статейка, точнее интервью, некого Шишкина про Рериха, действовавшего приблизительно о ту же пору, что и МС. Важно, что и в том же месте, именно в Индии. Любопытно: встречался ли Рерих с Ганди, потому что о встрече с МС известно, даже фотка есть в доказательствах :)
Showing posts with label Ганди. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ганди. Show all posts
November 14, 2013
Roerich
статейка, точнее интервью, некого Шишкина про Рериха, действовавшего приблизительно о ту же пору, что и МС. Важно, что и в том же месте, именно в Индии. Любопытно: встречался ли Рерих с Ганди, потому что о встрече с МС известно, даже фотка есть в доказательствах :)
July 19, 2013
Gandhi
Джед Адамс | Independent
Возбуждающее целомудрие: правда об интимной жизни Ганди
Вышла биография Ганди, проливающая новый свет на его привычку спать в одной постели с голыми девушками, сообщает The Independent. "Не секрет, что интимная жизнь Мохандаса Ганди была необычной: он постоянно говорил о сексе и давал своим последователям подробные, часто провокативные указания о соблюдении обета целомудрия", - пишет автор статьи Джед Адамс, который, собственно, и написал вышеупомянутую книгу "Ганди: голые амбиции" (Gandhi: Naked Ambition). Джавахарлал Неру, первый премьер-министр независимой Индии, назвал "ненормальным и неестественным" совет хранить целомудрие, который Ганди давал молодоженам."Но что, если за убеждениями, проповедями и даже необычными привычками Ганди (а он не просто хранил целомудрие, но и спал голым рядом с голыми молодыми женщинами, чтобы испытать свою выдержку) стояло нечто большее, чем набожный призыв к чистоте?" - задается вопросом Адамс и сам же отвечает, что отыскал в 100-томном собрании сочинений Ганди и многочисленных свидетельствах очевидцев много интригующих деталей. "Значительная часть этой информации была известна при жизни Ганди, но в период его возвышения до статуса "отца нации" была искажена или оказалась под спудом", - пишет автор.
Ганди женили в возрасте 13 лет на 14-летней девушке, что по меркам его родного штата Гуджарат в XIX веке было нормой. Когда Ганди было 15 лет, его отец находился на смертном одре. "Ганди отошел от его постели, чтобы заняться сексом с женой, а отец тем временем испустил дух", - повествует автор. Угрызения совести усугубили скорбь юноши, и позднее он объяснял этой историей свое отвращение к похотливой любви. "Однако последний ребенок Ганди и его жены Кастурбы родился лишь 15 лет спустя, в 1900 году", - отмечает автор.
Собственно, Ганди лишь в 38 лет принял обет бедности и целомудрия, считая, что таким образом сможет лучше всего служить человечеству. "Исполнять обет бедности Ганди было просто. Но с целомудрием у него не получалось. Поэтому он разработал систему запутанных правил, позволявших ему говорить, что он целомудрен, но вести крайне откровенные разговоры о сексе, писать откровенные письма и вести себя соответствующим образом", - повествует автор.
В порядке эксперимента Ганди создал ашрамы, где мальчикам и девочкам полагалось целомудренно мыться и спать вместе, но за разговоры о сексе их наказывали. Мужьям рекомендовалось не оставаться наедине с женщинами, а вожделение гасить холодным душем. "Но на Ганди правила не распространялись", - утверждает автор, сообщая, что красивая сестра его секретаря Сушила Найар с отрочества прислуживала Ганди, вместе с ним спала и мылась.
В более зрелом возрасте, после смерти жены Ганди обязывал спать вместе с собой женщин из ашрама, которым запрещалось спать с их законными мужьями. Судя по его письмам, он вовлекал женщин в эксперименты, которые представляли собой стриптиз и другие интимные действия, не предполагающие физического контакта. "Подобное поведение не имело ничего общего с общепринятыми практиками брахмачарьи (воздержания)", - замечает автор. Родственники Ганди и ведущие политики активно обсуждали и порицали поведение Ганди, но он нашел железный аргумент: "Если я не позволю моей племяннице Ману со мной спать, не будет ли это признаком моей слабости?" В последние месяцы жизни Ганди делил постель и с Ману, и с 18-летней Абхой, женой своего внучатого племянника.
"Позднее, когда люди стали расспрашивать о его физических контактах с женщинами - с Ману, с Абхой, со мной - появилась идея экспериментов с брахмачарьей, в первые дни и речи не шло о том, чтобы назвать это экспериментом с брахмачарьей", - признавалась Сушила в 1970-е годы. "Как многие великие люди, Ганди придумывал правила по ходу игры", - заключает автор.
Источник: Independent
July 12, 2013
November 9, 2012
Meeting Gandhi
On December 3, she and Gandhi discussed birth control, population, and the status of women in India. Although Gandhi ultimately refused to endorse the use of contraception to control population growth, Sanger was deeply grateful for his hospitality and time: “Needless to say,” she wrote, “these three days were not ever to be forgotten or parallel in human experience.” (“The Humanity of Family Planning,” Third International Conference on Planned Parenthood, Report on Proceedings (Nov 26, 1952), 12, 54-55. [MSM S72:0776].)
April 10, 2011
к свободе мог вывести только натурал ?
Депутат непальского парламента и гей-активист Сунил Бабу Пант (сунил таки бабу:) (Sunil Babu Pant) отреагировал на изданную биографию Махатма Ганди (Mahatma Gandhi), в которой утверждается, что политик был гомосексуален. Публицист Джозеф Леливелд (Joseph Lelyveld) в биографическом исследовании "Сильный духом: Махатма Ганди и его борьба за Индию" (Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India) пишет, что Ганди был влюблен в немецко-еврейского архитектора и культуриста Германа Калленбаха.
В связи с этим в некоторых индийских штатах было принято решение запретить книгу.
кстати, Гессен пишет о гомосексуальности Колмогорова и Александрова
"Какая разница, был Махатма натуралом, геем или бисексуалом? - задается вопросом Сунил Бабу Пант. - Ведь этот человек привел Индию к свободе… Он является примером для несметного количества людей во всем мире. Его принцип ненасильственной борьбы вдохновляет меня ежедневно".
Сунил Бабу Пант заявил, что Индия не должна запрещать эту биографию: "Надеюсь, что Индия и впредь будет оставаться оплотом демократии и сохранит свободу слова и печати".
В связи с этим в некоторых индийских штатах было принято решение запретить книгу.
кстати, Гессен пишет о гомосексуальности Колмогорова и Александрова
"Какая разница, был Махатма натуралом, геем или бисексуалом? - задается вопросом Сунил Бабу Пант. - Ведь этот человек привел Индию к свободе… Он является примером для несметного количества людей во всем мире. Его принцип ненасильственной борьбы вдохновляет меня ежедневно".
Сунил Бабу Пант заявил, что Индия не должна запрещать эту биографию: "Надеюсь, что Индия и впредь будет оставаться оплотом демократии и сохранит свободу слова и печати".
April 8, 2011
ещё про Ганди
The ‘Great Soul’ Meets the Greatest Movie Review Ever
Clarice, that article on Gandhi brings to mind the greatest movie “review” ever written — Richard Grenier’s magnum opus “The Gandhi Nobody Knows” essay from 1983. This is merely a tiny sample:
On my second viewing of ‘Gandhi,’ this time at a public showing at the end of the Christmas season, I happened to leave the theater behind three teenage girls, apparently from one of Manhattan’s fashionable private schools. “Gandhi was pretty much an FDR,” one opined, astonishing me almost as much by her breezy use of initials to invoke a President who died almost a quarter-century before her birth as by the stupefying nature of the comparison. “But he was a religious figure, too,” corrected one of her friends, adding somewhat smugly, “It’s not in our historical tradition to honor spiritual leaders.” Since her schoolteachers had clearly not led her to consider Jonathan Edwards and Roger Williams as spiritual leaders, let alone Joseph Smith and William Jennings Bryan, the intimation seemed to be that we are a society with poorer spiritual values than, let’s say, India. There can be no question, in any event, that the girls felt they had just been shown the historical Gandhi–an attitude shared by Ralph Nader, who at last account had seen the film three times. Nader has conceived the most extraordinary notion that Gandhi’s symbolic flouting of the British salt tax was a “consumer issue” which he later expanded into the wider one of Indian independence. A modern parallel to Gandhi’s program of home-spinning and home-weaving, another “consumer issue” says Nader, might be the use of solar energy to free us from the “giant multinational oil corporations.”
AS IT happens, the government of India openly admits to having provided one-third of the financing of ‘Gandhi’ out of state funds, straight out of the national treasury–and after close study of the finished product I would not be a bit surprised to hear that it was 100 percent. If Pandit Nehru is portrayed flatteringly in the film, one must remember that Nehru himself took part in the initial story conferences (he originally wanted Gandhi to be played by Alec Guinness) and that his daughter Indira Gandhi is, after all, Prime Minister of India (though no relation to Mohandas Gandhi). The screenplay was checked and rechecked by Indian officials at every stage, often by the Prime Minister herself, with close consultations on plot and even casting. If the movie contains a particularly poisonous portrait of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, the Indian reply, I suppose, would be that if the Pakistanis want an attractive portrayal of Jinnah let them pay for their own movie. A friend of mine, highly sophisticated in political matters but innocent about film-making, declared that ‘Gandhi’ should be preceded by the legend: *The following film is a paid political advertisement by the government of India.*
“Gandhi”, then, is a large, pious, historical morality tale centered on a saintly, sanitized Mahatma Gandhi cleansed of anything too embarrassingly Hindu (the word “caste” is not mentioned from one end of the film to the other) and, indeed, of most of the rest of Gandhi’s life, much of which would drastically diminish his saintliness in Western eyes. There is little to indicate that the India of today has followed Gandhi’s precepts in almost nothing. There is little, in fact, to indicate that India is even India. The spectator realizes the scene is the Indian subcontinent because there are thousands of extras dressed in dhotis and saris. The characters go about talking in these quaint Peter Sellers accents. We have occasional shots of India’s holy poverty, holy hovels, some landscapes, many of them photographed quite beautifully, for those who like travelogues. We have a character called Lord Mountbatten (India’s last Viceroy); a composite American journalist (assembled >from Vincent Sheehan, William L. Shirer, Louis Fischer, and straight fiction); a character called simply “Viceroy” (presumably another composite); an assemblage of Gandhi’s Indian followers under the name of one of them (Patel); and of course Nehru. I sorely missed the fabulous Annie Besant, that English clergyman’s wife, turned atheist, turned Theosophist, turned Indian nationalist, who actually became president of the Indian National Congress and had a terrific falling out with Gandhi, becoming his fierce opponent. And if the producers felt they had to work in a cameo role for an American star to add to the film’s appeal in the United States, it is positively embarrassing that they should have brought in the photographer Margaret Bourke-White, a person of no importance whatever in Gandhi’s life and a role Candice Bergen plays with a repellant unctuousness. If the film-makers had been interested in drama and not hagiography, it is hard to see how they could have resisted the awesome confrontation between Gandhi and, yes, Margaret Sanger. For the two did meet. Now *there* was a meeting of East and West, and *may the better person win!* (She did. Margaret Sanger argued her views on birth control with such vigor that Gandhi had a nervous breakdown.)
Oh to have been a fly on the wall for that meeting of the minds…
Clarice, that article on Gandhi brings to mind the greatest movie “review” ever written — Richard Grenier’s magnum opus “The Gandhi Nobody Knows” essay from 1983. This is merely a tiny sample:
On my second viewing of ‘Gandhi,’ this time at a public showing at the end of the Christmas season, I happened to leave the theater behind three teenage girls, apparently from one of Manhattan’s fashionable private schools. “Gandhi was pretty much an FDR,” one opined, astonishing me almost as much by her breezy use of initials to invoke a President who died almost a quarter-century before her birth as by the stupefying nature of the comparison. “But he was a religious figure, too,” corrected one of her friends, adding somewhat smugly, “It’s not in our historical tradition to honor spiritual leaders.” Since her schoolteachers had clearly not led her to consider Jonathan Edwards and Roger Williams as spiritual leaders, let alone Joseph Smith and William Jennings Bryan, the intimation seemed to be that we are a society with poorer spiritual values than, let’s say, India. There can be no question, in any event, that the girls felt they had just been shown the historical Gandhi–an attitude shared by Ralph Nader, who at last account had seen the film three times. Nader has conceived the most extraordinary notion that Gandhi’s symbolic flouting of the British salt tax was a “consumer issue” which he later expanded into the wider one of Indian independence. A modern parallel to Gandhi’s program of home-spinning and home-weaving, another “consumer issue” says Nader, might be the use of solar energy to free us from the “giant multinational oil corporations.”
AS IT happens, the government of India openly admits to having provided one-third of the financing of ‘Gandhi’ out of state funds, straight out of the national treasury–and after close study of the finished product I would not be a bit surprised to hear that it was 100 percent. If Pandit Nehru is portrayed flatteringly in the film, one must remember that Nehru himself took part in the initial story conferences (he originally wanted Gandhi to be played by Alec Guinness) and that his daughter Indira Gandhi is, after all, Prime Minister of India (though no relation to Mohandas Gandhi). The screenplay was checked and rechecked by Indian officials at every stage, often by the Prime Minister herself, with close consultations on plot and even casting. If the movie contains a particularly poisonous portrait of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, the Indian reply, I suppose, would be that if the Pakistanis want an attractive portrayal of Jinnah let them pay for their own movie. A friend of mine, highly sophisticated in political matters but innocent about film-making, declared that ‘Gandhi’ should be preceded by the legend: *The following film is a paid political advertisement by the government of India.*
“Gandhi”, then, is a large, pious, historical morality tale centered on a saintly, sanitized Mahatma Gandhi cleansed of anything too embarrassingly Hindu (the word “caste” is not mentioned from one end of the film to the other) and, indeed, of most of the rest of Gandhi’s life, much of which would drastically diminish his saintliness in Western eyes. There is little to indicate that the India of today has followed Gandhi’s precepts in almost nothing. There is little, in fact, to indicate that India is even India. The spectator realizes the scene is the Indian subcontinent because there are thousands of extras dressed in dhotis and saris. The characters go about talking in these quaint Peter Sellers accents. We have occasional shots of India’s holy poverty, holy hovels, some landscapes, many of them photographed quite beautifully, for those who like travelogues. We have a character called Lord Mountbatten (India’s last Viceroy); a composite American journalist (assembled >from Vincent Sheehan, William L. Shirer, Louis Fischer, and straight fiction); a character called simply “Viceroy” (presumably another composite); an assemblage of Gandhi’s Indian followers under the name of one of them (Patel); and of course Nehru. I sorely missed the fabulous Annie Besant, that English clergyman’s wife, turned atheist, turned Theosophist, turned Indian nationalist, who actually became president of the Indian National Congress and had a terrific falling out with Gandhi, becoming his fierce opponent. And if the producers felt they had to work in a cameo role for an American star to add to the film’s appeal in the United States, it is positively embarrassing that they should have brought in the photographer Margaret Bourke-White, a person of no importance whatever in Gandhi’s life and a role Candice Bergen plays with a repellant unctuousness. If the film-makers had been interested in drama and not hagiography, it is hard to see how they could have resisted the awesome confrontation between Gandhi and, yes, Margaret Sanger. For the two did meet. Now *there* was a meeting of East and West, and *may the better person win!* (She did. Margaret Sanger argued her views on birth control with such vigor that Gandhi had a nervous breakdown.)
Oh to have been a fly on the wall for that meeting of the minds…
April 4, 2011
Ганди -- гей ?
Один из руководителей и идеологов движения за независимость Индии от Великобритании Махатма Ганди (Mahatma Gandhi) был по-настоящему влюблен только в своего друга, немецкого архитектора Германа Калленбаха (Hermann Kallenbach), пишет публицист Джозеф Леливелд (Joseph Lelyveld) в биографическом исследовании "Сильный духом: Махатма Ганди и его борьба за Индию" (Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India). Об этом пишет The Wall Street Journal. Леливелд пишет, лишь в редких случаях Ганди "наслаждался" обществом дам, отдавая предпочтение любви всей его жизни - немецко-еврейскому архитектору и культуристу Герману Калленбаху, ради которого в 1908 году Ганди оставил жену. "Лишь ваш портрет стоит на каминном столике в спальне, - писал Махатма Герману. - Напротив моей кровати". Также публицист замечает, что часто в переписке двух мужчин Ганди упоминает о вате и вазелине, из чего Леливелд делает вывод, что Ганди делал себе клизмы во время визитов Калленбаха, хотя, возможно, этому существуют и другие объяснения.
"Вы без остатка овладели моим телом, - сказано в другом письме Ганди Калленбаху. - Это в полном смысле слова зависимость". В переписке Ганди называет себя "Верхней палатой", а Калленбаха - "Нижней" и простит "Нижнюю палату" не "смотреть с вожделением на женщин". Когда двое клянутся друг другу "сильно любить... может, как они надеются, возникнуть любовь, которую мир еще не видывал".
Мужчины расстались, когда Ганди вернулся в 1914 году в Индию [в возрасте 45]. Калленбах не мог получить разрешение на въезд в Индию во время Первой мировой войны, так как у него было немецкое гражданство. Хотя Ганди не переставал думать о нем. В 1933 году он написал: "Вы всегда перед моим мысленным взором".
ист = гей.ру
November 15, 2010
переписка с Ганди
в ИндияТудей
In 1924 a birth control league was established in Bombay and the secretary wrote to [Mahatma] Gandhi, seemingly to ask for his blessings as it would help the Indian population problem. Gandhi responded: "I am totally opposed to artificial means of controlling the birth rate, and it is not possible for me to congratulate you or your co-workers on having brought into being a League whose activities, if successful, can only do great moral injury to the people." Margaret Sanger entered the ensuing debate writing to Gandhi in protest.
Gandhi replied that he was open to further education on the subject and Sanger started planning a visit to India. … She came following an invitation to speak at the All-India Women's Conference, which the previous year had passed a resolution favouring birth control and now wanted to draw up a practical programme of action. How could she refuse? It seems that India was ready for her; by the time she completed her stay, she had travelled 10,000 miles, presided over more than 40 public meetings and had established some 50 birth control information centres. And she was more than ready to take her crusade to the subcontinent and to its perceived moral leader. Although originally expected to arrive on November 26, 1935, it was not until a week later that, after a bullock cart ride from Wardha railway station, Sanger arrived at Gandhi's headquarters on December 2, a Monday, Gandhi's day of silence. … The next day, after having accompanied Gandhi on his accustomed early morning walk, she was granted an interview at 11 and it continued till 3 o'clock.
Margaret Sanger's diary notes that the arguments in the formal interview "were along the same lines as in the morning", and she felt that "his personal experience at the time of his father's death was so shocking and self-blamed that he can never accept sex as anything good, clean or wholesome." During the interview … Gandhi counselled celibacy: "I have felt that during the years still left to me if I can drive home to women's minds the truth that they are free, we will have no birth control problem in India. If they will only learn to say 'no' to their husbands when they approach them carnally! … The real problem is that many do not want to resist them."
Not unexpectedly, Sanger raised the phantasmagoria of "irritations, disputes, and thwarted longings that Gandhiji's advice would bring into the home", citing cases of "great nervous and mental breakdowns as a result of the practice of self-control."
Gandhi countered that this would only be the case with "imbeciles", not with "healthyminded people". When Sanger insisted that his advice was not practical, that it would "mean a revolution in the home" and lead to divorce because "the average marriage contract assumes that intercourse and the married relationship shall be harmonious", Gandhi tried to draw a distinction between love and lust: "When both want to satisfy animal passion without having to suffer the consequences of their act it is not love, it is lust."
Sanger did not accept the analogy, explaining that "sex expression is a spiritual need" and that the quality of the expression is "more important than the result". She tried to get Gandhi to admit that he was against "sex lust" rather than "sex love"; however when she asked him whether he thought "it possible for two people who are in love, who are happy together, to regulate their sex act only once in two years, so that relationship would only take place when theywanted a child?", Gandhi answered that "I had the honour of doing that very thing". Sanger saw it as "illogical to contend that sex union for the purpose of having children would be love and union for the satisfaction of the sexual appetite was lust, for the same act was involved in both." Gandhi explained that he knew that all sexual unions partook of the nature of lust from his own personal experience because "as long as I looked upon my wife carnally, we had no real understanding. Our love did not reach a high plane."
Sanger responded by asking if that meant that "the sexual union takes place only three or four times in an entire lifetime?" In response to the woman who, like Olive Schreiner 30 years before her, had been a lover of Havelock Ellis, the pioneer of sexology and author of the seven- volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Gandhi responded: Why should people not be taught that it is immoral to have more than three or four children and that after they have had that number they should sleep separately? … If husband and wife have four children, they would have had sufficient animal enjoyment."
Not long before his discussion with Margaret Sanger, Gandhi received a letter from a councillor of the Municipal Corporation of Bombay asking him to support the opening of a birth control clinic … and issuing posters advising people to take advantage of it. Gandhi replied: "Everybody would welcome sex gratification without having to have children. Therefore the means of ensuring this are spreading like intoxicants. If there is any cause for regret, it is only that what is morally bad is being regarded as morally desirable."
In her autobiography Sanger notes that even though Gandhi appeared to be going along with her in their discussions, as soon as she stopped he continued "as though he had not heard you", putting up a "stone wall of religion or emotion or experience" which she could not "dynamite him over".
However, he had heard her, and tried hard to counter her arguments, and perhaps Sanger had slightly more impact on him than she imagined or he admitted to. At the end of the session of interviews, Gandhi conceded that he thought highly of Sanger's purpose, otherwise he "would not have given time to this subject". As a conclusion to the section of his article that contains the interview with Margaret Sanger, Desai wrote:
"And yet as Mrs Sanger was so dreadfully in earnest Gandhiji did mention a remedy which could conceivably appeal to him. That method was the avoidance of sexual union during unsafe periods confining it to the 'safe' period of about ten days during the month. That had at least an element of self-control which had to [be] exercised during the unsafe period."
What had induced this change? Later a close friend and member of his secretariat, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur [independent India's first health minister], was to recall how the talks with Sanger "grew tense and strangely exciting, as if longburied trains of thought were emerging".
Gandhi biographer Martin Green claims that the encounter left [the Mahatma] exhausted, resulting in his hospitalisation and a breakdown in his health that "was very painful to him because it involved an episode of involuntary sexual excitement." Green appears to be making a causal link between Gandhi's seminal discharge and the resurfacing of buried emotions, particularly those that had led to the platonic yet sexually charged love affair (or spiritual marriage) with Sarala Devi Chaudhurani [pioneering women's rights activist, Rabi- ndranath Tagore's niece and wife of Punjab Congress leader Rambhuj Dutt Chaudhary] that had fleetingly threatened his own marriage in 1920.
This is not an outrageous interpretation.
In her interviews, Sanger had put to Gandhi that, "If we have a choice in our mates [as he did not] there is a natural sex attraction between two people. You then have a different experience and in the experience an expression of love which makes you a finer human being ... and contributes to a finer understanding and a greater spiritual harmony."
GANDHI'S response was illuminating: "I had a woman with whom I almost fell. It is so personal that I did not put it in my autobiography. We have considered if there can be this spiritual companionship. The marriage relationship is a matter of contract. Your parents arrange it in your childhood and you have nothing to do with it. I came in contact with an illiterate woman. Then I met a woman with a broad, cultural education. Could we not develop a close contact, I said to myself? This was a plausible argument, and I nearly slipped. But I was saved."
In an article on birth control that appeared in his paper only a few months later, Gandhi reiterated that he would agree to at least consider the rhythm method of birth control, even though he did it reluctantly. Although she had no luck in convincing Gandhi of her position, her lecture tour of India led to the opening of several birth control clinics in the country. When, in 1959, Prime Minister Nehru declared that a large sum of money would go to family planning in India, Margaret Sanger was standing at his side.
- Extracted with permission from Going Native: Gandhi's Relationship with Western Women (Roli Books Lotus Collection; Rs 295). Weber, who teaches at Melbourne's La Trobe University, has been researching and writing on Gandhi's life for over 20 years.
In 1924 a birth control league was established in Bombay and the secretary wrote to [Mahatma] Gandhi, seemingly to ask for his blessings as it would help the Indian population problem. Gandhi responded: "I am totally opposed to artificial means of controlling the birth rate, and it is not possible for me to congratulate you or your co-workers on having brought into being a League whose activities, if successful, can only do great moral injury to the people." Margaret Sanger entered the ensuing debate writing to Gandhi in protest.
Gandhi replied that he was open to further education on the subject and Sanger started planning a visit to India. … She came following an invitation to speak at the All-India Women's Conference, which the previous year had passed a resolution favouring birth control and now wanted to draw up a practical programme of action. How could she refuse? It seems that India was ready for her; by the time she completed her stay, she had travelled 10,000 miles, presided over more than 40 public meetings and had established some 50 birth control information centres. And she was more than ready to take her crusade to the subcontinent and to its perceived moral leader. Although originally expected to arrive on November 26, 1935, it was not until a week later that, after a bullock cart ride from Wardha railway station, Sanger arrived at Gandhi's headquarters on December 2, a Monday, Gandhi's day of silence. … The next day, after having accompanied Gandhi on his accustomed early morning walk, she was granted an interview at 11 and it continued till 3 o'clock.
Margaret Sanger's diary notes that the arguments in the formal interview "were along the same lines as in the morning", and she felt that "his personal experience at the time of his father's death was so shocking and self-blamed that he can never accept sex as anything good, clean or wholesome." During the interview … Gandhi counselled celibacy: "I have felt that during the years still left to me if I can drive home to women's minds the truth that they are free, we will have no birth control problem in India. If they will only learn to say 'no' to their husbands when they approach them carnally! … The real problem is that many do not want to resist them."
Not unexpectedly, Sanger raised the phantasmagoria of "irritations, disputes, and thwarted longings that Gandhiji's advice would bring into the home", citing cases of "great nervous and mental breakdowns as a result of the practice of self-control."
Gandhi countered that this would only be the case with "imbeciles", not with "healthyminded people". When Sanger insisted that his advice was not practical, that it would "mean a revolution in the home" and lead to divorce because "the average marriage contract assumes that intercourse and the married relationship shall be harmonious", Gandhi tried to draw a distinction between love and lust: "When both want to satisfy animal passion without having to suffer the consequences of their act it is not love, it is lust."
Sanger did not accept the analogy, explaining that "sex expression is a spiritual need" and that the quality of the expression is "more important than the result". She tried to get Gandhi to admit that he was against "sex lust" rather than "sex love"; however when she asked him whether he thought "it possible for two people who are in love, who are happy together, to regulate their sex act only once in two years, so that relationship would only take place when theywanted a child?", Gandhi answered that "I had the honour of doing that very thing". Sanger saw it as "illogical to contend that sex union for the purpose of having children would be love and union for the satisfaction of the sexual appetite was lust, for the same act was involved in both." Gandhi explained that he knew that all sexual unions partook of the nature of lust from his own personal experience because "as long as I looked upon my wife carnally, we had no real understanding. Our love did not reach a high plane."
Sanger responded by asking if that meant that "the sexual union takes place only three or four times in an entire lifetime?" In response to the woman who, like Olive Schreiner 30 years before her, had been a lover of Havelock Ellis, the pioneer of sexology and author of the seven- volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Gandhi responded: Why should people not be taught that it is immoral to have more than three or four children and that after they have had that number they should sleep separately? … If husband and wife have four children, they would have had sufficient animal enjoyment."
Not long before his discussion with Margaret Sanger, Gandhi received a letter from a councillor of the Municipal Corporation of Bombay asking him to support the opening of a birth control clinic … and issuing posters advising people to take advantage of it. Gandhi replied: "Everybody would welcome sex gratification without having to have children. Therefore the means of ensuring this are spreading like intoxicants. If there is any cause for regret, it is only that what is morally bad is being regarded as morally desirable."
In her autobiography Sanger notes that even though Gandhi appeared to be going along with her in their discussions, as soon as she stopped he continued "as though he had not heard you", putting up a "stone wall of religion or emotion or experience" which she could not "dynamite him over".
However, he had heard her, and tried hard to counter her arguments, and perhaps Sanger had slightly more impact on him than she imagined or he admitted to. At the end of the session of interviews, Gandhi conceded that he thought highly of Sanger's purpose, otherwise he "would not have given time to this subject". As a conclusion to the section of his article that contains the interview with Margaret Sanger, Desai wrote:
"And yet as Mrs Sanger was so dreadfully in earnest Gandhiji did mention a remedy which could conceivably appeal to him. That method was the avoidance of sexual union during unsafe periods confining it to the 'safe' period of about ten days during the month. That had at least an element of self-control which had to [be] exercised during the unsafe period."
What had induced this change? Later a close friend and member of his secretariat, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur [independent India's first health minister], was to recall how the talks with Sanger "grew tense and strangely exciting, as if longburied trains of thought were emerging".
Gandhi biographer Martin Green claims that the encounter left [the Mahatma] exhausted, resulting in his hospitalisation and a breakdown in his health that "was very painful to him because it involved an episode of involuntary sexual excitement." Green appears to be making a causal link between Gandhi's seminal discharge and the resurfacing of buried emotions, particularly those that had led to the platonic yet sexually charged love affair (or spiritual marriage) with Sarala Devi Chaudhurani [pioneering women's rights activist, Rabi- ndranath Tagore's niece and wife of Punjab Congress leader Rambhuj Dutt Chaudhary] that had fleetingly threatened his own marriage in 1920.
This is not an outrageous interpretation.
In her interviews, Sanger had put to Gandhi that, "If we have a choice in our mates [as he did not] there is a natural sex attraction between two people. You then have a different experience and in the experience an expression of love which makes you a finer human being ... and contributes to a finer understanding and a greater spiritual harmony."
GANDHI'S response was illuminating: "I had a woman with whom I almost fell. It is so personal that I did not put it in my autobiography. We have considered if there can be this spiritual companionship. The marriage relationship is a matter of contract. Your parents arrange it in your childhood and you have nothing to do with it. I came in contact with an illiterate woman. Then I met a woman with a broad, cultural education. Could we not develop a close contact, I said to myself? This was a plausible argument, and I nearly slipped. But I was saved."
In an article on birth control that appeared in his paper only a few months later, Gandhi reiterated that he would agree to at least consider the rhythm method of birth control, even though he did it reluctantly. Although she had no luck in convincing Gandhi of her position, her lecture tour of India led to the opening of several birth control clinics in the country. When, in 1959, Prime Minister Nehru declared that a large sum of money would go to family planning in India, Margaret Sanger was standing at his side.
- Extracted with permission from Going Native: Gandhi's Relationship with Western Women (Roli Books Lotus Collection; Rs 295). Weber, who teaches at Melbourne's La Trobe University, has been researching and writing on Gandhi's life for over 20 years.
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