by SodaHead News
Mother Theresa got thrown under the bus after her death and now it seems like it’s Mahatma Gandhi’s turn. ABC News reported that a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Lelyveld claims the revered Indian man of peace left his wife for a male lover, and, oh yeah, he was racist.
Former New York Times reporter Lelyveld writes in “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle With India,” that the diminutive leader of India’s independence movement and worldwide symbol for peaceful civil disobedience took German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder Hermann Kallenbach as a lover and had a secret love nest in South Africa.
Lelyveld claims Gandhi left the arranged marriage to his wife, “Ba,” in 1908 for Kallenbach and that the intimacy between the men is revealed in letters between Kallenbach and the spiritual guru.
"How completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance,” Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach. "Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in the bedroom ... The mantelpiece is opposite the bed."
It also claims that their nicknames for each other were “Upper House” and “Lower House,” suggesting the power dynamic between the men.
The book has already been banned in the Western Indian state of
The book also chronicles Gandhi’s admiration of young women, including his 17-year-old great niece, and asserts that he had racist attitudes about black South Africans, who he referred to by the epithet “kaffir.” He is said to have referred to blacks as “uncivilized” and considered them to be “untouchables,” the lowest class in his homeland.
To put it mildly, The Wall Street Journal said the book depicted Gandhi as “a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent, a fanatical faddist, implacably racist, and a ceaseless self-promoter, professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals."
Do you believe Gandhi was gay?
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