Kasturba, Gandhi’s Wife
My heart is singing with something to share. I just finished reading a 70 page booklet, “Kasturba, the Wife of Gandhi,” by Sushila Nayyar, (Pendle Hill pamphlets, Wallingford, PA). It’s the most heart- touching book I’ve read in way-too-long. It’s only, maybe, the last 15 years of her life; she died around age 75. Exhausted in a very long imprisonment, she lay back in Gandhi’s arms and her spirit left. “She passed away in my lap!” He exclaimed. “Could it be better? I am happy beyond measure.” Though he also added, “She was an indivisible part of me. Her passing away left a vacuum which never will be filled.” He was so pulled down by her death that he caught Malaria, which forced the British to let him out of prison.
Theirs was a typical Hindu marriage of their time. (Though my American mother also seemed to live by the same value!) The central goal of all Kasturba’s activity (she was called Ba) was to support her husband in his life and work. When he went to jail or prison, they would arrest her also because – she was right there doing what he was doing. When he fasted, she fasted, except that she would take one meal a day of milk and fruit to be strong enough to take care of him. She was barely educated and he was a lawyer. He considered it a duty of his marriage to educate her, so whenever they were in prison and, so, had time, he’d sit down and teach her. However, I’ve heard it said that it was she who first taught him the practice of ”Satyagraha,” his method of non-cooperation with the British. Because of the imbalance in their education and the cultural attitudes of who wields power in the marriage, when she felt he was doing something wrong, her instinctive method was to do non-violent non-cooperation. This proved to be a perfect analogy for the political situation of the Indians with the British colonial rulers. Having no army nor arms to overthrow the Brits, Gandhi developed this careful determined method of non-cooperation which eventually succeeded in ridding India of the rule of Great Britain!
I live in a different culture and time than they and this kind of marriage would be questioned now. Because of equal education and birth control, women often have their own creative ideas to pursue, so marriage shifts into mutual help. But Gandhi and Kasturba were truly one, and that gave double power to Gandhi’s determination to use Satyagraha and move those Brits out. Today an understanding of the union of these two came to me like the proverbial lightbulb: She WAS the ordinary dear people to whom he gave every ounce of his life force. She was his closest experience of the value and dignity and rights of the common Indian people.