Was "Mahatma" Gandhi gay? A bisexual? Do I care?

A couple of days ago, after reading, in the NY Times, a review of Great Soul, I added that book to my list.  The review made it clear that it was a book that expected the reader to have had a great deal of background knowledge about Gandhi, and that it is not for the uninitiated.

In particular, I liked the way the review essay began--it is too good to be excerpted.  And the following sentences:

“Gandhi had hoped to bring about India’s freedom as the moral achievement of millions of individual Indians, as the result of a social revolution in which the collapse of alien rule would be little more than a byproduct of a struggle for self-reliance and economic equality.” Foreign rule did collapse, in the end, “but strife and inequality among Indians ­worsened.”
Gandhi is still routinely called “the father of the nation” in India, but it is hard to see what remains of him beyond what Lelyveld calls his “nimbus.” His notions about sex and spinning and simple living have long since been abandoned. Hindu-Muslim tension still smolders just beneath the uneasy surface. Untouchability survives, too, and standard-issue polychrome statues of Ambedkar in red tie and double-breasted electric-blue suit now outnumber those of the sparsely clothed Mahatma wherever Dalits are still crowded together.
Gandhi saw most of this coming and sometimes despaired. The real tragedy of his life, Lelyveld argues, was “not because he was assassinated, nor because his noblest qualities inflamed the hatred in his killer’s heart. The tragic element is that he was ultimately forced, like Lear, to see the limits of his ambition to remake his world.”

So, it is not difficult to imagine why I would add the book to my list.  But then ...

Gandhi is practically a saint in India.  And, that means one ought not to investigate into a saint's life other than to sing his praises.  Humanizing the saint, which is what I understand this book does, is a no-no, even if the reality is that most Indians, and for all purposes the entire lot of politicians, have completely forgotten, and systematically contradict, Gandhian principles.

One Indian state has already banned the book, and another is toying with that very idea.  Why?

The book claims the Mahatma was bisexual and had a German-Jewish bodybuilder lover in architect Hermann Kallenbach. Gandhian experts have panned the book and said this was a complete disregard for facts.

[Chief minister Narendra Modi] said the writer has a distorted view of Gandhi. "The writer has hurt the sentiments of the people of the country. This attempt to defame Mahatma Gandhi cannot be tolerated and the state assembly will agree with my sentiments," he said. 

This is the same Modi who was the mastermind behind the horrific violence that targeted Muslims in the state for which he is now the chief minister.  One of the many examples that we could list of how "anti-Gandhi" this Modi has been.  Oh well, Brutus is an honorable man, and they are all honorable indeed!

BTW, the NY Times review did not come across as "panned the book" ... 


Back to the reactions in India ... Gandhi's grandson thinks the book is crap, but at the same time writes that this:

alert us to the folly of banning books not because we respect the subject of their scrutiny but because it pays to appear as its protector. Gandhi, least interested in self-protection, is best protected by the strength of his own words and the wordlessness of his own strength.

The editorial in the Indian Express worries about the knee-jerk responses to ban books:

what’s truly abhorrent, even though it has been seen over and over again in India, is the alacrity with which we ban and proscribe books. Instead of letting people judge Lelyveld’s book, and discard it if the scholarship fails to persuade, the state declares it incendiary and closes off the possibility of reading it at all.

Apparently the federal government is also thinking of banning the book!


I care not what the book says about Gandhi and his sexuality.  If there is evidence, then I am all the more impressed that Gandhi was that much a regular mortal like all of us, but was able to orchestrate a freedom movement without guns and bullets.  What a fantastic achievement!