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The book, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India quotes extensively from Gandhi’s letters to Kallenbach.
A new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning former editor of The New York Times Joseph Lelyveld has quoted correspondence to suggest that Mahatma Gandhi was in love with Hermann Kallenbach, a male bodybuilder and German-Jewish architect, to whom he wrote “about ‘how completely you have taken possession of my body...this is slavery with a vengeance’.”
"Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom," he wrote to Kallenbach. "The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed." For some reason, cotton wool and Vaseline were "a constant reminder" of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might relate to the enemas Gandhi gave himself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.
Gandhi nicknamed himself "Upper House" and Kallenbach "Lower House," and he made Lower House promise not to "look lustfully upon any woman." The two then pledged "more love, and yet more love . . . such love as they hope the world has not yet seen."
Kallenbach was born in Germany but emigrated to South Africa where he became a wealthy architect.
Gandhi was working there and Kallenbach became one of his closest disciples.
The pair lived together for two years in a house Kallenbach built in South Africa and pledged to give one another ‘more love, and yet more love . . . such love as they hope the world has not yet seen.’
At the age of 13 Gandhi had been married to 14-year-old Kasturbai Makhanji, but after four children together they split in 1908 so he could be with Kallenbach, the book says.
They were separated in 1914 when Gandhi went back to India – Kallenbach was not allowed into India because of the First World War, after which they stayed in touch by letter.
As late as 1933 he wrote a letter telling of his unending desire and branding his ex-wife ‘the most venomous woman I have met’.
Lelyveld’s book goes beyond the myth to paint a very different picture of Gandhi’s private life and makes astonishing claims about his sexuality.
It details how even in his 70s he regularly slept with his 17-year-old great niece Manu and and other women..
He once told a woman: ‘Despite my best efforts, the organ remained aroused. It was an altogether strange and shameful experience.’
The biography also details one instance in which he forced Manu to walk through a part of the jungle where sexual assaults had in the past taken place just to fetch a pumice stone for him he liked to use to clean his feet.
She returned with tears in her eyes but Gandhi just ‘cackled’ and said: ‘If some ruffian had carried you off and you had met your death courageously, my heart would have danced with joy.’
In another startling revelation, the book claims he held racist views against South African blacks.
"We were marched off to a prison intended for Kaffirs," he is quoted as saying during a visit to the country. "We could understand not being classed with whites, but to be placed on the same level as the Natives seemed too much to put up with. Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilised."
The Wall Street Journal review of the book said it recast Gandhi as "a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent, a fanatical faddist, implacably racist, and a ceaseless self-promoter, professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals."
The revelations about Gandhi are likely to be deeply contested by his millions of followers around the world for whom he is revered with almost God-like status.
Nobody from the Indian High Commission to Britain was available for comment.
Faraan Khan
Pakistan Cyber Force
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