The making of a globalised Hindu: the unknown genealogy of Gandhi’s concept of brahmacarya

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although Gandhi had rigorously identified himself as a ‘Sanātanī Hindū (traditional Hindu)’, his idea and practice of religious politics (i.e. satyāgraha) have inspired people across the world. Recent studies point out that Gandhi’s life-long experiments with ‘brahmacarya (sexual celibacy)’ were the key to understand Gandhi’s contextualized-universal idea of religious politics. This paper aims to examine the intellectual evolution of Gandhi’s concept of brahmacarya. Gandhi was a trilingual speaker in Gujarati, Hindi, and English, and no previous works have studied Gandhi’s concept of brahmacarya using primary materials in all three languages. In this paper, I will proffer a cross-linguistic exploration into the genealogy of Gandhi’s concept of brahmacarya. In so doing, I will highlight some of the professed ‘deep influence(s)’ on his life; I will assess how Śrīmad Rājcandra (a native Gujarati poet), Svāmī Vivekānanda (a Bengali intellectual and nationalist), and western progressive thinkers such as Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and John Woodroffe, ‘influenced’ Gandhi. As a result of these explorations, this paper concludes that Gandhi’s brahmacarya is best seen as a concept that entails multi-layered roots which transcend the epistemological boundaries between ‘Indian’, ‘imaginative’, and even the hybrid amalgam of ‘the (other) wests’.