Manu Gandhi: The girl who chronicled

Gandhi's troubled years

On the evening of 30 January 1948, Mahatma Gandhi stepped outside the
house of an Indian business tycoon in Delhi where he was staying and walked
to a prayer meeting in the garden.

Accompanying Gandhi, as usual, were his grand-nieces, Manu and Abha.

As the 78-year-old leader climbed the steps of the prayer platform, a man in khaki
emerged from the crowd, pushed aside Manu, pulled out a pistol and pumped three
bullets into the frail leader's chest and abdomen.

Gandhi fell, invoked the name of a revered Hindu deity, and died in the arms of the
woman who had become his confidante, caregiver and chronicler in his troubled and
turbulent final years.

Less than a year earlier - in May 1947 - Gandhi had told Manu with chilling
prescience that he wanted her to be a "witness" when his end came.
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At just 14, Manu had become one of the youngest prisoners of India's struggle for
independence. She joined Gandhi, who had been jailed after his demand to end
British rule, and ended up spending nearly a year - between 1943 and 1944 - in
prison.

She also began writing a diary.

For the next four years, the teenage prisoner turned into a prolific writer.

Twelve volumes of Manu Gandhi's diaries are preserved in India's archives - written
in Gujarati in ruled notebooks, they contain her own writings, Gandhi's speeches
(which she wrote as he spoke) and letters, as well as her "English work book".

Now they have been translated into English by Gandhi scholar Tridip Suhrud and
published for the first time ever.

Her diary, a constant companion, fell out of her hand when Gandhi collapsed on her
after the fatal shooting. After that day, she stopped keeping a journal, and instead,
wrote books and delivered talks on the leader until her death in 1969 at the age of
42.

The first set of her diaries offers extraordinary insight into a precocious and
observant young girl, both devotee and budding chronicler, keenly recording the
everydayness of life in captivity.
She also reveals herself as a tireless caregiver to Gandhi's wife, Kasturba, whose
health is failing fast.
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Manu's early journal entries reveal what appears to be a joyless and regimented life.

It's a never-ending grind of daily duties - cutting vegetables, preparing food,

massaging Kasturba and oiling her hair, spinning thread, reciting prayers, cleaning
utensils, weighing herself on selected days and so on.

"But you have to remember, she, along with Gandhi and his wife and associates, are
in prison. They have voluntary obligations as prisoners. Life might seem joyless and
coercive, but she is also learning the rules of ashramic (a religious retreat or a
monastic community) way of life that Gandhi practised," Dr Suhrud told me.

Not formally educated, Manu, under Gandhi's guidance, learns English, grammar,
geometry and geography. She begins reading the epics and Hindu scriptures. She
finds out "where the War [WW2] is being fought" by looking at a map book. The
teenager also reads about Marx and Engels.

Grammar lessons take up a lot of study time. "Today I learnt about declinable
(changing) and indeclinable (unchanging) adjectives and about predicative and sub-
predicative adjectives," she writes about a lesson.

But prison life with Gandhi and his associates is not entirely desultory.

Manu listens to music on the gramophone, goes out for long walks, plays "ping
pong" [table tennis] with Gandhi and carrom with Kasturba, and learns to make
chocolate.

She writes of how Gandhi's associates in prison plan to dress up like Roosevelt,
Churchill and Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, in what appears to be readying for a fancy-
dress programme of sorts. Gandhi rejects it because he doesn't like "such
enactments".

The diaries are also permeated by tragedy. Her writings are bookended by two
deaths that shook Gandhi: his closest aide Mahadev Desai, regarded as the greatest
chronicler of the leader's life, and Kasturba.

There are heart-wrenching accounts of the days leading up to Kasturba's death in

February 1944.

One night she tells her husband that she is in great pain, and "these are my last
breaths".

"Go. But go with peace, won't you?" Gandhi tells her.

And when Kasturba passes away on a winter evening, her head in the lap of her
husband, Gandhi "closes his eyes and places his forehead on her as if he were
blessing her".
"They had spent their lives together, now he was seeking final forgiveness and
bidding her farewell… Her pulse stopped and she breathed her last," Manu writes.

As Manu becomes a young woman, her diary entries are longer and more thoughtful.
She is candid about Gandhi's most controversial and unfathomable experiment -
when he asked Manu in December 1946 to join him in bed as he slept "to test, or
further test, his conquest of sexual desire", in the words of biographer Ramachandra
Guha. (Gandhi had married at 13, and taken a vow of celibacy when he was 38 and
father of four children).

The experiment lasted barely two weeks and invited widespread opprobrium, but we
will have to wait for the forthcoming volumes to find out what she thought about it.

In the end, Manu Gandhi comes across as an earnest and resilient person, mature
beyond her years, discerning, and completely capable of asserting herself in front of
one of the world's most charismatic and powerful leaders.

"It is not easy to be with Gandhi in his last phase of life - he has grown old, times are
difficult, his wife is dead as are his close associates. To Manu, we owe a lot of our
understanding of Gandhi's last days. She's a chronicler, record-keeper and a
historian," says Dr Suhrud.

That is quite true.

"Churchill is convinced that I am his biggest enemy," Gandhi tells Manu in 1944.
"What is one to do? He believes that he would not be able to suppress and control
the country if I were to be kept out of prison. But even, otherwise, they will not be
able to suppress the country. Once people acquire confidence, they will not forget it.
I consider my work to have been more."

Three years later, amid a bloody partition, India gained freedom.

Mahatma & Manuben: Newly discovered

diaries of Gandhi's personal attendant
reveal how his experiments with celibacy
changed her life
More than four decades after Manuben's death, India Today has got access to 10
of her diaries that reveal the psychological impact of Gandhi's experiment with his
sexuality on his constant companion. Read More: Let the world say whatever it
wants | Master of his own mind | Pyarelalji is madly in love with me | I requested
Bapu to allow me to sleep separately | Bapu was a mother to me and me only

She is one of the most recognised faces in Indian history, always by Mahatma
Gandhi's side as his "walking stick" in his last two years. Yet, she remains a mystery.
Just 17 when she rejoined the Mahatma as one of his personal assistants in 1946, she
was the great man's constant companion till his assassination. Yet, Mridula Gandhi, or
Manuben as she is widely known, died a lonely spinster at the age of 40 in Delhi.

Manuben was portrayed by Supriya Pathak in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982).

More than four decades after her death, India Today has got access to 10 of her
diaries, written in Gujarati and running into 2,000 pages. Studied in detail by Gujarati
academic Rizwan Kadri, the diaries, which begin from April 11, 1943, reveal the
psychological impact of Gandhi's experiment with his sexuality on Manuben. They
also throw light on the jealousy and anger rife at the heart of Gandhi's entourage,
many of them young women. The diaries begin when Manuben, a grandniece of
Gandhi, came to Aga Khan Palace in Pune to look after Gandhi's wife Kasturba during
the couple's internment starting from 1942 following the Quit India movement.
Manuben nursed Kasturba in her final months of illness. The diary entries end 22 days
after January 30, 1948, the day Nathuram Godse pushed aside Manuben to fire three
shots at Gandhi from a 9mm Beretta.

The diaries, in which Gandhi often signed on the margins, reveal a girl devoted to
him. In an entry on December 28, 1946, at Srirampur, Bihar, nine days after joining
the then 77-year-old Gandhi who was on a walk through of troubled villages after
massacres in Noakhali in then East Bengal, she writes: "Bapu is a mother to me. He is
initiating me to a higher human plane through the Brahmacharya experiments, part of
his Mahayagna of character-building. Any loose talk about the experiment is most
condemnable." Pyarelal, Gandhi's secretary, endorsed this view in Mahatma Gandhi:
The Last Phase, "He did for her everything that a mother usually does for her
daughter. He supervised her education, her food, dress, rest, and sleep. For closer
supervision and guidance, he made her sleep in the same bed with him. Now a girl, if
her mind is innocent, never feels embarrassment in sleeping with her mother." She, in
turn, was his primary personal attendant-massaging and bathing him as well as
cooking for him.
the flames on the funeral pyre were consuming Bapu's body, I felt like sitting till well after the
was over...Bapu was there two days ago, yesterday at least his body was there and today I am all
am totally distraught."
en

The diaries go into the details of the lives of Gandhi's women associates like Dr
Sushila Nayar, his personal physician and Pyarelal's sister, and who later became
Union health minister, as well as his Rajput-Muslim follower Bibi Amtussalam.
They also indicate the intense jealousy over who would be part of the Mahatma's
experiments with celibacy. Manuben's diary entry dated February 24, 1947, at
Haimchar, Bihar, states: "Today Bapu wrote a strong letter to Amtussalamben saying
that the element of regret that his celibacy experiment didn't start with her was
apparent in her letter to him."

The diaries, which found their way to the National Archives in Delhi in 2010, also
show Pyarelal, despite being 47 years old, making repeated overtures to
Manuben with Sushila Nayar pushing the case. Manuben finally makes a telling
entry on February 2, 1947, at Dashdharia, Bihar: "I see Pyarelalji as my elder brother
and nothing else. The day I decide to marry my guru, my elder brother or my
grandfather, I shall marry him. Don't force me on this any further."

Manuben's jottings also give an insight into the growing disquiet among Gandhi's
followers over his celibacy tests. In a diary entry of January 31, 1947, when she was at
Navgram, Bihar, Manuben refers to a letter to Gandhi from his close follower
Kishorelal Mashruwala where he calls her "Maya" (an illusion or a temptress) and
asks the Mahatma to free himself off her clutches. To this, Gandhi replies: "You do
whatever you want but I am firm in my belief regarding this experiment." Even as
Manuben and Gandhi walked through Noakhali in Bengal, two of his entourage- R.P.
Parasuram, who had acted as his secretary, and Nirmal Kumar Bose, also his secretary
and later director of Anthropological Society of India-left in anger over Gandhi's
behaviour. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, in a letter to Gandhi on January 25, 1947,
currently among the Patel papers housed in the National Archives, asked him to
suspend the experiment which Patel called a "terrible blunder" on Gandhi's part that
pained his followers "beyond measure".

The deep imprint the Mahatma left on Manuben's psyche is best reflected in a letter to
Jawaharlal Nehru from Morarji Desai on August 19, 1955, soon after he called on
Manuben in August at the Bombay Hospital where she had been admitted for an
"unknown" ailment. Desai writes: "Manu's problem is more psychological than
physiological. She appears to have despaired for life and developed allergy to all kinds
of medicines."
Manuben was one of two persons by the Mahatma's side when he was shot by
Nathuram Godse at 5.17 p.m. on January 30, 1948, at Birla House in Delhi, the other
being Abhaben Gandhi, wife of his nephew Kanu Gandhi. Manuben writes the next
day: "While the flames on the funeral pyre were consuming Bapu's body, I felt like
sitting till well after the funeral was over. Sardar Patel comforted me and took me to
his home. It was just unimaginable for me. Bapu was there two days ago, yesterday at
least his body was there and today I am all alone. I am totally distraught." The next
and last entry in the diary is on February 21, 1948, when she left for Mahuva near
Bhavnagar from Delhi by train. It says: "Today I left Delhi." In Last Glimpses of
Bapu, one of five books Manuben wrote after Gandhi's death, she notes: "Kaka
(Gandhi's youngest son Devdas) warned me not to disclose the contents of my diary to
anyone and at the same time forbade me to divulge the contents of the important
letters? He said, 'You are very young but you possess a lot of valuable literature. And
you are also unsophisticated.'"

Even in her 68-page memoir, Bapu: My Mother, Manuben never revealed her feelings
about Gandhi's experiments with his sexuality in which she was a part. In one of the
15 chapters, she writes that soon after the death of Kasturba, which happened within
10 months of her moving to Pune, she received a very moving note from Bapu as he
was in maunvrat (vow of silence) and could communicate only by writing. Gandhi
advised her in that note to go to Rajkot and resume her studies. "From that day Bapu
became my mother," Manuben writes in the chapter. The teenaged Manuben, who had
studied till Class V in Karachi where her father, Gandhi's nephew Jaisukhlal, worked
in the Scindia Steam Navigation Company, also needed a mother-like anchor since
she had just lost her mother when she came to Pune.

Manuben's final years were spent by herself. She lived in Mahuva near Bhavnagar in
Gujarat for almost 21 years after Gandhi's assassination. She ran a children's school
besides floating Bhagini Samaj, which espoused women's issues. Among those who
were associated with Manuben during this last phase of her life is Bhanuben Lahiri,
from a family of freedom fighters. She was one of the 22 women members of the
Samaj. Lahiri recalls the profound impact Gandhi left on his grandniece. Once, she
says, when Manuben took a chunari (a scarf-like piece of cloth) from her for the
marriage of one of her poor followers, she said: "I see myself as Mirabai (the great
medieval saint who worshipped Lord Krishna) who lived only for her Shyamlo
(Krishna)."

Commenting on the diaries, psychoanalyst and scholar Sudhir Kakar writes: "So
focused was the Mahatma on his own feelings during these experiments that I believe
he may have 'chosen' to overlook their consequences for the women involved. Except
for the flaring up of violent jealousy between the various women, we do not know the
psychological effects, if any, that these experiments left on each of the women."

Now, thanks to the recovery of Manuben's diaries, we can assess the psychological
impact the Mahatma had on his intimate companion.

The Diary of Manu Gandhi’ Book launched in New Delhi

The book ‘The Diary of Manu Gandhi’ (1943-44), edited and translated by Tridip Suhrud, was
launched by Prahlad Singh Patel, Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Culture and
Tourism, at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi. The book has been brought out on
occasion of 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi by National Archives of India in
collaboration with Oxford University Press. Manu Gandhi (Mridula): She was a grand niece of
Mahatma Gandhi, daughter of his Nephew Jaisukhlal Amritlal Gandhi, and stayed with M Gandhi till
his assassination on 30 January 1948. She was an aide to Kasturba Gandhi (wife of Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi) during her imprisonment in Aga Khan Palace in 1943.

About ‘The Diary of Manu Gandhi’

The book was originally written in Gujarati and has been edited and translated by Tridip Suhrud, a
well known scholar engaged in understanding Gandhian Intellectual tradition. First volume of the
diary covers period from 1943-1944 which includes a record of her life and times with Mahatma
Gandhi. She had expressed the deep emotional bond she had developed with Gandhiji. The book has
been authenticated by M. Gandhi himself. The meticulous and intimate entries in Diary throws light
on his life as a prisoner and his endeavour to establish possibility of collective non-violence. It
chronicles spiritual and educational pursuits of a woman who takes up writing as a mode of self-
examination. Author has shared a moving portrait of Kasturba Gandhi’s illness and death.
Significance: The publication of such books immensely benefit scholars interested in Gandhian
studies and history of modern India at large. The book will be another milestone added to
publications that have been brought out by National Archives of India from time to time.

About National Archives of India

It is an Attached Office under Union Ministry of Culture. It was established as ‘Imperial Record
Department’ on 11 March 1891 at Kolkata (then Calcutta). Following the transfer of capital from
Calcutta to Delhi in 1911, the present building of National Archives of India was constructed in 1926.
The New Delhi’s building was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. All records stored were completely
transferred from Calcutta to New Delhi in 1937.

The Diary of Manu Gandhi: 1943-1944’

review: Light on a turbulent self
Tridip Suhrud interprets the moral ambiguities in the mutual
devotion of Mahatma Gandhi and the 15-year-old Manu Gandhi
Mridula “Manu” Gandhi (1927-69), M.K. Gandhi’s grand-niece, could be
thought of as a mirror held at close quarters and facing the Mahatma in his
last years, from 1942 to 1948. In this mirror, Gandhi saw himself, but
which aspects of his complex self they were that Manu’s presence and
proximity allowed him to see, we shall never really know.
To all others, including us, their intimacy remains an opaque surface; the
images, reflections and truths that passed between them seemed at that
time and are, even today, indecipherable. Manu’s diaries, written in the
years when she was inseparable from Gandhi, almost like a shadow, could
conceivably provide clues to the meaning of their unnameable bond. But
perhaps they only deepen the mystery rather than helping to solve it.

Budding relationship
The first set of diaries, dated between April 1943 and December 1944, are
written by a 15-16-year-old girl who is learning to write, learning to keep a
journal, and learning to use her diary as a space within which both her own
nascent selfhood and her budding relationship with Gandhi can emerge
into language. These fragments of text are deceptively straightforward and
yet astonishingly hard to decode, like symbols in an early script that might
have survived from a very ancient stage of human civilisation.
The authorial self, the language she uses and the meanings she seeks to
convey are all tentative and in a sense, adolescent. It is a testament to
Manu’s inner strength of character, yet to be fully expressed, that even her
simple unadorned words do not break under the strain of what she is
struggling to record and convey: both the ordinary bodily life, as well as
the extraordinary spiritual struggle of none other than Mahatma Gandhi
himself.
Manu comes to live with Gandhiji and Kasturba in May 1942, at their
ashram in Sevagram. But the events of the Quit India movement, later that
summer, land them all in prison in just a few months. As
a satyagrahi, Manu is at first incarcerated in Nagpur Central Jail for nine
months, but eventually she joins the Mahatma at the Aga Khan Palace in
Poona, where she begins writing her diary. Manu had already lost her own
mother and Ba too dies in February 1944, even as Manu personally tends
to her. To fill the vacuum, Gandhi metamorphoses into her mother. Make
of that what you will. In the period covered by the first set of diaries, here
collected, edited and translated by Tridip Suhrud, Manu’s position vis-à-
vis the old couple is a strange mix of grandchild, daughter, student,
personal caretaker and nurse. It is clear that they both love her tenderly,
and she does them. But there are ambiguities in this mutual devotion, as
Suhrud is at pains to elaborate in his lengthy introduction of 50 pages.

Reading Gandhi’s experiments

To help us understand what is going on, both in terms of defining the role
that Manu is expected to play in Gandhi’s personal life, as well as setting
up the function that the genre of the diary is supposed to perform for her in
Gandhi’s pedagogical scheme, Suhrud brings to bear a formidable set of
conceptual categories from the Gandhian repertoire. He has assembled
these over the years, especially whilst doing the careful exegetical work of
preparing, together with the late Suresh Sharma, an annotated critical
edition of Gandhi’s 1909 manifesto Hind Swaraj, as well as more recently,
the first critical edition of the Mahatma’s Autobiography or The Story of
My Experiments with Truth, written in the 1920s.
These categories come from Christianity: love, service, suffering, bearing
witness, conscience, confession, covenant, chastity and poverty. Equally
they come from Hinduism and
Jainism: yajna (sacrifice), vrata (vow), brahmacharya (celibacy)
and ahimsa (non-violence); while still others Gandhi has himself coined or
developed: notably, swaraj (self-rule) and satyagrah (soul-force).
If religious and philosophical systems both Indian and Western provide
one set of lenses for reading Gandhi’s experiments with Manu, another set
comes from the historical record — the responses and reactions of
Gandhi’s ashram community and his political associates in the freedom
movement.
Here we find universal incomprehension and condemnation — no one
around Gandhi empathises, agrees with or approves of the manner in
 which he treats Manu. Suhrud anticipates some of the later diaries and the
events of the tumultuous period from 1946 to 1948, spanning Partition,
Independence and Gandhi’s assassination, when he draws Manu ever
closer to himself and alienates everyone else in the process.
As the rest of the diaries come to light, we will need psychoanalytic
readings such as those by Erik Erikson, Ashis Nandy and Sudhir Chandra,
or the details of the South African years, as offered by Joseph Lelyveld, to
come to grips with the notoriously difficult complexities of gender,
sexuality and identity in Gandhi’s personality, that manifested most
acutely in the chapter of his life represented by Manu. Until then we only
have the words of a young girl, a thin beam of light to guide us through the
long dark passion of Gandhi’s struggle to master and liberate a turbulent,
unruly self.
The Diary of Manu Gandhi: 1943-44; Tridip Suhrud, Oxford University
Press, ₹750.

The girl who found a mother in Gandhi

In 1943, as 13-year-old Anne Frank began writing her diary, now recognized as
one of the most extraordinary literary documents of the 20th century, another
young girl, in another part of the world, also started recording her daily routine in a
journal.
Like Frank, who was in hiding with her Dutch Jewish family to escape the Nazis in
those years, 15-year-old Mridula Gandhi, better known by her nickname Manu,
had been dealt a cruel hand by life. After her mother died in 1942, Manu’s father
Jaisukhlal packed her off to Sevagram, the ashram near Wardha, in
Maharashtra, run by his world-famous uncle, M.K. Gandhi. The diffident but
affable girl was meant to learn English and Sanskrit from the man millions
revered as a “Mahatma", and also serve his wife Kasturba, whose health was in a
precarious state, and worsening every day.
But it wasn’t meant to be. Soon after Manu’s arrival, just as she was settling into
the loving care of her grand-uncle (Bapuji) and grand-aunt (Ba), Gandhi and his
associates were arrested by the British, moved to the Aga Khan Palace in
Pune, and detained there for months. Upset by this abrupt separation, especially
from Ba, her beloved charge, Manu took to the streets to protest against the
government. Her hope was to get arrested and be sent to the Aga Khan Palace
to join her adoptive family. She was indeed picked up by the police and
incarcerated with other women for weeks, before being sent over to Pune to
resume her duty as Kasturba’s nurse.
Thus, it was there, under Bapuji’s supervision, that Manu’s emotional education
began—a crucial aspect of which involved keeping a detailed log of her days,
noting down even the tiniest things she did from morning to night. Recently, the
first volume of the diaries written between 1943-44 was published in an English
translation from the Gujarati, with an introduction by the scholar Tridip Suhrud.
With no part of the text changed, the book captures a volatile period in Gandhi’s
life, both as a private individual and as a public figure. Seen by a young girl who is
intensely vulnerable and self-aware, it is an account that shies away from very
little. It is through Manu’s innocent eyes, and her joys and disappointments, that
we rediscover the Mahatma and his followers as all too human, acting up now and
then, even as they strive to live a morally unimpeachable life.
Holding up a mirror
From 1942, when she came to Sevagram, until the final moment of Gandhi’s life,
as he fell to Nathuram Godse’s bullets in front of her eyes, Manu hovered like a
shadow by her Bapuji’s side. Coming into Gandhi’s life shortly after the untimely
death of his faithful secretary Mahadev Desai, Manu went on to fill the void
left behind by the older man through her years of self-effacing seva (service). For
much of this time, she kept a diary, which began as an exercise in improving
her orthography and grammar. But, gradually, it turned into an invaluable
chronicle of Gandhi’s life, his personal choices and political actions, as well as a
mirror into Manu’s own maturing personality.
Keeping a diary was an indispensable part of ashram life on Gandhi’s watch.
Recording one’s thoughts and feelings truthfully was a stepping stone towards
achieving the higher ideal of satyagraha. A diary, Gandhi believed, could act as
a vehicle of self-examination and self-purification. But there was a conundrum
in this act too, in Manu’s case at least—the requirement that she show her diary
to Gandhi at the end of each day. The very notions of privacy and secrecy, which
are associated with the act of keeping a journal, were turned on their heads by this
injunction from Manu’s satyagrahi grand-uncle.
For the first few months, Gandhi corrected Manu’s prose, left terse remarks
on the margins (he chided her, for instance, for being irregular at spinning), and
signed off each entry “Bapu". No wonder almost all the entries in this phase
appear as bullet points, marked by a specific activity against each hour of the day.
Waking up at dawn (usually after being prodded by Bapu), saying the daily
prayers, cleaning, cooking, giving massages to Bapu and Ba, eating, sleeping,
studying, playing, learning new lessons: Manu’s days roll on with unremitting
sameness. The austere ashram life leaves no time for indulgences or even the
slightest of transgressions.
It is only after she began to confess her shame, contrition or misery to her
diary—after being rebuked by her teacher, Pyarelal Nayyar (Gandhi’s private
secretary in the later years), for instance—that Manu began to withhold some
entries from her Bapuji. Tears did come easily to the motherless girl. A
crooked joke about eating disorders by Sushila Nayyar—personal physician
to the Gandhis—led to an episode of misunderstanding. Manu would be wracked
with guilt, self-doubt and misgivings if she got a scolding from Ba for
neglecting her duties. And every time she failed to wake up for the morning
prayers, she got a slap from her Bapuji, the self-proclaimed advocate of non-
violence. In the relentless daily cycle of cooking, cleaning, praying, studying and
administering care, Manu had little time to note her personal landmarks. “I have
begun menstruating," she remarks crisply in one instance, with not a word before
or after to bookend that clinical observation.
Becoming Bapu’s stick
Selfless devotion to Bapuji and Ba was, indeed, the abiding theme of Manu’s days,
to the extent that she frequently wrote about Desai’s good fortune at being able
to die in his mentor’s arms. For a girl of 15, Manu’s obsession with the idea of a
perfect death may seem like a morbid preoccupation, but she was no ordinary
teenager.
Unlike her contemporary Anne Frank, whose interest in boys was expressed in
great detail in the pages of her diary, Manu’s account is, needless to say, untainted
by such thoughts. But in spite of her vow of celibacy, in accordance with the
code of conduct followed by all ashramites, Manu did not remain immune to
the appeal of clothes or external appearances. Her shock and pain are
palpable when Gandhi cut off Sushilaben’s thick, curly hair, for instance.
It is possible to glimpse in these early diaries the role that Manu would go on to
play in Gandhi’s last years. Towards the end of the volume, she is already helping
her Bapuji answer his voluminous correspondence and acting as a “stick" on which
Gandhi leant when he took his daily constitutional. In the years to come, Gandhi
would repeatedly urge Manu to bear witness to his final moments, to note
whether he breathed his last with Ram’s name on his lips like a true believer,
which was his cherished dream, or whether he died in a fog of agony, like any
ordinary mortal.
It was, however, by participating in his most controversial and widely reviled
experiment that Manu proved her utmost fealty to Gandhi. Schooled in the ideals
of brahmacharya, a word which connoted very specific meanings in the Gandhian
lexicon (Suhrud explains this at length in the introduction), Manu agreed to sleep
on the same bed as Bapu to help him test the strength of his commitment to
asceticism. The fallout of this act was so severe that Gandhi was reprimanded even
by his most ardent supporters. Several of his close followers deserted him. It was
only after Manu withdrew her consent that the experiment stopped.
Given the dynamics of Manu’s relationship with Gandhi, in whom she claimed to
have found a mother after the demise of Kasturba and her own mother, what
was the nature of the consent that she gave and withdrew? How much agency did
she have in controlling the terms of this bizarre experiment? And what thoughts
and feelings ran through her as she partook of this ritual night after night?
The portrait of a self-assured young lady that emerges at the end of this volume of
Manu’s diaries would hopefully attain more depth and definition when the more
explosive sequel is published next year.

An odd kind of piety: The truth about

Gandhi's sex life
It was no secret that Mohandas Gandhi had an unusual sex life. He spoke
constantly of sex and gave detailed, often provocative, instructions to his
followers as to how to they might best observe chastity. And his views were
not always popular; "abnormal and unnatural" was how the first Prime
Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, described Gandhi's advice
to newlyweds to stay celibate for the sake of their souls.

But was there something more complex than a pious plea for chastity at play
in Gandhi's beliefs, preachings and even his unusual personal practices
(which included, alongside his famed chastity, sleeping naked next to nubile,
naked women to test his restraint)? In the course of researching my new book
on Gandhi, going through a hundred volumes of his complete works and
many tomes of eye-witness material, details became apparent which add up
to a more bizarre sexual history.

Much of this material was known during his lifetime, but was distorted or
suppressed after his death during the process of elevating Gandhi into the
"Father of the Nation" Was the Mahatma, in fact, as the pre-independence
prime minister of the Indian state of Travancore called him, "a most
dangerous, semi-repressed sex maniac"?

Gandhi was born in the Indian state of Gujarat and married at 13 in 1883; his
wife Kasturba was 14, not early by the standards of Gujarat at that time. The
young couple had a normal sex life, sharing a bed in a separate room in his
family home, and Kasturba was soon pregnant.

Two years later, as his father lay dying, Gandhi left his bedside to have sex
with Kasturba. Meanwhile, his father drew his last breath. The young man
compounded his grief with guilt that he had not been present, and represented
his subsequent revulsion towards "lustful love" as being related to his father's
death.

However, Gandhi and Kasturba's last child wasn't born until fifteen years
later, in 1900.
In fact, Gandhi did not develop his censorious attitude to sex (and certainly
not to marital sex) until he was in his 30s, while a volunteer in the ambulance
corps, assisting the British Empire in its wars in Southern Africa. On long
marches in sparsely populated land in the Boer War and the Zulu uprisings,
Gandhi considered how he could best "give service" to humanity and decided
it must be by embracing poverty and chastity.

At the age of 38, in 1906, he took a vow of brahmacharya, which meant

living a spiritual life but is normally referred to as chastity, without which
such a life is deemed impossible by Hindus.

Gandhi found it easy to embrace poverty. It was chastity that eluded him. So
he worked out a series of complex rules which meant he could say he was
chaste while still engaging in the most explicit sexual conversation, letters
and behaviour.

With the zeal of the convert, within a year of his vow, he told readers of his
newspaper Indian Opinion: "It is the duty of every thoughtful Indian not to
marry. In case he is helpless in regard to marriage, he should abstain from
sexual intercourse with his wife."

Meanwhile, Gandhi was challenging that abstinence in his own way. He set
up ashrams in which he began his first "experiments" with sex; boys and girls
were to bathe and sleep together, chastely, but were punished for any sexual
talk. Men and women were segregated, and Gandhi's advice was that
husbands should not be alone with their wives, and, when they felt passion,
should take a cold bath.

The rules did not, however, apply to him. Sushila Nayar, the attractive sister
of Gandhi's secretary, also his personal physician, attended Gandhi from
girlhood. She used to sleep and bathe with Gandhi. When challenged, he
explained how he ensured decency was not offended. "While she is bathing I
keep my eyes tightly shut," he said, "I do not know ... whether she bathes
naked or with her underwear on. I can tell from the sound that she uses soap."
The provision of such personal services to Gandhi was a much sought-after
sign of his favour and aroused jealousy among the ashram inmates.
As he grew older (and following Kasturba's death) he was to have more
women around him and would oblige women to sleep with him whom –
according to his segregated ashram rules – were forbidden to sleep with their
own husbands. Gandhi would have women in his bed, engaging in his
"experiments" which seem to have been, from a reading of his letters, an
exercise in strip-tease or other non-contact sexual activity. Much explicit
material has been destroyed but tantalising remarks in Gandhi's letters remain
such as: "Vina's sleeping with me might be called an accident. All that can be
said is that she slept close to me." One might assume, then, that getting into
the spirit of the Gandhian experiment meant something more than just
sleeping close to him.

It can't, one imagines, can have helped with the "involuntary discharges"
which Gandhi complained of experiencing more frequently since his return to
India. He had an almost magical belief in the power of semen: "One who
conserves his vital fluid acquires unfailing power," he said.

Meanwhile, it seemed that challenging times required greater efforts of

spiritual fortitude, and for that, more attractive women were required:
Sushila, who in 1947 was 33, was now due to be supplanted in the bed of the
77-year-old Gandhi by a woman almost half her age. While in Bengal to see
what comfort he could offer in times of inter-communal violence in the run-
up to independence, Gandhi called for his 18-year-old grandniece Manu to
join him – and sleep with him. "We both may be killed by the Muslims," he
told her, "and must put our purity to the ultimate test, so that we know that
we are offering the purest of sacrifices, and we should now both start
sleeping naked."

Such behaviour was no part of the accepted practice of bramacharya. He, by

now, described his reinvented concept of a brahmachari as: "One who never
has any lustful intention, who, by constant attendance upon God, has become
proof against conscious or unconscious emissions, who is capable of lying
naked with naked women, however beautiful, without being in any manner
whatsoever sexually excited ... who is making daily and steady progress
towards God and whose every act is done in pursuance of that end and no
other." That is, he could do whatever he wished, so long as there was no
apparent "lustful intention". He had effectively redefined the concept of
chastity to fit his personal practices.

Thus far, his reasoning was spiritual, but in the maelstrom that was India
approaching independence he took it upon himself to see his sex experiments
as having national importance: "I hold that true service of the country
demands this observance," he stated.

But while he was becoming bolder in his self-righteousness, Gandhi's

behaviour was widely discussed and criticised by family members and
leading politicians. Some members of his staff resigned, including two
editors of his newspaper who left after refusing to print parts of Gandhi's
sermons dealing with his sleeping arrangements.

But Gandhi found a way of regarding the objections as a further reason

tocontinue. "If I don't let Manu sleep with me, though I regard it as essential
that she should," he announced, "wouldn't that be a sign of weakness in me?"

Eighteen-year-old Abha, the wife of Gandhi's grandnephew Kanu Gandhi,

rejoined Gandhi's entourage in the run-up to independence in 1947 and by the
end of August he was sleeping with both Manu and Abha at the same time.

When he was assassinated in January 1948, it was with Manu and Abha by
his side. Despite her having been his constant companion in his last years,
family members, tellingly, removed Manu from the scene. Gandhi had
written to his son: "I have asked her to write about her sharing the bed with
me," but the protectors of his image were eager to eliminate this element of
the great leader's life. Devdas, Gandhi's son, accompanied Manu to Delhi
station where he took the opportunity of instructing her to keep quiet.

Questioned in the 1970s, Sushila revealingly placed the elevation of this

lifestyle to a brahmacharya experiment was a response to criticism of this
behaviour. "Later on, when people started asking questions about his physical
contact with women – with Manu, with Abha, with me – the idea of
brahmacharya experiments was developed ... in the early days, there was no
question of calling this a brahmacharya experiment." It seems that Gandhi
lived as he wished, and only when challenged did he turn his own
preferences into a cosmic system of rewards and benefits. Like many great
men, Gandhi made up the rules as he went along.

While it was commonly discussed as damaging his reputation when he was

alive, Gandhi's sexual behaviour was ignored for a long time after his death.
It is only now that we can piece together information for a rounded picture of
Gandhi's excessive self-belief in the power of his own sexuality. Tragically
for him, he was already being sidelined by the politicians at the time of
independence. The preservation of his vital fluid did not keep India intact,
and it was the power-brokers of the Congress Party who negotiated the terms
of India's freedom.

Gandhi: Naked Ambition is published by Quercus (£20)