Gandhi is still so revered in India that a book about him that few Indians have read and that hasn’t even been published in this country has been banned in one state and may yet be banned nationwide.
The problem, say critics who have fanned the flames of popular outrage this week, is that the book suggests that the father of modern India was bisexual.
The book’s author, Joseph Lelyveld, does write extensively about the close relationship Mohandas K. Gandhi had with a German architect, but he denies that the book, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India, makes any such argument.
Photo: Antiquorum via Bloomberg
In an interview, Lelyveld, a former executive editor of the New York Times and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, said he thought he had “treaded very carefully” with the information, which he knew was delicate.
“I lived in India and there’s an Indian word called tamasha,” he said, which translates to “spectacle.” “I’m surprised to find myself at the center of one, because I think this is a careful book, and I consider myself a friend of India.”
Still, this week Gujarat, the state where Gandhi was born and grew up, banned the book after reviews and news stories about it appeared in Indian newspapers. Gujarat is particularly conservative — alcohol can’t be sold in the state, for instance — and the state is governed by a Hindu nationalist party.
“The writing is perverse in nature,” Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, said of the book after the ban. “It has hurt the sentiments of those with capacity for sane and logical thinking.”
And on Tuesday, India’s law minister, M. Veerappa Moily, said “the book denigrates the national pride and leadership,” which he said could not be tolerated. Officials “will consider prohibiting the book,” he added.
The crux of the controversy seems to be the intersection of two subjects on which Indians have strong views: sexuality and Gandhi. On the first point, India is quite conservative, but the recent rapid growth of its economy has helped loosen attitudes, especially among the large youth population. In 2009, the Delhi High Court struck down a British-era law against sodomy, a ruling seen as a watershed for gay rights. Nevertheless, most gay Indians would not feel comfortable coming out.
On the second, Gandhi is revered even by the young, but there is little significant understanding of the nuances of his philosophy and life. He has been mostly reduced to an idol. Young Indians don’t spend much time studying him. And many of his ideas, like the development of small-scale village industries, have faded.
That doesn’t mean Gandhi can’t be a figure of fun. A few years ago, he was made a character in the Munna Bhai film franchise, about a gangster in Mumbai; the character is visited by Gandhi, who tells him to change his ways and give up violence. It’s a comedy.
The controversy also highlights India’s highly circumscribed right to free speech. Indian officials frequently ban and censor books, movies, art and other works. Under Indian law, any citizen can petition to have a work banned, and activists and political leaders frequently exercise that right. But it is uncommon for even a book a year to be banned nationally.
The Constitution allows the government to impose “reasonable restrictions” on speech that might be construed as offensive. In 1988, India joined many Muslim countries in banning The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie, a native of India. Last year, the Shiv Sena, a regional political party, forced the University of Mumbai to remove Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry from its curriculum, arguing that this acclaimed novel denigrated the Maharashtrian ethnic group.
Certain subjects, like Gandhi, who is often referred to as mahatma, or great soul, are particularly guarded. Gandhi is widely admired not only in India but around the world for his advocacy of nonviolent struggle and the austere and celibate life he led when he was fighting for India’s freedom from the British.
Using documents, letters and other research, Lelyveld writes about how Gandhi came to his particular social vision, first as a lawyer in South Africa and later as a freedom fighter, and how he tried to spread that vision in India, with mixed results.
The controversy appears to have started because of reviews in publications in the US and Britain, including one in the Wall Street Journal asserting that the book provides evidence that Gandhi was “a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist.”
That review, by Andrew Roberts, a British historian, argued that Gandhi was in love with Hermann Kallenbach, the German-Jewish architect with whom Gandhi lived in Johannesburg, and it cited letters from Gandhi to Kallenbach, which are quoted in Great Soul.
Gandhi expresses great fondness and yearning for Kallenbach in the letters, telling him that his was the only portrait on Gandhi’s mantelpiece, opposite the bed, and that cotton wool and Vaseline were “a constant reminder” of him.
The letters were acquired by the National Archives of India in an auction and have been available to scholars; they were sold by descendants of Kallenbach. Gandhi destroyed Kallenbach’s letters to him early on, according to the book.
In the book, Lelyveld writes, “One respected Gandhi scholar characterized the relationship as ‘clearly homoerotic’ rather than homosexual, intending through that choice of words to describe a strong mutual attraction, nothing more.”
But Lelyveld then acknowledges: “The conclusions passed on by word of mouth in South Africa’s small Indian community were sometimes less nuanced. It was no secret then, or later, that Gandhi, leaving his wife behind, had gone to live with a man.”
Although Lelyveld does not draw a conclusion about the relationship in the book, he writes, “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.”
The situation is complicated by the fact that the book is not yet on sale in India, and very few people have read it. It was released in the US on Tuesday last week.
While Knopf published the book in the US, HarperCollins is expected to publish it in India. The considerable negative press has unnerved executives at HarperCollins. VK Karthika, the publisher and chief editor of HarperCollins in India, said in an e-mail that a publication date has not been set.
“Obviously we are concerned about the situation,” Karthika said, “but we are committed to the book and the author.”
An editor at HarperCollins suggested that at least one revision be made for the India edition. Lelyveld refused. Karthika said on Thursday in an e-mail that there was no reason to make any revisions.
In the interview, Lelyveld said the information about Gandhi’s relationship with Kallenbach was not his own discovery and was never intended to be the main focus of his book.
“All I can claim is that I dealt with that material more extensively with an eye to the general public than anyone previously,” Lelyveld said. “But it’s not a central preoccupation. My book is about Gandhi’s struggle for social justice, not his intimate relationships. But he was a complicated man and the two are linked.”
The ban in Gujarat and a threatened ban in another state, Maharashtra, whose capital is Mumbai, as well as the threatened national ban, have drawn criticism from scholars, newspapers and some descendants of Gandhi’s.
“I deplore the culture of bans and burning of books,” said Tushar Gandhi, a great-grandson of Gandhi. “It’s a form of draconian censorship.”
In a telephone interview, Tushar Gandhi said he was considering legal options to challenge the ban in Gujarat. Though he has not read the book, he said that his great-grandfather’s letters to Kallenbach have been in the public domain for years.
“The story of his friendship with Hermann Kallenbach was very well documented,” he said.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not
This Qing Dynasty trail takes hikers from renowned hot springs in the East Rift Valley, up to the top of the Coastal Mountain Range, and down to the Pacific Short vacations to eastern Taiwan often require choosing between the Rift Valley with its pineapple fields, rice paddies and broader range of amenities, or the less populated coastal route for its ocean scenery. For those who can’t decide, why not try both? The Antong Traversing Trail (安通越嶺道) provides just such an opportunity. Built 149 years ago, the trail linked up these two formerly isolated parts of the island by crossing over the Coastal Mountain Range. After decades of serving as a convenient path for local Amis, Han settlers, missionaries and smugglers, the trail fell into disuse once modern roadways were built