I must admit, I haven’t heard this one said about Mahatma Gandhi before. I came across it in a Wikipedia article.

Some people who have read this book, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld

are claiming, or at least asking, whether he was gay, just because he had a close friendship with Hermann Kallenbach.

Um, people of the same sex can be friends without getting into each others’ pants!

That said, I am interested in what the book has to say. Leave it to some people to jump to odd conclusions based on their own obsessions with who does what to whom, and how they do it.

His experiments with challenging his celibacy in the 1940s were way over the top and extremely creepy to boot; those experiments ceased in 1947. I do not know how old the women were that were involved in the experiments; even if they were adults, it’s still creepy particularly because of the age difference between the participants. Because of Gandhi’s stature as a historically important figure at the time of the events, I have to wonder: if they were adults, did they freely give consent to these activities, or could they have felt they had no choice because of Gandhi’s social status as Indian’s national hero?

It doesn’t make it all right that he did it, but at least he had sense enough to listen to whoever told him to stop. I just wish he’d never done it at all. It’s something Richard Attenborough’s film conveniently overlooks. It really doesn’t look good for your hero to admit he’s an ephebophile.

• The biography by Ved Mehta is a short and small book, but packed with lots of interesting information. It is told from various points of views of the people who knew Gandhi during his life. I was drawn to it because of the first chapter, which describes a typical day in his later life.
• The biography by Louis Fisher is what inspired Attenborough to make his film. Another small and readable book. I don’t think I’ve read it all the way through yet.
• Richard Attenborough’s own book about his research and making of the film. I read this as a library book sometime in the late 1990s, and would like to have another look at it sometime if I can get a copy.