Joseph Lelyveld has written a generally admiring book about Mohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947. Yet "Great Soul" also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist—one who was often downright cruel to those around him. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive intellectual, professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals.That about sums up exactly what I think about Gandhi too. He lived in South Africa for 21 years before returning to India and there are two ashrams and a farm near where I was born in Natal that were founded by and for his disciples. Gandhi's oldest son had a falling out with his father and, when the "Great Soul" returned to India, his son stayed behind in South Africa. I once met one of Gandhi's grandsons and knew two of his grandchildren through my Gujarati friends when I lived in a Hindu ashram in Durban for two years.
The whole review is worth reading. Here are a few more snippets:
Although Gandhi's nonviolence made him an icon to the American civil-rights movement, Mr. Lelyveld shows how implacably racist he was toward the blacks of South Africa. "We were then marched off to a prison intended for Kaffirs," Gandhi complained during one of his campaigns for the rights of Indians settled there. "We could understand not being classed with whites, but to be placed on the same level as the Natives seemed too much to put up with. Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized—the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals."Gandhi's devotees don't like to think that their Mahatma ("Great Soul") was a dirty old man who molested his young niece. And of course they are too embarrassed to ever mention just how queer he really was. In fact I'd never even heard of this take on Gandhi's relationship with Kallenbach before:
In an open letter to the legislature of South Africa's Natal province, Gandhi wrote of how "the Indian is being dragged down to the position of the raw Kaffir," someone, he later stated, "whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a number of cattle to buy a wife, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness." Of white Afrikaaners and Indians, he wrote: "We believe as much in the purity of races as we think they do." That was possibly why he refused to allow his son Manilal to marry Fatima Gool, a Muslim, despite publicly promoting Muslim-Hindu unity.
Gandhi's pejorative reference to nakedness is ironic considering that, as Mr. Lelyveld details, when he was in his 70s and close to leading India to independence, he encouraged his 17-year-old great-niece, Manu, to be naked during her "nightly cuddles" with him. After sacking several long-standing and loyal members of his 100-strong personal entourage who might disapprove of this part of his spiritual quest, Gandhi began sleeping naked with Manu and other young women. He told a woman on one occasion: "Despite my best efforts, the organ remained aroused. It was an altogether strange and shameful experience."
Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi's organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908. "Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom," he wrote to Kallenbach. "The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed." For some reason, cotton wool and Vaseline were "a constant reminder" of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might relate to the enemas Gandhi gave himself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.But his blatant racism really takes the cake:
Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about "how completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance." Gandhi nicknamed himself "Upper House" and Kallenbach "Lower House," and he made Lower House promise not to "look lustfully upon any woman." The two then pledged "more love, and yet more love . . . such love as they hope the world has not yet seen."
Gandhi was willing to stand up for the Untouchables, just not at the crucial moment when they were demanding the right to pray in temples in 1924-25. He was worried about alienating high-caste Hindus. "Would you teach the Gospel to a cow?" he asked a visiting missionary in 1936. "Well, some of the Untouchables are worse than cows in their understanding."Most Indians are very caste, class and color conscious. When I first moved into that Hindu ashram in Durban, I used to invite all my friends. After a few visits by some of my Zulu friends, I was told by the leader of the cult not to invite anymore blacks because it made the Indian devotees uncomfortable to be so close to "such dirty people."
Gandhi's first Great Fast—undertaken despite his belief that hunger strikes were "the worst form of coercion, which militates against the fundamental principles of non-violence"—was launched in 1932 to prevent Untouchables from having their own reserved seats in any future Indian parliament. Because he said that it was "a religious, not a political question," he accepted no debate on the matter. He elsewhere stated that "the abolition of Untouchability would not entail caste Hindus having to dine with former Untouchables." At his monster rallies against Untouchability in the 1930s, which tens of thousands of people attended, the Untouchables themselves were kept in holding pens well away from the caste Hindus.
...
Gandhi and Mussolini got on well when they met in December 1931, with the Great Soul praising the Duce's "service to the poor, his opposition to super-urbanization, his efforts to bring about a coordination between Capital and Labour, his passionate love for his people."
Of course I had to find out about Gandhi's German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder:
Hermann Kallenbach (1871–1945) was a South African architect who is best known for being a very close friend of Mahatma Gandhi, starting from the latter's early days in South Africa. Together with another Jew, H.S.L. Polak, Kallenbach was associated with Gandhi throughout the Satyagraha (non-violent resistance) struggle which lasted in South Africa until 1914.Of course, Hermann and Mahandas may not have been actual butt-buddies but I know all about the "homo-erotic" aspects of Hindu monastic life. I had a very intensely emotional and sensuous (but not sexual) relationship with one of the male disciples who used to come to my ashram for devotions. There's a fine line between the intimacy of sharing with another "brother" in the experience of ecstatic love for "God" (that is generated by constant meditation) and plain old human emotional and physical love and affection.
Hermann was born in 1871 in East Prussia to a German Jewish family. He went to study architecture in Stuttgart and Munich. In 1896 he went to South Africa, where he practiced as an architect and became a South African citizen.
In 1904 he met Mohandas Gandhi, who was then working in South Africa. He was highly influenced by Gandhi's ideas of Satyagraha and equality among human beings and became his intimate friend and a dedicated devotee. In 1910 Kallenbach, who was a rich man, donated to Gandhi a thousand acre (4 km²) farm belonging to him near Johannesburg. The farm was used to run Gandhi's famous "Tolstoy Farm" that housed the families of satyagrahis. Abandoning the life of a wealthy, sport-loving bachelor, he adopted a simple lifestyle, vegetarian diet and equality politics of Gandhi on this farm. In Gandhi's words, they became "soulmates" and, for a time, shared Kallenbach's home.
Here is a photo of Kallenbach:
And here he is with Gandhi and his secretary Sonia Schlesin (click to biggify):
The statue of Gandhi in Durban.
