A rare collection of letters between Indian independence icon Mahatma Gandhi and a South African bodybuilder with whom he shared a close relationship went on display in New Delhi.
Gandhi with his secretary Miss Sonia Schlesin and friend Doctor Hermann Kallenbach 1913
The bond between Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach has been a subject of speculation and gossip for years owing to their closeness, with previously published correspondence suggesting they may have had a physical relationship.
One of the handwritten letters from Gandhi to Kallenbach that went on show on Wednesday, the 65th anniversary of Gandhi's assassination, is addressed to "My dear Lower House" and signed "Sinly yours, Upper House".
However scholars looking for clear evidence on the full extent of the men's relationship were left disappointed, with curators acknowledging that they had only put a sample of correspondence on display at the National Archives museum.
"These are original letters and we have provided a sample of the correspondence between Gandhi and Kallenbach. There is a lot that is new and significant," Mushirul Hasan, chief of the National Archives, told news agency Agence France-Presse.
Gandhi lived with Kallenbach, a German-born Jewish architect, in Johannesburg for about two years from 1907 before returning to India in 1914 where he helped unify the gathering political movement against British colonial rule.
The archive of letters and photos belonging to Kallenbach was purchased by the Indian government last year, just before they were due to be auctioned by Sotheby's in London.
Hasan denied that the collection had been screened and controversial letters left out keeping in mind the exalted status that Gandhi enjoys in the country.
"Nothing controversial has been left out or necessarily included," Hasan said.
"They had a marvellous relationship and the archives reveal the intensity of that relationship."
The relationship between Gandhi and the wealthy South African was most recently chronicled in a book by former New York Times editor Joseph Lelyveld.
"How completely you have taken possession of my body," Gandhi was quoted as saying in a letter to Kallenbach in Lelyveld's book, entitled "Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India".
"This is slavery with a vengeance," the man known as the "father of the nation" in India is quoted as adding.
Lelyveld was forced to defend his book against accusations that he had suggested Gandhi was bisexual. "The word 'bisexual' nowhere appears in the book," he wrote afterwards.
Raj Bala Jain, part of the National Archives team that studied the collection in detail, said she was surprised how their relationship had been misconstrued.
"I do not know from where he (Lelyveld) quoted those letters. I did not find even a single letter with sexual overtones," she told AFP.
"Friendship can be misinterpreted. I think Gandhi was very normal and above such things," she said of the man who took a public vow of celibacy in his 30s, adding it was not possible to display all correspondence between the two.
"We have displayed what we thought was most interesting."
Among other documents were dozens of letters written by Gandhi's sons to Kallenbach that provide details of his life after his return to the country from South Africa.
In one of them, Harilal, one of the four sons of Gandhi, complains to Kallenbach about how his father had "neglected us". "For my failures in exam I hold him responsible," he wrote.
India has in the past fretted about private auctions of Gandhi's belongings, saying that they insult the memory of a man who rejected material wealth. Auctions of Gandhi's personal items like spectacles and other memorabilia often raise an uproar in the country where many people feel the items are part of the country's cultural legacy.
"We are talking about Gandhi. Such emotions are justified considering the glory that he brought to India," said Hasan.
Source: AFP
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The truth about Mahatma Gandhi: he was a wily operator, not India’s smiling saint
The Indian nationalist leader had an eccentric attitude to sleeping habits, food and sexuality. However, his more controversial ideas have been written out of history
This week, the National Archives here in New Delhi released a set of letters between Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and a close friend from his South African days, Hermann Kallenbach, a German Jewish architect. Cue a set of ludicrous “Gay Gandhi” headlines across the world, wondering whether the fact the Mahatma signed some letters “Sinly yours” might be a clue (seemingly unaware that “sinly” was once a common contraction of “sincerely”).
The origin of this rumour was a mischievous book review two years ago written by the historian Andrew Roberts, which speculated about the relationship between the men. On the basis of the written evidence, it seems unlikely that their friendship in the years leading up to the First World War was physical.
Gandhi is one of the best-documented figures of the pre-electronic age. He has innumerable biographies. If he managed to be gay without anyone noticing until now, it was a remarkable feat. The official record of his sayings and writings runs to more than 90 volumes, and reveals that his last words before being assassinated in 1948 were not an invocation to God, as is commonly reported, but the more prosaic: “It irks me if I am late for prayers even by a minute.”
That Gandhi had an eccentric attitude to sleeping habits, food and sexuality, regarding celibacy as the only way for a man to avoid draining his “vital fluid”, is well known. Indeed, he spoke about it at length during his sermons, once linking a “nocturnal emission” of his own to the problems in Indian society.
According to Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, Mahatma Gandhi’s pronouncements on sex were “abnormal and unnatural” and “can only lead to frustration, inhibition, neurosis, and all manner of physical and nervous ills… I do not know why he is so obsessed by this problem of sex”.
Although some of Gandhi’s unconventional ideas were rooted in ancient Hindu philosophy, he was more tellingly a figure of the late Victorian age, both in his puritanism and in his kooky theories about health, diet and communal living. Like other epic figures from the not too distant past, such as Leo Tolstoy and Queen Victoria, he is increasingly perceived in ways that would have surprised his contemporaries. Certainly no contemporary Indian politician would dare to speak about him in the frank tone that his ally Nehru did.
Gandhi has become, in India and around the globe, a simplified version of what he was: a smiling saint who wore a white loincloth and John Lennon spectacles, who ate little and succeeded in bringing down the greatest empire the world has ever known through non-violent civil disobedience. President Obama, who kept a portrait of Gandhi hanging on the wall of his Senate office, likes to cite him.
An important origin of the myth was Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film Gandhi. Take the episode when the newly arrived Gandhi is ejected from a first-class railway carriage at Pietermaritzburg after a white passenger objects to sharing space with a “coolie” (an Indian indentured laborer). In fact, Gandhi’s demand to be allowed to travel first-class was accepted by the railway company. Rather than marking the start of a campaign against racial oppression, as legend has it, this episode was the start of a campaign to extend racial segregation in South Africa. Gandhi was adamant that “respectable Indians” should not be obliged to use the same facilities as “raw Kaffirs”. He petitioned the authorities in the port city of Durban, where he practised law, to end the indignity of making Indians use the same entrance to the post office as blacks, and counted it a victory when three doors were introduced: one for Europeans, one for Asiatics and one for Natives.
Gandhi’s genuine achievement as a political leader in India was to create a new form of protest, a mass public assertion which could, in the right circumstances, change history. It depended ultimately on a responsive government. He figured, from what he knew of British democracy, that the House of Commons would only be willing to suppress uprisings to a limited degree before conceding. If he had faced a different opponent, he would have had a different fate. When the former Viceroy of India, Lord Halifax, saw Adolf Hitler in 1938, the Führer suggested that he have Gandhi shot; and that if nationalist protests continued, members of the Indian National Congress should be killed in increments of 200.
For other Indian leaders who opposed Gandhi, he could be a fiendish opponent. His claim to represent “in his person” all the oppressed castes of India outraged the Dalit leader Dr BR Ambedkar. Gandhi even told him that they were not permitted to join his association to abolish untouchability. “You owe nothing to the debtors, and therefore, so far as this board is concerned, the initiative has to come from the debtors.” Who could argue with Gandhi the lawyer? The whole object of this proposal, Ambedkar responded angrily, “is to create a slave mentality among the Untouchables towards their Hindu masters”.
Although Gandhi may have looked like a saint, in an outfit designed to represent the poor of rural India, he was above all a wily operator and tactician. Having lived in Britain and South Africa, he was familiar with the system that he was attempting to subvert. He knew how to undermine the British, when to press an advantage and when to withdraw. Little wonder that one British provincial governor described Mr Gandhi as being as “cunning as a cartload of monkeys”.
Patrick French is the author of 'India: A Portrait’ (Vintage)
I WAS GANDHI’S BOYFRIEND
According to a new biography by Joseph Lelyveld, the love of Mahatma Gandhi’s life was a German-Jewish bodybuilder named Hermann Kallenbach. “Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom,” Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach. “The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed.”
KOCHI, India—Gandhi is still so revered in India that a book about him that few Indians have read and that hasn’t even been published in this country has been banned in one state and may yet be banned nationwide.
—The Times.
I know that some people still don’t buy that Gandhi was gay, but let me tell you, from experience, Gandhi liked guys. I first met him when he came to see my ice show in Nepal, which was called “Holiday on Dirt.” Gandhi came backstage and he told me, “I very much enjoyed watching you pretend to ice-skate, in your tight pants.” I asked him, “Um, so why are you wearing a diaper?” And he explained that his outfit was a traditional Indian dhoti, and I said, “Well, you look like the New Year’s baby.” And he said, “You are so handsome when you are not speaking.”
Then he told me about how he made the fabric for his dhoti himself, on his spinning wheel and hand loom, and I said, “Whoa, are you, like, a Native American lesbian?” And he said, “I will tell you over dinner.”
So we do the dinner thing, and he’s all, like, “I’ll just have a salad,” and I go, “Wait, are you some sort of total vegetarian whatever?” And he says yes, that he doesn’t believe in killing living things for food, and I’m, like, “Excuse me, but I’m gonna eat the cow before it eats me.” And Gandhi says, “You are the only grown man I have ever met whose first name is Kelly.” And I’m, like, “Well, your first name is Mohandas, right? Maybe you should change it, so that people can relate more. You could be, like, Tim Gandhi or Gary Gandhi.” And he goes, “Oh, Kelly.”
But he’s kinda cute, you know, in a legendary-world-leader sort of way, and he’s telling me all about his philosophy of nonviolence—I mean, on and on, blah blah blah, until I just want to smack him. And so I say, “O.K., so what if someone, like, punches you—are you just gonna sit there?” And he says, “Yes. What would you do?” And I say, “If someone punched me, I would throw my drink at them. I mean, maybe you should try that with the British.” And he says, “You are so very wise, perhaps you should spell your name Kellhi.”
And I think that’s totally adorable, so I say, “Let’s go back to your place,” and he tells me that he’s celibate. And I’m, like, “Huh? ’Scuse me?” And he says that he believes in the purity of the body and the soul, and that sometimes he sleeps beside a naked young woman, and does not become aroused. And I’m, like, “Me, too.” And then he says that also he’s married. And I’m thinking, Kelly, here we go again.
So I ask him if he’s come out to his parents, and he says, “Oh, no, they’re all old-school Hindu and they wouldn’t understand.” So I say, “But wouldn’t it be cool if you could do a campaign with a poster of your parents hugging you, and the poster could say, ‘Staying in the Closet Is a Hin-Don’t’?” And then he tells me about how India has this, like, totally bogus caste system, and how they even have people called untouchables, and I’m, like, “You mean brunettes?” And he laughs and I say, “No, it’s not funny. You mean, like, brunettes?” And he asks, “Kelly, have you ever studied any world history?,” and I’m, like, “Excuse me, but I happen to be wearing an imported Italian cashmere sweater,” and he says, “You know, maybe I’ll think about a steak.”
Of course, he eventually dumped me for this German-Jewish bodybuilder, and I warned him, I said, “Hello, been there, and I know that at first it sounds hot, but pretty soon it’s all ‘Nein, I can’t stay out late, because I have to get up early for the gym,’ and ‘Nein, we can’t do your rally for South Africa, because we’ve got my cousin’s Seder, remember?’ And his mother will be all ‘So, Mr. Gandhi, I’m told you like to lie down in front of railroad cars, to demonstrate a political point. Can you make a living from this?’ “
But Gandhi and I stayed in touch, because he really was a good person. And he’d give me advice on guys and stuff. Like, he told me, “I know he’s cute, with the mustache and all, but Stalin is not for you.” But do I listen? ♦
Paul Rudnick contributes regularly to the magazine.
Gandhi, Kallenbach and the controversial ‘Vaseline’ reference
Presumably some of the elderly members of the audience had no idea what the speaker was getting at when the subject of Vaseline came up in his talk on M K Gandhi and Herman Kallenbach. They, after all, belonged to a time when Vaseline was still associated with skin care rather than as a means of facilitating homosexual intercourse. Other audience members must have squirmed a bit though; I know, I did. After an erudite discourse on the high idealism, striving for spiritual elevation and shared devotion to combating injustice that characterised the friendship between the two men, it was more than a little jarring to be confronted with the bare mechanics of what, in less enlightened times, was referred to as “buggery”.
To put everyone in the picture, in 2011 the writer Joseph Lelyfeld provoked a bitter controversy when passages in his new book on Gandhi (Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India) were interpreted by some reviewers as inferring that he and the German-Jewish architect Herman Kallenbach were lovers during the time they lived together in Johannesburg. Such inferences were derived from certain letters Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach, in which he commented among other things that Vaseline and cotton wool were a “constant reminder” of him. Further meaning has been read into the practice of the two men of referring to one another in their correspondence as “Upper House” (Gandhi) and “Lower House” (Kallenbach). Lelyveld himself has rejected the gay interpretation of his work, saying that it did not say that Gandhi was bisexual or homosexual, but rather that he was celibate and deeply attached to Kallenbach. Even so, Great Soul has been banned in parts of India, and it continues, rightly or wrongly, to be primarily associated with an attempt at “outing” the Mahatma.
The speaker at the above-mentioned event, Israeli author (of Soulmates: The Story of Mahatma Gandhi and Herman Kallenbach) and researcher Shimon Lev, debunked the homosexuality theory. Even prior to meeting Kallenbach, Gandhi had adopted a regime of strict celibacy and persuaded his friend to do likewise. Writing to his brother, Kallenbach confirmed that he had given up what had been an active heterosexual sex life (years later, he had at least one extended heterosexual affair, although he never married). The two men lived lives of the strictest ascetism, following a simple vegetarian diet, doing every menial physical chore themselves and in general limiting physical comforts to the barest necessities. So far as the “Vaseline” reference goes, this simply referred to how they treated the corns they developed through walking for many miles each day to their offices. (Gandhi once tried to persuade Kallenbach to burn his car. In the end, he simply left it unused in the garage for a year and then sold it. When the two men lived on Tolstoy Farm, they would walk twenty kilometres each day into the centre of town).
As for the terms “Upper House” and “Lower House”, Kallenbach was referred to by the latter because, like the Lower House in the British Parliament, he controlled the financial side of things, not just in their home set-up but in his largely bankrolling the entire Satyagraha (Indian Passive Resistance) movement. In Gandhi’s case, “Upper House” indicated the dominant role he had in determining the spiritual and philosophical development of the two men. Accounting for the terms even more simply, in the house they shared in Orchards, Johannesburg, Gandhi slept in a loft while Kallenbach slept on the floor below. So much for “Upper” and “Lower” being code words for active and passive sodomy. That people’s thoughts so readily stray in that direction nowadays probably says more about the times we live in than in this aspect of the Gandhi-Kallenbach relationship. Here, a white Jew and an Indian Hindu were able to transcend the formidable barriers of race, culture and religion to establish a remarkable personal bond, one characterised by a joint striving to live lives of the highest idealism. Today, it is all reduced to grubby speculation over who inserted what and where.
Some might ask why it is necessary to disprove the homosexuality theory, since even if there was a sexual component to the relationship that would hardly be antithetical to modern, liberal sensibilities. To that, there is at least one persuasive answer, namely that if there was a sexual relationship between the two men, then they were hypocrites and frauds since both claimed to be celibate. This inference would be bad enough if made solely against Kallenbach, a genuinely noble personality who devoted much of his life to fighting racial injustice in this country. It would be even worse if applied to Gandhi, someone who for all his undoubted eccentricities was undoubtedly one of history’s greatest leaders and thinkers who continues to inspire millions the world over.
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