We all know how Gandhi used to sleep naked with young girls at his ashram as part of his ‘experiments.’
Of course, if any of us tried those, ahem, ‘experiments’ we’d be carted off to prison or hauled off to a mental ward. 
But how many of us know that the Mahatma might have also been an AC/DC?
As all intelligent SI readers know, AC/DC in slang means bi-sexual.
A new biography of Gandhi by Pulitzer Prize winner and former Editor of the New York Times Joseph Lelyveld has just come out.
Titled Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, the book, despite being one in an extended line of Gandhi biographies, has some interesting tidbits.
The book releases in the U.S. on March 29 and we will, of course, buy it and review it on SI.
But the sneaky bastards at the Wall Street Journal managed to lay their hands on a copy of Great Soul and reviewed it.
Here’s an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal’s review of the book for all ye voyeuristic schmucks:
Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi’s organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908. “Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom,” he wrote to Kallenbach. “The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed.” For some reason, cotton wool and Vaseline were “a constant reminder” of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might relate to the enemas Gandhi gave himself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.
Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about “how completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance.” Gandhi nicknamed himself “Upper House” and Kallenbach “Lower House,” and he made Lower House promise not to “look lustfully upon any woman.” The two then pledged “more love, and yet more love . . . such love as they hope the world has not yet seen.”
They were parted when Gandhi returned to India in 1914, since the German national could not get permission to travel to India during wartime—though Gandhi never gave up the dream of having him back, writing him in 1933 that “you are always before my mind’s eye.” Later, on his ashram, where even married “inmates” had to swear celibacy, Gandhi said: “I cannot imagine a thing as ugly as the intercourse of men and women.” You could even be thrown off the ashram for “excessive tickling.” (Salt was also forbidden, because it “arouses the senses.”)
Source: Wall Street Journal, March 26-27, 2011, p- C10 (print edition)
If Gandhi was an AC/DC, that would not diminish his stature as one of the most interesting personalities of our times.
Truth be said, monogamy and heterosexuality are fairly modern contrivances in the long history of Man.
Related Stories:
Great Soul by Joseph Lelyveld – Chapter 3; Before he Became Mahatma, Gandhi was a Racist Swine
Great Soul by Joseph Lelyveld – Chapter 2
Great Soul by Joseph Lelyveld – Chapter 1
Eng 129-3 after 32 overs Run Rate 4.03
Recent Comments