There is much howling and gnashing of teeth in India at the moment. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Joseph Lelyveld has written a book about Gandhi, which, it is alleged, portrays Gandhi as having homosexual and racist tendencies.
When in South Africa, Gandhi lodged with a German body-builder and architect, Hermann Kallenbach. Lelyland quotes Gandhi’s in a letter to Kallenbach saying: ‘How completely you have taken possession of my body’ and ‘this is slavery with a vengeance.’ In his correspondence from that period, Gandhi referred to black Africans as ‘kaffirs’; Lelyveld mentions this contoversy also.
Lelyveld insists that is not implying that the two men were lovers or that Gandhi was a racist, but he is no longer master of the book’s destiny in India. Homosexuality remains taboo in India: it was only decriminalised in 2009. That Gandhi might have held what we would regard as racist attitudes is also anathema to 21st century minds.
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