Gandhi’s many Western women followers offer his biographers an opportunity. But A K Bhattacharya finds a new book on the subject under-analysed.
The title of the book is unabashedly provocative. The idea of Mahatma Gandhi’s relationship with Western women conjures up an interesting image of a man who during his long public life never ceased to surprise his colleagues and followers by his unconventional views on sex and married life. However, the anointment of that “naked fakir” as the Father of the Nation, after India gained independence, made an objective assessment of his relationship with women politically risky and potentially controversial.
Ved Mehta’s writing on Gandhi’s experiments with celibacy had sparked off instant controversy. That was many decades ago. A recent book by Joseph Lelyveld (Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India) presents a fresh perspective on Gandhi’s sexual preferences, but expectedly has caused an even greater furore in some parts of India.
It appears that Thomas Weber, a Melbourne-based scholar on Gandhi, is acutely conscious of such over-sensitivity to Gandhi in the country of his birth. Thus, the elaboration of the nature of the relationship between Gandhi and his many Western women associates appears deliberately restrained and largely restricted to references to the letters Gandhi exchanged with them. There is no detailed account of the nature of the relationship Gandhi had with them and this despite the fact that some of the interactions were indeed very intense. Nor is there a liberal dose of authorial interpretation of what could have transpired between Gandhi and some of his women friends.
This is ironic, for Gandhi does offer a huge opportunity for any researcher to delve deep into his complex relationship with women. Presenting them as they unfolded as a narrative would have been a hugely rewarding experience for the reader. A little bit of imagination and contextualisation of the highs and lows in such relationships would have made the book highly readable. Instead, what we have is a serial recounting of Gandhi’s communication with his Western women associates, with a commentary from Weber that mostly refuses to be overtly interpretative about what the relationship could actually have meant for either the Mahatma or his women associates.
This is because Weber has chosen to rely mostly on his research and documents to portray Gandhi’s relationships with Western women. Indeed, he succeeds in that goal and presents a book that no student of Gandhi keen to understand the Mahatma’s complex relationship with Western women friends can afford to ignore. Not surprisingly, therefore, Weber is dismissive of all publications that reduce Gandhi’s relationship with women to his “sleeping” with young women in his old age. He attributes such an approach to the “prurient interest fostered by sensationalist biographies or books aimed at debunking the myth of the Mahatma”. He also regrets the absence of any scholarly work on Gandhi’s attitudes to and relationships with women, although he acknowledges that there are many collections of his letters and speeches on women.
What, therefore, governs Weber’s approach to this subject is a larger cause. His primary thesis, expounded laboriously with the help of letters, extracts from books and memoirs, is worth the trouble he has taken. In the process, he has presented in all their various shades the Mahatma’s relationships with the women, who “went native and threw their lot in completely with Gandhi”. The result has been no less satisfying. Students of Gandhi would certainly have a more complete grasp of his quest and vision. More importantly, as Weber argues, Gandhi’s Western women associates were “so remarkable in their own right that they should not be overlooked by history”. What puzzles you, therefore, is that the book carries no pictures of any one of these women associates. A few pictures of these remarkable women would have certainly made the book more interesting.
Gandhi’s attraction for Western women, according to Weber, has a lot to do with the New Age thinking at the start of the 20th century. Indian mysticism, its famed Vedantic philosophy, the idea of Hinduism and the concept of a guru — all were the by-products of New Age thinking and Indian leaders helped in the enunciation of those ideas as much as they benefited from them. Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi were responsible for the spread of those ideas and benefited from them in equal measure. Adding to Gandhi’s charm for Western women was a hugely popular biography written by Romain Rolland — Mahatma Gandhi: The Man Who Became One with the Universal Being. Gandhi’s popularity saw a sharp rise in the West after the publication of this biography in the early 20th century. The number of Western women who flocked after Gandhi also rose, seeking the Mahatma’s guidance on life and living.
Weber believes that Gandhi’s relationship with Western women was a two-way street. Just as the Western women found Gandhi attractive for his many qualities, he too benefited from them by checking the validity of his many thoughts. Thus, Florence Winterbottom told him that he was losing something of his joyous humanity with his growing asceticism, Olive Schreiner questioned his support of the British war efforts, Margaret Bourke-White questioned his glorification of rural simplicity and Katherine Mayo challenged him “in ways that left him obsessed with her criticisms for years to come”. Weber’s conclusion is a telling commentary on Gandhi: “The fact that Gandhi engaged with such criticisms... tells us something very positive about him and may also explain why many of these empowered women were drawn into substantial relationships with him and why he may have encouraged them.”
The only occasion where Weber comes close to saying something provocative about Gandhi’s relationships with Western women is when he describes his interaction with Nilla Cram Cook. “She was an unashamedly sexual being with unbounded optimism in her own abilities... While, on the surface, Gandhi should have totally rejected her, she fascinated him. If she, the ‘fallen woman’, could be cleansed and could demonstrate a living example of brahmacharya, a triumph of the individual will would have been demonstrated,” writes Weber. The reader can guess the rest.
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Weber’s account raises another question. Like Gandhi, Tagore and Vivekananda had several Western women disciples and friends. Victoria Ocampo, an Argentine poet, was very close to Tagore and inspired him to produce some memorable poems. Margaret Noble made no secret of her love for Vivekananda, before she became Sister Nivedita and a disciple of the Swami. For how long should one have to wait before Tagore and Vivekananda too have the benefit of a Thomas Weber to bring to light the various shades of their relationships with Western women friends?
GOING NATIVE
Gandhi’s Relationship with Western Women
Author: Thomas Weber
Publisher: Roli
Pages: 406
Price: Rs 395