s Tantricism cannot be right-handed kind because this school proscribes intimate contact with women.
As would be expected, we will find that Gandhi was a very distinctive Tantric. Just as he claimed that he was an Advaitin while that the same time being a Dvaitin,[10] perhaps it can be said that Gandhi was somehow simultaneously a left-handed and right-handed Tantric. Raihana Tyabji, a close associate with a Tantric past, thought that Gandhi’s position straddling right-handed and left-hand Tantra was untenable, and that the only way to free himself and his women from sexual desire was “to give free rein to it—to indulge it and satiate it. But he wouldn’t listen.”[11] It is significant to note that when his colleagues criticized him for sleeping with his grandniece Manu, Gandhi defended himself by saying that he, according to Geoffrey Ashe, “held radical views of brahmacharya and urged them to study the Tantra cult. (11a)
It is not widely known that Gandhi subscribed to Shakta theology, one that puts skakti, the power of the Hindu Goddess, at the center of existence. As we shall see, Shakta theology is the foundation of Hindu Tantricism. Scholars have warned us that not all Shaktas are Tantrics, but Gandhi’s sexual experiments with young women definitely suggest some association with Tantra. In the first section I will evaluate the position of one commentator who makes strong claims about Gandhi’s Tantricism. In the second section I explain Gandhi’s views on shakti and how they relate to Tantricism. The third section will investigate how well Gandhi’s Tantric qualities match with a standard list of what constitutes Tantricism. The fourth section is a summary of Gandhi’s intimate relations with early female associates before he invited women to share his bed. The fifth section deals with those women who were directly involved his sexual experiments and the effect that these experiences had on them and on Gandhi himself.
The final section will compare Gandhi with Ramakrishna’s failed Tantric initiation and Sri Aurobindo’s relationship with Mira Richards, better known simply as The Mother. I will then summarize what I believe we can reasonably say about Gandhi’s Tantricism, and whether or not he achieved the spiritual goal that he was seeking. It is also possible that that Gandhi’s sexual experiments may have been an abuse of personal power rather than a practice of Hindu spirituality.
One defense that could be made for Gandhi’s actions is that he experienced intimate relations with men as well. Hermann Kallenbach, a South Africa associate, was very close to the Mahatma. Kallenbach promised that he would travel to the “ends of the earth in search of [Gandhian] Truth,”[12] and he also promised Gandhi that he would never marry. Gandhi reciprocated by declaring unconditional love and a declaration that they would always be “one soul in two bodies.”[13]
Gandhi was also very close to Pyarelal Nayar, Sushila Nayar’s brother, and boasted that Pyarelal slept closer to him than his sister did. For Gandhi, however, sleeping with men was different from sharing a bed with women. Abha Gandhi’s husband Kanu once objected to his wife sleeping with the Mahatma and offered himself as a “bed warmer.” Gandhi rejected his proposal by making it clear that brahmacharya experiments required young women as bedmates.[14] Finally, if someone makes an appeal to the Indian custom and necessity of intimate Indian family sleeping arrangements, Girja Kumar is not convinced: “Not even in India do grown-up daughters sleep with their fathers.”[15]
I
In his book The Days with Gandhi Bose does mention in passing that Gandhi’s techniques are “reminiscent of the Tantras,”[16] and Gandhi himself said that he read the books on Tantra written by Sir John Woodroofe,[17] but, as far as I know, only Gopi Krishna has argued at any length about Gandhi’s Tantricism. In his on-line essay “Mahatma Gandhi and the Kundalini Process,”[18] Krishna argues that the only way that we can explain Gandhi’s actions with these young women is to assume he was a kundalini yogi. Krishna speculates that “upward flow of reproductive energy [shakti]” started as soon as he committed himself to brahmacharya in 1906. Gandhi was 37, “the usual time,” from Krishna’s own experience, “for the spontaneous arousal of the Serpent Power.”
As evidence that Gandhi had perfected this state, Krishna cites this passage from Gandhi’s Key to Health: “[the brahmachari’s] sexual organs will begin to look different. . . . He does not become impotent for lack of the necessary secretions of sexual glands. But these secretions in his case are sublimated into a vital force pervading his whole being.”[19] Krishna claims that this passage makes it “patently clear” that Gandhi had attained the state of brahmacharya, but it is not clear that Gandhi is writing about himself, and that, except during the crisis with Manu, he rarely ever claimed spiritual perfection.
As the kundalini yogi matures, Krishna states that he “needs constant stimulation to increase the supply of reproductive juices. . . . The Tantras and other works on kundalini clearly acknowledge the need of an attractive female partner in the practices undertaken to awaken shakti.” Gandhi does in fact say that “my brahmacharya . . . irresistibly drew me to woman as the mother of man. She became too sacred for sexual love.”[20] Krishna admits that Gandhi himself most likely “had no inkling of the transformative process at work in him,” even though he claims that Gandhi noticed that his male organ had shrunk. Krishna brushes aside criticism of Gandhi’s actions and also concern for the young women’s mental health, because “nature accomplishes her great tasks in her own way and leaves short-sighted mortals wondering how it could happen.” Apart from the speculative nature of Krishna’s theory, we should be most concerned about his disregard for the women’s well being, as well has the implication that Gandhi was driven by forces over which he had no control.
II
For Gandhi the virtues of patience, self-control, and courage were absolutely essential to defeat the temptation to retaliate and respond with violence. Gandhi made it clear that each of these virtues were found most often in women. Gandhi once said that he wanted to convert the womans capacity for “self-sacrifice and suffering into shakti-power.”[21] Gandhi describes womankind as follows: “Has she not great intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage?”[22] He also claimed that ahimsa is embodied in the woman: she is “weak in striking. . . strong in suffering.”[23]
The women around Gandhi were amazed how comfortable they felt in his presence and how much of a woman he had become to them. Millie Polak observed that “most women love men for [masculine] attributes. Yet, Mohandas Gandhi has been given the love of many women for his womanliness.”[24] His orphaned grandniece Manu considered Gandhi as her new mother, and she simply could not understand all the controversy surrounding their sleeping together. D. K. Kalelkar also thought that there was no scandal with Manu, “because his relationships with women were, beginning to end, as pure as mother’s milk.”[25]
The fact that women felt no unease in his presence was proof to Gandhi that he was approaching perfection as a brahmachari. Indeed, Bose contends that Gandhi attempted to “conquer sex” was “by becoming a woman.”[26] Gandhi told Pyarelal Nayar that he once tore the burning sari off a woman in his ashram, but “she felt no embarrassment, because she knew I was a brahmachari and so almost like a sister to her.”[27] Gandhi also mentions Krishna’s bathing gopis, their clothes hidden from them, standing unembarrassed in front of their beloved Lord.[28] Alternatively, Gandhi says that his goal was the state of “complete sexlessness” recommended by Jesus and that this condition could be achieved by becoming a eunuch by prayer not by an operation.[29]
Shakti is substantially different from the masculine tejas, a power that the gods and brahmins possess, because shakti is a necessary attribute that the Goddess shares with everything in the universe. Ontologically speaking, tejas is a quality, seen most clearly in its meaning as fire, a primary element of the basic substance, while shakti is that basic substance. The Hindu Goddess theology essentially breaks the vicious cycle of the Vedic maxim, explained superbly by Brian K. Smith,[30] that one gains power only at another’s expense. The Vedic power game, as with most patriarchal concepts of power, is a zero-sum game; those who control the sacrifice control tejas. The result is constant battles between gods and antigods, gods and ascetics, priests and kings. Goddess theology offers something radically different: shakti is a power that all beings have by virtue of their very existence.
Given Gandhi’s commitment to the nonviolent feminine, we must read shakti rather than tejas when he states that “all power comes from the preservation and sublimation of the vitality that is responsible for the creation of life.”[31] Gandhi may very well be indicating a Tantric process of empowerment that involves the preservation and sublimation of a male vitality that has its source in shakti. When Gandhi did his first radio broadcast on November 12, 1947, he declared that the phenomenon of broadcasting demonstrated “shakti, the miraculous power of God.”[32]
When Gandhi once described himself as “half a woman,”[33] an alternative view of masculine and feminine power suggests itself. The Chinese/Jungian view of complementary yin (anima) and yang (animus) energies is found in this passage: “A man should remain man and yet should learn to become woman; similarly, a woman should remain woman and yet learn to become man.”[34] (This view of coequal powers differs ontologically from the view of shakti as primary and tejas as derivative.) Hsi Lai uses the yin/yang model to explain Gandhi’s sexual experiments: “He didn’t do this for the purpose of actual sexual contact, but as an ancient practice of rejuvenating his male energy. . . . Taoists called this method ‘using the yin to replenish the yang.”[35]
The source of Gandhi’s dipolar views of male and female may have been Christian rather than Asian. While a young man in England, Gandhi came into contact with the Esoteric Christian Union, whose interpretation of the image of God meant that the individual “must comprise within himself the qualitiesBmasculine and feminineBof existence and be spiritually both man and woman.”[36] When he confesses to Kedar Nathji and Swami Anand that his sexual experiments were “unorthodox,” Gandhi says that his views on this subject had been influenced by “Western writers on this subject.”[37] We will see that Aurobindo had similar views of a dipolar relationship between himself and his own skakti Mira Richards. The emphasis that both men placed on equality with women fits this male-female model much better.
Hindu Tantrics drew their philosophical inspiration from a fusion of Upanishadic monism and Sankhya-Yoga with its radical dualism of purusha (pure spirit) and prakriti (material energy). Tantricism dissolves this dualism by identifying prakriti as the Goddess, who then creates both the spiritual and material worlds. Here is an illustrative passage from the Devi-Mahatmya, one of the first Shakta texts: “You are the primordial material (prakriti) of everything, manifesting the triad of constituent strands [of gunas]; (You are) the cause of all the worlds . . . the supreme, original, untransformed Prakriti.”[38] A common image for Shaivite Tantricism is Kali standing on top of an inert Shiva—”Shiva without Shakti is a corpse”[39]—confirming in Shakta theology that even the gods derive their power from Durga/Kali’s shakti. A Vaishnava version of this is beautifully succinct: “Without you [Radha], I [Krishna] am inert and am always powerless. You have all powers [shakti] as your own form; come into my presence.”[40]
Despite this emphasis on goddess dynamism, it is the human male who is active in Tantric rites. Only males undergo initiation, and the only instruction females receive, if they get any, is that they “should not even mentally touch another male.”[41] Gandhi’s Tantricism definitely follows this androcentric approach. Gandhi also takes the defiant stance of the Tantric who says that he cares nothing for what others thinks of his practice: “The whole world may forsake me but I dare not leave what I hold is the truth for me.”[42] Gandhi once admonished a critic that he would sleep with a thousand women if that is what it took to reach spiritual purity.[43]
Buddhist Tantricism, interestingly enough, inverts the active/passive polarity and makes the Goddess passive and the male active. (Exceptions to this were some Tantric Buddhists in Bengal and Oddiyana who kept the dynamic female, and the goddesses Vajravarahi and Aparajita who maintained active power in Tibet.)[44] As prakriti the Hindu Goddess was primordial cause, but in the Hevajra Tantra the “yogin is Means and Compassion (upaya), and the yogin [is] Wisdom (prajna) and Voidness for she is deprived of causation.”[45] Ironically, an active Hindu Goddess did not lead to any relief for oppressed women in India, but a passive Buddhist Goddess has inspired the practice of thousands of female Tantrics in the Tibetan tradition, including Mongolian nuns I witnessed training in the Red Hat sect in Ullanbatur.
Superficially, it appears that Gandhi’s dominance in his sexual experiments may indicate a completely passive female role, but his statements about shakti quoted above support, at least philosophically, the Hindu view of active female power. Nevertheless, Gandhi would have approved of the fact that many of the Buddhist Siddhas receive instruction from mentor goddesses (dakinis), and some of the Siddhas are women themselves. Furthermore, nonviolence, salvation of the lower castes, and selfless service to others are pervasive themes in the stories of the 84 Buddhist Siddhas.[46]
Bharati is correct in rejecting the standard Advaitin strategy of identifying their absolute monism with Nagarjuna’s deconstruction of all metaphysics,[47] or the constructive postmodern view that Nagarjuna’s is subtlely reformulating the non-substantial ontology of Pali Buddhism.[48] But I believe Bharati is wrong to imply that the Shakta philosophy behind Hindu Tantricism dissolves the phenomenal into the noumenal into a state of “absolute oneness.”[49] I make this criticism only from the standpoint of the Shakta tradition, which I have studied carefully, and not the Tantric sutras of which I currently know little. In any case, Gandhi’s neo-Vedanta does not embrace this absolute monism.
III
Gandhi’s embrace of Shakta philosophy and his “sacred” experiments with young women (calling one of them his “spiritual wife”) qualify him as some type of Tantric, but let us see how his practice matches the criteria traditionally used to identify Tantrics. If Tantra is “psycho-experimental interpretation of non-Tantric lore,”[50] then Gandhi’s experiments with young women as a means to become a bramachari certainly qualifies as Tantra. Gandhi is also a Tantric in that he believes that his investigations are value free in that they place experiment above conventional law and morality.
One significant difference in this regard is that while Indian Tantricism represents a premodern recovery of primordial knowledge, Gandhi most often models his experiments in truth on a modern scientific discovery of new personal truths, saying in particular that he “framed [his] own rules [for brahmacharya] as occasion necessitated.”[51] However, in his response to A. V. Thakkar in February, 1947, he leaves the scientific model: “It is not an experiment but an integral part of my yajna. One may forgo an experiment, one cannot forgo one’s duty.”[52] In his response to Bose’s criticisms of his sleeping with Manu, Gandhi claims that “I have not become modern at all in the same sense you seem to mean. I am as ancient as can be imagined and hope to remain so to the end of my life.”[53]
Normally Tantric practices are tightly structured, highly ritualized, and the initiation procedures, guided by a guru, are esoteric. The only bona fide guru in Gandhi’s spiritual development was Raichandcharya, a Jain saint, not a Tantric, with whom Gandhi corresponded during his formative South Africa period. Gandhi officiated at daily worship and hymn singing, encouraged the chanting of the Ramanama, and followed an unconventional diet, but these practices are not Tantric in any way. The chanting of the Ramanama is said to have magical properties, but its use is so widespread in India it may not indicate any special Tantric associations. Nevertheless, Gandhi does connect the chanting of Rama’s name with “an alchemy [that] can transform the body” that leads to “the conservation of vital energy.”[54]
Gandhi’s experiments with truth were highly personalized but not spiritually esoteric as are Tantric practices. Only after the sexual experiments came under public scrutiny did Gandhi started telling his female associates to keep their activities secret. Not until his last days, when his sleeping with Manu became public, did Gandhi confess that this secrecy was actually a sign of untruthfulness.[55] Gandhi’s secrecy was simply expedient and not spiritually required.
Let us now check Douglas R. Brooks’ ten “principal generic features of Hindu Tantricism” against Gandhi’s spiritual practices. The first feature is that the Tantric, while based in the Vedic tradition, appeals to extra-Vedic “practices, concepts, and traditions.” Gandhi’s experiments with truth are definitely extra-Vedic practices, and he frequently appealed to concepts and traditions that had their origins outside of India. It appears that Gandhi also meets the second criterion that Tantrics practice “special forms of yoga and spiritual discipline.” Gandhi also embraces Brooks’ third Tantric principle—namely, “Tantrics are at once theists and philosophical nondualists.”[56] Gandhi is frustratingly inconsistent on this matter, alternating between a fervent personal theism and equally strong affirmation of impersonal monism. I believe that Gandhi is best understood as a neo-Vedantist, one, such as Aurobindo and Vivekananda, who saw Atman-Brahman as a dialectical identity of the One and the Many. The last section is devoted to the Tantric aspects of this movement.
Except for possibly two, the rest of Brooks’ “generic features”—the use of mantras (4th), yantras and mandalas (5th), the absolute authority of the guru (6th), god and goddess conjugal union (7th), and the use of unconventional substances (9th)— are not found in Gandhi’s spiritual practices. The ninth criterion is not entirely alien to Gandhi because, in addition to the four forbidden substances, the 5th makara is “sexual intercourse outside the legitimate, dharmic boundaries of marriage.”[57] It is significant to note that, although we are assuming he did not engage in sex, Gandhi’s experiments were not with his legal wife but with young virgin girls, a requirement for left-handed Tantrics. Brooks’ eighth criterion actually has two parts, the first requiring that Tantra be esoteric, which does not match Gandhi, but the second, Tantric practice is “dangerous” and “not easily controlled or mastered,” fits Gandhi quite nicely. The tenth feature, that the practice is open to all regardless of gender or caste, is also one that Gandhi easily qualifies.
IV
Before Gandhi started his brahmacharya experiments in 1938, he had a string of intimate relationships with European and Indian women. I am indebted to Girja Kumar’s book Brahmacharya: Gandhi and His Women Associates for information about the five women discussed in this section. In contrast to Bose, who encountered resistance everywhere when he tried to publish on this topic 50 years ago, Kumar’s book, which is more explicit, judgmental, and comprehensive than Bose’s, has been warmly received, signaling that most Indians are now ready to accept Gandhi as fully human. Kumar’s sources are not secret or anonymous; in fact, most of the material comes from letters found in Gandhi’s Collected Works.
While he was in South Africa, Gandhi fell in love with Millie Polak, the wife of Henry Polak, both of whom lived with Gandhi at Phoenix Farm. Kumar describes their first contact as follows: “Gandhiji and Millie started conversing through their eyes. They made a pact between them immediately. Poor Henry was left stranded.”[58] As with all of his female friends, Gandhi insisted that he and Millie be sisters or alternatively that he be her father, but after they were together in London in 1909 without Henry, Gandhi dared to suggest that he was a substitute husband.[59]
Even though Millie was smitten by him, she stood up to Gandi’s controlling nature and argued against his absurd dietary ideas and his goal to force chastity on all his coworkers. This independent spirit that defines most of his female intimates of this early period stands in instructive contrast to the passive participants in the later brahmacharya experiments. For example, Kumar describes Manu as a devotee who “was prepared to sacrifice her life at the altar of her ishtadeva (personal God).”[60] Gandhi controlled every aspect of Manu’s life, and when she once forgot his favorite soap at their last stay, he made her walk back through a dark jungle to retrieve it.
When Millie finally broke off their 3-year affair, Gandhi's attentions turned to Maud Polak, Henry's sister. Maud worked with Gandhi at Phoenix Farm as his personal secretary until 1913. In a letter to Henry, Gandhi described Maud seeing him off at a railway station: "She cannot tear herself from me. . . . She would not shake hands with me. She wanted a kiss. [This incident] has transformed her and with her me."[61]
Esther Faering, a young Danish missionary, was the next major love in Gandhi's life. From her very first visit at the Satyagraha Ashram in 1917, Kumar describes Faering as "completely hooked on" Gandhi, and as with Millie Polak, "an instant chemistry developed" between them. Gandhi "experienced an intensely personal passion for Esther," and she praised him as the "Incarnation of God in man."[62] The other ashramites were alarmed at Gandhi’s obsession with Faering, and Kasturba Gandhi was particularly cool to her husband’s new love interest. Gandhi made matters worse by siding with Faering against his wife. While he was away from the ashram, he wrote daily letters to Faering, which Kumar describes as having the passionate intensity of the bhakti and sufi poets. He hazards a guess that “Esther must have stirred,” as young beautiful women are supposed to do in the Tantric yogi, “the serpent resting uncoiled in [Gandhi’s] kundalini.”[63]
One would expect Gandhi to have at least been serially monogamous in his relationships, but that was not the case. While Faering was struggling against Kasturba and other ashramites and receiving Gandhi’s loving support by mail, he was away conducting what Kumar calls a “whirlwind romance” with Saraladevi Chowdharani, a Bengali revolutionary married to a Punjabi musician. Her father was a secretary of Indian National Congress in Calcutta, and by virtue of her singing and activism, Saraladevi was celebrated as Bengal’s Joan of Arc and as an incarnation of Durga. She rose to the challenge and wrote that “my pen reverberated with the power of Shiva’s trumpet and invited Bengalis to cultivate death.”[64]
After the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, Gandhi stayed at Saraladevi’s home in Lahore and then they toured India together during 1920. Her husband, R. D. Chowdhary, was in jail for the first eight months this period, but he was content, as was Henry Polak, to share his wife with the Mahatma. Gandhi agreed with Chowdhary that Saraladevi was the “greatest shakti of India.”[65]
Gandhi called Saraladevi his “spiritual wife” after “an intellectual wedding,” and he reported that he bathed “in her deep affection” as she showered “her love on [him] in every possible way.”[66] Kasturba Gandhi had refused to wear khadi, but Saraladevi became the Mahatma’s most elegant khadi model. Kumar describes them as “lovelorn teenagers with stars in their eyes,” and depicts Saraladevi as “aristocratic, gorgeously dressed, sensuously beautiful, and imperious. In short, she had everything that [Kasturba] lacked.”[67]
In contrast to his later brahmacharya mistresses, Saraladevi, just as Millie Polak before her, did not bow to Gandhi’s authority in any way. For example, as the quotation above implies, she agreed with fellow Bengalis, such as the young Aurobindo, that independence required violent revolution. Following her Goddess, Durga’s shakti was always accompanied by violence, and Saraladevi eventually broke with Gandhi over this very issue.
Kumar concludes that just as his relation to Faering, while “full of sensuality,” was asexual, Gandhi’s romance with Saraladevi was “probably . . . entirely platonic.” There was, however, a “large component of eroticism” and the “line of demarcation between sexual, sensuous, erotic and platonic was only of degree and not of kind.”[68] Kumar’s phrasing is unfortunate and logically incoherent, because “degree” means a slippery slope and not a strict line between the intellectual/spiritual and the physical. In letters to Saraladevi in July, 1920, Gandhi insists that being “spiritually” married means that the “physical must be wholly absent,” but he then admits that he is “too physically attached to” her for there to be a true “sacred association.”[69] In his conversations with Margaret Sanger, Gandhi refers to a “woman with whom I almost fell,” and “the thought of my wife kept me from going to perdition.” Writing to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, a later bedmate, he admitted the he, “with one solitary exception,” had never “looked upon a woman with lustful eyes.” These two references must have been to Saraladevi Chowdharani.
Madeleine Slade, later Gandhi’s beloved Mirabehn, was the daughter of a British naval officer who was once stationed in Bombay. Mirabehn first learned of Gandhi through Romain Rolland, who was then writing a Gandhi biography. She wrote to Gandhi requesting that she become a member of the Sabarmati Ashram, but he required that she live as an ascetic for one year before coming to India. More than any of his disciples, Mirabehn eagerly took to the austerities that Gandhi demanded. As opposed to Kasturba, who disliked latrine duties, Mirabehn eagerly took charge of the toilets, even those for all the delegates to a meeting of the Indian National Congress.
At their first meeting in November, 1925, Mirabehn found Gandhi “divine,” and she was able to confirm Rolland’s claim that he was indeed the second Christ. They fell in love with one another and Kumar says that “Mira was Saraladevi . . . all over again.” Once again, because of Gandhi’s fascination for her, Mirabehn was shunned by the ashramites. Gandhi soon discovered that Mirabehn’s emotional instability caused his blood pressure to rise, so he frequently sent her away on other tasks. They did, however, keep in contact with weekly self-described “love letters,” and Gandhi wrote that she haunted his dreams.[70] Mirabehn agreed with Gandhi’s depiction that their passion was like a “bed of hot ashes,”[71] a veritable ascetic-erotic rhapsody of yogic tapas. Gandhi also shared with Mirabehn agonies about his spontaneous erections, daytime ejaculations, and wet dreams, for which he castigated himself unmercifully, and they even discussed the causes and cures of constipation.
V
Of the women closely associated with Gandhi, at least ten were said to have slept in his bed. They can be identified as follows:
· Sushila Nayar was only 15 when she came to the Sabarmati Ashram and then became Gandhi’s intimate companion, with some periods of alienation and remove, for the rest of his life. Gandhi claimed that Nayar was a natural brahmachari, having observed it from childhood.[72] They bathed together and even used the same bath water, but Gandhi assured everyone that he kept his “eyes tightly shut.”[73]
· Lilavati Asar, associated with Gandhi from 1926-1948, slept in his bed and gave him “service,” which meant bathing and massaging.
· Sharada Parnerkar slept “close” to Gandhi and rendered “service.” She was very ill in October, 1940, and Gandhi gave her regular enemas.
· Amtul Salaam, whom Gandhi called his “crazy daughter,” was a Punjabi from Patiala. She was also a bedmate and masseuse. Gandhi once wrote about the joy he gave Salaam when she received a massage from him.[74]
· Prabhavati Narayan, a Kashmiri, lived in an unconsummated marriage with Jayaprakash Narayan, Indira Gandhi’s most famous political foe. Because of her lack of sexual interest or desire, Gandhi thought that Prabhavati would be a perfect married brahmachari. In addition to sleeping with Gandhi, she also gave him “service.”
· Raj Kumari Amrit Kaur, married to a Rajasthani prince, was India’s first health minister and was a Gandhi associate for 30 years. Although older, she slept right along with the younger women in Gandhi’s quarters. She also helped with baths and massages.
· Sucheta Kriplani, a member of Parliament and professor at Benares Hindu University, was a member of Gandhi’s Peace Brigade in East Bengal in 1947. She maintained a brahmachari marriage with J. B. Kriplani, a famous socialist and saint. Gandhi fought their union tooth and nail. Although Gandhi invited Mrs. Kriplani to his bed on a regular basis, he insisted that married couples in his ashrams always sleep in different quarters.
· Abha Gandhi was a Bengali who accompanied the Mahatma in East Bengal. She started sleeping with Gandhi when she was 16; she also bathed him and washed his clothes.
· Kanchan Shah, also a married woman, had a “one night stand” with Gandhi and was banned from brahmacharya experiments because she reputedly wanted to have sex with him.[75] Gandhi gave the following instructions on brahmachari marriage to Shah and her husband: “You should not touch each other. You shall not talk to each other. You shall not work together. You should not take service from each other.”[76] But Gandhi of course received “service” from his women on a daily basis. On the hypocrisy of taking what he denied to others, Kumar has this to say: “The vow of brahmacharya was a revenge he took upon everyone else.”[77]
· Manu Gandhi was his brother’s granddaughter and she was his constant companion for the last eight years of his life. Interestingly enough, there is a temple to Manu, a powerful rain goddess, in Gandhi’s home city of Porbandar.
Most accounts of Gandhi’s spiritual experiments focus on those with Manu in 1946-47 in East Bengal. Although he conceded at the time that it “may be a delusion and a snare,” and although he seemed to be recalling his earlier experiments at Sevagram—”I have risked perdition before now”—he was still confident that he had “launched on a sacrifice [that] consists of the full practice of truth” and the development of a “non-violence of the brave.”[78] He said that these tests were no longer an experiment, which could be seen as optional, but a compulsory sacred duty (yajna). His hut where he slept with Manu was called “holy ground,” and Manu’s father had to sleep elsewhere when he visited.[79]
There is some confusion about whether the women simply slept next to him or shared the same cover, or whether they slept clothed or unclothed. The scenario appeared to be that they first slept next to him, then slept under the same cover without clothes. Significantly, Gandhi admitted that “all of them would strip reluctantly. . . and they did so at my prompting.”[80] As to the reason for complete nakeness, Sushila Nayar recalls Gandhi’s explanation to Manu: “We both may be killed by the Muslims at any time. We must both put our purity to the ultimate test. . . and we should now both start sleeping naked.”[81]
Gandhi described his sleeping with Manu as a “bold and original experiment,” one that required a “practiced brahmachari” such as he was, and a woman such as Manu who was free from passion.[82] Confessing as she even might have done with her own mother, Manu told Gandhi that she had not ever experienced sexual desire. Presumably because of these ideal conditions, Gandhi predicted that the “heat would be great.”[83] It is not clear whether Gandhi was speaking of the yogi heat of tapas, or the heat of the negative reactions that he anticipated.
One has to admire Manu because it was she, not Gandhi, who suggested that they not sleep together any longer. It is harder to credit Gandhi, particularly when he said that the experiments ceased because of Manu’s “inexperience,” not because of any failing on his part. As Kumar states: “Just five days before Gandhiji was assassinated, he charged her with failing to realize the potential of mahayajna.”[84] So it was Manu’s fault, not his.
Controversy about the practice continued during the summer of 1947, but Gandhi was pleased when two editors of Harijan, who had resigned in protest about the experiments, confessed that they had misjudged Gandhi. It is not clear that the experiments stopped because Pyarelal notes that “the practice was for the time being discontinued”; indeed, after returning to Delhi, Manu and Gandhi resumed sleeping together and “continued right till the end.”[85]
Gandhi’s “sacred associations” actually began at his Sevagram ashram as early as 1938, when his wife Kasturba was still alive. Sushila Nayar not only slept with him there, but also gave him regular massages, sometimes in front of visitors, and they, as I have noted, bathed together. About his relations to Nayar, Gandhi states: “She has experienced everything I have in me. . . . She is more absorbed in me. Hence I would even make her sleep by my side without fear.”[86] Nayar told Ved Mehta that “long before Manu came into the picture, I used to sleep with him just as I would with my mother. . . . In the early days there was no question of calling this a brahmacharya experiment. It was just part of a nature cure. Later on, when people started asking questions about his physical contact with women, the idea of brahmacharya experiments was developed.”[87] The fact that Gandhi changed the justification for these experiments after closer public scrutiny suggests that his motivation for these actions may not have been as pure as he wanted people to assume.
In an extremely candid confession, Gandhi admits that at Sevagram he had made a grave mistake:
I feel my action was impelled by vanity and jealousy. If my experiment was dangerous, I should not have undertaken it. And if it was worth trying, I should have encouraged my co-workers to undertake it on my conditions. My experiment was a violation of the establishment norms of brahmacharya. Such a right can be enjoyed only by a saint like Shukadevji who can remain pure in thought, word and deed at all times of day.[88]
Gandhi, however, could not maintain his resolve, because shortly thereafter (as soon as 12 hours!) intimate contact with women of the ashram resumed. According to Mark Thomson, “Gandhi explained that he could not bear the pain and anguish suffered by women devotees denied the opportunity to serve him in this fashion.”[89] Gandhi confessed that he “could not bear the tears of Sushila and fainting away of Prabhavati.”[90] In February, 1939, there was another crisis. Gandhi admitted that four women at Sevagram did not like “giving service” and they were ordered to sleep “out of reach” of his arms.[91]
When Gandhi spoke of the dangers of his sexual experiments in 1938, he must have realized that he was not ready for the test. While he did claim that he “can keep [sexual desire] under control,” he admitted he had not “completely eradicated the sex feeling,”[92] a criterion that he had honored from the traditional rules of brahmacharya. Gandhi openly admitted that there were some “black nights,” presumably sleeping with his women, in which God “saved me in spite of myself.”[93]
One of these dark nights must have been May 9, 1938. In a letter to Nayar’s brother, Gandhi admitted that he may have had “a dirty mind” and may have played “the role of Satan.” His “diseased mind” might have “aroused him” and thereby compromised Nayar, causing her “untold misery.”[94] Gandhi was obviously wrong when he claimed previously that Nayar’s natural purity could “forestall any mistake I may make,” and that “contact with her has brought greater purity to me.”[95] Although he took all the blame upon himself, Gandhi appears incredibly obtuse in assuming that Nayar had no reason to feel disturbed or unhappy about the psychological effects of her intimate relations with him.
Sushila Nayar was away from the ashram for long periods for her medical education. When she finished, Gandhi begged her to return as the ashram’s doctor. He was upset that she now refused to be called his daughter, and he urged her, without her preconditions, to “rush to me and become one with me.”[96] Reading the dozens of letters exchanged during this time, it is clear that Nayar was still very troubled about what happened at Sevagram. She wrote that she would return only on “conditions,” which were that she would not have to give Gandhi “service.” Nayar reluctantly submitted to Gandhi’s indomitable will in September, 1940. While he was in Delhi, she did give him a massage, but she came to him “with great difficulty.” She also sent him a letter beforehand, which he described as “hurtful.” While describing himself as unhappy, he acknowledged that Nayar was suffering “deep misery.”[97] It looked as if Nayar could have succeeded in tearing herself away from Gandhi’s possessive domination, just as his earlier intimates had, but she did eventually return to him and was with him and Manu in East Bengal.
Although Gandhi declared that he, compared to other men, could take greater liberty” with women, and that no woman “has been harmed by contact with me or been prey to lustful thoughts,”[98] there is sufficient evidence to prove that Gandhi’s experiments had a deleterious effect on his female intimates’ mental health. There was intense competition among the women for Gandhi’s attention. For example, Lilavati Asar and Amtul Salaam were very jealous of Sushila Nayar, and Gandhi promised Asar that he would stop sleeping with Nayar because of her anger.
Gandhi was always inclined to blame others for not understanding the unique nature of his experiments. In 1940 Gandhi admitted that the “atmosphere here [Sevagram] cannot be said to be natural for anyone,” but nevertheless the conflict was caused by those who were not properly “absorbed” in it. Those who had learned “master the atmosphere” could live at Sevagram “comfortably and grow.”[99] Several visitors attested to definite signs of psychological turmoil among Gandhi’s women companions. In 1947 Swami Ananda and Kedar Nath, two visitors with substantial spiritual credentials, queried Gandhi as follows: “Why do we find so much disquiet and unhappiness around you. Why are your companions emotionally unhinged?”[100] Raihana Tyabji observed that the more Gandhi’s young women “tried to restrain themselves and repress their sexual impulses . . . the more oversexed and sex-conscious they became.”[101]
After learning of the experiments, Bose wrote that he would “never tempt [himself] 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.”[102] He was also concerned about the women’s emotional health: “Whatever may be the value of the prayog [experiment] on Gandhiji’s own case, it does leave 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.”[103]
Bose was also concerned about Gandhi’s own emotional state, observing that Sushila Nayar’s presence brought him out of his normal “unruffled” composure. On December 17, 1946 at 3:20 AM, Bose heard two loud slaps and “deeply anguished cry” from Gandhi’s sleeping quarters. He went in to find both Nayar and Gandhi in tears.[104] Bose had assumed that Gandhi had slapped Nayar, but she insisted that Gandhi had hit himself on the forehead twice, a physical form of Gandhi’s “self-suffering” that Manu had witnessed as well. Bose also mentions an unnamed woman “Z,” who “was not always disinterested in her relations with” with Gandhi, and who also upset him and distracted him from his political work.[105]
VI
Gandhi can be seen as part and parcel of a radical transformation of Indian political and religious thought that began with Rammohun Roy (1772-1833) and the Bengali Renaissance. Roy responded to British colonialism with what I call a “reverse” Orientalism, and he and other like minded Indian intellectuals, bolstered by European scholarship, claimed that behind the shroud of a corrupt popular Hinduism there lay rational, monotheistic religion equal to, if not greater, than Christianity. Roy and those who followed him targeted sati, idol worship, and animal sacrifice to the Goddess as particularly degenerate accretions to the pure philosophy of the Vedas and the Upanishads. Although many rejected that idea of the Aryan invasion, many Indian intellectuals nonetheless turned the Indo-European linguistic theory into a racial theory of indigenous high caste (Aryan) superiority over the colonizers.
Although Roy rejected Kali worship in a dramatic way, he recommended the Mahanirvana Tantra as an antidote to the left-handed Tantra that was prevalent in Bengal. Urban has investigated the origins of this text and has determined that it was most likely written in the late 18th Century (perhaps 1775).[106] The author obviously wished to present a sanitized version of Tantra to ameliorate British concerns and to incorporate a significant Indian, especially Bengali, tradition. The most suspicious aspect of this Tantra is that the ruling deity is not the Durga or Kali but an impersonal Brahman. Chapter Seven of the text, however, does feature Kali, but not in her violent form; rather, she is “the ocean of nectar of compassion . . . whose mercy is without limit,” and the “possessor of beautiful ornaments, adorable as the image of all tenderness, with a tender body.”[107] The five forbidden things (meat, fish, wine, parched grain, and sexual union) are mentioned “euphemistically” and Tantric sex is performed exclusively with one’s wife. The text also recommends intercaste marriage based on mutual consent of the partners.
One of the most significant results of the Bengali Enlightenment was the Ramakrishna mission, which now offers social and spiritual services at 137 offices all over the world. Ramakrishna’s followers have tried to deemphasize his Tantric connections, but the influence was intimate and profound. Ramakrishna’s first major spiritual teacher was a woman called the Bhairavi Brahmani, who taught a mixture of Tantra and Bengali Vaishnavism. There are two radically opposed camps of interpretation of Ramakrishna’s experience with the five Ms (mamsa, matsya, madya, mudra, and maithuna)–mischievously translated by Doniger as the five F’s–flesh, fish, fermented grapes, frumentum, and fornication.[108] On the one hand, there is Saradananda who claimed that Ramakrishna completely refused to participate, thereby legitimizing the view that being Kali’s child is spiritually superior to the decadent state of being her lover. On the other hand, Datta’s belief that Ramakrishna “easily performed all of these obscene and horrific rites with the Bhairavi.”[109]
Jeffrey Kripal, author of Kali’s Child, believes that the truth lies somewhere in between. He concludes that Ramakrishna passed the first M in its most horrific form: eating rotten human flesh. Fulfilling the second M was not that difficult for Bengalis, for they have a great passion for fish, but Ramakrishna ate it in the Tantric way–boiled in a human skull. Ramakrishna fudged on the third M: so great was his aversion to wine that he was only able to touch his tongue to a drop of it.
The most notorious M–ritual intercourse–proved to be Ramakrishna’s greatest problem. All that Ramakrishna could manage was to sit on the virgin’s lap, crying out for Mother, and falling into samadhi. Ramakrishna interpreted the event as follows: “In the Tantras there is talk about the left-handed practice with a woman, but this is not good. . . . I performed the worship of the sixteen-year-old girl in the child state. I saw that her breasts were Mother’s breasts, that her vagina was Mother’s vagina.”[110] Kripal’s main thesis is that Ramakrishna remained forever Kali’s child never the mature Tantric hero.
Returning to Gandhi’s Tantricism, we can make some instructive observations. Both he and Ramakrishna were married, and both experienced intimate relations with virgin girls. (Kumar notes insightfully that both Gandhi and Ramakrishna was “compulsively tactile” with Gandhi’s constant touching of young women and Ramakrishna’s caressing of his disciples.) Ramakrishna’s child bride was later elevated as the “Holy Mother Sarada Devi.” She is now an equal person in what the Ramakrishna Mission calls “Holy Trinity,” consisting of her, Ramakrishna, and Vivekananda. Until her death in 1920, Sarada Devi was considered the adopted mother of the remaining disciples, and today she is revered as a “human, yet divine” saint,[111] an obvious manifestation of shakti. While Ramakrishna was involved in an actual Tantric rite, Gandhi was operating in a quasi-Tantric context. The most important difference, however, is that Manu and the other young women played the child role, while Gandhi claimed victory, at least during this period, as a mature yogin, a true master of sexual desire.
As a young revolutionary in Calcutta, Sri Aurobindo and his associates represented a radical political manifestation of the Bengali Renaissance. Outraged by the ill-fated partition of Bengal in 1905, underground groups formed and executed terrorist acts against the British government. Aurobindo most likely composed the oath taken by many of these revolutionaries, whose final act was to lift a sword to Kali. In another text Aurobindo phrases Kali’s disposition as follows: “Offer sacrifice to me. Give for I am thirsty. [It is I] who . . . hungers to enjoy the heads and bodies of mighty rulers.”[112] Kali’s ugliness and violence was blamed on the colonial powers, which brought out the wrath of the great goddess who now sanctioned revolutionary action by her devotees.
In Aurobindo’s mature philosophy the Tantric elements are clear, complete with Tantric terms such as sadhaka (Tantric aspirant) and sadhana (Tantric practice). The primordial being of Aurobindo’s Shakta cosmogony is Mahashakti, the transcendent Universal Mother, who “descends” as the Tantric polarity of Ishvara-Shakti, which expresses itself as the purusha-prakriti dualism in the nescient world. P. B. Saint-Hilaire explains Aurobindo’s view most aptly:
Purusha and Prakriti are separate powers, while Ishvara and Shakti are contained in each other. . . . Purusha is the true being. . . in ordinary man, he is covered by the ego and by the ignorant play of . . . Prakriti, and remains veiled as a “witness” which upholds and observes the play of Ignorance. When he emerges, he is perceived at first as a calm, immovable consciousness, detached from the play of Nature. Thereafter he gradually asserts himself as the sovereign Master of Prakriti.[113]
The traditional assertive Durga/Kali dominating an inert Shiva is replaced by a dipolar Shiva-Skakti pair committed to right-handed Tantra. Aurobindo, and even Gandhi, would agree with Shaiva Siddhanta, one of whose texts reads: “Shiva generates Shakti, and Shakti generates Shiva. Both in their happy union produce the worlds and souls. Still Shiva is [ever] chaste and the sweet-speeched Shakti is [ever] a virgin.”[114] Gandhi’s view of pure satyagrihis who conceived of shakti as the embodiment of ahimsa would prove to be the most effective form of Indian nationalism and arguably the best form of conflict resolution known to humankind. Gandhi’s spiritual universalism, however, owes much to Aurobindo and other thinkers of the Bengali Renaissance.
It is significant that Aurobindo takes a Western Jewish woman, Mira Richards, as his shakti, consciously or unconsciously bringing East and West together just as Gandhi did in his own ways. When Aurobindo claimed that he and Richards “were one but in two bodies,”[115] he is embracing the right-handed Tantra that is described above. (We are assuming that, as in Gandhi’s case, Aurobindo had no sexual relations with his Tantric consort, although their rooms adjoined one another.) In contrast to Gandhi, Aurobindo saw no need to prove his spiritual purity by sleeping with young virgins. In Ramakrishna, Aurobindo, and Gandhi we see also a sweet and gentle goddess, not the militant and ugly Kali of the Bengali nationalists. It could be argued that both Aurobindo and Gandhi, as least from the standpoint of a masculinized Shakta theology, became mature Tantric yogis, while Ramakrishna never left the child state of what Freudians would call a pregenital sexuality. As opposed to Gandhi, Ramakrishna did not appear to know the temptation of sexual attraction, unless Kripal’s thesis of Ramakrishna’s homoerotic tendencies can be supported.
In conclusion, if we can call Gandhi a Tantric, then it is a very unique nonritualistic, nonesoteric practice combining aspects of both left- and right-handed Tantric schools. It also must be said, no matter how much we want to hold Gandhi in the highest esteem, that there is sufficient evidence to conclude that Gandhi was inconsistent in his justifications for his sexual experiments and not completely sincere in carrying them out. This would then lead one to question whether these experiments were a spiritual necessity or simply a personal indulgence and abuse of power. If the goal of the true Tantric is to transform desire into something sacred, then personally I am less and less certain that Gandhi achieved this goal. As Aldous Huxley once said: “The professional Don Juan destroys his spirit as fatally as does the professional ascetic, whose [mirror] image he is.”[116]
ENDNOTES
[1]Letter to R. A. Kaur, March 18, 1947.
[2]Quoted in Ved Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penquin Books, 1976), p. 213. I rely heavily on Mehta for two reasons: (1) his book was well received and republished by Yale University Press; and (2) he sought out all the living Gandhian associates and interviewed them extensively.
[3]Quoted in Girja Kumar, Brahmacharya: Gandhi and His Women Associates (New Delhi: Vitasta Publishing, 2006), p. 90.
[4]The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Government of India Publications, 1958), vol. 93, p. 340.
[5]Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1974), p. 349.
[6]Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will (New York: Doubleday, 1928), p. 45.
[7]William Bartley, Wittgenstein (Chicago: Open Court, 2nd ed., 1985).
[8]Quoted in Mehta, p. 203.
[9]Jeffrey Kripal, Kali’s Child (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
[10]Gandhi, Young India 8 (January 21, 1926), p. 30.
[11]Quoted in Mehta, p. 211.
11aGeoffrey Ashe, Gandhi: A Study of Revolution, (London: Heineman, 1968), p. 370.
[12]Collected Works, vol. 79, p. 301.
[13]Ibid., vol. 96, p. 183.
[14]See Mehta, p. 201.
[15]Kumar, p. 294.
[16]Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1974), p. 2.
[17]Pyarelal Nayar, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 2nd ed., 1966), vol. 1, bk. 2, p. 229.
[18]Gopi Krishna, “Mahatama Gandhi and the Kundalini Proces” (Institute of Consciousness Research, 1995) at http://www.icrcanada.org/gandhi.html (accessed on June 11, 2006). All the citations are from the second section of the essay.
[19]Gandhi, Key to Health, trans. Sushila Nayar (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust, 1948), p. 24. Krishna’s English translation differs significantly from this one, so I wonder if he is citing the same text. He himself gives no reference.
[20]Cited in Bose, p. 171.
[21]Pyarelal, p. 214.
[22]Gandhi, Womans’s Role in Society (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing, 1959), p. 8.
[23]Gandhi, Harijan (November 14, 1936), p. 316). “Woman is the incarnation of ahimsa. Ahimsa means infinite love, which again means infinite capacity for suffering” (Harijan [February 24, 1940], p. 13.
[24]Cited in Martin Green, Gandhi: Voice of a New Revolution (New York: Continuum, 1993), p. 261.
[25]Quoted in Mehta, p. 213.
[26]Bose, p. 177. Mrs. Polak noted a Atrait of sexlessness@ even in his South Africa days (Gandhiji as We Know Him, ed. Ch. Shukla [Bombay, 1945], p. 47). A Mrs. Shukla said that Athere are some things relating to our lives that we women can speak of . . . with no man . . . . But while speaking to Gandhiji we somehow forgot the fact that he was a man@ (C. Shukla, Gandhiji=s View of Life [Bombay, 1951], p. 199). See also The Last Phase, vol. 1, p. 595; 2nd ed., vol. 1, bk. 2, p. 234.
[27]Cited in Metha, p. 44.
[28]Pyarelal, p. 585. This story may have variations, but the one that I read clearly indicated that the Gopis were embarrassed to come out of the Yamuna River and redeem their saris for a kiss from Krishna. Radha of course was the single exception.
[29]Ibid., pp. 219, 220.
[30]Brian K. Smith, “Eaters, Food, and Social Hierarchy in Ancient India,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 58:2 (Summer, 1990), pp. 177, 178.
[31]Gandhi, Harijan (July 23, 1938), p. 192.
[32]V. S. Gupta, “Gandhi and the Mass Media” at http://mkgandhi-arvodaya.org/mass_media.htm, visited on May 30, 2006.
[33]Quoted in Pyarelal, p. 217.
[34]Gandhi’s Letters to Ashram Sisters, ed. K. Kalelkar and trans. A. L. Mazmudar (Ahmedadbad: Navajivan, 2nd rev. ed., 1960), p. 94.
[35]Hsi Lai, The Sexual Teachings of the White Tigress: Secrets of Female Taoist Masters (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 200), p. 16. Lai states that he became interested in “the matter of transformational sex” by reading about Gandhi’s experiments.
[36]Pyarelal, p. 223.
[37]As told to Bose, pp. 149-50.
[38]Devi-Mahatyma, 1.59 (Coburn translation).
[39]Agehananda Bharati, The Tantric Tradition (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1965), p. 202.
[40]Brahmavaivarta Purana, Rakriti-Khanda 55.87, trans. Tracy Pintchman, The Rise of the Goddess in the Hindu Tradition (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 164.
[41]Bharati, p. 236.
[42]Collected Works, vol. 87, p. 13. Compare this with the Tantric yogi who said “Let my kinsmen revile me. . . let people ridicule me on sight . . . .” (cited in Bharati, p. 238).
[43]”Thousands of Hindu and Moslem women come to me. They are to me like my own mother, sisters, and daughters. But if an occasion should arise requiring me to share the bed with any of them I must not hesitate, if I am the bramacharya that I claim to be. If I shrink from the test, I write myself down as a coward and a fraud” (Collected Works, vol. 87, p. 15).
[44]See Bharati, pp. 200, 202, 203. Other exceptions were an active Shiva in Tamil Shaivism and a static female in the Markandeya Purana (p. 213).
[45]Hevajra Tantra, trans. D. L. Snellgrove, excerpted in The World of the Buddha, ed. Lucian Stryk (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 311.
[46]See Buddha’s Lions: The Lives of the Eighty-Four Siddhas, trans. and ed. James B. Robinson (Berkeley: Dharma Publishing Co., 1979).
[47]Bharati, p. 21.
[48]See N. F. Gier and Paul K. Kjellberg, “Buddhism and the Freedom of the Will” in Freedom and Determinism: Topics in Contemporary Philosophy, eds., J. K. Campbell, D. Shier, M. O’Rourke (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 277-304. See sections on Nagarjuna.
[49]Bharati, pp. 19, 200.
[50]Ibid., p. 20.
[51]Cited in Bose, p. 172.
[52]Collected Works, vol. 87, p. 14.
[53]Cited in Bose, p. 153.
[54]Gandhi, Harijan (June 29, 1947), p. 212.
[55]Quoted in Metha, p. 48.
[56]Douglas R. Brooks, The Secret of the Three Cities: An Introduction to Hindu Shakta Tantrism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 58.
[57]Ibid., p. 69.
[58]Kumar, p. 90.
[59]See ibid., p. 97.
[60]Ibid., p. 317.
[61]Collected Works, vol. 96, p. 34.
[62]Kumar, pp. 145-46.
[63]Ibid., p. 152.
[64]Cited in ibid., p. 216.
[65]Collected Works, vol. 17, p. 375; vol. 16, p. 516.
[66]Ibid., vol. 16, p. 316. “Spiritual wife” found in ibid., vol. 18, p. 130.
[67]Kumar, pp. 223, 218.
[68]Ibid., p. 225.
[69]Collected Works, vol. 18, pp. 20, 71.
[70]Ibid., vol. 35, p. 70.
[71]Ibid., vol. 47, p. 49.
[72]Ibid., vol. 67, p. 117.
[73]Ibid., vol. 93, p. 204.
[74]Ibid., pp. 335-36.
[75]See Kumar, p. 7.
[76]Collected Works, vol. 70, p. 220.
[77]Kumar, p. 288.
[78]Collected Works, vol. 87, pp. 13-14, 15. “Non-violence of the brave” cited in Bose, p. 159.
[79]Quoted in Kumar, p. 321.
[80]Ibid., vol. 79, p. 238.
[81]Quoted in Metha, p. 203.
[82]Cited in Bose, p. 103.
[83]Cited in ibid., p. 134.
[84]Kumar, p. 331.
[85]Pyarelal, pp. 226, 238. In letters to Mannalal G. Shah on March 6 and 7, 1945, Gandhi wrote equivocally: “As far as possible I have postponed the practice of sleeping together. But it cannot be given up altogether” (cited in Kumar, p. 8).
[86]Collected Works, vol. 93, p. 333.
[87]Quoted in Mehta, p. 203. The question of whether Gandhi’s touching of women was appropriate had been raised as early as 1935. His response entitled “A Renunciation” can be read in Harijan, September 21, 1935.
[88]Collected Works, vol. 67, pp. 104-5.
[89]Mark Thomson, Gandhi and His Ashrams (Columbia, MO: South Asia Books, 1993), p. 202.
[90]Collected Works, vol. 67, p. 117.
[91]Ibid., vol. 93, pp. 237-38.
[92]Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing, 1st ed., 1958), vol. 1, p. 588. “Now mere abstention from sexual intercourse cannot be termed brahmacharya. So long as the desire for intercourse is there, one cannot be said to have attained brahmacharya” (Key to Health, p. 23).
[93]Cited in Bose, p. 171.
[94]Collected Works, vol. 93, p. 161.
[95]Ibid., p. 33.
[96]Ibid., p. 349. In a letter to Sushila Nayar on August 5, 1940, Gandhi states that one condition of her return was “taking care of [his] body,” and he acknowledged that this was not acceptable to her (Collected Works, vol. 93, p. 343).
[97]Ibid., pp. 364-66.
[98]Ibid., p. 333.
[99]Ibid., p. 338.
[100]Pyarelal, 2nd ed., vol. 1, bk. 2, p. 228.
[101]Quoted in Mehta, p. 211.
[102]Bose, p. 150.
[103]Ibid., p. 151.
[104]Ibid., p. 95.
[105]Ibid., p. 159.
[106]See Hugh Urban, Tantra: Sex. Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), p. 67.
[107]Mahanirvana Tantra 7.13, 22, cited in Urban, p. 65.
[108]Wendy Doniger, Foreward in Edward C. Dimock, Jr., The Place of the Hidden Moon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. xiii; cited in Kripal, p. 117.
[109]Kripal, p. 118.
[110]Kathamrita 2.62; 5.140-41 (trans., Kripal); see The Gospel of Ramakrishna, p. 701.
[111]From the Ramakrishna Mission website at http://www.sriramakrishna.org/sdlife.htm, accessed on June 9, 2006.
[112]Cited in Urban, p. 93.
[113]P. B. Saint-Hilaire, The Future Evolution of Man (Pondicherry: All India Press, 1963), p. 148.
[114]P. Nallaswami, Shivajñana Siddiyar 3.2.77; cited in R. C. Zaehner, Evolution in Religion: A Study in Sri Aurobindo and Pierre Teihard de Chardin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 104.
[115]Cited in Urban, p. 101. It seems that Aurobindo has not left Tantra behind, as Urban claims, but has simply embraced a right-handed form of it.
[116]Huxley, p. 45.
