History
A Repressed Mohandas Gandhi Shaped A Repressed India
by MICHAEL CONNELLAN
Mohandas Gandhi was an amazing human being. He led his country to freedom and helped destroy the British Empire. Little wonder India worshipped him, and still worships him, as the Mahatma - "Great Soul". In the west - [shaped by Richard Attenborough's largely fictional account in the film 'Gandhi' - he is viewed as a near-perfect combination of compassion, bravery and wisdom.
But Gandhi was also a puritan and a misogynist who helped ensure that India remains one of the most sexually repressed nations on earth - and, by and large, a dreadful place to be born female. George Orwell, in his 1949 essay 'Reflections on Gandhi', said that "saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent". If only.
Gandhi despised his own sexual desires, and despised sex in any context except for procreation. He preached that the failure to control carnal urges led to complaints including constipation.
He believed that sex was bad for the health of an individual, and that sexual freedom would lead Indians to failure as a people. He sought to consign his nation to what Martin Luther called "the hell of celibacy". He took his own celibacy vow unilaterally, without consulting his wife.
Both Gandhi and his hagiographers claimed he viewed women as equal to men, pointing to his inclusion of women in India's independence struggle. He celebrated non-violent protest as a "feminine" principle, neutralising the masculine brutality of British rule. But his sexual hang-ups caused him to carry monstrously sexist views.
His view of the female body was warped. As accounted by Rita Banerji, in her book 'Sex and Power', "he believed menstruation was a manifestation of the distortion of a woman's soul by her sexuality".
During Gandhi's time as a dissident in South Africa, he discovered a male youth had been harassing two of his female followers. Gandhi responded by personally cutting the girls' hair off, to ensure the "sinner's eye" was "sterilised". Gandhi boasted of the incident in his writings, pushing the message to all Indians that women should carry responsibility for sexual attacks upon them.
Such a legacy still lingers. In the summer of 2009, colleges in north India reacted to a spate of sexual harassment cases by banning women from wearing jeans, as western-style dress was too "provocative" for the males on campus.
Gandhi believed Indian women who were raped lost their value as human beings.
He argued that fathers could be justified in killing daughters who had been sexually assaulted for the sake of family and community honour. He moderated his views towards the end of his life. But the damage was done, and the legacy lingers in every present-day Indian press report of a rape victim who commits suicide out of "shame".
Gandhi also waged a war against contraceptives, labelling Indian women who used them as whores.
Like all men who wage a doomed war with their own sexual desires, Gandhi's behaviour around females would eventually become very, very odd. He took to sleeping with naked young women, including his own great-niece, in order to "test" his commitment to celibacy. The habit caused shock and outrage among his supporters. God knows how his wife felt.
Gandhi cemented, for another generation, the attitude that women were simply creatures that could bring either pride or shame to the men who owned them. Again, the legacy lingers. India today, according to the World Economic Forum, finds itself towards the very bottom of the gender equality index.
Indian social campaigners battle heroically against such patriarchy. They battle dowry deaths. They battle the honour killings of teenage lovers. They battle Aids. They battle female foeticide and the abandonment of new-born girls.
In the words of the Indian writer Khushwant Singh, "nine-tenths of the violence and unhappiness in this country derives from sexual repression". Gandhi isn't singularly to blame for India's deeply problematic attitudes to sex and female sexuality. But he fought, and succeeded, to ensure the country would never experience sexual freedom while his legend persevered. Gandhi's genius was to realise the great power of non-violent political revolution.
But the violence of his thoughts towards women has contributed to countless honour killings and immeasurable suffering.
Remember, there's no such thing as a saint.
[Courtesy: The Guardian]
January 31, 2010
Conversation about this article
1: Inni Kaur (Fairfield, CT, U.S.A.), January 31, 2010, 10:18 AM.
Brilliant piece! The timing could not be more perfect! History does have a way of catching up. Let's hope the producer of the proposed film on Indira Gandhi takes note and steers away from fiction.
2: Tejwant Singh (Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A.), January 31, 2010, 4:47 PM.
A lecher who also envied the Sikhs.
3: H. Singh (San Diego, California, U.S.A.), January 31, 2010, 7:38 PM.
Gandhi was not a perfect human being and needs to be condemned for looking down upon women, blacks and untouchables. Yet he should be remembered for the largest mass non-violent movement - an idea borrowed from the Sikhs and the Guru ka Bagh Morcha - to free India from the yoke of imperialism, which in turn became a source of inspiration for other social transformations in the 20th century.
4: K. Singh (U.S.A.), January 31, 2010, 9:23 PM.
It is propaganda that Gandhi was responsible for the freedom of India. Not only is this dellusionary but a 'slap in the face' to all those who gave their lives so that we could be free! Men such as Sardar Bhagat Singh, Sardar Uddam Singh and other shaheeds, both Sikh and non-Sikh, who made the ultimate sacrifice. Do not forget Gandhi's agreement with the British ... that Indian men would fight in the British Army in exchange for freedom ... 80,000 Sikhs, 40,000 Muslims and Hindus lost their lives so that Gandhi could parade around proclaiming non-violence to liberate India. Also let us not forget the blood-letting that occurred as a consequence of the Partition and his blatant lies to the Sikhs by him and his cronies that the Sikhs too would feel the 'glow of freedom' if they joined forces with the Hindus!
5: H.S. Vachoa (U.S.A.), February 01, 2010, 10:55 AM.
Gandhi is the father of modern hindu racism ... which makes him a hindu deity.
6: Raj (Canada), February 01, 2010, 10:32 PM.
Actually, non-cooperation and non-violence were the brainchild of nineteenth-century Sikh leader, Ram Singh Namdhari. Yet, he was never given due credit by the Sikhs and today's India doesn't consider the Kuka movement for autonomy part of the larger freedom movement. Their own copycat, Gandhi, became a Mahatma. There're many books on Gandhi that shed light on the racist, casteist, sexual-deviant sides of this saint. After the extremist Hindus killed him, they turned him into a saint!
7: Gurjender Singh (Maryland, U.S.A.), February 02, 2010, 11:58 AM.
Most of the comments reiterate that Sikhs were and are the founders of the non-violence movement that freed India, not Gandhi. Dear readers, history was and is being changed every day in front of our very eyes and our political leaders are just watching because they are part of this short-sighted political system and they do not speak out against the travesties because it would involve challenging the majority's wishes and they would lose their seats.
8: Gurmeet Kaur (Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.), February 04, 2010, 11:51 AM.
How awful that Gandhi's view of dignity, sympathy and respect were based on total disregard of one's life, let alone personal freedom. Be it women or Jews or Blacks or Sikh ... He has put down all in the interest of his own agenda. Quoting George Orwell - {...Gandhi's view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which "would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence." After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly...} Not only this, I am hurt by this man who wronged my people and belittled their contribution to the struggle of Indian independence. But I am equally appalled by his disrespect of and apathy towards the suffering of Women, Blacks and Jews.
9: Manjit Singh (Fresno, California, U.S.A.), February 09, 2010, 4:08 PM.
India is a country where truths like these are hidden under a pile of social taboos until individual efforts are put in to find them. The history books would never let you have an independent view of the past but would always provide you a biased and falsely glorified account of men whom you are forced to remember as "Mahatma".