Opinion What is the fuss about?

In 1896,Gandhi calls black South Africans “raw Kaffirs whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a number of cattle to buy a wife”; then in 1904,after an outbreak of plague in Johannesburg,he tells a medical officer: “About the mixing of the Kaffirs with Indians,I must confess I feel most strongly.” In four years,however,Gandhi discards that crude imagery and says,“In a well-ordered society,industrious and intelligent men can never be a menace.” And this time he is referring to both Africans and Indians. In another five years,he says,“Every other question not excluding the India question pales into insignificance before the great Native question.”

Lelyveld points out three crucial differences in the grand,national narrative of the Indian Gandhi and the limited concerns of the African Gandhi. One,Gandhi never made a common cause of Indians and Africans. When asked about this later,long after he returned to India,by a delegation of black Americans,Gandhi said it would have endangered their cause. Lelyveld calls this “retrospective tidying up”. Two,although he spoke for indentured labourers in 1903,it took Gandhi 10 more years to mobilise a mass movement. Three,in all his writings of and from South Africa,he mentions only three Africans by name and acknowledges having met only one: John Dube,a Zulu aristocrat and first president of the South African Native National Congress,which later became the African National Congress. Lelyveld debunks the much-celebrated alliance of Gandhi and Dube in South Africa as imagined,resting on “political convenience and wispy oral tradition.”

What could trouble hagiographers is that Lelyveld does not entirely buy Gandhi’s narrative in the Autobiography. “He is more the unsung hero of East-West bildungsroman than the Mahatma in waiting he portrays,who experiences few doubts or deviations after his first weeks in London,” he says. He further points out certain discrepancies in Gandhi’s own accounts of an episode involving a Tamil indentured labourer,Balasundaram. In the Autobiography,Gandhi says,Balasundaram,beaten by his white master and bleeding in the mouth,turned up at his law office in Durban. Gandhi then sends him to a doctor and takes him to a magistrate. Lelyveld then points to a different account by Gandhi,just two years after the incident: there Balasundaram had gone on his own to the “protector of immigrants” who conveys him to a magistrate,who in turn arranges him to be taken to a hospital. Only then does he land on Gandhi’s doorstep. His wounds have been treated,he is no longer bleeding. Lelyveld calls Gandhi’s version in the autobiography “movie treatment”,and says evidence is slight to support his further claim that “Balasundaram’s case reached the ears of every indentured labourer.” Lelyveld says: “Gandhi the Indian politician shapes and reshapes the experience of Gandhi the South African lawyer in order to advance his nationalist agenda and values at home.” But sometimes he unnecessarily quibbles. Where Pyarelal talks about Gandhi’s role in carrying the mortally wounded General Edward Woodgate during the Boer War,Lelyveld remarks Times History of the War in South Africa does not mention Indians in this instance.

Now,to the Kallenbach episode in Great Soul. Hermann Kallenbach was a Jewish architect,gymnast and bodybuilder of Lithuanian background from East Prussia. He bought the land for Tolstoy Farm and has been referred to as a close friend by Gandhi and even a soulmate by some others. Lelyveld calls theirs “the most intimate,also ambiguous,relationship of his lifetime.” There is a little mischief there. Especially when he cleverly refrains from following that up with a direct comment or an explanation. Instead,he first quotes Tridip Suhrud as saying,“They were a couple”; he then says “one respected Gandhi scholar characterised the relationship as ‘clearly homoerotic’ rather than “homosexual,’” hastening to add that he meant only “a strong mutual attraction,nothing more.”

In that much-reported letter from a hotel room in London in 1909,the year Freud was giving his Clark lectures in the US,Gandhi writes about Kallenbach’s portrait on his mantelpiece and how Vaseline and cotton wool are a constant reminder. Lelyveld’s mischief is in throwing a question that could have a scandalous undertone,before proceeding to a non-controversial answer. Here he wonders,“What are we to make of… the reference to petroleum jelly?” Indeed. As the reader’s imagination begins to work,he explains: “The most plausible guesses are that the Vaseline… may have to do with enemas,to which he regularly resorted,or may in some other way foreshadow the geriatric Gandhi’s enthusiasm for massage.”

Lelyveld doesn’t say there was a homosexual relationship between Gandhi and Kallenbach,but even an implicit suggestion of an intriguing relationship falls flat with the rather vague letters he excerpts. Even the explicit ones are hardly outrageous. What is one to make of “more love,and yet more love… such love as they hope the world has not yet seen”? That is not indecent,by Gandhi’s standards. He had a vocabulary of love and lust all his own,untouched by Freud. Well,he has even said,“Gokhale by his features took me by storm.” And that was in a letter to Kallenbach.