Of Gandhi, spirituality and sexuality!

New Delhi, November 6: To Mahatma Gandhi the greatest obstacle in his spiritual striving was the promptings of his sexuality, says psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar.
"The manner in which he conceived the struggle and the weapons he chose to employ in a lifelong conflict with the god of desire have earned him the derision of many, especially in the West, who have discerned crankishness, if not worse, in his ideas that relate to sexuality," writes Kakar in ‘Mad And Divine: Spirit And Psyche In The Modern World’.

"For an explanation of his failure to influence people and the course of events, Gandhi would characteristically probe for shortcomings in his sexual abstinence, seeking to determine whether Kama, the god of desire, has perhaps triumphed in some obscure recess of his mind, depriving him of his spiritual powers," the book, published by Penguin, says.

According to the author, in the midst of widespread political turmoil and religious frenzy, Gandhi wrote a series of five articles on celibacy in his weekly newspaper.

"But more striking than his public evidence of his preoccupation were his private experiments wherein the aged Mahatma sought to reassure himself on the strength of his celibacy by having close women associates (his 19-year-old granddaughter among them) share his bed and try to ascertain in the morning whether any trace of sexual feeling had been evoked, either in himself or in his companions.”

"In spite of criticism by his co-workers, Gandhi stubbornly defended these experiments which he regarded as exercises in self-purification and tests of his celibacy and insisted that they be public even if they met general condemnation from his close associates."

Besides the contemplative and ecstatic spiritual traditions, Gandhi was a pioneer of a new spirituality, Kakar writes.