Mahatma Gandhi portrayed as a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist

In the last week of March 2011, a biography of Mahatma Gandhi ignited one of the fiercest literary controversies India had seen in years — before most of its angriest critics had even read it.

The book was Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, by Pulitzer-winning journalist and former New York Times executive editor Joseph Lelyveld, published by Alfred A. Knopf on March 29. Its reception in the press turned on two themes: Gandhi's intense, emotionally charged friendship with Hermann Kallenbach, a German-Jewish architect he had lived with in South Africa, and his later experiments with celibacy — including the practice of sleeping beside young women, clothed, to test his vows.

Britain's Daily Mail compressed the Kallenbach material into a headline that traveled the world: "Gandhi 'left his wife to live with a male lover,' new book claims." The Wall Street Journal review, by the historian Andrew Roberts, was scathing in the opposite direction — mocking Gandhi's celibacy experiments and dismissing his political judgment. Between the reviews and the reporting, the book was being sold to readers as a portrait of Gandhi as a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent, and a fanatical faddist.

The backlash in India was swift. Gujarat, Gandhi's home state, voted in its legislative assembly to ban the book — unanimously, before it had even gone on sale in India. Narendra Modi, then the state's chief minister, called the writing perverse in nature and said it had hurt the sentiments of crores of people.

And then there was the awkward fact at the center of it all: the author himself said the controversy was built on a misreading. Lelyveld stated plainly: "The book does not say that Gandhi was bisexual or homosexual. It says that he was celibate and deeply attached to Kallenbach. This is not news." He added that the word "bisexual" nowhere appears in the book.

That is the pattern worth remembering. A serious, admiring biography of a world-historical figure — Lelyveld described his book as responsible, sensitive, and admiring of Gandhi's struggle — gets fed through the machinery of headline-writing, and what comes out the other end is a cartoon: weirdo, incompetent, faddist. The ban followed the reviews; the reviews followed the headlines; and the headlines had almost nothing to do with the book.

Gandhi deserved better than the cartoon. So, frankly, did the readers.