12-25-2006, 05:51 AM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Bapu's Human Tryst</b>
<i>The Mahatma's attachment to a beautiful Bengali woman threatened his marriage, reveals his grandson.</i>
RAJMOHAN GANDHI
www.outlookindia.com/full...F%29&sid=1
For nearly 90 years, Gandhi's large familyâwhich included, besides his wife, four sons, their wives and children, national leaders, fellow ashramites and freedom fighters and even his biographersânursed one of the few secrets in his open-book life: a passionate love relationship the Mahatma had with a fiery beauty from Bengal called Saraladevi. She was a dazzling woman, by all accountsâbelonging to the cream of Bengal's aristocratic intellectuals, a niece of Tagore's, a writer and musician who was hailed in her time as Bengal's Joan of Arc and goddess Durga come down to earth, and who drew around her a captivated circle of young men willing to fight and die at her instance. That Gandhi was clearly bewitched by her brilliance and beauty was no secret among his own circle of intimates, including C. Rajagopalachari, his sons, especially Devadas, and secretary Mahadev Desai, all of whom were worried enough to bring pressure upon him to end the affair for their sake and his. Even his wife Kasturba, one of the most unpossessive women in history, who took without a batting of an eyelid the series of infatuated women who passed in and out of her husband's crowded life, was badly shaken by Gandhi's evident intoxication with the spirited Saraladevi. Strangelyâor perhaps predictablyâ it was the one relationship in his life that even a compulsive confessor like Gandhi barely spoke about, keeping her deliberately out of his otherwise candid autobiography. Now his grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, breaks the silence and reconstructs in his forthcoming biography, Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, His People and an Empire, the moving story of the Mahatma's greatest temptation and how he struggled to overcome it. An extract:<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<i>The Mahatma's attachment to a beautiful Bengali woman threatened his marriage, reveals his grandson.</i>
RAJMOHAN GANDHI
www.outlookindia.com/full...F%29&sid=1
For nearly 90 years, Gandhi's large familyâwhich included, besides his wife, four sons, their wives and children, national leaders, fellow ashramites and freedom fighters and even his biographersânursed one of the few secrets in his open-book life: a passionate love relationship the Mahatma had with a fiery beauty from Bengal called Saraladevi. She was a dazzling woman, by all accountsâbelonging to the cream of Bengal's aristocratic intellectuals, a niece of Tagore's, a writer and musician who was hailed in her time as Bengal's Joan of Arc and goddess Durga come down to earth, and who drew around her a captivated circle of young men willing to fight and die at her instance. That Gandhi was clearly bewitched by her brilliance and beauty was no secret among his own circle of intimates, including C. Rajagopalachari, his sons, especially Devadas, and secretary Mahadev Desai, all of whom were worried enough to bring pressure upon him to end the affair for their sake and his. Even his wife Kasturba, one of the most unpossessive women in history, who took without a batting of an eyelid the series of infatuated women who passed in and out of her husband's crowded life, was badly shaken by Gandhi's evident intoxication with the spirited Saraladevi. Strangelyâor perhaps predictablyâ it was the one relationship in his life that even a compulsive confessor like Gandhi barely spoke about, keeping her deliberately out of his otherwise candid autobiography. Now his grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, breaks the silence and reconstructs in his forthcoming biography, Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, His People and an Empire, the moving story of the Mahatma's greatest temptation and how he struggled to overcome it. An extract:<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->