This Was Bapu – Compiled by R. K. Prabhu

This description is apocryphal and one of pure imagination. Gandhiji did not ask the scavengers to give up their work, nor was there a single day when the latrines were not cleaned. We, some of the teachers and students, in our impatience did demolish a permanent latrine because Gandhiji happened to remark that the structure was old- fashioned, insanitary and hopeless. He had neither the time nor the occasion to carry pots of the night-soil on his head. I do not mean to say that he would not have done it. He had done it on many occasions in jails in South Africa. He did it along with us, inmates of the ashram, for long periods, but we never carried the pots on our heads. We had better methods.
In the anecdote 25, the following sentence is attributed to Gandhiji: “Whether it is my Gurudev or anybody, my eating goes on.” I think it unlikely that Gandhiji could have referred to Tagore as “my Gurudev”. In Shantiniketan we all referred to the Poet as “Gurudev”. Gandhiji loyally followed the practice and always referred to the Poet as “the Gurudev”, just as the latter referred to him as “the Mahatma”. “My Gurudev”, just does not represent the natural attitude of Mahatma Gandhi. There is an element of irreverent familiarity and possessiveness in the word “my” which was foreign to it.