“I am not the Joseph Lelvyeld who wrote a book about the secret sex life of Gandhi,” he said, referring to reviewers who have said his book, Great Soul, reveals the Mahatma as a bisexual. His lecture about what the book does say sold out the Billy Wilder Auditorium at the Hammer Museum.

In fact, said Lelyveld, the former executive editor of The New York Times and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, though he does not follow many of Gandhi’s life choices – vegetarianism, nature cures and celibacy, to name a few – “I like and admire him even more at the end of this journey I imposed on myself than I did at the outset” of the book-writing project.

Learning From South Africa

The more than two decades Mohandas Gandhi spent in South Africa, where he moved as a young lawyer, are a crucial part of any biography, Lelyveld said. Yet few people understand what his time in Africa actually meant to his life.

Great Soul was intended to “get beyond the notion that South African shaped him and to an understanding of how that act happened, how the preoccupations he took on in one subcontinent played out in the other,” Lelyveld said. “His remarkable self-reinvention almost required foreign soil.”

Gandhi was chosen by his family to go out into the world and make a living to support his relatives. After three years in Britain, Gandhi attempted to start a law practice in Bombay. He didn’t find much success, so when he received an offer to assist with a case in South Africa he got on a boat.

“He expected to stay a year, and his final departure took place 21 years later,” Lelyveld said.

Gandhi did work on the case, but he also felt pulled toward social movements.

“In 1913, on the eve of the World War, he was still in South Africa leading a series of strikes against the coal mines and sugar plantations,” Lelyveld said.

Returning to India, Preaching Nonviolence

By the time Gandhi returned to his home country in 1915, he had transformed his philosophies, goals and even style of dress, Lelyveld said. He had begun wearing the loincloth and shawl that would be his uniform for the rest of his life, to be in touch with the poorest of the poor among Indians.

“It is our responsibility to dress [the poor] first and then dress ourselves, to feed them first and then feed ourselves,” Lelyveld quoted Gandhi as saying.

As president of the Indian National Congress, a position he assumed shortly after returning home, Gandhi took the helm of the ultimately successful movement for independence from Britain. But although his leadership has led to his deification among millions of Indians, it didn’t happen the way Gandhi imagined.

“Gandhi had to recognize that each of the values he said would be pillars of Indian freedom had been pushed aside, sometimes even trampled,” by people who were ostensible followers, he said.

Failing Nobly

But if Gandhi’s role in the Indian independence movement was not an unqualified success, more troubling was the effects, or lack there of, of his work to unite Indians of different religions during the last several months of his life. He wandered the country seeking to show that Hindus could live as minorities among Muslims and vice versa.

The Mahatma sought to “douse the flames of ethnic cleansing that would ultimately destroy Hindu and Muslim and Sikh lives by the hundreds of thousands,” Lelyveld said. The effort was temporarily successful but, ultimately lost to the tremendous forces pulling Indians of different religions apart.

“I am more moved by this noble failure than his successes,” Lelyveld said.

Gandhi also seemed to sense that South Asia would join the nuclear-equipped world, an event he dreaded.

“In 1947 he said ‘God save us from this atomic bomb mentality,’ Lelyveld said, “and that was 27 years before india exploded its first nuclear device.”

What Gandhi Means

The question underlying any study of Gandhi’s life, Lelyveld said, is the relevance it has for the present day and the future. One major legacy Gandhi left is of anticolonial protests, a form of expression he pioneered.

Furthermore, Lelyveld said, Gandhi’s idea of satyagraha, or nonviolent resistance, has outlived him by more than 60 years and shows no signs of waning. Lelyveld cited figures from Martin Luther King, Jr. to the protesters in Egypt, Libya and other dictator-led nations as disciples of Gandhi, whether explicitly or not.

And, of course, Gandhi changed India’s fortunes forever, though he would never recognize the nation that is now home to 17 percent of the world’s people. His fight for independence, Lelyveld said, was “a conscientious attempt not just to achieve a transfer of power but to change a society from inside out.”

“If India has a social conscience, and I believe it does, that social conscience can still be called Gandhian,” he said.

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The meaning of Gandhi has been hotly debated ever since his death, but one thing is certain: his pioneering concept of satyagraha, or nonviolence, continues to inspire activists and protesters today. Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography, Great Soul, has ignited controversy over Gandhi’s human side, so in advance of Lelyveld’s appearance at Zócalo on April 12, we asked two experts to evaluate his life and legacy.

Let’s Evaluate Him on His Ideas, Not His Sex Life

I read Lelyveld’s biography as soon as it appeared because I was eager to include an assessment of it in a bibliographical essay for the next edition of my study of Gandhi’s political theory out soon. Great Soul impressed me as being a fair, fluent and well researched account of Gandhi, striking a fine balance that appreciated his signal achievements – especially the salt march and Calcutta fast, his most dramatic satyagrahas – yet introduced criticisms of his early views in South Africa that were fair and penetrating. I subsequently wrote that it was the best biography by an American or British journalist since the classic by Louis Fischer.

Lelyveld inevitably lacks what Fischer featured, a direct personal relationship with Gandhi, but even more than Fischer, Lelyveld is determined to get the story right. This is evident, for example, with the precision that he relentlessly tracks the twists and turns of Gandhi’s attitudes toward race during his initial period in South Africa. Lelyveld does recognize the central theme of all great biographies of Gandhi, that his life was a journey marked by unusual changes. My main criticism, aside from the book not including interviews with Gandhi’s contemporaries, is that it could have emphasized even more the extent that many of Gandhi’s ideas underwent such drastic transformations after he left South Africa. His mature thought and leadership left behind basic attitudes toward caste and race to develop into an extraordinarily inclusiveness. The sheer imagination of this thinker and activist is staggering.

With this assessment of his book in mind, I read the review of it by Andrew Roberts, “Among the Hagiographers” in The Wall Street Journal on March 26. My astonishment began with the opening paragraph that called Gandhi a “sexual weirdo, a political incompetent … professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals.”  I was surprised not by the tenor and tone, because Gandhi’s enemies in India during his lifetime had spewed worse. (After all, the conspirators that assassinated him openly expressed extreme hatred for the man they firmly believed had singlehandedly betrayed their country.) What surprised me, then, was the fact that The Wall Street Journal, to which I had subscribed until March 26, published such an irredeemably venomous review, enabling a person with little knowledge of Gandhi to push a personal agenda. (My faith in journalism generally was soon restored by other reviews.)

At the end of this controversy, though, remains a query: how long will the obsession with Gandhi’s sex life continue? The judgment of history is already being made about Gandhi, helped by books like Great Soul, and it seems incredible that the original ideas and remarkable leadership he provided could possibly hinge on whether or not he was bisexual. Perhaps we need brilliant humorists like Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain to get some perspective.

Dennis Dalton is professor emeritus of political science at Barnard College specializing in political theory, nonviolence and the life of Gandhi.

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Just Look at the Middle East Protests

Although Gandhi is a controversial figure whose legacy has often been disputed, his reputation has in general increased in the years since his assassination in 1948. He is revered today by many as a spiritual leader and saintly figure. He is seen by others as a great pacifist. He is admired for his method of militant nonviolent resistance – satyagraha – and many have sought to apply it in struggles for civil and democratic rights.  He has been held up as a champion of national liberation who has provided a potent means for resisting colonial rule. Others have appreciated his critique of the industrial mode of production and his call for a self-sustaining economy and egalitarian society.

Ghandi’s philosophy of satyagraha, or nonviolent resistance, is of particular relevance today. His creation of a new word in English, that of “nonviolence” – which he took from the Sanskrit ahimsa – has become the standard term to describe such that form of protest. Gandhi evolved a range of techniques and strategies that were tried and tested in actual protests in South Africa and colonial India. They were developed further by figures like Martin Luther King Jr., and the foremost political theorist in this area, Gene Sharp. And, of course, Gandhi’s continuing influence in this respect can be seen in the ongoing protests in the Middle East and north Africa, where manuals on the strategy of nonviolent resistance that are directly inspired by Gandhi’s methods have been circulated and applied to telling effect by protestors. Gandhi’s struggle against colonial and racial oppression provides in this respect a beacon that continues to inform ongoing struggles for democracy and civil liberties in the face of authoritarian repression.

David Hardiman is professor of history at University of Warwick specializing in subaltern studies.

*Photo courtesy of Elton Melo.

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