The more I ponder over the lives of great men in world’s history, the more I feel compelled to conclude that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was perhaps the greatest of them all. What we knew of our prophets, messiahs, and teachers is from hearsay: most of it entrusted with myth, magic, miracles and make-believe. Any thinking person has to take it with large spoonfuls of salt. Not so in the case of Gandhi.
- Khushwant Singh, The Tribune.
Of all the seekers and spiritualists who were drawn to Gandhi during his long, nonviolent struggle against British colonial rule, perhaps “none stood out so vividly as a tall, broad-shouldered and rather imperious-looking Englishwoman named Madeleine Slade.” Madeline was the daughter of a British Admiral who spent part of her childhood in Bombay.
She returned to India at the age of 33 to join Gandhi’s Ashram. She chopped off her hair, traded her Western clothes for an outfit of homespun cotton and embraced Gandhi’s principles of simplicity and self-denial. Gandhi, in return, named her Mira – for her devotion seemed no less. Soon, Mirabehn as she was called in the ashram, was elevated to the status of Gandhi’s foremost disciple. Over two decades, Gandhi and Mira exchanged over 500 letters. But was there more to the relationship?
Sudhir Kakkar explores this question in Mira and the Mahatma. He doesn’t suggest that the relationship ever actually turned sexual, he does suggest that Slade fell passionately in love with Gandhi, who had taken a vow of celibacy, and that Gandhi may have been tempted by her affections before the intensity of her feelings caused him to all but banish her from his life, to her everlasting despair.
She eventually started her own ashram, and activities on behalf of India’s independence movement earned her numerous stays in British colonial jails. Slade later fell in love with Prithvi Singh, a legendary Indian revolutionary, but he too spurned her affections. She left India in 1958 and moved to a town near Vienna, where Kakar, then a student, met her in 1965. She refused to answer any of his questions about Gandhi before she died in 1982. The book is light and easy to read, and left me with a lot of questions and not many answers. Yet there were the answers. You have to read the book to understand what I mean.