The life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is perhaps the most intensely documented of the modern era, yet for decades, one of its most radical, and from a conventional standpoint, most disturbing episodes remained actively suppressed. In the waning years before his assassination in 1948, amidst the devastating communal violence that preceded India’s partition, Gandhi undertook a final, controversial “experiment” in Brahmacharya. This practice involved taking young, naked women to bed with him at night, most notably his grandniece Manu Gandhi, along with Abha Gandhi and his physician, Sushila Nayyar.
This act, which lost him many trusted disciples and provoked immense public ignominy, stands as a massive, often ignored blot on an otherwise saintly life. “The goal, however, was not carnal, but spiritual: to test his absolute mastery over the senses and perfect his non-attachment”. The text provided here seeks to break that silence. It moves beyond the simplistic view of brahmacharya as mere celibacy to explore Gandhi’s complex re-articulation of the term as a quest for ‘Truth’ (satya) and self-realization. By examining this final, desperate act of personal purification in the face of political failure, we can understand how Gandhi injected the body into the body politic, utilizing the power of nakedness and the rejection of masculinity in an ultimate bid to revitalize his strategy of nonviolence (ahimsa). His “celibate sexuality” was not a hypocritical indulgence, but a profound, albeit extreme, final act of political and spiritual philosophy.
Defining Brahmacharya: From Celibacy to Self-RealiSation.
To understand the controversy, we must first confront Gandhi’s expansive and challenging definition of the term he had vowed to follow since 1906. Initially, brahmacharya is simply understood as celibacy, voluntary abstinence from sex. Gandhi, the father of four, took this lifelong vow at age 37, after a long and sometimes tumultuous married life with Kasturba. Though his autobiography suggests she consented, it is evident that Gandhi, believing “no consent is necessary for abstention,” made the monumental decision unilaterally. From that point on, they ceased to be a conventional married couple, becoming “true friends” bound by a common, if unequal, commitment to his work.
The roots of Gandhi’s obsession with sexual control are often traced back to his youth and a single, catastrophic event he called his “double shame.” When he was 16, Gandhi was consumed by lust for his pregnant wife, Kasturba. He abandoned his primary duty attending to his dying father to consummate his desire. Moments later, a servant announced his father’s death. This “blot I have never been able to efface or forget,” combined with the subsequent death of the child born of that lust, profoundly shaped his view of the sexual act as a “criminal waste” and an unpardonable lapse into “animal passion.”
Yet, Gandhi was no mere advocate of Victorian prudery. He rejected the narrow conception of brahmacharya as simply avoiding sexual intercourse. For him, true continence required the elimination of all desire. “So long as the desire for intercourse is there,” he wrote, “one cannot be said to have attained brahmacharya.” He demanded control “in thought, word and deed.”
Furthermore, he rejected the segregation of sexes practiced by traditional Indian sages. For Gandhi, true brahmacharya was not achieved by retiring from the world, but by intense engagement with it. He consistently sought the company of women, from his closest political ally, Sarojini Naidu, to devoted disciples like Mirabehn (Madeleine Slade). He cultivated deep, “platonic” relationships that nonetheless required extreme detachment. He urged Mirabehn to seek the “spirit without the body,” a philosophical echo of the Bhagavad Gita’s teaching that one must renounce attachment to the rewards of action.
This complex, life-long effort was jolted by a profound realization of its inadequacy in his later years. A nocturnal emission in 1936, which he described as experiencing the “blackest moment of my life,” convinced him that his spiritual discipline was wanting. It was this intense, lifelong struggle for inner purity, which included the common Indian belief that the preservation of ‘vital fluid’ (semen) transmutes into spiritual power (ojas), that laid the foundation for his final, most radical experiment. He had to know if his purity could withstand the ultimate temptation.
Androgyny, Nakedness, and the Political Account of Semen.
Gandhi’s final experiment in taking naked young women to bed was not a lapse in morals, but an extreme act of self-testing driven by a political crisis. To understand this, we must recognize the connection between his spiritual practice and the crisis of his public, nonviolent strategy.
For Gandhi, the ultimate obstacle to achieving true brahmacharya, that state of complete control appeared to be the very nature of masculinity. His physical and mental anguish over his inability to fully conquer “animal passion” pointed to a persistent, deeply rooted “flaw” he felt inherent to the male state. His oft-expressed remark that he was “half a woman” was therefore a statement of spiritual aspiration. He sought to shed the persistent sexual urge symbolized by the phallus and acquire the gender-transcendent potency celebrated in Indian ascetic traditions.
In these traditions, there is the belief that through rigorous spiritual discipline and the successful retention of “vital fluid”, the body undergoes an ontological transformation. The stored energy (ojas) is transmuted into spiritual power, enabling the yogi to become like a “productive female,” developing a capacity for nurture and spiritual potency. This is paralleled in the figure of the 19th-century saint Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, who openly cultivated androgyny as a path to conquering passion and realizing God, sometimes physically manifesting female characteristics.
This context makes the reaction of Gandhi’s female companions profoundly instructive. When Manu Gandhi published her short testament, she titled it “Bapu-My Mother.” This, alongside Sushila Nayyar’s account of feeling “as she would with her mother” while sharing his bed, suggests that for these women, Gandhi had indeed achieved a gender transcendent state. They were not sleeping next to a lustful man, but with a pure, non-sexual entity, a spiritual parent who had successfully shed the gender that was proving to be the fatal flaw in his internal life.
Gandhi & the Crisis in Noakhali.
This desperate personal quest was directly driven by the political failure in late 1946. Gandhi was in the violence-torn villages of Noakhali in East Bengal, confronting Hindu-Muslim massacres. His life’s work, ahimsa (nonviolence), seemed to be failing. He confessed to feeling deep foreboding: “What is it that is choking the action of my ahimsa? Why does not the spell work?”
For the Satyagrahi, the violence and untruth pervading the public domain were reflections of profound shortcomings in his own practice. The social problem was ultimately his personal problem. The experiment was thus an act of penance and radical purification, an attempt to detect the “serious flaw deep down in me” that prevented his nonviolence from working.
In this trajectory, Gandhi sought to appear completely naked before God, or Truth (satya), just as he had steadily shed clothes throughout his life, from an English gentleman’s suit to the simple loincloth. He found a strange spiritual justification in the Vaishnava legend of the Gopis and Krishna, where the cowherdesses, stripped by Krishna, shed their shame and submit in complete nudity, attaining a higher, passionless form of devotion.
For Gandhi, the test was a prerequisite for regaining the moral authority needed to quell the violence. He had to be stripped clean of all attachments, all pretense of masculinity, and all sexual desire. As he wrote to Mirabehn, his objective was to reduce himself to “zero,” so that “God will possess me.”
Conclusion: Purity, Narcissism, and the Betrayal of Consent.
The tragedy of Gandhi’s final experiment is that it transformed the pursuit of ultimate spiritual purity into an act of profound moral narcissism. He was prepared to risk everything: his reputation, his leadership, and the psychological comfort of the young women involved to prove a point to himself.
Even now, defenders argue that Gandhi’s intentions were pure, that these acts were spiritual, not sexual. But purity without empathy isn’t purity, it’s narcissism disguised as sainthood. The vastly unequal power dynamic between the world-renowned 77-year-old saint and his devoted, teenage grandniece, Manu, cannot be dismissed by an appeal to divine intention.
In the end, Gandhi’s greatest experiment wasn’t with truth or nonviolence; it was with how much contradiction a nation can tolerate in the name of reverence. He wanted to be the man who conquered desire, but in doing so, he became the man who conquered consent.
For this reason, Gandhi does not deserve the uncritical title of Father of the Nation. A father who practiced such things, who leveraged a position of absolute power to demand submission in the name of purity, can only teach subsequent generations how not to treat women. The current scenario of rampant violence and the violation of consent against countless women in India is a dark mirror reflecting the toxic hierarchy that Gandhi, in his spiritual zeal, ultimately endorsed.
Call it asceticism. Call it moral madness. But don’t call it sainthood.
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