‘A sad reflection on public discourse’

The debate surrounding Joseph Lelyveld's biography of Gandhi Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi's Struggle With India is a sad reflection on the nature of public discourse. Most of the reports in the media are based on one review in which the reviewer drew his own inference that the author of the Great Soul had described Gandhi as a 'racist' and a 'bisexual'.

As we seek to ban the book on the ground that it constitutes an insult to the Father of the Nation, we should remember that the book itself makes no statements of the kind which are attributed to it. But, that cannot be the sole ground on which the decision to ban or not ban a book rests. No civilised, democratic society can ban a book, however blasphemous or salacious it may be. The only response to a book can be a book, a counter-argument.

It ought to be placed on record that Lelyveld at no place in the book has described Gandhi as a racist. Lelyveld is one of the foremost authorities on apartheid and racial discrimination. His earlier work Move your Shadow: South Africa Black and White remains one of the most powerful condemnations of apartheid as an idea and as a regime.

In his biography of Gandhi, Lelyveld has shown the cultural distance that Gandhi traversed in a short span of only four months in his understanding of the 'native question' in colonial South Africa, it records with empathy and understanding Gandhi's role in the Zulu rebellion and public advocacy on behalf of all people of colour. Gandhi was perhaps one of the first Indians to understand and contend with the racial question in philosophical and political dimensions.

The other part of the controversy relates to the deeply personal, intimate and mutually enriching relationship that Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach shared. Any scholar wishing to understand or record Gandhi's life and experiments in South Africa cannot do so without dealing with Gandhi's relations with various non-conformists: Albert Baker, Michael Coates, Rev. Joseph Doke, Henry Polak and Kallenbach.

But the researcher is hampered in the quest by the fact that in most instances only half the archive is available; Gandhi's correspondence with them is preserved, but their letters to Gandhi are in most instances not available in the public domain. Gandhi's correspondence with Hermann Kallenbach has for decades been part of the public domain, ever since the Government of India acquired these in an auction in South Africa. These letters are housed at the National Archives of India and were published as volume 96 of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG).

The editors of CWMG in their preface to the volume write that the acquisition and publication of these letters have brought home "whole invaluable new world of Gandhiji hitherto not glimpsed by historiographers." Kallenbach, according to the editors of CWMG, viewed Gandhi as "a friend, and companion, mother and mentor". They record the rare intimacy between these 'soul partners.'

Lelyveld does not argue for a 'homo-erotic' or 'bisexual' reading of this relationship. He states on page 88 of the book; "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."

He also says that the playful undertones of the letters, their naming each other "Upper House" and "Lower House" (a reference to the bi-cameral nature of the parliamentary democracy as also to their unequal relationship), should not lead us to ignore the broader context and deep philosophical ideas that these letters contain.

Do we have the right to explore Gandhi's experiments with brahmacharya? We should remind ourselves that for Gandhi these experiments were part of a much larger quest and set of observances, called Ekadash Vrata or 11 vows, through which he sought to govern both his spiritual quest and his political struggle.

These Vrata were also the basis of the Ashram life that he envisioned. If we were to focus on the experiments of brahmacharya to the exclusion of the other practices we face the danger of either reducing them to salacious gossip or at best remain perplexed as to their significance.

Apart from Gandhi himself, many other biographers have tried to understand his quest for 'perfect brahmacharya'; some like Nirmal Kumar Bose, Narayan Desai and Rajmohan Gandhi have done so with rare empathy, sensitivity and insight; while others like Jad Adams have reduced it to “Naked Ambition”. 

So long as we continue to grapple with Gandhi we will have to contend with his numerous experiments, his relationships with a variety of individuals, institutions, and philosophies. Some will continue to elude us, as we might have lost the capacity to patiently ask Gandhi our questions and await his responses. This can be done, not by mass hysteria and political or commercial expediency, but by equanimity.       

The author is a social scientist