Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld: book review

America journalist, Joseph Lelyveld, has written a book outing political and spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi. The book, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India (2011), has provoked a wave of anger across India. Lelyveld suggests, in his book, that Gandhi was bisexual. He cites Gandhi’s and Hermann Kallenbach’s correspondence, and claims that his bisexualism was the reason behind his decision to leave his wife and move in with the architect and bodybuilder Kallenbach.

This is only a small part of the book, but it is a warts-and-all revelation about the positive and even more about the negative aspects of his personality – what made him great, and what made him human. It details a historical biography of Gandhi (1869-1948) and his politics and philosophy and, the author notes, his fantasies of an ideal world. It describes his metamorphosis from an English-educated lawyer in business suits to the figure most known to readers – the leader in a loincloth.

More interesting is Lelyveld’s documentation of the development of Gandhi’s philosophies that lead to his defining concepts of “satyagraha” and “ahimsa”– mass civil disobedience and non-violence, culminating in civil rights and freedom.

The book has been banned in many Indian states in a country where homosexual activity was a criminal offense until 2009. Gandhi’s grandson denounces the ban, saying that his grandfather advocated for, and was the epitome of, freedom of speech.

[The photograph shows a statue of Mohandas Gandhi in Glebe Park, Canberra, Australia]

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