There is of course a fair amount here on Gandhis obsession with bodily functionsand his demonstrative brahmacharya, but equally important for this study of Gandhispassion is an account of sheer bodily pain that Gandhi endured and inflicted upon himself.Were Gandhi not such a masterful, modern mass leader, one would be tempted to give the nodto the lazy generalisation that much like the yogis and sufis of yore, Gandhi practisedausterities in order to induce states outside the realm of normal experience. But whateverthe exact locus of his small inner voice, to which Wolpert draws repeatedattention, Mahatma Gandhi was a nationalist, and given the modernity of that categorycould never have been a living god to the millions of his peasant followers.
This point needs some emphasis, for when Wolpert writes of the illiterate millions,who (in 1921) fought to bow and touch his bare feet or his naked legs, and worshipped theMahatma as their living god, walking all day and night for a glimpse of his baldhead, he overdramatises. And for two reasons. First, Mahatma Gandhi was neverdeified in the proper sense of that term. Popular adoration of Gandhi, the mad quest forhis darshan produced for sure a category of active peasant followers who acted upon theirown understanding of his message, often in starkly un-Gandhian ways. It never created asect of Gandhipanthis, as happened with a Kabir or other medieval saints. And that wasbecause Gandhi was a nationalist leader, and nationalism leads tocitizenshiphowsoever circumscribed for somein a nation-state, not to amembership in a sampradaya or a silsilah.