An unnecessary unit

July 19, 2023

When the Zulu Rebellion broke out in South Africa in 1906, Gandhi got permission to raise a unit of stretcher-bearers to serve as an ambulance corp. For a few short weeks, the 20 men, led by Sgt-Major Gandhi himself, followed British troops around and performed light hospital work. Wounds were treated, bandages changed, and camps disinfected. In a handful of cases they actually carried men on stretchers, all of whom were suffering from self-inflicted injuries or wounded by friendly fire.

To describe this as a war is to downplay its lopsided nature. Using modern machine guns, the British had killed close to 4,000 native Africans armed with spears and leather shields. On the British side, 31 lives were lost. The conflict might have been better described as the Zulu Massacre. On July 19, 1906, the Indian Stretcher-Bearer Corps was disbanded. The men were thanked for their service and proceeded home.

While the time in the field hadn’t given the men any combat experience, it had offered up something else: time to think. The group marched up to 40 miles a day across the sparsely populated countryside of Natal. It was winter in the southern hemisphere, the weather was pleasant, and Gandhi notes that on these marches he “often fell into deep thought.” At the age of 36, it was a perfect time for him to consider the path he’d walk for the second half of his life.

After careful consideration and conversations with others, Gandhi decided to take a vow of brahmacharya. For simplicity’s sake, I translate it as a vow of celibacy, but there are some minor distinctions. Gandhi concluded that “one aspiring to serve humanity with his whole soul,” would be handicapped by “engag[ing] in the pleasures of family life and in the propagation and rearing of children.” With the decision made, he headed home to tell his wife Kasturba.

Gandhi never quite explains how he reached this conclusion. His voluntary communities were full of families with children, and Tolstoy Farm would be founded a few years later specifically to support families where the male breadwinner was incarcerated as part of their struggle. So why couldn’t he have done the same?

One of his biographers (the specific one escapes me at the moment) suggested that Gandhi’s vow was to protect his wife. This seems very plausible to me. She’d nearly died after giving birth to their son Devadas in 1902, and another pregnancy could have been fatal. They began sleeping in separate beds at some point afterward; his Autobiography says his “main object was to escape having more children.” But it wasn’t until 1906 that he made the vow that he would keep for the rest of his life.

Can you think of any reasons why having children would assist “one in aspiring to serve humanity with his whole soul?”