Into every life a little disappointment must come.

A little while back, Chris over at Cynical-C Blog discovered and posted an exposé of sorts on Gandhi which got my dander up. After all, here was this person slagging a man renowned world-wide as a spiritual leader and Indian statesman; who also happened to be one of the few men whom I truly admired for his sheer steadfastedness. I wasn't going to take this lying down, so I went a'googling for ammo. I was going to debunk this scurrilous debunker. The more fool I.

Having gone looking for ammunition to launch an epic rebuttal; I found instead further indication that I, along with many of my generation, may have been sold a bill of goods. Among the many treatises which I found was Richard Grenier's "The Gandhi Nobody Knows", written on the occasion of the 1982 release of the award winning Ben Kingsley vehicle named for its subject. This longish article, whose anecdotal references are not refuted even by the Gandhi apologists, provides a jaw-dropping insight into the "canonization" of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi; as well as his unhusbandly behaviour, decidedly kinky (by western standards) nature, racist leanings and astonishing ambivalence on the definitive matter of pacifism. You'll regret not reading the entire piece.

...a friend of mine...objected strenuously that the picture of Gandhi that emerges in the movie is grossly inaccurate, omitting, as one of many examples, that when Gandhi's wife lay dying of pneumonia and British doctors insisted that a shot of penicillin would save her, Gandhi refused to have this alien medicine injected in her body and simply let her die. (It must be noted that when Gandhi contracted malaria shortly afterward he accepted for himself the alien medicine quinine, and that when he had appendicitis he allowed British doctors to perform on him the alien outrage of an appendectomy.)...

Read on...

"Gandhi", then, is a large, pious, historical morality tale centered on a saintly, sanitized Mahatma Gandhi cleansed of anything too embarrassingly Hindu (the word "caste" is not mentioned from one end of the film to the other) and, indeed, of most of the rest of Gandhi's life, much of which would drastically diminish his saintliness in Western eyes...

I cannot honestly say I had any reasonable expectation that the film would show scenes of Gandhi's pretty teenage girl followers fighting "hysterically" (the word was used) for the honor of sleeping naked with the Mahatma and cuddling the nude septuagenarian in their arms. (Gandhi was "testing" his vow of chastity in order to gain moral strength for his mighty struggle with Jinnah.) When told there was a man named Freud who said that, despite his declared intention, Gandhi might actually be *enjoying* the caresses of the naked girls, Gandhi continued, unperturbed. Nor, frankly, did I expect to see Gandhi giving daily enemas to all the young girls in his ashrams (his daily greeting was, "Have you had a good bowel movement this morning, sisters?"), nor see the girls giving him *his* daily enema...

(Link)

Hmpf. Riiiiight. Ok, so it's going to take me a bit to integrate these, uh, eccentricities into my perception of the man and his contribution to this past century. All part of growing up I suppose, this coming to terms with the inevitable human failings of our so-called 'greats'.

posted by dorna! @ 12:05 am