Global Phenomenon Addressed: CONTROVERSY: GANDHI BIOGRAPHY Picture Of Gandhian Grey There was more complexity to the Mahatma than a simple reading of his correspondence would suggest SHEELA REDDY

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COURTESY: NATIONAL GANDHI MUSEUM

Johannesburg, 1913 Gandhi with Sonja Schlesin and Hermann Kallenbach

CONTROVERSY: GANDHI BIOGRAPHY

Picture Of Gandhian Grey

There was more complexity to the Mahatma than a simple reading of his correspondence would suggest

-- There's no easy way of coming to terms with Mahatma Gandhi's sex life, as his biographers have realised in the over 100 years since he sparked off a cottage industry of books about him. To dwell on this aspect of his life is to exclude his other achievements and invite the label of sensationalism. But to censor it would be telling only half his story. How to get the balance right is what worries most Gandhian scholars, including presumably, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author Joseph Lelyveld, whose otherwise scholarly new biography, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle, was banned even before it hit the stands in Gujarat for daring to talk about yet another of Gandhi's controversial love relationships, this time allegedly with a man friend, Hermann Kallenbach.

Opposing the ban, Lelyveld denied that his book is "some kind of sensationalist potboiler". "It does not say Gandhi was bisexual. It does not say he was homosexual"—was his first response to the ban and the furore over the book. What it does say, however, is that Gandhi's relationship with the luxury-loving architect and body-builder was "the most intimate, also ambiguous, relationship of his lifetime".


	Gandhi may have destroyed the letters, says Lelyveld, but Kallenbach preserved them. How have they escaped others' scrutiny?

"Intimate and ambiguous" are words that could well describe the author's portrait of the friendship between the two. "It was no secret then, or later, that Gandhi, leaving his wife behind, had gone to live with a man," writes Lelyveld in the South Africa section of the book, citing a "respected Gandhi scholar" as describing the relationship as "clearly homoerotic". Another Gandhian scholar, Tridib Suhrud, is quoted as saying: "They were a couple." Kallenbach himself, according to the author, "later remarked that they'd lived together almost in the same bed".

And how did such a crucial relationship—Gandhi's feelings for Kallenbach, according to the author, were a powerful factor for both his turning inwards and being tied down to the Transvaal—escape the slew of biographies in recent years by the world's most renowned Gandhian scholars, including his own grandsons? Lelyveld explains that Gandhi destroyed all of Kallenbach's "charming love notes" to him because he believed Kallenbach wanted them to be seen "by no other eyes". And yet, Lelyveld points out, Kallenbach himself preserved all the letters (some 350 of them between 1909 and 1944) that Gandhi wrote to him, and his descendants even put them to auction. They were acquired by the National Archives of India, and finally published in Gandhi's collected works in 1994. "Most recent Gandhi studies tend to deal with them warily, if at all," Lelyveld writes.

Lelyveld begins by warning his reader: "In an age when the concept of Platonic love gains little credence, selectively chosen details of the relationship and quotations from letters can easily be arranged to suggest a conclusion." Then, inexplicably, he leads his reader on to the exact conclusion he's warned them against: we are told that Kallenbach was a lifetime bachelor, gymnast and body-builder, that Gandhi boasted of his physical training under the legendary strongman Eugen Sandow. He tells us Gandhi was never preoccupied with body-building but still refers to Gandhi's "taut torso".


	Other editors of Kallenbach letters say he willingly he submitted to Gandhi's tests. For Lelyveld, it was a sign of the man's weakness.

"If not infatuated, Gandhi was clearly drawn to the architect," Lelyveld continues, citing one of Gandhi's letters. "Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in the bedroom. The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed." He dwells lovingly on the details in Gandhi's letter: the cottonwool and Vaseline, "a constant reminder". Gandhi's words—"How completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance"—are coldly scrutinised. "What are we to make of the word 'possession' or the reference to petroleum jelly," asks Lelyveld. "The most plausible guesses," he goes on to answer, "are that the Vaseline...may have to do with enemas...or for massage," adding that Gandhi usually relied on the women in his entourage for his massages, "arousing gossip that has never quite died down".

Lelyveld then dwells on the "teasing pet names" he thinks Gandhi coined—Kallenbach, two years the younger, is addressed as 'Lower House' while Gandhi himself is 'Upper House'. But he omits to tell us that Gandhi addressed several other close associates in South Africa by similar coinages, 'Buffer House', for instance. The allusion, according to the author, is in the parliamentary sense—Lower House getting the right to pronounce on practical matters while the Upper House "gets to think deep thoughts, strategise, and direct the moral development of his other half in this touching bicameral relationship". But just in case you think this a harmless joke, we are then told: "Upper House makes Lower House promise 'not to contract any marriage tie during his absence' nor 'look lustfully upon any woman'." The two Houses then mutually pledge "more love, and yet more love...such love as they hope the world has not yet seen". And in case you didn't get the message, Lelyveld rubs it in: "By then...the two had been together for more than three years."

Deconstructionist J. Lelyveld

Having hammered his message home, Lelyveld does yet another turnaround: "We can indulge in speculation, or look more closely at what the two men actually say about their mutual efforts to repress sexual urges in this period." He goes on to explain how it became Gandhi's self-imposed mission to "drill his housemate in...self-denial". Other editors of the Kallenbach letters point out how willingly Kallenbach submitted to Gandhi's tests, refusing to protest even when Gandhi threw his precious field glasses into the sea. But in Lelyveld's eyes, it's a sign of Kallenbach's weakness: "He is more than an acolyte, less than an equal. Never...does he present an intellectual challenge to the spiritual explorer who's become his companion."


	What Lelyveld ignores is how Kallenbach was a great favourite of Kasturba's, unlikely if he was her rival for Gandhi's affections.

Lelyveld then goes on to Gandhi's sleeping arrangements with Kasturba, a thorny subject which eludes the best of his biographers. This is the time when Gandhi took his famous vow of celibacy, and he and Kasturba, as Lelyveld tells us, have been sleeping in separate quarters for more than five years by now. But instead of dwelling on the tensions this may have caused in their marriage, we are asked to ignore it, just as Lelyveld ignores the fact that Kallenbach was a great favourite with Kasturba, which would have been unlikely if he was her rival for Gandhi's affection.

On Kallenbach's jealousy and possessiveness, however, we hear a great deal. There's Gandhi's feisty secretary, Sonja Schlesin, 17 years his junior. It was Kallenbach who introduced her to Gandhi, but that didn't prevent him from considering her a rival for his soulmate's time. Then there's Gandhi's new-found fondness for British clergyman C.F. Andrews. Lelyveld quotes Gandhi reassuring Kallenbach in a letter: "Though I love and almost adore Andrews, I would not exchange you for him. You still remain the dearest and nearest to me."

So what are we to make of this unlikely friendship between two men who were destined to go their separate ways: Gandhi to lead the Indian National Congress and Kallenbach to the war against the Nazis and a rediscovery of his Jewish roots. According to the letters themselves, it was certainly a friendship of "rare intimacy", as the editors of the Collected Works say. They reveal a Kallenbach who loves to give gifts to Gandhi, his wife and children, a handyman who came to the rescue when a bathroom had to be laid or a pipe burst in the primitive farm where Gandhi set up his ashram near Johannesburg. He became such a favourite with Kasturba that Gandhi wrote to him from India saying she missed him most of all. A man whose affection for Gandhi was so deep that Gandhi called him his "advertising agent" and counselled him to subdue his feelings for him because he didn't deserve it.

According to Suhrud, a scholar quoted in Lelyveld's book and now supporting a move to lift the ban on the book, the letters Gandhi wrote to C.F. Andrews were equally intense and intimate. Gandhi tended to attract non-conformist spiritual seekers like Henry Polak, who was a Quaker and a Jew, or Kallenbach, who was a theosophist, says Suhrud. "It was clearly a different cultural mode, where men could address men in a tone that is now acceptable only between men and women."


	The letters Gandhi wrote to C.F. Andrews were equally intense and intimate, says Tridib Suhrud, a scholar Lelyveld quotes.

For Sudhir Kakar, who has already written two books about Gandhi's troubled sexuality, the suggestion about Gandhi's homosexuality is outrageous. "He'd have killed himself if anyone had said that to him," Kakar says, pointing out how an incident of sexual games between boys at his South African ashram disturbed him so deeply that he went on a fast. But the possibility that Gandhi had an intense non-sexual relationship with Kallenbach is not beyond belief, he says. It's hardly unique, he says, "Gandhi could be very intense with people who were very close to him, both men and women." Many people fell passionately in love with Gandhi, according to Kakar. It was the combination of his fearlessness, lack of inhibition and his ability to be truly himself.

As for the way Gandhi played hot and cold with Kallenbach, Kakar says it's the same pattern of behaviour Gandhi followed with another person he was intensely involved with: Miraben. "He allowed people to get close to him, but once they got too close, he pushed them away." Gandhi wasn't playing games, according to Kakar, only defending himself sub-consciously. He needed adoration, so he would pull people closer and closer until they started disturbing his equilibrium, then he pushed them away until he recovered his own balance. Like all very virtuous persons, "he didn't care what impact this had on the other person in the relationship."

So what is it about the sex life of our Mahatma, the man who felt sex was the ugliest act in the world, who gave it up in the prime of his life and regularly exhorted his near-and-dear ones "to mend their ways and not do it again", that continues to fascinate his biographers and readers alike? According to Kakar, it's not his sex life we are all interested in, but his struggle with it. And no one certainly has written more regularly and prolifically about his sex life than Gandhi himself. Which is why Lelyveld is right: Don't ban the book, discuss it.

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COMMENTS

APR 02, 2011 02:16 PM 1	Why such focus on Gandhi's sex life? To sell a book? Freedom of expression, just like all other freedoms, is not absolute. It comes with responsibility. And responsibility is a not a concept that is recognisable to the greedy free marketeers whose sole value in life is making money. I am normally against banning books, but on this occasion I believe it is the right thing to do. This is just a cheap stunt to throw some mud onto Gandhi's character (debate about his supposed 'sex life' is utterly irrelevant to his contribution to the human race) in order to earn a few despicable dollars. We can not allow the so called 'freedom of expression' to be abused in this way. PRADIP SINGH STAFFORD, UK PERMALINK \| LIKE (1) \| DISLIKE (0) \| REPORT ABUSE
APR 02, 2011 03:53 PM 2	Banning the book is not a solution.There are many books written on Gandhi with explicit,candid sexual encounter(including Bi-sexual,homosexual)incidence in his life. jaideo,(Nanded) JAIDEO NANDED, INDIA PERMALINK \| LIKE (1) \| DISLIKE (0) \| REPORT ABUSE
APR 02, 2011 04:52 PM 3	It is very unfortunate that a man's innocent writings have been interpreted in the most obscene way. I don't agree with Gandhi on many things, but to suggest he is homosexual or bisexual is an unnecessary attempt at sensationalism, just like Poonam Pandey's offer to strip before the Indian team. Even today in India friends who live in the same house sleep in the same bed, live in the same room and walk with their hands together wearing a pink shirt, innocently. Nobody even knows that these are taken as suggesting homosexuality in the West. Even me when I first went to the United States was saved from embarassment only when my friends alerted me against wearing a pink shirt which I had purchased new in India. Apartment owners refuse to let a single bedroom house to 2 men saying they should only live in seperate bedrooms and get a double bedroom house. The West with its dirty fantasies and contempt for other civilizations is now trying to force its crazy thoughts again on India just like they forced Victorian morality long ago. SHAAN CHENNAI, INDIA PERMALINK \| LIKE (4) \| DISLIKE (0) \| REPORT ABUSE
APR 02, 2011 06:35 PM 4	Gandhi is a legend in the history. every person have his own weaknesses which couldnot be traced during his life time.It is all about sex life, a fine peice of interesting information. All big leaders are sex perverted in their lives but it is not possible unless the other sex partner is interested to reveal. Now the story is developed to the reference of some letter correspondence it is to better to ignore rather than to respond emotionally H R VEERA NA GOUD BANGALORE, INDIA PERMALINK \| LIKE (1) \| DISLIKE (0) \| REPORT ABUSE