Gandhi would surely have been widely reviled, and his faults distorted and oversimplified in the rush to judge him
The Indian historian Ramachandra Guha has launched the second volume of his two-volume biography of Mohandas K(Mahatma) Gandhi, a magnificent achievement that, in Guha’s words, has taken “30 years of unsystematic interest and 15 years of obsessive foraging”. At a talk last week at the London School of Economics, he was passionate and amusing, and it was uplifting to hear his respect and affection for one of the great moral figures of the last century. The questions from the audience mainly concerned Gandhi’s role in the independence movement and his attempts to heal India’s religious and social divisions. But then – a last question – a young woman wondered about a strange episode in Gandhi’s life that she found “unsettling”. In reply, Guha went further; it had been “inexplicable and indefensible”.
For several decades after his death, this episode was not widely known. Popular accounts of Gandhi’s life, including Richard Attenborough’s biopic, never mentioned it. The facts are that after his wife, Kasturba, died in 1944, Gandhi began the habit of sharing his bed with naked young women: his personal doctor, Sushila Nayar, and his grandnieces Abha and Manu, who were then in their late teens and about 60 years younger than him.
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