ABSTRACT

The success of the brahmacharya experiments in Noakhali was critical both personally and politically for Gandhi. Gandhi saw bread labour as a vernacular form of sacrifice. Bose in 1974 notes that Gandhi immediately set out to speak of trusteeship to the people of Noakhali and neighbouring areas. Gandhi's effort was to demonstrate the fundamental opposition to a theory of cosmos based on self-destruction, as is evident was the case with the epistemological system of classification that separated science, religion and politics based on the dualism of subject and object and means and ends that made possible the atom bomb. The framework for Gandhi is one defined by celibacy as a condition of non-violence, presupposing equality or correspondence and difference or complementarity between man and woman, and sexuality as an obstacle to it. Gandhi was not unacquainted with the sexual revolution and acknowledges being inspired by the thought of Havelock Ellis and Bertrand Russell in his own research.