In their philophical approach regarding how the struggle for India’s Freedom from British Colonial Rule must be conducted, Srinivasa Sastri and Mahatma Gandhi were indeed poles apart.
Gandhi looked upon himself as a saint-politician. Sastri looked upon himself as scholar-statesman. The contrast between the two men stood out starkly at times whenever Gandhi chose to weaponize his spiritualism and use it as a political tactical attack against the British establishment. Sastri, on the other hand, many a time weaponized his liberal value-system to shame British conscience and their sense of political fairplay.
Gandhi’s most preferred weapon thus was militant Sathyagraha while Sastri’s standard weapon was militant constitutionalism, both of which although fundamentally rooted in Ahimsa, India’s civilisational principle of Non-Violence, nonetheless and not too rarely, led to the two friends being at odds with each other.
An incident in 1933 happened which reveals the sharply contrasting philosphical outlook and political operating-style of Sastri and Gandhi as it had always existed and simmered beneath their otherwise brotherly relationship.
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Gandhi wrote the below letter to Sastri in Mylapore:
2nd May 1933
My dear Brother
Dare I ask for your blessings for the coming Yajna ? It is now nearing 2 a.m I have left my bed among other things to write this begging letter. If the fast does not meet with your approval, I know you are too true a brother to grant my request merely to please me.
With love, Yours
M. K. GANDHI
The “yajna” (observance of a sacrificial rite) that Gandhi was referring to in the letter was an intended twenty-one days’ fast that the Mahatma had resolved to volunatarily undertake from the 8th to 29th May 1933 in the Yerawada Prison. What was the reason for such a fast?
Gandhiji claimed it was part of his “Harijan work” i.e. his passionate campaign championing the cause of Harijan emancipation from caste oppression, abolition of Untouchability and social advancement of the Harijan population in India. However, Gandhi’s expression “purification of self and my associates...” was rather intriguing since there was a larger background story behind it. But before that story can be recounted here, first it is to Sastri’s reply to Gandhi’s letter that must be reproduced and read carefully so that the context can be understood.
This is Sastri’s letter below. In it we see him clearly tell the Mahatma right to his face that the idea of fasting does not fit in at all with Sastri’s own philosophical convictions. In a very gentle, subtle and characteristically inoffensive manner, Sastri also expresses his dismay at what we may today perhaps recognize to be the mystic mumbo-jumbo with which the Mahatma oftentimes disguised his pious self-flaggelation:
Private
MYLAPORE : 7th May 1933
Dearest Brother
After much thought and destruction of several drafts, I have decided that the best reply to your ‘ begging ‘ and most touching letter of the 2nd instant is the enclosed extract (i.e. in which Gandhi had stated “‘It is particularly prayer for the purification of self and my associates. .. .. I want more workers of unassailable purity.’). I trust it will sustain you ever so little in the ordeal which will have begun when it reaches Yeravada.
It would have been useless and, as you said in your first statement, embarrassing for me to try to dissuade. What remains for your friends and associates is to wish that you may come out of the ordeal not merely unscathed, but armed afresh with the strength of tapas for the struggle that seems without end.
I will not pretend for a moment that I approve of your fast. To one like me, born in Hinduism and bred up in it for long years, the arguments pro and con are thoroughly familiar. From sacred texts one might confute most of the reasoning in your statements. But beyond texts and mere authority is reason and humanity, on which you habitually fall back. Even in that ultimate court I fear we shall not be found on the same side.
Our values are different fundamentally. Tbe difference is radical, no sophistry can abolish it.
In spite of what you have said in the last revelation of your heart, I believe that too much self-communion and internal debate have undermined your judgement. The state of ecstasy when values are reversed, when day becomes night and night day, when pleasure becomes pain and pain pleasure, is rare even in the experience of mystics. The attempt to make it habitual and to adopt the language appropriate to that state as the language of everyday speech is, if I may use the expression, to walk on moral stilts. On occasions you appear to me, in strange contrast to your realism, to impose that mode of movement on the common men and women around you.
The atmosphere in such circumstances is apt to be thick with disappointment and grievous failure. And if the only correction possible were self-correction, the master must needs find himself doomed to the cell of penitence, which is next door to suicide. You have enough philosophy to understand that to claim divine sanction for a course of conduct is to withdraw it from the field of discussion and deprive it of direct validity to other minds. Whenever I come across the claim in your writing I cannot help quoting to myself the famous line of Kalidasa:
“विचार्येषु: प्रतिभासि मे त्वम्।”
You appear to me to be confounded by anxious thought.
I cannot tell you how much I deplore the publication of the story of Nila Nagini Devi. If it were merely a confession, I might understand it, though it would still repel me as the exposure of one’s sores. But why should you rub it in? The moral proclaims itself. Here again it is a deep-going disparity of taste. I am still in the grip of the world’s idea of decorum. You have gone beyond, and would repudiate low standards. With great effort I remind myself that hagiology is full of such records, and I must somehow get reconciled.
I did not mean to write at length, but the stuff inside has forced itself on your attention. Don’t mind it. Treat the letter as if it were nothing but the expression of my unchanged love and of my fervent wish that you should live long and serve the great causes you cherish. For, contrary to your teaching, I hold that you are more potent than your memory can be.
With affectionate thoughts, Yours always
V. S. SRINIVASAN
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It is interesting to see that Sastri minced no words in saying to Gandhi pointblank that “Our values are different fundamentally. The difference is radical, no sophistry can abolish it”. Sastri often found it tiresome to hear his friend Gandhi go on and on often moralising on even matters that were political and worldly and nothing to do with the spiritual. He even openly expressed his impatience with the Mahatma’s frequent invocation of his so-called “inner voice“… Gandhi himself was quite aware of Sastri’s impatience and wrote a tad apologetically in another letter of his (1932):
“I do wish I never spoke of God or the Inner Voice or Conscience. But, like “Ramnaam”, however much it may be abused, it has got to be repeated when it is relevant, and almost becomes imperative. Truth will receive a deep cut if, for fear of being misunderstood or even being called a fraud, I did not say boldly what I felt to be true”.
The other interesting line in Sastri’s letter is his reference to “Nila Nagini Devi“. He expresses mortification in no uncertain terms at Gandhi having written about it publicly which he describes as “a deep-going disparity of taste” … “that repels me as the exposure of one’s sores”.
Who was “Nila Nagini Devi“? What was she to Mahatma Gandhi? Why did Gandhi bring her name up in the context of his 21-day fast, championing at Yerawada the Harijan cause? What did she have to do with Gandhi’s “Harijan work”?
Ms. Nilla Cram Cook was an attractive American lady who had come to India in search of spiritual solace and self-discovery. Thanks to some friends in Ahmedabad, she had ended up as a volunteer sevak at the Ashram and an ardent disciple of Mahatma Gandhi himself with whom she began profusely corresponding on a host of Indian social issues such as Harijan upliftment and abolition of Untouchability, a cause that was very close to Gandhi’s heart. Ms. Cook began calling herself Nila Nagini Devi in all her correspondence with Gandhi.
To fully understand why in his letter to Sastri, Gandhi had referred to his 21-day proposed fasting as a “yajna” as a “prayer for the purification of self and my associates“, it becomes necessary to know a little background about Nila Nagini Devi. In an article ( https://www.theindiaforum.in/book-reviews/gandhis-american-disciple ), Gangeya Mukherjee explains to us what this American lady-disciple was to Gandhi.
QUOTE: “The account of Ms. Cook’s life in India makes for painful reading. Cook, or Nila Nagini Devi as she was also known, swirled in the currents of her mercurial temperament, her lack of inhibitions and striking beauty, drawing admirers to her. They were willing to provide her with logistical support for indulging her numerous itinerant whims, including introducing her to Indian royalty. Individuals as varied as ministers of Indian princes, venerable pedants, staid journalists such as Durga Das, and countless youths from all sorts of backgrounds were participants in her enterprises.
“Born to a broken marriage between bohemian American parents, raised for some years in Greece, married and divorced at a very young age, and generally disillusioned with life in the West, the talented and versatile Cook arrived in Kashmir in 1931 with her young child. Bereft quite soon of her inheritance, scarred by exploitative physical relationships, and with spiritual bliss still elusive, she appeared to find solace in Harijan service, having been introduced to it by Thakkar, the secretary of the Harijan Sevak Sangh. Her contact with Gandhi and his anti-untouchability campaign of 1932 soon followed.
“Beginning in November 1932, within the space of hardly a year, Cook wrote what can only be described as a flurry of letters to Gandhi, receiving usually prompt, though not always the expected, responses from him. Her letters, graduating from the initial address of “Revered Mahatmaji” and signed as “ever yours in service and devotion, Nila Nagini” to the final phase with “Beloved Bapu” and “With all our love, Nila”, contain her thoughts and plans for Harijan service, and many other things.
“They express her weakness before a desire that blurs both social norms and ethical principles; they complain about the hardships of slum housing or the defects of the Satyagraha Ashram; and they agonise about her physical ailments and those of her son, and even speak of her menstrual problems. Above all, the letters plead for guidance and nearness. As the volume reveals, Gandhi’s responses—even when he seems on the verge of giving up on her for her immorality and weakness before desire—never waver in their caring tone. He advises her on her diet and spiritual upliftment, on a possible pregnancy after an indiscreet encounter with a youth volunteer in Harijan service, and is solicitous about the welfare of her son. Gandhi remains, to all intents and purposes, a combination of a father and a mother to her.
“After a troubled stint in the Harijan cause and increasing restlessness in Satyagraha Ashram, Cook left Ahmedabad in October 1933, without informing Gandhi, never to return. Only a few letters were exchanged between them after this
“Gandhi’s relationship with Cook illustrates the natural affinity that women usually felt towards him, and his own conception of his generally filial approach towards participants of his movements, particularly the inmates of his ashrams.
“It also illustrates his rare understanding of the enchantment of regarding service to Harijans as an exotic experience other than an expiatory one, which made it necessary for one to be very vigilant against exploiting the vulnerabilities of the deprived and disinherited. Most of all, it illustrates the sacrality that Gandhi perceived in the Harijan cause, any other word being wholly inadequate to describe its place in his moral universe.
“Cook’s brief but disappointing relationship with Rudramani, a Harijan youth (in the Ashram), jolted Gandhi. Although in this case he was critical of Rudramani’s conduct, on the general plane, it rudely brought home to him the possibility of helpless men and women being treated as emotional and physical prey by volunteers turned predators, all in the guise of service. He was very aware that in informal interactions between young and healthy men and women, erotic desire could be at the root of attraction though it could be camouflaged as a spiritual yearning for a higher cause”. UNQUOTE
So, the fast that Gandhi told Sastri he was going to undertake was thus “prayer for the purification of self and my associates” and a way to atone for a sexual scandal that had happened at Sathyagraha Ashram in which a Harijan was both victim and perpetrator. And that was the real cause of such intense mystic agony for Gandhi’s troubled “inner voice” and which had thus compelled him to perform a self-imposed “yajna“! And all this according to Gandhi was part of his “Harijan work“! Sastri himself confessed that he had found that very hard to get reconciled to and so he wrote candidly to Gandhi:
“… if the only correction possible were self-correction, the master must needs find himself doomed to the cell of penitence, which is next door to suicide. You have enough philosophy to understand that to claim divine sanction for a course of conduct is to withdraw it from the field of discussion and deprive it of direct validity to other minds”.… I believe that too much self-communion and internal debate have undermined your judgement The state of ecstasy when values are reversed, when day becomes night and night day, when pleasure becomes pain and pain pleasure, is rare even in the experience of mystics. The attempt to make it habitual and to adopt the language appropriate to that state as the language of everyday speech is, if I may use the expression, to walk on moral stilts. On occasions you appear to me, in strange contrast to your realism, to impose that mode of movement on the common men and women around you”.
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What a brave but so very accurate character-profiling of the great man the whole country was looking up to — then and as even today — as a Mahatma!
(to be continued)
Sudarshan Madabushi