Mohandas and the unicorn.

• Author: French, Patrick
• Position: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India - Book review

Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul." Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 448 pp., $28.95.

If celebrity is a mask that eats into the face, posthumous fame is more like an accretion of silt and barnacles that can leave the face unrecognizable, or recognizable only as something it is not. We might feel we know Mohandas Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Joan of Arc or Martin Luther King Jr., but, rather, we know their iconic value: their portraits or statues, their famous deeds and sayings. We have trouble seeing them as their contemporaries did--as people. Jawaharlal Nehru, writing in the 1930s when he was in a British prison and some distance from becoming India's prime minister, said that Gandhi's views on marital relationships 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." Nehru was writing publicly, in his autobiography, but it is fair to say that few Indian politicians today would speak of the Father of the Nation in this unfettered way. Gandhi has become, in India and across the world, a simplified character: a celibate, cheerful saint who wore a white loincloth and round spectacles, ate small meals and succeeded in bringing down an empire through nonviolent civil disobedience. Barack Obama, who kept a portrait of Gandhi hanging on the wall of his Senate office, is fond of citing him.

Joseph Lelyveld has already found himself in some trouble over Great Soul, not for what he wrote, but for what other people say he wrote. In a contemporary morality tale of high-speed information transfer and deliberate misconstruction, his book has been identified as something it is not. The Daily Mail, one of London's lively and vituperative tabloids, ran a story saying Great Soul claimed Gandhi "was bisexual and left his wife to live with a German-Jewish bodybuilder." The paper took its lead from a review written by the historian Andrew Roberts, who had suggested Gandhi was, among other things, "a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist." When the Mail's story was recast in India, Narendra Modi, the combative chief minister of Gandhi's home state of Gujarat, banned Great Soul saying it was "perverse in nature. It has hurt the sentiments of those with capacity for sane and logical thinking. Mahatma Gandhi is an idol not only in India but in the entire world."

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Modi, who is unable to obtain a visa to enter the United States because of his complicity in anti-Muslim pogroms in 2002, was seeking to redeem his own damaged reputation by appropriating Gandhi--a project he has been engaged in for some time--so as to soften his image. Modi knew this move would appeal to his constituents, who admire his muscular nationalism as well as his efficiency as chief minister. As usual, a politician was laying claim to Gandhi's retrospective endorsement. The ban was almost enforced nationally by India's law minister, Veerappa Molly, until some Gandhi scholars and descendants dissuaded him. Great Soul rose up the best-seller lists. As Andrew Roberts told me, "Banning books is a fail-safe way of giving them huge free publicity. The Gujarat government has just spectacularly shot itself in the foot." In India, however, a book ban is not really a book ban: it is a way for politicians to gain credence. Anyone who wishes to read Great Saul can still do so, in any part of the country, and it remains freely available in Gujarat's high-end bookshops. If India's frequent book bans were genuine curtailments of free speech, it might be assumed that New Delhi's literary types would make a more serious effort to overturn them.

Rather than a work of sensation, Lelyveld's book is a measured, judicious attempt to understand Gandhi's career as a social thinker and activist. It looks forensically at crucial moves and legends that are part of his accepted life story. Instead of focusing on the constitutional machinations that led to Indian independence from British rule in 1947, the author devotes much of his attention to Mohandas Gandhi's time in South Africa, during which he laid down the principles of direct action and personal sacrifice that could be used to promote social or political change. Lelyveld is well placed to do this: before he became executive editor...