{"id":8639,"date":"2011-04-04T10:00:33","date_gmt":"2011-04-04T14:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=8639"},"modified":"2020-08-07T09:38:14","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T13:38:14","slug":"no-wonder-india-does-not-want-this-gandhi-biography-to-be-published","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/04\/04\/no-wonder-india-does-not-want-this-gandhi-biography-to-be-published\/","title":{"rendered":"No wonder India does not want this Gandhi biography to be published"},"content":{"rendered":"

Based on this Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a> review, it’s far from being another hagiography:<\/p>\n

\n

Joseph Lelyveld has written a \u00adgenerally admiring book about \u00adMohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947. 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. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive \u00adintellectual, professing his love for \u00admankind as a concept while actually \u00addespising people as individuals. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The strongest objection raised in the Indian debate appears to have been the suggestion that Gandhi was bisexual:<\/p>\n

\n

Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi’s organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908. “Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom,” he wrote to Kallenbach. “The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed.” For some \u00adreason, cotton wool and Vaseline were “a constant reminder” of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might \u00adrelate to the enemas Gandhi gave \u00adhimself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.<\/p>\n

Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about “how completely you have taken \u00adpossession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance.” Gandhi nicknamed himself “Upper House” and Kallenbach “Lower House,” and he made Lower House promise not to “look lustfully upon any woman.” The two then pledged “more love, and yet more love . . . such love as they hope the world has not yet seen.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Based on this Wall Street Journal review, it’s far from being another hagiography: Joseph Lelyveld has written a \u00adgenerally admiring book about \u00adMohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947. Yet “Great Soul” also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,7,23,28],"tags":[1391,1195,196,255],"class_list":["post-8639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-india","category-media","tag-biography","tag-gandhi","tag-lgbt","tag-sexuality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2fl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8639"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59395,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8639\/revisions\/59395"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}