That the Mahatma saw the suppression of sexual cravings as one of his greatest spiritual challenges and sought to test the same by having close women associates share his bed is well known.
Admitting the psychoanalytical possibility that the above experiments bear out an old man?s infantile need for motherly warmth, Sudhir Kakar?s latest book Mad and Divine nonetheless goes on to argue that the Mahatma was a pioneer of a new spirituality: ?Whereas artistic and scientific creativity is limited to the individual, creativity in the social and political worlds, Gandhi?s chosen field of action, required that the masses were ready to recognise his inner voice as their own.? Even his political invention par excellence ? the satyagraha ? had a spiritual goal, to touch the hearts of both the so-called terrorists and the rulers seeking to wipe them out, to have the whole nation admit to the primacy of altruism.
Overall Kakar?s broader concern in the book is reconciling the science of psychoanalysis with the discipline of spirituality, whether it is with reference to hagiographies or common, everyday religious rituals. In training as a psychoanalyst, he remembers feeling that he was being led away from his native Indian imagination, into a Freudian worldview where all gods had feet of clay and all ritualistic performance had to be viewed with suspicion. Times have however changed. No longer is modernity considered incompatible with the wondrous narratives that form the core of divinely inflected experiences, altering states of consciousness much as the analyst seeks to do.
Kakar?s balancing act cannot however escape the sexism of most Freudian and religious dogmas. Take his idolisation of the ribald and tantric tales of Drupka Kunley. It seems that this lama seduced some 5,000 virgins, overwhelming each of them into following him on his ?spiritual? journey. Each of them was then abandoned at a lonely spot that the lama selected for her meditations. Kakar says that the intense brevity of these affairs illustrates the importance of sex as a tantric aid to enlightenment. Sure, he offers a passing apologia to the feminists who have exposed the abusive aspect of gurus consorting with their disciples. But this does not really temper his general glorification of the male organ, uncritically lauded as the ?thunderbolt?. More interesting and less offensive is the way in which Kakar traces the iconoclasm shared by all the giants whose lives he maps on a psyche-spirit axis. Rajneesh, whom the author rightly describes as a pioneer in the globalisation of spirituality, called for a rejection of all conventional values, going to the extent of exhorting his followers to ?be absolutely selfish?. Gandhi was no less of an oddball in seeing fearlessness as the first requisite of spirituality. He did not shrink from stating even his most controversial beliefs publicly: ?Thousands of Hindu and Muslim women come to me. They are like my own mothers, sisters and daughters. But if an occasion should arise requiring me to share the bed with any of them I must not hesitate, if I am the brahmachari I claim to be. If I shrink from the test, I write myself down as a coward and a fraud.?
