Queering Gandhi
Now this new book has queered the Gandhian pitch, eh? Methinks that the Gay 'community' should be highly displeased with all this media labelling of Gandhi as 'Gay'.
Whatever his sexual orientation may have been, Gandhi couldn't be called 'Gay' by any stretch of imagination. Married men having an occsaional fling with another man is a well documented cultural aspect of any sexually segregated society, no matter how many 'prim and proper' people want to keep this fact well hidden under the carpet. Ask those of us who have been in the HIV/AIDS circuit for the past two decades.
So what if Gandhi wrote 'love letters' to a man, so did Shakespere ... and a great many other famous people I am told. How does it matter?
Of course, it will be interesting to see how all this new 'informantion' we have about Gandhi will impact the 'Gandhians' . Will they actually begin to lift their heads from the sand and take a look around?
American author Joseph Lelyveld yesterday dismissed claims his new book on Mahatma Gandhi alleged that India's independence leader was a racist bisexual who left his wife for a bodybuilder.
Indian newspapers (naturally) were 'outraged' by reviews in the United States and Britain of biography that focused on Gandhi's relationship with German-Jewish architect and amateur bodybuilder Hermann Kallenbach.
A quote: Joseph Lelyveld has written a generally admiring book about Mohandas 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 intellectual, professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals. [here's the link to the full article]
The British Daily Mail ran the headline 'Gandhi 'left his wife to live with a male lover' new book claims", while the Daily Telegraph review said he had 'held racist views against South African blacks'.
Revisionist works on Mahatma Gandhi—the man, not the icon—have become pretty commonplace in recent years and many Indian readers won’t be particularly astonished to read that Gandhi, when it came to race rights, was far more concerned about Indians than he was about Africans.
I quote from Andrew Roberts piece in the Wall Steet Journal: For all his lifelong campaign for Swaraj ("self-rule"), India could have achieved it many years earlier if Gandhi had not continually abandoned his civil-disobedience campaigns just as they were beginning to be successful. With 300 million Indians ruled over by 0.1% of that number of Britons, the subcontinent could have ended the Raj with barely a shrug if it had been politically united. Yet Gandhi's uncanny ability to irritate and frustrate the leader of India's 90 million Muslims, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (whom he called "a maniac"), wrecked any hope of early independence. He equally alienated B.R. Ambedkar, who spoke for the country's 55 million Untouchables (the lowest caste of Hindus, whose very touch was thought to defile the four higher classes). Ambedkar pronounced Gandhi "devious and untrustworthy.
One hopes that the hullabaloo over the sexuality angle, however, doesn’t get the book banned here. We’d rather like the chance to read it ourselves.
Whatever his sexual orientation may have been, Gandhi couldn't be called 'Gay' by any stretch of imagination. Married men having an occsaional fling with another man is a well documented cultural aspect of any sexually segregated society, no matter how many 'prim and proper' people want to keep this fact well hidden under the carpet. Ask those of us who have been in the HIV/AIDS circuit for the past two decades.
So what if Gandhi wrote 'love letters' to a man, so did Shakespere ... and a great many other famous people I am told. How does it matter?
Of course, it will be interesting to see how all this new 'informantion' we have about Gandhi will impact the 'Gandhians' . Will they actually begin to lift their heads from the sand and take a look around?
American author Joseph Lelyveld yesterday dismissed claims his new book on Mahatma Gandhi alleged that India's independence leader was a racist bisexual who left his wife for a bodybuilder.
Indian newspapers (naturally) were 'outraged' by reviews in the United States and Britain of biography that focused on Gandhi's relationship with German-Jewish architect and amateur bodybuilder Hermann Kallenbach.
A quote: Joseph Lelyveld has written a generally admiring book about Mohandas 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 intellectual, professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals. [here's the link to the full article]
Revisionist works on Mahatma Gandhi—the man, not the icon—have become pretty commonplace in recent years and many Indian readers won’t be particularly astonished to read that Gandhi, when it came to race rights, was far more concerned about Indians than he was about Africans.
I quote from Andrew Roberts piece in the Wall Steet Journal: For all his lifelong campaign for Swaraj ("self-rule"), India could have achieved it many years earlier if Gandhi had not continually abandoned his civil-disobedience campaigns just as they were beginning to be successful. With 300 million Indians ruled over by 0.1% of that number of Britons, the subcontinent could have ended the Raj with barely a shrug if it had been politically united. Yet Gandhi's uncanny ability to irritate and frustrate the leader of India's 90 million Muslims, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (whom he called "a maniac"), wrecked any hope of early independence. He equally alienated B.R. Ambedkar, who spoke for the country's 55 million Untouchables (the lowest caste of Hindus, whose very touch was thought to defile the four higher classes). Ambedkar pronounced Gandhi "devious and untrustworthy.
One hopes that the hullabaloo over the sexuality angle, however, doesn’t get the book banned here. We’d rather like the chance to read it ourselves.
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