What is it about the Guinness World Records that makes Indians dizzy with anticipation and sends them on a bizarre journey of self-gratification?

A number of public commentators, among them a New York Times correspondent, appear to have stumbled upon this phenomenon in recent months, but it is something that struck my attention nearly 20 years ago.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a man who is rather keen on records. Witness, for example, the infamous  on which his name had been embroidered with gold color thread in stripes, or the construction that is afoot to build the largest statue in the world just outside Baroda—a monument of faith and folly to Sardar Patel, the architect (as the statue seeks to recognize) of Indian “unity.” In 2014, apparently at Modi’s behest, the United Nations General Assembly agreed to designate June 21 as International Yoga Day.

And so it was celebrated this June.

There is much that is newsworthy about the events that transpired, not the least the fact that yoga may be India’s most successful and globalized spiritual commodity.

Therein lies the source of an anxiety that success has ironically generated. Even as many Indians—or rather Hindus—rejoice in the universalization of yoga, some are also alarmed by its commodification, giving little thought to the fact that globalization and commodification go hand-in-hand. And indeed there are others, the self-appointed guardians of the faith, such as the relatively young and cocksure acolytes of the faith who staff diasporic organizations of the likes of the Hindu American Foundation, who have strenuously sought to wage a war against those who—stripping yoga of its purported roots in Hindu traditions or what is vaguely described as Indian/Hindu spiritual traditions—have embraced it purely as a system of exercises and meditational techniques.

International Yoga Day, however, was most interesting for something altogether different, namely an attempt in Delhi, spearheaded by Modi himself, to bring laurels to India by having the country set two new records that would merit mention in the Guinness Book of Records. In the matter of records, at least, Indians recognize a copy or a cheap imitation when they see one, and the truly aspiring Indians who seek what they think is global recognition have never settled for the Indian Book of Records or the Limca Book of Records.

Never mind the fact that some who have sought to blaze a trail of glory by having themselves recognized as the holder of a world record are probably clueless about Guinness and might even be teetotallers. They are certainly knowledgeable enough about the fact that an entry in the Limca Book of Records isn’t going to earn them any cultural capital.

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Modi and his ministers were, moreover, resolved that International Yoga Day should be marked by India claiming, in some distinct fashion, ownership and exclusive authorship of the idea of yoga. Bikram himself has only attempted to patent certain asanas or, to be more precise, his particular style and even the milieu for yoga—the temperature of the room in each and every Bikram yoga studio is set at 40.6 Celsius or 105 Fahrenheit. But what the Indian government seeks to do is to patent the very idea of yoga.

One government official interviewed recently on the subject of India’s preparations for the celebration of International Yoga Day admitted that the prime minister is “insistent that the event makes an impact internationally.” Another official at the newly created Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy (AYUSH) ministry, charged with organizing events for the momentous day, his team as “trying very hard to get the record set but the rules of the record are tough.”

On the anointed day, Prime Minister Modi decided to lead the country by example. The photograph published in The Hindustan Times the following day captured the event well: The leader must be part of a collective and yet singular, showing both his affinity with the masses and his ability to guide and inspire them.

Here he is at the head of the masses: Strikingly, it is a group of women, the cadres who one is tempted to say form the storm troopers of his movement, who are immediately seated behind him in rows. Much more can be said about the photograph and the interplay of masculinity and a feminized nation. But what is not less striking is that Modi and the thousands who followed him in this orchestrated display are seated on the Rajpath—the Path of Kings—a colonial thoroughfare now appropriated in the service of a rejuvenated and disciplined nation.

Nearly 40,000 women and men—35,985 to be precise, since to deal with records is to give one’s allegiance to precision—followed Modi, thus establishing a new world record for the largest yoga class and eclipsing the old record which was set in November 2005, when 29,973 students attended a yoga class, drawn from 362 schools, at the Vivekananda Kendra at Jiwaji University, Gwalior, in Central India. Shripad Naik, the minister of AYUSH, declared that “it is a matter of pride for India that we have broken two records in one day.” But Naik neglected to say that the second Guinness World Record noted (but not yet officially recognized) at that day’s yoga event—namely the presence of nationals from 84 countries—did not previously exist. It is doubtless an interesting and perhaps impressive fact that nationals of seven dozen countries thought it fit to become part of history (to use the common idiom of our times), but no record was broken.

“A Nation of Freaks”

One suspects that this second record is much like the attempt to introduce kabaddi—a contact team sport which, to invoke a very personal definition, is yoga on the run and revolves around strategies of breathing and tagging one’s opponents—at the Olympics. Since India is generally starved for medals, kabaddi is nearly a fool-proof way of ensuring that India does not appear at the rock bottom of the medals tally, alongside the Ivory Coast, Bhutan, Zambia and the like. As the entry on kabaddi on Wikipedia states: “India is the most successful team on the world stage, having won every world cup and Asian Games title so far, in both men’s and women’s categories.” Kabaddi is, however, only played in South Asian countries and among some of the more enthusiastic diasporic communities from the Indian sub-continent.

We are, of course, still far from understanding what is it that prompts Indians to make a run for the Guinness Book of Records. In my first ruminations on this subject, I wrote thus:

“A certain anxiety, first generated during the colonial period, and subsequently aggravated by the process of nation-building, over masculinity and the manliness of a people, no less of a nation, must also account to a great degree for the quest among Indians to have their names etched in the Guinness Book. Part of the ethos of manliness consists simply in gaining recognition, in being acknowledged. One long-lasting effect of colonialism has been that the Indian continues to look up to the white European male, who confers recognition upon inferiors, and who has established the standard that the Indian (like other formerly colonized people) must meet. That is the canonical truth, the qanoon of this world.”

However, as I then argued, and would still insist upon today, the matter is considerably more complex, since many of the records established by the Indians—for running backward over the longest distance, for having the longest fingernails or for standing for a period of 17 years—are profoundly disturbing to some Indian elites, who would much rather see India recognized for “genuine achievements” rather than be dubbed a nation of freaks, charlatans and eccentrics.

*[This article was originally published on the author’s blog, .]

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A celibate for the greater part of his life, continues to attract nearly unrivaled attention — often for the that did not take place. Even his friends and admirers, who revered him for bringing ethics to the political life, or for never demanding of others what he did not first demand of himself, were quite certain that Gandhi was unable to comprehend that a woman and a man might enjoy a perfectly healthy sexual relationship with each other.

, seldom critical of the personal life of his political mentor, was convinced that Gandhi harbored an “unnatural” suspicion of the sexual life. And he deplored, as did many others, Gandhi’s strongly held view that sexual intercourse, other than for purposes of procreation, had no place in civilized life — not even among married couples. Marxists have long subscribed to the view that Gandhi was a “romantic,” a hopeless idealist and even a hypocrite; to this a chorus of voices added the thought that Gandhi was an insufferable “puritan.”

A Perfect Satyagrahi

Gandhi’s discomfort with the sexual life, according to one widely accepted strand of thought, commenced when his father passed away shortly after his marriage to Kasturba. Though the young Gandhi liked to nurse his ailing father, one evening he was unable to contain his urge to share a night of ribaldry with his young wife. He had just withdrawn to the bedroom when a knock on the door announced that his father had passed away.

Gandhi was, it has been argued, never able to forgive himself his transgression, and became determined to master his sexual drive. A more complex narrative links his renunciation of sex to his firm conviction, first developed during the heat of a campaign of nonviolent resistance to oppression in South Africa, that it compromised his ability to be a perfect .

Many commentators have pointed to his failure to consult with Kasturba before he took a vow of celibacy at the age of 37 as a sign of his cruelty and tendency to be self-serving.

“Dirty Old Man”

One British reviewer of Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography of Mahatma Gandhi, however, had much more than this in mind when he characterized him as a “sexual weirdo.” In his 70s, at the sunset of his life, Gandhi embarked on a new set of sexual experiments in which several women partook, among them Manu and Abha, his “two walking sticks” and Sushila Nayar, his personal physician and sister of his secretary, Pyarelal.

Gandhi

In the midst of raging communal violence, which Gandhi characteristically attributed to his own personal shortcomings, he decided to test his resolve: by going to bed naked with one or the other of the women. His detractors have ever since had a field day. Though no one has ever suggested that Gandhi made improper advances, or that the encounter was in the remotest manner sexual, the mask is supposed to have come off the “dirty old man.”

Few of his critics are aware that after such experiments came to a halt, Manu penned a remarkable little book titled, Bapu, My Mother; or that Sushila Nayar, furnishing an account of these experiments in brahmacharya several years after Gandhi’s death stated that, far from experiencing any sexual desire, she felt as though she was sharing the bed with her mother.

The Celibate

The celibate Gandhi is as much a conundrum as any other Gandhi we have known. Though the principal architect of the Indian independence struggle, he had much less invested in the idea of the nation-state than any other nationalist. He was a radical democrat, but one detects a streak of authoritarianism in his political conduct. Similarly, while declaring himself a bhakta of Tulsidas, he never doubted that passages in the Ramacharitmanas that were repugnant to one’s moral conscience were to be rejected.

The vow of brahmacharya did not preclude, as it has for reformers and saints in Indian religious traditions, the company of women. Indeed, Gandhi adored their presence and reveled in their touch. He was constantly surrounded by women, and for decades Mirabehn, the daughter of an English admiral who was mesmerized by Gandhi, was privy to his innermost thoughts to such an extent as to arouse jealousy within Kasturba.

Their correspondence has a touch of the erotic; and, Mirabehn, in particular, would write of her longing for Gandhi when he was away. She was by no means the only woman with whom Gandhi enjoyed a platonic relationship: There was an intense exchange of “love letters” over many years between him and Esther Faering, a Danish missionary, and Saraladevi Chowdharani was cast as his “spiritual wife.”

Many of his male friendships are equally interesting. For example, he may also have been attracted to Hermann Kallenbach, a wealthy Jewish architect who would become one of Gandhi’s earliest patrons and closest friends. Kallenbach, a bodybuilder and athlete, may have been the embodiment of masculinity, but Gandhi saw his soft side and his gift for nonviolence.

Experiments with Truth

We are not likely to understand these friendships, which should also make us aware of Gandhi’s singular disinterest in the traditional concept of the family, if we fail to make a distinction between sex and sexuality and see through to the core of his thoughts on masculinity and femininity.

Though Gandhi repudiated sex, which he saw as a finite game — finite in that its end seemed to be mere physical consummation — he was a consummate player of sexuality who delighted in the infinite pleasures of touch, companionship and the eroticism of longing and withdrawal.

More so than any other Indian political figure of his time, Gandhi made very little distinction between men and women. This will appear to be a brazen statement to those who have read his unequivocally clear pronouncements on the distinct duties of women and men, and the spheres they ought ideally to occupy in life.

In practice, however, he fundamentally treated them as alike, endeavoring also to bring out something of the feminine in men and something of the masculine in women. It is wholly characteristic of Gandhi, a relentless advocate of experiments with truth, that even if he appeared to work with a crude conception of what it means to be male or female, his entire life can be read as an attempt to bring us to a new threshold of understanding the notions of masculinity and femininity.

*[This article was originally published on the author’s blog, .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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