Affairs of the Mind

Much heat was generated among the moral police when some youngsters organised a Kissing Festival in Kerala. This was of course put down, once again reaffirming that Indians are uncomfortable with any manifestation of carnality, even with the innocent kiss. Since the days of the Bhakti movement, the ideal that love should only be spiritual has left an indelible mark on the Indian imagination. Indeed, if we think of it, this tendency to forswear bodily contact is exemplified in our everyday discreet ‘namaste’ salutation.

Our Prime Minister has declared he is a confirmed celibate having dedicated himself to the nation, and so were the previous BJP leaders, Atul Behari Vajpayee, and Dr. Abdul Kalam. As it happens, the earlier saga of the freedom movement is also replete with asceticism, the relationships of Indian leaders and their female devotees being markedly spiritual.

Everyone knows now how the father of the nation battled against his libido having decided to be celibate at the age of 36. The tall and beautiful Madeleine Slade, daughter of an English Admiral, was commanded by him to shave off her golden locks so that she could serve him as Mira Behn without rousing those feelings in himself that he so deplored. She was of course in love with Mahatma Gandhi. She was to write: ‘I saw his slight figure sitting on his cushion on the floor, I felt, a strong sensation of light coming from his direction, it was a light I felt rather than saw till it exploded behind my eyes.’ In 1925 she wrote him her first letter. ‘My being is filled with a great joy and a great anguish. The joy of giving all I have to you and to your people and the anguish of being able to give so little,’ and signed it as his humble and most devoted servant. Poor Madeleine soon grew into the role of a sanyasin, though like most women around him she could rarely suppress jealousy of the others.

Long before Madeleine’s encounter with Indian leaders, Margaret Noble, an Irishwoman, met Swami Vivekananda in 1895 in a London aristocratic drawing-room and was enchanted by his ‘majestic personality,’ in saffron robes and a red waistband, sitting crosslegged and reciting Sanskrit slokas in a deep sonorous voice. She was to write later: ‘Suppose he had not come to London that time! Life would have been like a headless dream, for I always knew that I was waiting for something.... The arrow has found its place in the bow. But if he had not come! If he had meditated, on the Himalayan peaks! ... I, for one, had never been here!’ Irresistibly drawn, she followed him to Calcutta in 1898, when he gave her the name of Nivedita and made her a Bramacharyin. The Swamiji found her ‘a real lioness—to work for Indians, women especially. India cannot yet produce great women, she must borrow them from other nations. Your education, sincerity, purity, immense love, determination and above all, the Celtic blood make you just the woman wanted.’  In his ‘blessings’ to her he wrote her a poem:

The mother's heart, the hero's will
The sweetness of the southern breeze,

The sacred charm and strength that dwell
On Aryan altars, flaming, free;
All these be yours and many more

No ancient soul could dream before-
Be thou to India's future son
The mistress, servant, friend in one.

And Nivedita thought of him as her ‘King,’ and she sublimated her feelings considering herself to be his spiritual daughter prepared to serve the cause of India. Her grandfather had fought for Irish independence, while her upbringing in Church schools had readied her for a life of service and sacrifice. She died nine years after Vivekananda in 1911 and on her epitaph in Darjeeling are the simple words: Here reposes Sister Nivedita who gave her all to India.

Nivedita contributed many articles to a semi-revolutionary journal, Karma Yogin,  edited by Sri Aurobindo Ghosh. In search of him came Mirra Alfassa, born to Sephardic Jewish parents who has emigrated to France from the Ottoman Empire. She had received an elite education in the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and mixed easily with great artists like Rodin and Monet. Both her marriages failed. She went to Africa in search of esoteric knowledge since she had experienced visions as a teenager. She remembered one: ‘This music was being played, and I was up there – I was fourteen – and there were some leaded-glass windows - white windows, with no designs. I was gazing at one of them, feeling uplifted by the music, when suddenly through the window came a flash like a bolt of lightning. Just like lightning. It entered-my eyes were open-it entered like this, and then I... I had the feeling of becoming vast and all-powerful. And it lasted for days.’ She sought a spirituality not found in everyday Europe. Finally she was introduced to Sri Aurobindo, and remembered that years ago she had dreamt of a dark figure she had called Krishna who had guided her inner life. She said unlike Judaism where God is depicted as the judge of mankind, in Hinduism He was its ‘Lover.’ She returned to Pondicherry in 1920 and was acclaimed by Sri Aurobindo as the spiritual ‘Mother,’ who continued to be consulted by Indira Gandhi and other leaders over the next five decades.

In the pantheon of India’s spiritual leaders during the early years of the 20^th century the third name that comes effortlessly to mind is that of Jiddu Krishnamurti, once anointed by Annie Besant and other Theosophists as the semi-divine ‘World Teacher.’ Rosalind Williams, a beautiful and vivacious American became a friend and confidante who married another close associate. By the late 1920s Krishnamurti had discarded the role thrust upon him by the Theosophists, though he still remained a great teacher to everyone. According to an account written by Rosalind’s daughter, her parents became estranged soon after, and Krishnamurti and Rosalind had an intimate relationship, perhaps an affair, over several years, though they all lived together almost as a family.

If here we have a hint that a great Indian guru can have a relationship other than the normative spiritual one, this acceptance would be strongly advocated by the beautiful and rich Argentinian writer, Victoria Ocampo, who adored Gurudev Tagore, twice her age when she met him. He had gone to South America on a tour, but forgot everything and stayed with her in her stately home in Buenos Aires for months. Tagore’s biographers insist it was a platonic relationship, though some of his Purabi poems, acknowledged to be addressed to her, are of the love ordinary mortals can understand. Though she never followed him to India, she found ‘the days are endless since you went away.’ After his death in 1941, she said: ‘I guard everything I learned from him so that I may live it. So that I may live it as long as my strength permits me.’ She had thrust upon him as one memento of his visit an armchair, and it became the object of several intimate messages, for once when he was ill and sleepy she had bent over him and he had held her breast. As Thomas Mann says: ‘Truth demands the hard confession - that thought and spirit come badly off, in the long run, against nature.’

This primacy of the platonic even coloured the famous relationship Pandit Nehru had with Edwina Mountbatten, though with other partners he was known to be very much a ladies’ man, and she had quite a reputation in England as the centre of many male admirers, whom her husband gallantly accepted into the household. And yet Pamela Mountbatten writing about the historic affair insists it was platonic, and even Edwina is known to have told her husband that ‘it was mostly platonic.’ Quite.

Even within a marriage, such as between Babasaheb Ambedkar and Sharada Kabir, the platonic motive seems to predominate, for most of their time together she was his nurse. She had married him out of deep admiration, and even changed her name from Sharada to Savita to get rid of the last vestiges of her Saraswat Brahmin background. She said he loved her for her intelligence. ‘He may have appeared strict to the outsider, but towards me, he was always very loving. He almost trained me - he used to show me how to sit, how to talk, even how to make chapatis! Whenever he took me for important functions, he would personally pick out which saree I should wear. He would get irritated if everything didn't go according to his instructions. Yet, he never made me cry even once in his life.’The idyll ended within eight years with his death, and she was hounded by some of his followers for having once been a Brahmin, and even his son accused her of having caused his death!

The other famous marriages that come to mind were short and gave little happiness to the women. Netaji Subash Chandra Bose, after escaping from British India, spent a few years in Germany and Austria, where he secretly married his secretary Emilie Shenkl. Soon after they had a daughter, he had to leave in 1943 for the Far East to lead the Indian National Army. He never returned. Emilie was not treated well by the Germans and she was left in obscurity for many years till Netaji’s brother welcomed her as a family member when he visited her in Austria. She never visited India. Dr. Kotnis who had gone to help Mao Zedong during the Long March died like Dr. Bethune, his Canadian colleague, of overwork, and both are honoured in China, but little is known of his nurse wife, Guo Qinglan, or their son Yinhua [meaning Indian-Chinese].

The one great romantic story that lives from that period is about Jinnah and how he won the heart of Ruttanbhai Petit, the 16 year-old daughter of the rich Sir Dinshaw Maneckjee Petit. Ruttie as she was known was ‘the flower of Bombay,’ a veritable fairytale princess with beauty, brains, charm, and talent. Her father forbade them to meet again, but they were very much in love, and waited till she reached majority. Sarojini Naidu wrote to Sir Syed’s son, about their marriage: ‘The child has made far bigger sacrifices than she realises but Jinnah is worth it, he loves her.’ Ruttie followed him to London, and they had a daughter, but soon they parted never to meet again since he was committed to his politics. Within years she was dead of cancer, and it is reported that the only time anyone saw Jinnah break down in tears was at her funeral. She had written a last pathetic letter to him. ‘Try and remember me as the flower you had plucked, and not as the flower you tread upon.’

Not all was tragic in that famous period, however. Aly Khan, father of the present Aga Khan, made up for all the spirituality he must have found around him by having roaring affairs, with the mistress of the Prince of Wales, and with Churchill’s daughter-in-law, while still being married to Rita Hayworth, the star of that age. But even he could not match the libido of the earlier Maharajah of Patiala, Bhupinder Singh, who not only had many maharanis and countless concubines but is reported to have given Simla its Scandal Point. As Natwar Singh puts it succintly: ‘Every temptation was available to him and he resisted none.’ A persistent rumour has Curzon banning him from Simla after being caught in flagrante delicto with his daughter. Some historians have doubted the veracity of this rumour, for if it happened, it would have been around 1905, when he was hardly 14 and Irene, Curzon’s daughter only 8. But then, in later life, Irene seems to have matched the young maharajah in raunchiness, so we can only hope that since the child is the father – and also the mother – of the man/woman, they really gave good cause for Curzon’s ire. And we may also end this piece in the hope that the young leaders of India’s next generation will give us a really good fairytale romance that will be roses, roses, all the way!