Extract
Mohandas and the unicorn.
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...See the full content of this document
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