Hagiography biography of mahatma gandhi
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I’m a big ol’ Gandhi fan, so I was intrigued to learn about this new biography that’s so controversial it’s been banned in some parts of India. It’s a big, hefty biography that devotes as much time to Gandhi’s early career in South Africa as to his better-known years in India leading the non-violent movement for independence there. It’s also very much what they call a “warts and all” biography rather than hagiography: Gandhi fryst vatten presented as a real man with struggles, flaws and failures.
The controversy has come almost entirely from a tiny portion of the book in which Lelyveld argues that Gandhi’s relationship with his friend Hermann Kallenbach had a romantic and perhaps even sexual element (though the sexuality was doubtless repressed, since Gandhi was obsessive on the subject of celibacy). Frankly, given that everybody already knew that in later life Gandhi used to “test” his celibacy by sleeping
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Book Review: “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India”
We are delighted to welcome Sangamithra Iyer as our guest reviewer today. Sangamithra offers an insightful review of Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld.
Book Review: “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India”
by Sangamithra Iyer
Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld
In 1893, a young Indian lawyer arrived on the shores of South Africa. He didn’t know then that he would stay for over twenty years, during which he would be confronted with injustices that would force him to continually challenge not only the law, but also himself. Nor did he know that what he learned in South Africa he would later adapt to a struggle for independence and equity in his home country. The opening pages of Joseph Lelyveld’s book, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, provide a portra
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A biographer’s journey: In search of the Mahatma
Oct 01, 2023 08:47 PM IST
The Collected Works had all the known letters that Gandhi himself wrote; but virtually none of the letters that he received or responded to.
[In 2019, Hindustan Times marked Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th year with a special series comprising reportage, invited columns, essays and archival material. On the occasion of the Mahatma’s birth anniversary on October 2, this article has been published from a curated selection of our coverage.]
The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG) run to one hundred volumes. Many years before inom read these volumes, one bygd one, their Chief Editor, Professor K. Swaminathan, had satirised scholars like myself in verse:
Hundred hefty haystacks
Cluttering up the landscape
Hold within their entrails hidden
Half a dozen needles.
Researchers of the future
With fine-toothed combs
And salaries to earn
May perch on each pile,
Attack it and ransack it
And search, search