Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House. Dominique Lapierre

      To Gandhi, with his convoluted philosophy of sex, her words had special importance. Since he had sworn his own vow of chastity, Gandhi had maintained that sexual continence was the most important discipline his truly non-violent followers, male and female, had to master. His ideal non-violent army would be composed of sexless soldiers because otherwise, Gandhi feared, their moral strength would desert them at a critical moment.

      Gandhi saw in Manu’s words the chance to make of her the perfect female votary. ‘If out of India’s millions of daughters, I can train even one into an ideal woman by becoming an ideal mother to you,’ he told her, ‘I shall have rendered a unique service to womankind.’ But first, he felt he had to be sure she was telling the truth. Only his closest collaborators were accompanying him in Noakhali, he informed her, but she would be welcome provided she submitted to his discipline and went through the test to which he meant to subject her.

      They would, he decreed, share each night the crude straw pallet which passed for his bed. He regarded himself as a mother; she had said she found nothing but a mother’s love in him. If they were both truthful, if he remained firm in his ancient vow of chastity and she had never known sexual arousal, then they would be able to lie together in the innocence of a mother and daughter. If one of them was not being truthful, they would soon discover it.

      If, however, Manu was being truthful then, Gandhi believed, she would flourish under his close and constant supervision. His own sexless state would stifle any residual desire still lurking in her. Pygmalion-like, a transformation would come over her. She would develop clarity of thought and firmness of speech. A new spirit would suffuse the girl, giving her a pure, crystalline devotion to the great task which awaited her.

      Manu had accepted and her lithe figure had followed Gandhi’s traces across the swamp-lands of Noakhali. As Gandhi had known it would, his decision had immediately provoked the consternation of his little party.

      ‘They think all this is a sign of infatuation on my part,’ he told Manu after a few nights together. ‘I laugh at their ignorance. They do not understand.’

Very few people would. Only the purest of Gandhi’s followers would be able to follow the complex reasoning behind this latest manifestation of a great spiritual struggle, which for Gandhi, went all the way back to that evening in South Africa in 1906 when he had announced to his wife his decision to take the vow of Brahmacharya, chastity. In swearing that pledge,^* Gandhi was setting out on a path almost as old as Hinduism itself. For countless centuries, a Hindu’s route to self-realization had passed by the sublimation of that vital force responsible for the creation of life. Only by forcing his sexual energy inward to fuel the furnace of his spiritual force, the Hindu ancients maintained, could a man achieve the spiritual intensity necessary to self-realization.

      To aid men sworn to lead the chaste life, those Hindu sages had laid down a code of conduct for Brahmacharya called the nine-fold wall of protection. A true Brahmachari was not supposed to live among women, animals or eunuchs. He was not allowed to sit on the same mat with a woman or even gaze upon any part of a woman’s body. He was counselled to avoid the sensual blandishments of a hot bath, an oily massage or the alleged aphrodisiac properties of milk, curds, ghee or fatty foods.

      Gandhi had not become chaste so as to live in a Himalayan cave, however. That kind of chastity involved little self-discipline or moral merit, he maintained. He had taken his vow because he firmly believed the sublimation of his sexual energies would give him the moral and spiritual power to accomplish his mission. His kind of Brahmachari was a man who had so suppressed his sexual urge that he could move normally in the society of women without feeling any sexual desire in himself or arousing it in them. A Brahmachari, he wrote, ‘does not flee the company of women’, because for him ‘the distinction between man and woman almost disappears’.

      The real Brahmachari’s ‘sexual organs will begin to look different’, Gandhi declared. ‘They remain as mere symbols of his sex and his sexual secretions are sublimated into a vital force pervading his whole being.’ The perfect Brahmachari in Gandhi’s mind was a man who could ‘lie by the side even of a Venus in all her naked beauty, without being physically or mentally disturbed’.

      It was an extraordinary ideal and Gandhi’s fight to attain it was doubly difficult because the sex drive he was struggling to suppress had been strongly and deeply rooted. For years after taking his vow, Gandhi experimented with different diets, looking for one which would have the slightest possible impact on his sexual organs. While thousands of Indians sought out exotic foods to stimulate their desires, Gandhi spurned in turn spices, green vegetables, certain fruits, in his efforts to stifle his.

      Thirty years of discipline, prayer and spiritual exercise were needed before Gandhi reached the point at which he felt he had rooted out all sexual desire from his mind and body. His confidence in his achievement was shattered one night in Bombay in 1936, in what he referred to as ‘my darkest hour’. That night, at the age of 67, thirty years after he’d sworn his Brahmachari’s vow, Gandhi awoke from a dream with what would have been to most men of that age a source of some satisfaction, but was to Gandhi a calamity, an erection. There, quivering between his loins, was proof he had still not reached the ideal towards which he’d been striving for three decades. Gandhi was so overwhelmed by anguish at ‘this frightful experience’, that he swore a vow of total silence for six weeks.

      He pondered for months over the meaning of his weakness, debating whether he should retreat into a kind of Himalayan cave of his own making. He finally concluded his horrible nightmare was a challenge to his spiritual force thrown up by the forces of evil. He decided to accept the challenge, to press on to his goal of extirpating the last traces of sexuality from his being.

      As his confidence in the mastery of his desires came back, he gradually extended the range of physical contact he allowed himself with women. He nursed them when they were ill and allowed them to nurse him. He took his bath in full view of his fellow ashramites, male and female. He had his daily massage virtually naked, with young girls most frequently serving as his masseuses. He often gave interviews or consulted the leaders of his Congress Party while the girls massaged him. He wore few clothes and urged his disciples, male and female, to do likewise because clothes he said, only encouraged a false sense of modesty. The only time he ever addressed himself directly to Winston Churchill was in reply to his famous phrase ‘half-naked fakir’. He was trying to be both, Gandhi said, because the naked state represented the true innocence for which he was striving. Finally, he decreed that there would be no problem in men and women who were faithful to their vow of chastity sleeping in the same room at night, if they happened, in the performance of their duties, to find themselves together at nightfall.

      The decision to have Manu share his pallet so he could guide more totally her spiritual growth was, to Gandhi, a natural outgrowth of that philosophy. During the agonizing days of his penitent’s pilgrimage, her delicate figure was rarely out of his sight. From village to village, she shared the crude shelters offered him by the peasants of Noakhali. She massaged him, prepared his mudbaths, cared for him when he was striken with diarrhoea. She slept and rose with him, prayed by his side, shared the contents of his beggar’s bowl. One bitter February night she awoke to find the old man shaking violently by her side. She massaged him, heaped on his shivering frame whatever scraps of cloth she could find in the hut. Finally, Gandhi dozed off and, she later noted, ‘we slept cosily in each other’s warmth until prayer time’.

      For Gandhi, secure in his own conscience, there was nothing improper or even remotely sexual in his relations with Manu. Indeed, it is almost inconceivable that the faintest tremor of sexual arousal passed between them. To the Mahatma, the reasoning which had led him to perform what was, for him, a duty to Manu, was sufficient justification for his action. Perhaps, however, deep in his subconscious, other forces he ignored helped propel him to it.

      In the twilight of his life, Gandhi was a lonely man. He had lost his wife and closest friend in wartime prison. He was losing the support of some of his oldest followers. He risked losing the dream he’d pursued for decades. He had never had a daughter and, perhaps, the one failure