Word: brahmacharis
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Dates: during 1952-1952
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Last week he got distressing news. His only opponent in Allahabad, 52-year-old Prabhudatt Brahmachari, who wears a luxuriant grey beard, orange-and red-rimmed spectacles, a saffron robe and a long white loincloth, had been quietly building up the vote. Quietly was the word for it: he had done it without uttering a single sound, except an occasional loud laugh...
...Plank. Back in 1921 Brahmachari, like Nehru, came under the spell of Mahatma Gandhi, but Brahmachari became a sadhu, or holy man. He took vows of silence and celibacy, was jailed several times by the British (once along with Nehru), set up a camp on the banks of the River Ganges to study the Hindu epics, and wrote the first 60 volumes of a 180-volume biography of the Hindu god Krishna. One day last October he cried out: "He nath Narayan!" (meaning, "Oh, Lord God," the holy man's only departure from silence). An attendant brought...
...Brahmachari had but one plank in his platform: uncompromising opposition to the Nehru-sponsored Hindu Code Bill, which sanctions inter-caste marriage, relaxes the prohibition against marriage between cousins seven times removed, and, for the first time, makes divorce possible -though still very difficult-for Hindu women. Wrote Brahmachari: "The Hindu Code Bill will ruin religion, confuse castes, undermine the authority of the Scriptures, damage Hindu culture, split every family, pit brothers against sisters, and profit only lawyers." Nehru, he said, is "a black Englishman [who] studied in the West . . . and is so stuffed with its ways that he wants...
...Holy Man Brahmachari toured Nehru's constituency in a 1931 Dodge sedan, accompanied by a troupe of Hindu singers. To the chanting of Hindu psalms, he danced on the platform, rhythmically tapping a pair of small brass cymbals. A disciple read from a pamphlet he had written. Brahmachari on U.S. divorce: "I have heard that in America . . . women marry and divorce as many as three husbands a day, and there are some women who have had several hundred spouses each." On U.S. marriage: "An Indian student, visiting an American cemetery, found a young woman seated by the side...
Hearing that Brahmachari's pamphlet had sold 76,000 copies, Nehru came rushing back to Allahabad last week with the challenge: "I shall fight to the end for the Hindu Code Bill. No country can dream of progress if it neglects the cause of its womenfolk." Snapped Nehru: "Rich people are behind Brahmachari.. . None else but the big black-marketeers, moneylenders, and landlords who are scared that Congress will soon do away with their feudal possessions." This week, as Allahabad voters went to the polls, Nehru seemed to have his constituency under control again. The whole country...