Mohandas Gandhi may have been a great man, leading India to independence, but he was also a great jerk, leading a life of racism, self-promotion, sexual weirdness, and cruelty—or so says the new biography Great Soul, by former New York Times executive editor Joseph Lelyveld. Gandhi's early biographers dubbed him a "moral demi-god," but Lelyveld's book shows a much more human image. "Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive intellectual," writes Andrew Roberts in his review in the Wall Street Journal, "professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals."
Among the key points in Great Soul:
- India's independence could have been achieved much earlier if Gandhi had not kept abandoning his civil disobedience campaigns at critical points.
- Gandhi expressed much racism throughout his life, against blacks in South Africa, Muslims, and low-caste "untouchables" in India. Comparing white Afrikaaners and Indians, he said, "We believe as much in the purity of races as we think they do."
- In his later years, Gandhi liked to sleep naked with a 17-year-old great-niece and other girls.
- But early in his life, Gandhi loved men, specifically German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder Hermann Kallenbach, for whom he left his wife in 1908.
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