Mahatma Gandhi’s place in history is secure, but was he a “great soul”?
Mahatma Gandhi has long been considered a visionary and a martyr. But Pulitzer Prize–winner Joseph Lelyveld examines Gandhi’s accomplishments as a politician and an advocate for the downtrodden, measuring them against Gandhi’s own expectations and in light of his complex, conflicted relationship with India.
Joseph Lelyveld’s interest in Gandhi dates back to tours in India and South Africa as a foreign correspondent in the early years of a nearly four-decade career at the New York Times. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on apartheid Move Your Shadow. Lelyveld says, there are already more than enough this is a meditation on the interlinked puzzles of Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi’s strange personal disciplines, the communalistic passions of the two societies where Gandhi worked (South Africa and India), his improbable achievements against vast odds, and the ultimate failure of his ideals. Here is an eccentric who achieved mass followings; a near-naked vegetarian and celibate who, by force of will, made masses of people temporarily abjure the primitive passion of communal enmity; and an icon who is worshiped globally while the hatreds he opposed flourish.
The book titled “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India”, goes on to say that Gandhi was racist and bisexual.He was a bisexual (showing physical attraction both towards men and women).Mahatma Gandhi was bisexual and left his wife to live with a German-Jewish bodybuilder.The leader of the Indian independence movement is said to have been deeply in love with Hermann Kallenbach.The pair lived together for two years in a house Kallenbach built in South Africa and pledged to give one another ‘more love, and yet more love . . . such love as they hope the world has not yet seen.’
At the age of 13 Gandhi had been married to 14-year-old Kasturbai Makhanji, but after four children together they split in 1908 so he could be with Kallenbach.
Gandhi lived with Kallenbach in Johannesburg for about two years from 1907 before leaving South Africa to return to India in 1914.
“How completely you have taken possession of my body,”Gandhi was quoted as saying in a letter to Kallenbach. “This is slavery with a vengeance.”
The British Daily Mail ran the headline “Gandhi left his wife to live with a male lover, new book claims,”
The Wall Street Journal said Lelyveld’s book depicted Gandhi — who is revered as the father of independent India and an icon of non-violent protest — as “a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist.” “Mr Lelyveld makes abundantly clear… the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach,” the Journal review said.
It quoted a letter Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach saying “your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom.” The book also details how Gandhi said cotton wool and Vaseline were “a constant reminder” of Kallenbach — a reference the author believes might relate to enemas that Gandhi gave himself.
Jad Adams, who wrote a book last year that itself caused a storm for examining how Gandhi bathed with nubile young women and often shared a bed with one or more of his female followers, rejected any suggestion that Gandhi was gay.
“If Gandhi committed acts of homosexuality, there would be ample evidence, either justifying them or expressing shame,” he said, adding Gandhi used the word “love” often in letters and speech.
Adams said that he believed Kallenbach was homosexual and strongly attracted to Gandhi, but that the future independence leader, who had four children with his wife Kasturba, did not reciprocate.
Tara Bhattacharjee, Gandhi’s granddaughter and chair of the Kasturba Gandhi National Memorial Trust, said any attempt “to discredit the man who gave us the gift of non-violence because of his friendships is just small-minded.”