A new biography of Mahatma Gandhi has created outrage in India while putting its author, former New York Times Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld, at odds with the press. Lelyveld's book on the iconic leader of India's independence movement, "Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India," has drawn positive reviews. But articles in at least two British papers have created a firestorm by focusing on passages that characterize Gandhi's close relationship with another man.
Lelyveld's book was described by a reviewer in his former newspaper as "not a full-scale biography. Nor is it for beginners. ... But [it] is a noteworthy book, nonetheless, vivid, nuanced and cleareyed."
However, less staid publications, as the AP notes, focused on passages characterizing Gandhi's close relationship with the German-Jewish architect and amateur body-builder Hermann Kallenbach, who lived with Gandhi in South Africa for several years in the early 1900s. The implication of such coverage is that Gandhi was bisexual, though Lelyveld—author of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize winning study of apartheid rule in South Africa, "Move Your Shadow"—has issued a statement saying that "the word 'bisexual' nowhere appears in the book." The overseas press has also dwelled on a single instance in which the word 'racist' appears to characterize comments made by the late Indian independence leader and civil-disobedience pioneer.
"Gandhi 'left his wife to live with a male lover' new book claims," blared the headline in the U.K. Daily Mail. And the opening sentence of the Daily Mail dispatch doesn't pull any punches: "Mahatma Gandhi was bisexual."
Likewise, the Telegraph, another U.K. daily, proclaimed: "Mahatma Gandhi 'racist and bisexual' claims new book." The Telegraph prominently featured this salacious anecdote: "The book alleges that as an older man he held 'nightly cuddles'—without clothes—with seventeen year-old girls in his entourage, including his own niece."
Even the Wall Street Journal's review led with the explosive allegations. "Joseph Lelyveld has written a ­generally admiring book about ­Mohandas Gandhi," wrote Andrew Roberts in the investors' broadsheet."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."
The early reviews have prompted "outrage" in India, where the book, published by Alfred A. Knopf, has yet to be released. (It hits American bookshelves today.) Some Indians, including Gandhi's relatives, took the claims as an affront to their loved-one's legacy. "These western writers have a morbid fascination for Gandhi's sexuality," his great-grandson told a Delhi-based newspaper. "It only helps them sell their books. It is always open season with Gandhi."
Now Lelyveld is swinging back. The author dismissed the articles, claiming the press sensationalized his Gandhi biography.
"I do not allege that Gandhi is racist or bisexual," Lelyveld said in a statement his publisher issued to the AP. ". . . . The word 'racist' is used once to characterise comments by Gandhi early in his stay in South Africa . . . the chapter in no way concludes that he was a racist or offers any suggestion of it."
Gandhi scholars have also pushed back on the reviews.
"Lelyveld asks me what I think of Gandhi's relationship with Kallenbach and I say, 'It is almost like a couple'," one of them, Tridip Suhrud, who was consulted during the biography's research phase, told The Times of India. "The two had a deep bond that borders on attraction of a Platonic kind. Joseph is not talking about what the reviewers are claiming,"
Suhrud also said the "racist" claims were inaccurate, ultimately concluding: "It is a fascinating work. Lelyveld shows there is continuity in Gandhi as well as major points of departure."