No offence but don't you think he went a little too far?
Not taking anaesthetic during surgery, then sleeping with his grand-niece and other girls.
I mean he was trying desperately to prove something to the world, probably his greatness or mental strength.
The ideals of celibacy and self-control is emphasized in Hinduism. Many feats in this direction have been mentioned in the scriptures so people try to emulate them.
There is a famous story of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's Guru placing sugar cubes in Chaitanya's tongue, and then going for a bath. After the bath, the Guru thought that saliva emitted by the tongue due to greed would have melted the cubes. But upon inspection of Chaitanya the Guru found that the cubes were intact. This was seen as a great feat of self-control and mastery over the senses, and it is said that the astounded Guru took Chaitanya for his Guru instead.
In the Mahabharatha, you can see Arjuna deep in meditation and austerities in the forest for strengthening himself, that beautiful apsara women were unable to disturb his state of meditation, much to their frustration.
So there are many such stories and it motivates people in this direction.
Gandhi had written in his memoirs of his dissatisfaction with his carnal feelings and lust in his youth, as he put it , and took absolute celibacy and self-control as an ideal.
He was also influenced a lot by Jainism, which similarly emphasized nonviolence and hard austerity.
He undertook all kinds of austerities upon himself to eliminate all passion with respect to lust or anger or greed in his system and did all kind of projects in this regard, which may appear weird to some people who do not know the cultural and religious background behind this.
Mahavira, the founder of the Jain religion and many Jain monks in present,were and are nude in private or public. Even some Indians find it gross, but it is a part of the austerities they took upon themselves.
Experiments on celibacy by Gandhi included sleeping with naked women
But ultimately he ended up tarnishing his image.
Not only that, he didn't even realize what could be the aftereffects of his actions. A couple of girls whom he slept with, went into some sort of trauma, as they would often weep in isolation.
Women who took part in such projects of his on self-mastery, did so voluntarily, and if it were an act of coercion, she could easily complain to his critics and detractors then. But they understood the reasons behind such actions of his and worked with him.
I have never read or heard of anyone crying of trauma because of such acts. Many propagandists today trying to defame Gandhi use such tactics with exaggerations. And this include many Indians and misguided Hindu fundamentalists as well who were upset with his ideals of fraternity and equality of all human beings and denunciation of casteism and hatred.
Saints like Vivekananda and Shankaracharya practiced strict celibacy without the need to test their self control.
In the case of Vivekananda, after his father died, he was very much in grief and so his friends dragged him to brothels to cheer him up. Even though he was drunk, he didn’t let the prostitutes touch him.
Vivekananda never had such an experience, and as a youth, out of idealistic pride, he used to avoid walking near streets with brothels and looked down upon them.
Later on, he revised his views upon hearing a devotional song from a courtesan, whom he had formerly avoided.This happened in the court of a king who had invited him. He developed understanding and compassion for such people.
It is actually Gandhi who had the said experience, and he faithfully recorded it in his autobiography.
As I said earlier, many propagandists all over the world try to defame Gandhi for ideological purposes related to ultra-nationalism or fascism.
Coming from the tide of the two world wars and the holocausts, the sheer momentum of violence was enough to bring about the third and final world war and nuclear holocaust in the last century itself. Gandhi himself had criticized nuclear weapons and emphasized the necessity of the doctrine of nonviolence then.
And you can see that there were a couple of times when the world was in the verge of this, and was averted at the last moments due to some wise judgements , which had deferred official orders to launch nuclear weapons.
I would say Gandhi's doctrine of nonviolence had a great impact all over the world, and leaders like Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, Nelson Mandela , Andrei Sakharov had nurtured and cultivated a culture of nonviolence in the world, which probably had prevented a nuclear holocaust and the end of the world till date.
Gandhi may have had his faults, which he himself have admitted, but his legacy of the doctrine of nonviolence is quite important for the world if wars and human conflict is to end.
