INDIA’S FEDERAL government has backed away from banning Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph Lelyveld’s biography of Mahatma Gandhi after reviews abroad suggested the leader considered father of India’s independence had a homosexual relationship with a Jewish German body builder, Hermann Kallenbach, and was a racist.
But the book has been banned in Gandhi's western home province of Gujarat, whose chief minister, Narendra Modi, demanded the author apologise publicly for "hurting the sentiments of millions of Indians" and called for a nationwide ban on Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India.
After initially veering towards imposing a ban, federal law minister M Veerappa Moily said yesterday there were no plans for legislative changes to deal with publications that cast aspersions on national heroes such as Gandhi.
Instead, he suggested “self-regulation” by the author and conceded the “perverse” inferences made in relation to Gandhi stemmed exclusively from book reviews in Britain and the US.
“Why should we give more publicity to such things? The image of our national heroes cannot be sullied like this,” he said.
“My stand is that since the author has himself denied any adverse remarks on Mahatma Gandhi, no further action is required.”
Great Soulhas not yet been published in India, so few in the country have read Lelyveld's book. Reaction to it has been based exclusively on reviews that quoted one of Gandhi's letters to Kallenbach in which he declared: "How completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance."
Reacting to the uproar his painstakingly researched book has triggered in India, a distraught Lelyveld denied using any offensive language in relation to Gandhi or dwelling on his sexual preferences. “It does not say Gandhi was bisexual. It does not say that he was homosexual. It does not say that he was a racist,” he said.
“The word bisexual never appears in the book and the word racist only appears once in a very limited context, relating to a single phrase and not to Gandhi’s attitude or history in South Africa.
“I didn’t say these things, so I can hardly defend them.
"I'd say someone might take the trouble to look at it and read it before it's banned," the former New York Timesforeign and executive editor and India correspondent irascibly told an Indian television news channel.
Several other Gandhi scholars had stoutly defended Lelyveld, saying the correspondence between Gandhi and Kallenbach had been in the public domain for decades as part of Volume 96 of the government-sponsored Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.
This was no great secret and no scandal, they said.
“On the question of alleged bisexuality, the book does not either use that term or invite that reading,” said renowned Gandhi scholar Tridip Suhrud.
Even Gandhi’s great-grandson, Tushar Gandhi, opposed a ban on Lelyveld’s book.
“If the government . . . bans the book, it will be a greater insult to Bapu (Gandhi) than that book or the author might have intended. I will challenge the ban,” he said in a message on Twitter.
“How does it matter if the Mahatma was straight, gay or bisexual? He would still be the man who led India to freedom,” he added.