Tonic water
Jillian Robertson
Mr Morarji Desai, the austere Prime Minister of India who regards alcohol as an evil, has already started this week to impose prohibition on his country.
But what does he propose that people should drink instead? The answer, I discovered when I met him recently in Delhi, is urine. I had heard rumours that he drank his own urine, but this was the first time that he had admitted the curious practice to a journalist. He is, indeed, a passionate advocate of urine as a health-giving tonic and a preventive medicine.
I obtained an interview with Mr Desai almost by chance when I went along to attend one of his daily public audiences in the garden of his Delhi bungalow. We talked about his favourite subject — dieting— and he was interested in an article I had written for The Times in May about excessive consumption of protein in the West. I then asked him about his vegetarian diet and his theories about fasting and colonic irrigation as cures for all ailments. As time was short, I asked him straight out: 'Is it true that you drink your own urine?' For the past five or six years I have drunk a glass of my own urine — about six to eight ounces — every morning,' he replied. 'It is very, very good for you.' And it's free,' he continued. 'It doesn't cost anything. In America now doctors are using extracts from urine to treat certain heart conditions and are charging thousands of dollars. But you can drink your own! Even in the Bible it says to drink from your own cistern. What is your own cistern? It's your own urine. Urine is the Water of Life.'
Mr Desai explained that urine was a powerful cleansing agent. 'It contains many elements which are passed out of the system and if those things are put back, it is very good for you.' It is very important that the urine you drink is passed first thing in the morning,' he added.
The Prime Minister, who looks fit for someone born in 1895, also uses urine as an external tonic. 'You must massage it from the ankle to the waist and from the head to the waist,' he said as he leant over to demonstrate, vigorously pushing his hands up his legs from the bottom of his white khadi pants to his now slightly plump stomach, and then from his Gandhi cap down to his white kurta. 'Yes, it's very effective for aches,' he said. 'It's very good for many diseases. I used to give myself a routine urine massage every morning just because it is good, not because I had anything wrong with me, but now I don't have time.'
Mr Desai's passion for auto-urine therapy has resulted in a recent announcement by the Indian Health Minister that a government committee is being set up to investigate it. Among Hindus, it has always been customary for the devout to sip the urine of the sacred cow, but the practice of drinking one's own urine does not appear to have been common. By contrast, Moslems consider urine to be dirty and the orthodox try to ensure that no drpp ever touches their body or their clothes.
Mr Desai's aversion to meat and alcohol is based on orthodox Hindu customs, but his other health habits result from his belief in the doctrines of Mahatma Gandhi and also of `naturopathy.' He rises at four in the morning, makes his own bed, spins the cloth for his own simple clothes, has a room temperature bath and follows the discipline of Brahmacharya — self-restraint and mastery over the sexual organs. Desai has not had sexual intercourse since he was thirtythree in 1928, although he always lived with his wife.
This life of simple habits gave him remarkable resilience in his nineteenmonth imprisonment during the Emergency. He is so healthy, he told me, that he has never had an inoculation or vacination. He has never been seriously ill, 'Whenever I am ill, I fast for two or three days and I am cured,' he said. When fasting, he takes an enema every day.
Continuing his advice on how to be healthy, he said: 'People don't chew enough. They gulp down their food as if there was another set of teeth in their stomach. You must chew your food until it is liquid in the mouth and only then swallow it'. 'Drink your solids and eat your liquids,' he urged, mouthing each word slowly to add emphasis to his mastication theory. 'And if you really chew, you don't have to eat so much and it tastes better. A lot of people swallow unchewed mouthfuls of food and wash it down with water which is very bad.'
Mr Desai believes that water should never be drunk with meals: a glass has no place on the table. He also believes that most intestinal complaints result from food not being chewed properly. The foods he recommends are: fruit, nuts, vegetables, yoghurt, honey, milk, raw cucumber, lightly roasted wholewheat — topped off with one whole clove of raw garlic to aid digestion and, of course, a morning glass of fresh urine.
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