DARK SHADES

The man who became Gandhi remains an enigma in this study of his early life, says Jad Adams. Mohandas Gandhi   had an extraordinary power to make people believe in him as much as he believed in himself: to enrol others in his cult of narcissism. Ramachandra Guha’s book purports to address the question of how Gandhi’s first 45 years shaped his remarkable personality, before he hit upon the image of the loin-clothed fakir challenging the Empire, a guise he assumed in 1921, seven years after this book ends. Most of Gandhi Before India deals with his 20 years in South Africa (1893-1914), where he developed techniques of mass civil disobedience and set up his first two ideal communities, Phoenix and Tolstoy Farm. Here he promoted mud packs and celibacy and worked on ways to render food as tasteless as possible. The smarter of his followers did not live in these places: they took Gandhi’s heroic leadership and discarded the food faddist, the sexual obsessive and the tyrannic...

The bond between Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach has been a subject of speculation and gossip for years owing to their closeness, with previously published correspondence suggesting they may have had a physical relationship. One of the handwritten letters from Gandhi to Kallenbach that went on show on Wednesday, the 65th anniversary of Gandhi's assassination, is addressed to "My dear Lower House" and signed "Sinly yours, Upper House". Gandhi lived with Kallenbach, a German-born Jewish architect, in Johannesburg for about two years from 1907 before returning to India in 1914 where he helped unify the gathering political movement against British colonial rule. The archive of letters and photos belonging to Kallenbach was purchased by the Indian government last year, just before they were due to be auctioned by Sotheby's in London. Hasan denied that the collection had been screened and controversial letters left out keeping in mind the exalted status that ...

the National Archives here in New Delhi released a set of letters between Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and a close friend from his South African days, Hermann Kallenbach, a German Jewish architect. Cue a set of ludicrous “Gay Gandhi” headlines across the world, wondering whether the fact the Mahatma signed some letters “Sinly yours” might be a clue (seemingly unaware that “sinly” was once a common contraction of “sincerely”). The origin of this rumour was a mischievous book review two years ago written by the historian Andrew Roberts, which speculated about the relationship between the men. On the basis of the written evidence, it seems unlikely that their friendship in the years leading up to the First World War was physical. Gandhi is one of the best-documented figures of the pre-electronic age. He has innumerable biographies. If he managed to be gay without anyone noticing until now, it was a remarkable feat. The official record of his sayings and writings runs to more than 90 v...