A penitential fast concluded
December 1, 2023
As December begins, I’m relatively pleased with how the first year of this Substack has gone. I’m on track to have about 125 posts for 2023, covering a third of the year. I hope after a few years to have a different post for every day of the year, ready to publish as a book. But it’s low on my list of priorities at the moment.
A quick search of what Gandhi was up to in December revealed that on December 1, 1925, he finished a 7-day fast. This fast isn’t one of the epic ones; it’s better classified as one of his penitential fasts, in the same vein as the 7-day and 14-day fast he’d undertaken in South Africa. In those cases, some members of his voluntary community had been caught in an inappropriate relationship, and Gandhi took responsibility for his failure as a leader with the fasts.
The 1925 incident took place at Sabarmati Ashram, which Gandhi had founded in Ahmedabad a decade earlier. Biographer Judith Brown describes it along with some of the problems that cropped up over the years:1
There were constant squabblings and personality clashes, particularly among the women, disagreements when they attempted to have a single kitchen for the whole ashram, and sexual experiments and relationships which defied the principles of purity and chastity. It was one of these fairly minor incidents among the boys in the ashram school which in 1925 made Gandhi fast for a week.
Most of the biographies are silent on this particular fast, although Robert Payne writes: “Some boys had been caught in homosexual practices.”2 At the time, Gandhi explained to the readers of Young India that “I discovered errors among the boys and somewhat among the girls.”3
Whatever the specific details, Gandhi had become cocky about his fasting abilities, having completed his first 21-day fast (for Hindu-Muslim unity) the previous year. For a mere seven days, he was sure he “would be able to work all [week].” Halfway through, Payne says he suffered from nausea and had to stop all work. He lost nine pounds over the week, which sounds about right for me, but for Gandhi that was 8% of his body weight!
On December 1, 1925, he summoned the boys to his bedside and enumerated the different ways he could have responded to their behavior. First was “the easy road of corporal punishment,” which he rejected because in his experience, “it is futile and even harmful.” The second option was indifference, which did not appeal to him. Last was “the method of Love.” As head of the community, he punished himself, trusting the boys would learn something from it. Perhaps they did.
What other ways could Gandhi have dealt with the boys?
Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (Judith Brown, 1989) p. 200
The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (Robert Payne, 1969) p. 378
The Latest Fast (November 30, 1925)