Bapu's Human Tryst

For nearly 90 years, Gandhi's large family—which included, besides his wife, four sons, their wives and children, national leaders, fellow ashramites and freedom fighters and even his biographers—nursed one of the few secrets in his open-book life: a passionate love relationship the Mahatma had with a fiery beauty from Bengal called Saraladevi. She was a dazzling woman, by all accounts—belonging to the cream of Bengal's aristocratic intellectuals, a niece of Tagore's, a writer and musician who was hailed in her time as Bengal's Joan of Arc and goddess Durga come down to earth, and who drew around her a captivated circle of young men willing to fight and die at her instance. That Gandhi was clearly bewitched by her brilliance and beauty was no secret among his own circle of intimates, including C. Rajagopalachari, his sons, especially Devadas, and secretary Mahadev Desai, all of whom were worried enough to bring pressure upon him to end the affair for their sake and his. Even his wife Kasturba, one of the most unpossessive women in history, who took without a batting of an eyelid the series of infatuated women who passed in and out of her husband's crowded life, was badly shaken by Gandhi's evident intoxication with the spirited Saraladevi. Strangely—or perhaps predictably— it was the one relationship in his life that even a compulsive confessor like Gandhi barely spoke about, keeping her deliberately out of his otherwise candid autobiography. Now his grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, breaks the silence and reconstructs in his forthcoming biography, Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, His People and an Empire, the moving story of the Mahatma's greatest temptation and how he struggled to overcome it. An extract:

***

For four to five months—between January and May 1920—Gandhi was clearly dazzled by her personality and seemed to fantasise that Providence desired them together to shape India to a new design. He wrote to her that he often dreamt of her, and that she was a great shakti. In February 1920 Young India carried a song by Saraladevi on the front page, and Navajivan another poem by her, along with Gandhi's comment that it was "perfect".

But his son Devadas and others (Desai, Mathuradas and C.R. [Rajagopalachari] were among them) questioned Gandhi and asked him to think of the consequences for Kasturba, people like them and Gandhi himself if he continued the special relationship with Saraladevi. "It was their love which chained me so tightly and strongly" and saved him, Gandhi would say to Father Lash.

An autobiography that Saraladevi later wrote makes no reference to the relationship. Nor does Gandhi's, though a few letters and recorded conversations reveal his thoughts on it. "It was so personal I did not put it into my autobiography," he said to Sanger. Rambhuj Dutt Chaudhuri had died in 1923, but Saraladevi and her son Dipak were very much alive when the autobiography was written and Gandhi could not have referred to the episode without hurting her again.

Saraladevi was heart-broken when Gandhi informed her that their relationship could not continue as once thought. The change seems to have occurred in the middle of June 1920, for on June 12, after receiving a telegram from Gandhi, Rajagopalachari wrote to him: "Had your telegram. Words fail me altogether. I hope you have pardoned me." We can infer that Gandhi's telegram (its text is not known) signified a change in the relationship to one who had voiced his concern.

Determined to nail down the change, Rajagopalachari wrote Gandhi a strong letter on June 16. Addressed to "My dearest Master", the letter said that between Saraladevi and Kasturba the contrast was similar to that between "a kerosene oil Ditmar lamp" and "the morning sun". Asserting that Gandhi had nursed a "most dreadful delusion", CR added: "The encasement of the divinest soul is yet flesh.... It is not the Christ but the shell that I presume to warn and criticise. Come back and give us life.... Pray disengage yourself at once completely."

The break was made. Devadas has written that when he was leaving for a course of study in Benares (probably in the summer of 1920), his father "suddenly stepped forward and with great love kissed me on the forehead". Gandhi was showing gratitude, and not just love, to his 20-year-old son.He would say in August in a letter toKallenbach [4], "Devadas is with me, ever growing in every way and every direction."

And to Saraladevi he wrote on August 23 that Mathuradas and other allies were right to be "jealous of his character, which was their ideal". To deserve their love, which was "so pure and unselfish", he would, he told her, "surrender all the world".

A shattered Saraladevi complained she had "put in one pan all the joys and pleasures of the world, and in the other Bapu and his laws, and committed the folly of choosing the latter". She demanded an explanation, which Gandhi finally tried to offer in a letter he sent in December 1920:

"I have been analysing my love for you. I have reached a definition of spiritual (marriage). It is a partnership between two persons of the opposite sex where the physical is wholly absent. It is therefore possible between brother and sister, father and daughter. It is possible only between two brahmacharis in thought, word and deed....

"Have we that exquisite purity, that perfect coincidence, that perfect merging, that identity of ideals, the self-forgetfulness, that fixity of purpose, that trustfulness? For me I can answer plainly that it is only an aspiration. I am unworthy of that companionship with you.... This is the big letter I promised. With dearest love I still subscribe myself, Your L.G."

The initials stood for Law Giver, the title with which she had rebuked Gandhi. A brave effort, the letter could not assuage Saraladevi's feelings. In the years that followed she would criticise Gandhi, at times accusing him of allowing non-violence to break out in hatred, and at other times saying that he possessed a Christo-Buddhist rather than a Hindu frame of mind.

Communication did not cease, however. In the 1940s, at her instance, Gandhi suggested Dipak's name to Jawaharlal as a possible match for his daughter Indira. That idea did not work out but after Saraladevi and Gandhi were both no more, Dipak married Radha, the daughter of Maganlal Gandhi. Saraladevi and Gandhi had known of this romance. After giving some of her time to the education of girls, Saraladevi turned to spirituality and in 1935 adopted a guru. She died in 1945.

What if anything Gandhi told Kasturba about the episode is not known, but we must assume that she noticed both the attachment and its severance. Others too would have told her, including Devadas, who was devoted to his mother. We must assume also that the relationship shocked and wounded Kasturba while it lasted, and that its ending enhanced her prestige in circles around him. Writing about her in the letter he wrote to Kallenbach after a two-year gap, Gandhi said in August 1920: "Mrs Gandhi is at (the) Ashram. She has aged considerably but she is as brave as ever."

Twelve years later Gandhi would write to Ramdas that he did not want any of his sons "to behave towards his wife as I did towards Ba.... (S)he could not be angry with me, whereas I could with her. I did not give her the same freedom of action which I enjoyed.... My behaviour towards Ba at Sabarmati progressively (changed)...and the result was that...(h)er old fear of me has disappeared mostly, if not completely".

Though Gandhi didn't mention it, the Saraladevi episode which occurred a year after Kasturba's life-saving intervention over milk may have contributed to the improvement in his attitude.

1. Gandhi's English friend from Johannesburg, sub-editor in English newspaper Critic. Gandhi was best man at his wedding with Millie.
2. A 20th century Methodist Christian missionary whose sympathy for the cause of Indian self-determination brought him close to Gandhi and Nehru.
3.Well-known American proponent of birth-control who met Gandhi when she came to India in 1935
4.Hermann Kallenbach, Gandhi's Jewish friend from South Africa who was an architect until he became his ardent follower