‘Gandhi fell in love with Tagore’s niece’

Mahatma Gandhi fell passionately in love with the beautiful Saraladevi Chaudhuri, a writer and niece of Rabindranath Tagore, at the age of 50. It threatened his family life and his work, his grandson writes in the recently published biography of the Father of the Nation.

Rajmohan Gandhi writes, “I wanted to capture the real man in my book, so I couldn’t leave out this episode of my grandfather’s life.”
According to a report in the Sunday Telegraph here, although Gandhi’s friendship with Saraladevi was known at the time, the full extent of his relationship with the writer three years his junior has not been revealed until now.
Gifted, well-informed and driven, Saraladevi was 29 when Gandhi first saw her, in 1901, conducting an orchestra as it played a song she had written for the Congress party.
But it was not until she was 47, and married to newspaper editor Rambhuj Dutt Chaudhuri, that Gandhi fell for her, while staying at their house in Lahore.
Chaudhuri was in jail for his part in the struggle against the British and soon after he arrived, Gandhi — by now dedicated to personal celibacy — wrote in a letter: “Saraladevi’s company is very endearing... She looks after me very well.”
Within months, he was thinking of their relationship in terms of a “spiritual marriage”, says his grandson, who admits he is unsure what his grandfather meant by this.


Coutesy:TOI