Sixty three years after his assassination and dozens of books and biographies later Gandhi watchers continue to scrutinize the phenomenon. The latest one titled ‘Great Soul—Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India’ (Knopf, 425 pages, $28.95) by Joseph Lelyveld apparently shows that Gandhi was “implacably racist” (The Wall Street Journal reviewer Andrew Roberts’ words) towards the blacks in South Africa.
Going by the same review it seems Gandhi was also gay who never came out of the closet with his love for Hermann Kallenbach, a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder. Roberts definitively says that Gandhi left his wife Kasturba for Kallenbach in 1908. He also supported the Muslim caliphate in the 1920s. So once you add up these three broad personality traits you have a Gandhi was was a racist closet gay man in love with a Jewish bodybuilder who stood for fundamentalist Islamic domination over the world. If one man could host such stunningly contradictory personalities in his life in the midst of one of the world’s greatest and most tumultuous campaigns for freedom, then that man ought to be a freak of nature.
I have heard all of these conclusions about Gandhi separately at one time or another, but never quite strung together the way this particular book, as reviewed by Roberts, appears to do. I have not yet read it but given News Corp’s stellar record, I am sure this one is accurate the way they understand accurate.
The problem is when you read The New York Times review of the same book by the paper’s critic Geoffrey C. Ward, you feel as if he is talking about a different book altogether. Ward calls ‘Great Soul’ “a noteworthy book, nonetheless, vivid, nuanced and cleareyed.” In contrast, Roberts infers that while the book may be “generally admiring” of the man, it does show him to be “a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist.”
Incidentally, Lelyveld is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, who was once worked for the Times covering South Africa. He also reported out of India for several years. In short, he has the credentials to write this book. My problem is which book to believe—the one that Roberts read or the one that Ward read. I will read both, I suppose. With some luck I will also interview Lelyved who has to be just one man.