Was Mahatma Gandhi a racist? Is Gandhi still a hero to Indians? Rare pictures of the last 10 years of Gandhi's life. On the evening of 30 January , Mahatma Gandhi stepped outside the house of an Indian business tycoon in Delhi where he was staying and walked to a prayer meeting in the garden.

At a talk last week at the London School of Economics, he was passionate and amusing, and it was uplifting to hear his respect and affection for one of the great moral figures of the last century. For several decades after his death, this episode was not widely known. The facts are that after his wife, Kasturba, died in , Gandhi began the habit of sharing his bed with naked young women: his personal doctor, Sushila Nayar, and his grandnieces Abha and Manu, who were then in their late teens and about 60 years younger than him.

Gandhi did not develop his censorious attitude to sex and certainly not to marital sex until he was in his thirties. It was no secret that Mohandas Gandhi had an unusual sex life. He spoke constantly of sex and gave detailed, often provocative, instructions to his followers as to how to they might best observe chastity. And his views were not always popular; "abnormal and unnatural" was how the first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, described Gandhi's advice to newlyweds to stay celibate for the sake of their souls. But was there something more complex than a pious plea for chastity at play in Gandhi's beliefs, preachings and even his unusual personal practices which included, alongside his famed chastity, sleeping naked next to nubile, naked women to test his restraint?