In 1906 I took the vow of celibacy in the conviction that it would help me to be of better service to my country. From that day forward my life became far more open and free than it had ever been before. It was celibacy that gave me the independence I desired for my work. It revealed a richness and fullness in life beyond anything I had previously experienced or even imagined. I have never had the slightest occasion to regard my decision as a mistaken one. Indeed, the opposite has been true; more and more, celibacy has seemed to me one of the greatest blessings possible to bestow.

Not long ago, however, a sensational story was brought to my attention. Like all rumors, and particularly unfounded ones, it appears to have traveled very widely and very quickly. It began in a native newspaper in India. From there it spread to the pages of a Bombay newspaper, and since this paper has a large circulation of readers, it soon reached England, and perhaps even America.

The story was to the effect that I had given up my celibacy and had resumed sensual relations with women.

I believe that this story had its real beginnings in my campaign against the creed of untouchability, the belief that for centuries has separated the people of my country. When I began to fight against it, insisting that there be no discrimination against untouchables, a group of orthodox Hindus who had previously been my friends broke with me and started to vilify me with all the resources at their command. They pointed to the number of women among my close followers and declared that my pretended "saintliness" in reality was "sinfulness." They dragged before the public eye the woman doctor, Sushila Nayar, who for years has been a constant companion and whose "crime" and "sinfulness" consist of giving me massages and medicated baths! — treatments, incidentally, that are conducted entirely without privacy, and during which indeed I often transact business with my co-workers.

Hitherto I have ignored these charges. I did not think that they deserved the dignity of being acknowledged, much less answered. But when close associates of mine are made to suffer, and when the rumor reaches the ears of friends in other countries, the air needs clearing.

I have no secrets of my own in this life. I think that I have confessed my weaknesses. It happens that I am not sensually inclined; but if I were, I hope that I would have the courage to make the confession.

As I have said, I began the practice of celibacy in 1906, when I was living in Phoenix, South Africa. A detestation of sensual connection even with my own wife had been developing in me for some time. I determined to test myself, to see if I would have the strength and resolution to maintain celibacy, and to see what effect it would have on me, mentally and physically. When I had determined that I could maintain it and that it would benefit me in my lifework, I took the vow.

It was on that day that true freedom began, and not only for myself but for my wife. My wife became a free woman in the most significant sense of the word — she became free from my authority as her lord and master. For my part, I became free from her — free from my previous slavery to her.

There were a great many women around me at this time. It might be said, then, that there was the opportunity for promiscuity. But no other woman had ever had any attraction for me in the sense that my wife had. I had never experienced a sensual urge toward other women. Nevertheless before I took the vow of celibacy I had been conscious of a certain restraint standing in the way of full, open friendship between the two sexes. I think it is a consciousness that no woman, perhaps, can ever entirely rid herself of when she is in the society of men.

But my celibacy changed this. I discovered that it drew me irresistibly to woman as the mother of man. She had become too sacred for sexual love, and so every woman became at once a sister or daughter to me.

Celibacy, in my case, has been governed by no orthodox rules. I have never believed that to practice celibacy one must become a hermit. The restraint that demands abstention from all contact with the opposite sex, no matter how innocent, is a forced growth having little or no vital value. Therefore I never tried to avoid natural, normal contacts with women.

And I found that there was a greater pleasure in such friendship than there had ever been before I took my vow. I found that I could work with all women to far greater advantage. Sex was no longer an invisible barrier between us. Women came closer to me; they gave me their confidence as I think even the closest of my friends among them would have hesitated to give it to me before.

When I returned to India from South Africa, therefore, and invited women of my own country to join the civil-resistance movement, they answered with a wholehearted and joyous response, with a perfect trust that I do not think would have been possible otherwise. My vow had given me a special fitness to serve womankind. The easy access which they gave me to their hearts was a wonderful revelation. The old beliefs and conflicting creeds of India dropped away, and we faced one another as equals.

For example, Moslem women would not veil themselves before me, a thing that would have been unthinkable in other circumstances, as any one who knows the power of the custom of purdah — the veil — will realize. How otherwise could I have overcome this obstacle, the barrier of the veil, when I appealed to these Moslem sisters to support our movement? How otherwise could I have appeared to them as the close and trusted friend, entirely without motivation except in the interest of our movement, that I wished to be?

And so, from that day forward, there has been no false privacy in my life. In my dwelling I sleep at night surrounded by women, for they feel safe with me in every respect. There is nothing to make us strangers and enemies.

All these great benefits celibacy has given me. I would be weak and foolish indeed were I to relinquish them!

Nevertheless, if I were sexually attracted to women, I think I have courage enough, even at this time of my life, to become a polygamist, to take not one but several wives. For I have never believed in free love — secret free love or open free love. Open free love I have always regarded as dog's love. Secret free love seems to me nothing more than a cowardly evasion.

I hope that this will serve to repudiate the lie that has been circulated about me. People may disagree with my beliefs; they may attack my celibacy; they may attack my ideal of nonviolence — but I do not think it can be said that any one who has come under my influence has ever been turned into a coward.

Publication Date: May 4, 1940