Gujarat has banned Pulitzer-Prize winning author Joseph Lelyveld’s new book about Mahatma Gandhi on 30th March after reviews saying it hints that the father of India’s independence had a homosexual relationship.
More bans have been proposed in India, where homosexuality was illegal until 2009 and still carries social stigma.
Gujarat’s state assembly voted unanimously Wednesday to immediately ban “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India.”
The furor was sparked by local media reports, based on early reviews out of the U.S. and U.K., some of which emphasized passages in the book suggesting Gandhi had an intimate relationship with a German man named Hermann Kallenbach.
The book has not yet been released in India, so few here have actually read Mr. Lelyveld’s writings.
But in the information age the excerpts are available on websites suggest about homosexual relationship of MG. Like some of past precedents of writing on Bapu this endeavour appears to sensetionalize the issue, never mind the propaganda will work.
In this context, Joseph Lelyveld’s book, “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India,” seems almost eccentric, devoted as it is to explaining the evolution of a social and moral philosophy that, 60 years after the end of the British Raj, has lost the attention of the nation it once enthralled.
Mr. Lelyveld teases out the forces that transformed a sheltered young Gujurati Hindu lawyer from a conservative merchant caste into the Mahatma, a figure part politician and part saint, who renewed the ancient tradition of Hindu asceticism in the hope not just of political independence, but also of a social and spiritual transformation based in the Indian villages
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