Book of the week: Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India by Joseph Lelyveld

(Knopf, $29)

Most books about the father of Indian independence—and there have been many—“tend to hagiography,” said Alan Cate in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The “considerable virtue” of Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography of Mohandas K. Gandhi is that it sheds new light on the 20th-century leader known as Mahatma, or “great soul,” while avoiding blind veneration. Lelyveld rightfully focuses on Gandhi’s moral idealism—his dedication to Hindu-Muslim equality, his efforts to uplift the “untouchables” in India’s Hindu caste system, and his development of nonviolent-resistance tactics to advocate for an end to British colonial occupation. But the former executive editor of The New York Times also doesn’t shy away from Gandhi’s imperfections, showing him to have been at times “both scold and sage,” and occasionally even a hypocrite.

“Hypocrite” might be an understatement, said Andrew Roberts in The Wall Street Journal. Lelyveld’s “generally admiring” work provides enough information for a reader to discern that Gandhi was a “sexual weirdo, a political incompetent,” and “implacably racist.” It’s disturbing to discover that the spiritual leader, while in his 70s, encouraged his 17-year-old great-niece to strip naked for “nightly cuddles” with him. Eye-opening, too, are the details provided about Gandhi’s relationship with Hermann Kallenbach, a German bodybuilder he lived with after leaving his wife, in 1908. Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about “how completely you have taken possession of my body,” and the two men pledged undying love. But perhaps most damaging is the disdain Gandhi showed for black Africans during the 21 years he practiced law in South Africa, writing once that they were “uncivilized” and “lived like animals.”

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When Lelyveld’s book was banned in parts of India last week, the author claimed that reviewers had distorted his reporting, said Vikas Bajaj and Julie Bosman in The New York Times. Lelyveld is actually careful in the book to present the relationship with Kallenbach as possibly Platonic, said Hari Kunzru, also in the Times. And though he makes it clear that Gandhi didn’t ally himself with South Africa’s black majority when he began demonstrating against discrimination there, he shows Gandhi undergoing a moral evolution that took decades. Controversies aside, Lelyveld’s work has “restored human depth to the Mahatma, the plaster saint.” At a time when Gandhi’s “lofty ideals of nonviolence and human brotherhood” can seem otherworldly, making him more real might be useful.