Gandhi Was a Racist Who Forced Young Girls to Sleep in Bed with Him
Be the self-righteous misogynist you wish to see in the world.
By Mayukh Sen
December 4, 2015, 2:55am
In August 2012, just before India's 65th Independence Day, Outlook India, one of the country's most widely circulated print magazines, published the results of a blockbuster poll it had conducted with its readership. Who, after "the Mahatma," was the greatest Indian to have walked the country's soil? The Mahatma at the center of this smarmy question was, of course, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
There's nothing surprising about the fact that Outlook passed this assumption off as truth. Gandhi has become the obvious, no-duh barometer for Indian greatness, if not greatness in general. After all, who doesn't like Gandhi? We've come to know him as this frail, nobly malnourished old man with a purely moral, pious soul. He's a guy who ushered in a new grammar of nonviolent resistance to India, a country he helped escape the constraints of British imperial rule. He soldiered through some valiant hunger strikes until a Hindu nationalist shot, killed, and effectively martyred him.
My maternal grandfather went to jail with Gandhi in 1933, so I grew up knowing this myth was cobbled together from half-truths. My grandfather took the lessons he'd learned in jail to begin an ashram in the bowels of West Bengal. As a consequence, my parents raised me with an intimate understanding of Gandhi that teetered between laudatory and critical. My family adored him, though we never really bought into the idea that he single-handedly orchestrated India's independence movement. This is to say nothing of Gandhi's bigotry, which we didn't touch in our household. In the decades since his assassination in 1948, the image of Gandhi has been constructed so carefully, scrubbed clean of its grimy details, that it's easy to forget that he predicated his rhetoric on anti-blackness, a vehement allergy to female sexuality, and a general unwillingness to help liberate the Dalit, or "untouchable," caste.
Gandhi lived in South Africa for over two decades, from 1893 to 1914, working as a lawyer and fighting for the rights of Indians—and only Indians. To him, as he expressed quite plainly, black South Africans were barely human. He referred to them using the derogatory South African slur k__affir. He lamented that Indians were considered "little better, if at all, than savages or the Natives of Africa." In 1903, he declared that the "white race in South Africa should be the predominating race." After getting thrown in jail in 1908, he scoffed at the fact that Indians were classed with black, not white, prisoners. Some South African activists have thrust these parts of Gandhi's thinking back into the spotlight, as did a book published this past September by two South African academics, but they've barely made a dent on the American cultural consciousness beyond the concentric circles of Tumblr.
GANDHI IN SOUTH AFRICA. PHOTO VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Around this same time, Gandhi began cultivating the misogyny he'd carry with him for the rest of his life. During his years in South Africa, he once responded to a young man's sexual harassment of two of Gandhi's female followers by forcibly cutting the girls' hair short to make sure they didn't invite any sexual attention. (Michael Connellan, writing in the Guardian, carefully explained that Gandhi felt women surrendered their humanity the minute men raped them.) He operated under the assumption that men couldn't control their basic predatory impulses while simultaneously asserting that women were responsible for—and completely at the mercy of—these impulses. His views on female sexuality were similarly deplorable; according to Rita Banerji, writing in Sex and Power, Gandhi viewed menstruation as the "manifestation of the distortion of a woman's soul by her sexuality." He also believed the use of contraceptives was the sign of whoredom.
He confronted this inability to control male libido head-on when he vowed celibacy (without discussing it with his wife) back in India, and using women—including some underage girls, like his grand-niece—to test his sexual patience. He'd sleep naked next to them in bed without touching them, making sure he didn't get aroused; these women were props to coax him into celibacy.
It's easy to forget Gandhi predicated his rhetoric on anti-blackness, a vehement allergy to female sexuality, and a general unwillingness to help liberate the "untouchable" caste.
Kasturba, Gandhi's wife, was perhaps his most frequent punching bag. "I simply cannot bear to look at Ba's face," he once gushed about her, because she was caring for him while he was sick. "The expression is often like that on the face of a meek cow and gives one the feeling as a cow occasionally does, that in her own dumb manner she is saying something." An apologist's response to this, of course, would claim that cows are sacred beings in Hinduism—and so Gandhi's likening of his wife to a cow was really a veiled compliment. Or, perhaps, we could chalk it up to mere marital annoyance. When Kasturba came down with pneumonia, Gandhi denied her penicillin, even though doctors said it would cure her; he insisted the new medicine was an alien substance her body should not take in. She succumbed to the sickness and died in 1944. Just years later, perhaps realizing the grave mistake he'd made, he willfully took quinine to treat his own malaria. He survived.
There's a Western impulse to view Gandhi as the quiet annihilator of caste, a characterization that's categorically false. He viewed the emancipation of Dalits as an untenable goal, and felt that they weren't worth a separate electorate. He insisted, instead, that Dalits remain complacent, waiting for a turn that history never gave them. Dalits continue to suffer from the direct results of prejudices sewn into the cultural fabric of India.
History, as Arundhati Roy wrote in last year's seminal essay "The Doctor and the Saint," has been unbelievably kind to Gandhi. This has given us the latitude to brush off his prejudices as mere imperfections, small marks on clean hands. Apologists will insist that Gandhi was flawed and human. Perhaps they'll morph his prejudices into something positive, proof that he was just like us! Or another type of rhetorical defection: the argument that illuminating Gandhi's prejudices demonstrates how Americans harbor a sick fascination with India's problems, as if Western writers are obsessed with concocting social ills for the subcontinent out of thin air.
These are the mental gymnastics we engage in when we're eager to mythologize. The vile traits Gandhi exhibited persist in Indian society at large today—virulent anti-blackness, a blasé disregard for women's bodies, careful myopia around the piss-poor treatment of Dalits. It's not a coincidence that these very strains of Gandhi's rhetoric have been stamped out of his legacy.
But how do you live up to a ridiculous sobriquet like "the greatest Indian"? This is a colossal burden to place upon anyone—to dub him the greatest person to hail from a country that's home to billions of people. Creating a false idol involves a great deal of forgetting. It's easy to slobber over a man who didn't really exist.
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Vladimir Tikhonov
4 h ·
There is nothing specifically Indian about it. 'Moderate nationalists' everywhere across the colonial world were predominantly upper-middle class or upper-class people who learned all the prejudices of the colonizers while doing their studies at the colonial metropolises. To these prejudices, they could also add their own - that was the case with Gandhi's views on caste or his view of female sexuality, which would be regarded as terribly outdated even in interbellum Britain (definitely not the vanguard place for sexual liberation, I should say). In most places, these people grabbed the power from the moment their old European (or Japanese) masters left, using largely the same administrative machine, just without the colonial settlers. The consequences? We are still encountering the continuities with the colonial age, all around the formerly colonial world. Korean universities, for example, still have their history departments divided into 'national/Korean', 'Western' and 'Eastern' history, just like in Meiji times in Japan. As if African, Latin American or, say, Middle Eastern history never existed....De-colonization of knowledge is still an urgent task - as well as dismantling of the mythology about the 'national heroes' of this type.
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Gandhi Was a Racist Who Forced Young Girls to Sleep in Bed with Him
VICE.COM
Gandhi Was a Racist Who Forced Young Girls to Sleep in Bed with Him
Be the self-righteous misogynist you wish to see in the world.
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Charles Park
Gandhi apparently slept with younger women to test his celibacy. As far as I can tell (from my limited reading of it), the tests were successful. They were not molested. In the case of his teenage grand-nieces, they were like his own kids. Very peculiar way of testing one's celibacy but no rape/abuse apparently occurred.
In the 1920s Africa, Gandhi was indeed racist, upholding white supremacy even above his Indian race. However, in his later years, his views changed to uphold racial equality and also equality among the genders.
Also while as a young man, Gandhi promoted the caste system. Here too, in his later years, it appears he wanted to abolish it, even proposing inter-caste marriages to abolish it at the root.
I do not know the motivation of the author. But his analysis and reporting seem incomplete, inaccurate, and misleading.
The South African Gandhi
Stretcher-Bearer of Empire
ASHWIN DESAI AND GOOLAM VAHED
SERIES: SOUTH ASIA IN MOTION
BUY THIS BOOK
2015
344 PAGES.
FROM $25.00
Hardcover ISBN: 9780804796088
Paperback ISBN: 9780804797177
Ebook ISBN: 9780804797221
Winner of the 2016 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title, sponsored by the American Library Association.
In the pantheon of freedom fighters, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has pride of place. His fame and influence extend far beyond India and are nowhere more significant than in South Africa. "India gave us a Mohandas, we gave them a Mahatma," goes a popular South African refrain. Contemporary South African leaders, including Mandela, have consistently lauded him as being part of the epic battle to defeat the racist white regime.
The South African Gandhi focuses on Gandhi's first leadership experiences and the complicated man they reveal—a man who actually supported the British Empire. Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed unveil a man who, throughout his stay on African soil, stayed true to Empire while showing a disdain for Africans. For Gandhi, whites and Indians were bonded by an Aryan bloodline that had no place for the African. Gandhi's racism was matched by his class prejudice towards the Indian indentured. He persistently claimed that they were ignorant and needed his leadership, and he wrote their resistances and compromises in surviving a brutal labor regime out of history. The South African Gandhi writes the indentured and working class back into history.
The authors show that Gandhi never missed an opportunity to show his loyalty to Empire, with a particular penchant for war as a means to do so. He served as an Empire stretcher-bearer in the Boer War while the British occupied South Africa, he demanded guns in the aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion, and he toured the villages of India during the First World War as recruiter for the Imperial army. This meticulously researched book punctures the dominant narrative of Gandhi and uncovers an ambiguous figure whose time on African soil was marked by a desire to seek the integration of Indians, minus many basic rights, into the white body politic while simultaneously excluding Africans from his moral compass and political ideals.
About the authors
Ashwin Desai is Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg.
Goolam Vahed is Associate Professor of History at the University of KwaZulu Natal.
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ESSAY CASTE
The Doctor and the Saint
Ambedkar, Gandhi and the battle against caste
ARUNDHATI ROY01 March 2014
![]()
BR Ambedkar in Bombay, in 1939—three years after publishing Annihilation of Caste, his most radical text.
BCCL
[I]
ANNIHILATION OF CASTEis the nearly eighty-year-old text of a speech that was never delivered.* When I first read it I felt as though somebody had walked into a dim room and opened the windows. Reading Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar bridges the gap between what most Indians are schooled to believe in and the reality we experience every day of our lives.
My father was a Hindu, a Brahmo. I never met him until I was an adult. I grew up with my mother, in a Syrian Christian family in Ayemenem, a small village in communist-ruled Kerala. And yet all around me were the fissures and cracks of caste. Ayemenem had its own separate “Parayan” church where “Parayan” priests preached to an “untouchable” congregation. Caste was implied in peoples’ names, in the way people referred to each other, in the work they did, in the clothes they wore, in the marriages that were arranged, in the language we spoke. Even so, I never encountered the notion of caste in a single school textbook. Reading Ambedkar alerted me to a gaping hole in our pedagogical universe. Reading him also made it clear why that hole exists and why it will continue to exist until Indian society undergoes radical, revolutionary change.
ARUNDHATI ROY is the author of the novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Her most recent book is a collection of essays, My Seditious Heart.KEYWORDS:Mohandas Karamchand Gandhiwomen’s rightsAmbedkarMK GandhiSouth AfricaBR Ambedkarcasteindian constitutionDalitHinduismimperialism
COMMENT
READER'S COMMENTS
Dipankar Dey
19 Jul, 2019
I still fail to understand why Ambedkar proposed transfer of religious minorities as a permanent solution. BJP is using this thesis to Amend Citizenship Act as per their Bill 2016. As an architect of Indian constitution he could put many provisions তো safe guard religious minorities. But he did not do that
Vinod Shahi
05 Nov, 2016
‘The Doctor and the Saint’, as Arundhati Roy’s Ambedkar and Gandhi, are presented as though they represent the two foremost political archetypes of Indian fredom struggle and it's aftermath. This seems to be an intellectual attempt to carve out the stereotyped idols out of the complex historical stuff. Ambedkar, the doctor, represents the radical intillectual, the revolutionary and the Massiah of the deprived ‘other’; whereas Gandhi looks like liberal comprador spokesman of the Hindu uppercaste mainstream of self-contradictory nature. Here it looks like that we can ‘choose’ from the vast ocean of historical accounts and interpretations of varied hues and forms to suit and prove the standpoint of our own making. Here Arundhati Roy is trying to ‘construct an opinion first by saying that it’s the ‘objective narrative’ that has been passed on to us by the history itself, and then tries to ‘deconstruct’ and demolish the same. Her Ambedkar is almost a non-entity of history pushed to the boundaries dedliberately, to design her argument to prove that he actually was so great to be compared with Gandhi and perhaps even greater. Similarly she quotes others to prove that Gandhi too was a deliberate construction of some historical forces who raised him to Sainthood for some vested hidden goals before them. Thus having carved an idol of Gandhi, she goes on to prove that he was rather the opposite of it, a person driven by political exigencies and a status-quoist. In this kind of a decostructive discourse, she hides the other sides of both these archetypal figures, of the inherent ‘separatism of Ambedkar which was a construction of the imperial culture of divide and rule ; and that of the inegative core of the Gandhi an philosophy which was anti-c I lonial and pro-human. What that needs to be taken care of while interpreting the historical figures that we should try to keep the ‘idealisation’ of those figures in check and must not simplify the ‘events’ to be focused on the ‘persons’. Hero-worship and breaking idols- both are examples of intellectual violence. To replace Gandhism with Ambedkarism is also a self-contradictory alternative, as the Dalit upsurge of the post-Ambedkar phase . The creamy layer of Dalits stands assimilated by the mainstream in the form of reserved category of the middle and lower middle classes and in sted of the revolutionary desire of Amedkar for a ‘separate homeland for the untouchables’, several new Dalit leaders control a large chunk of voters to be in power as Chief Ministers of some states, leaving behind the pertinent question, what goals can the Arundhati Roy’s resurrection of this revolutionary Daltivism hope to serve and achieve ?
Democrat
22 Oct, 2016
Dr. B.R Ambedkar’s Complete works
https://archive.org/details/Ambedkar_CompleteWorks
ESSAY CASTE
The Doctor and the Saint
Ambedkar, Gandhi and the battle against caste
ARUNDHATI ROY01 March 2014
BR Ambedkar in Bombay, in 1939—three years after publishing Annihilation of Caste, his most radical text.
BCCL
[I]
ANNIHILATION OF CASTEis the nearly eighty-year-old text of a speech that was never delivered.* When I first read it I felt as though somebody had walked into a dim room and opened the windows. Reading Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar bridges the gap between what most Indians are schooled to believe in and the reality we experience every day of our lives.
My father was a Hindu, a Brahmo. I never met him until I was an adult. I grew up with my mother, in a Syrian Christian family in Ayemenem, a small village in communist-ruled Kerala. And yet all around me were the fissures and cracks of caste. Ayemenem had its own separate “Parayan” church where “Parayan” priests preached to an “untouchable” congregation. Caste was implied in peoples’ names, in the way people referred to each other, in the work they did, in the clothes they wore, in the marriages that were arranged, in the language we spoke. Even so, I never encountered the notion of caste in a single school textbook. Reading Ambedkar alerted me to a gaping hole in our pedagogical universe. Reading him also made it clear why that hole exists and why it will continue to exist until Indian society undergoes radical, revolutionary change.
ARUNDHATI ROY is the author of the novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Her most recent book is a collection of essays, My Seditious Heart.KEYWORDS:Mohandas Karamchand Gandhiwomen’s rightsAmbedkarMK GandhiSouth AfricaBR Ambedkarcasteindian constitutionDalitHinduismimperialism
COMMENT
READER'S COMMENTS
Dipankar Dey
19 Jul, 2019
I still fail to understand why Ambedkar proposed transfer of religious minorities as a permanent solution. BJP is using this thesis to Amend Citizenship Act as per their Bill 2016. As an architect of Indian constitution he could put many provisions তো safe guard religious minorities. But he did not do that
Vinod Shahi
05 Nov, 2016
‘The Doctor and the Saint’, as Arundhati Roy’s Ambedkar and Gandhi, are presented as though they represent the two foremost political archetypes of Indian fredom struggle and it's aftermath. This seems to be an intellectual attempt to carve out the stereotyped idols out of the complex historical stuff. Ambedkar, the doctor, represents the radical intillectual, the revolutionary and the Massiah of the deprived ‘other’; whereas Gandhi looks like liberal comprador spokesman of the Hindu uppercaste mainstream of self-contradictory nature. Here it looks like that we can ‘choose’ from the vast ocean of historical accounts and interpretations of varied hues and forms to suit and prove the standpoint of our own making. Here Arundhati Roy is trying to ‘construct an opinion first by saying that it’s the ‘objective narrative’ that has been passed on to us by the history itself, and then tries to ‘deconstruct’ and demolish the same. Her Ambedkar is almost a non-entity of history pushed to the boundaries dedliberately, to design her argument to prove that he actually was so great to be compared with Gandhi and perhaps even greater. Similarly she quotes others to prove that Gandhi too was a deliberate construction of some historical forces who raised him to Sainthood for some vested hidden goals before them. Thus having carved an idol of Gandhi, she goes on to prove that he was rather the opposite of it, a person driven by political exigencies and a status-quoist. In this kind of a decostructive discourse, she hides the other sides of both these archetypal figures, of the inherent ‘separatism of Ambedkar which was a construction of the imperial culture of divide and rule ; and that of the inegative core of the Gandhi an philosophy which was anti-c I lonial and pro-human. What that needs to be taken care of while interpreting the historical figures that we should try to keep the ‘idealisation’ of those figures in check and must not simplify the ‘events’ to be focused on the ‘persons’. Hero-worship and breaking idols- both are examples of intellectual violence. To replace Gandhism with Ambedkarism is also a self-contradictory alternative, as the Dalit upsurge of the post-Ambedkar phase . The creamy layer of Dalits stands assimilated by the mainstream in the form of reserved category of the middle and lower middle classes and in sted of the revolutionary desire of Amedkar for a ‘separate homeland for the untouchables’, several new Dalit leaders control a large chunk of voters to be in power as Chief Ministers of some states, leaving behind the pertinent question, what goals can the Arundhati Roy’s resurrection of this revolutionary Daltivism hope to serve and achieve ?
Democrat
22 Oct, 2016
Dr. B.R Ambedkar’s Complete works
https://archive.org/details/Ambedkar_CompleteWorks
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