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Loving and losing Gandhi
Sudhir Kakar's new book fictionalises the relationship between Gandhi and Mira Behn, taking consi- derable liberty.
In her last days, the Englishwoman who Mahatma Gandhi made his spiritual heir, refused to talk about him - and in their lifetime both she and the man India reveres as father of the nation, grappled between soul and body in one mesmerizing relationship.
These are revelations in a new book by psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar Mira and the Mahatma - a fictionalized account of the life and time of Madeline Slade who Gandhi renames Mira.
This is the extraordinary story of a girl passionately in love with a distant messiah, who leaves her home and family to come to India, to the Sabarmati Ashram of Gandhi in Gujarat, chops her auburn hair, takes a vow of celibacy and dedicates her life to living like a poor Indian like her guru, Gandhi.
"To you, I must pour out all that is in my heart," she wrote to Gandhi, who she called "Bapu" or father, like all his other followers.
"I shall go out of my mind if I try to suppress it. A tinny voice of doubt, a feeble flapping of intellect's wings whispers, 'Will you accept the pouring out of all that I have held back for so many years?'
"Will you hold me, contain me, so that I do not scatter into millions of tiny pieces - cold stars forever condemned to populate a cold universe?"
When she arrives at the Ashram in 1925, this daughter of a British admiral who hates dancing and prefers the company of horses than men, Gandhi had been running it for around six years.
In it the man who would lead India to freedom and give a world a new meaning to resistance had built the microcosm of all that he stood for - a simple life, lived in honesty, dignity, grace, and without the caste discriminations that dogged Indian life.
There he welcomed Madeline, naming her Mira after the great Rajput poetess who deserted the material world in search of her divine lord, Krishna.
"She was someday deeply connected to the spirit of Gandhi, who understood Gandhi like no other, who wanted to carry within her the spirit of Gandhi.
"Only the body came in the way," Kakar said. "He (Gandhi) saw in her the flag-bearer of his ideals."
Kakar said Gandhi was acutely aware of the dilemmas of his relationship with Mira, more aware, in fact, than her. "He tells her that if you only want my soul, then why do you wish to be so near me all the time?
"Why do you need to touch me?"
Kakar, who has taught at the University of Chicago and Harvard, and now teaches at Insead Fontainebleu in France, calls himself an admirer, though not a worshipper of Gandhi.
He said Mira was tremendously disturbed by the way Gandhi's legacy was forsaken after his death. "She was in the hills when Gandhi was assassinated.
"History does not record what he reaction was when she heard the news but it must have been the collapsing of her universe. She left India in 1958 and those were the times of the great socialist dreaming in the country - when big dams were being called the temples of modern India.
"Gandhi's ideal village economy had disappeared."
And Mira had decided to protect her Gandhi from everyone else. "When I met in 1965, she refused to speak about Gandhi. She had decided that since no one understood him, she would not bother to explain, that no one was worthy of Gandhi.
"Instead she spoke of her other great love Beethoven, who biography she was writing. Before she died in 1982, she never spoke about Gandhi to anyone."
