The human face of the Mahatma

Many have looked at Sudhir Kakar's book Mira and the Mahatma as the true telling of unfulfilled passion between Madelaine Slade aka Miraben and the architect of India's freedom movement M K Gandhi.

It is too easy to relate the symbolism of naming Slade Mira, the Rajput princess in love with Krishna, who lives out her life in search of her divine lover and Miraben's impossible love for the Mahatma.

It is, in fact, the telling of the story of an extraordinary relationship at a difficult period of history with a lot more to it than a trite love story with suitable undertones of spiritual conflict.

To Kakar's credit, by using the heuristic device of a fictional third "voice" of Naveen, Mira's Hindi teacher, he tries to make an honest examination of the compulsions and motives that drove these two strong individuals.

Using the correspondence between Miraben, Gandhi, the fictional Naveen, and Romain Rolland (who first introduced Mira to Gandhi) Kakar weaves a vivid picture of those extraordinary years in India's history.

If Mira is conflicted by her desire to be with Gandhi, and her admiration for his "Godlike" aloofness, Gandhi is also torn not just between his feelings for her and the need to forge the collective conscience of the nation.

Gandhi's internal conflict is deeply rooted in his foundations in Hindu philosophy. Whereas Indian saints have traditionally stressed the path of personal salvation, austerity, and denial for a very personal quest for fulfilment, Gandhi's quest had a collective salvation in mind.

So whereas the Indian sadhu denied himself the basics of food and cloth to meditate, Gandhi exhorted the nation by his own example of denying foreign goods and spinning the charkha. The complications in trying to exhort a nation to denial have their own conflicts.

His experiments aimed at forging a moral individual in himself and applying those precepts to the inmates at the Sabarmati Ashram are detailed in the central chapters of the book.

Some of these experiments are welcomed enthusiastically, like spinning the charkha; others like taking turns at cleaning the community latrines are, at best, tolerated.

There are some highly revealing chapters on life in the Sabarmati Ashram, starting with Mira's arrival, which invokes its own share of problems between Gandhi and Kasturba.

For, despite living in the midst of a community, the evening ritual when Gandhi would have his forehead and feet rubbed with ghee by Kasturba is a winsome glimpse into the very private bond between the couple.

It is, in fact, this ritual that first signals Gandhi's affection for Mira, when she replaces Kasturba for this evening task. While Kasturba is present, she remains a silent presence, quietly exuding her disappoval from her corner of the room.

When Gandhi realises his dependence on Mira's company, he quickly discontinues the ritual, banishing Mira to Bihar to open a charkha training centre and later to the Wardha Ashram.

In his letters to Mira, he gently reveals to her his own conflicts and she finally realises that she cannot compete for him, overriding the claims of an entire nation.

As an interlude to this intense involvement is Mira's brief infatuation with Prithvi Singh, a reformed militant, tall, strapping and good-looking. Mira's fascination with Singh is a more conventional one, involving ideas of marriage and temporal fulfilment.

Singh, who is embarrassingly not interested in Mira at all, breaks the news to her not too gently.

Interspersed with the main narrative is the story of Naveen. It is in fact in his relationship with Gandhi that one perceives the very humanism of the Mahatma.

When Naveen confesses to impure thoughts of a carnal nature, Gandhi talks to him more as a summer camp counsellor than an ideologue. Gandhi's infrequent bouts of temper, with a German disciple and with Kasturba, when some ashram funds go missing are faithfully recorded.

When Naveen expresses a desire to pursue his career in jounalism with Munshi Premchand, rather than serve the freedom movement, Gandhi's only reaction is for him to follow his heart.

This image of Gandhi not as a paragon of moral rectitude but an almost avuncular figure is one of the many revelations of this book. The rest of the book, of Gandhi's sex phobia due to his preoccuptaion with it as his father lay dying are too well-documented.

The latter-day image of Gandhi as an eccentric old man bent on imposing fad diets and tests of celibacy on his disciples is dealt a big blow.

It is in the final chapter that actually one gets the key to Mira's life when she remarks to her one-time Hindi teacher who visits her in Baden that she would describe her life as fortunate for hearing the "call of the eternal first in Beethoven's music and then in Bapu's person".

After leaving India following Gandhi's death, Mira resolutely refuses to speak of him, claiming him in her silence in a way she never could if she spoke out loud.

The book is enjoyable in that it rescues Gandhi from his latter-day interpreters who only look at his politics without their strong moral underpinings.

To be an Indian and write on Gandhi is not an easy task, and to make him human and yet not diminish the awe with which he is treated is also difficult. The book is not an easy read, but a must for all those fascinated by the freedom movement and its moral underpinnings.

Sudhir Kakar
Penguin
Price: Rs 295
Pages: 267

Mira and the Mahatma