Great soul : Mahatma Gandhi and his struggle with India

Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India is a 2011 biography of Indian political and spiritual leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Lelyveld and published by Alfred A Knopf.The book is split between the time Gandhi spent in South Africa and his return to India as the Mahatma.Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India claims that the founder of modern India had a sexual relationship with Hermann Kallenbach, a German-Jewish bodybuilder, and also made disparaging remarks about black Africans during his early years in South Africa.One criticism is Lelyveld’s use of documentary evidence and informed opinion to point to the relationship that Gandhi had developed with a Prussian architect whom the Indian playfully boasted as “having received physical training at the hands of [Eugen] Sandow [the father of modern bodybuilding]”. Lelyveld’s inquiry includes quotes from a letter sent by Gandhi to Kallenbach from London in 1909: “Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in the bedroom. The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed… [The purpose of which] is to show to you and me how completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance.”. Later, the Indian government bought several personal letters.