Stray or Great

What has shocked me most about the brouhaha over Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India is that the words “bisexuality” and “racism” have been given equal weight and seem to be equally offensive to most people in the ensuing public discussion. I have yet to hear of protests from progressive individuals or interest groups like the LGBT about this implicit and unfair prejudice.

Racism is a phenomenon that upholds the genetic superiority of one group over another. Its effects are ugly, militate against the human spirit and the dignity of the individual and have resulted in some of the most abhorrent crimes against humanity such as slavery, the holocaust, ethnic cleansing and untold death and destruction over the years.

Bisexuality, on the other hand is the human condition of being physically or romantically attracted to both male and female genders that has been acknowledged by anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists as being one that is natural amongst people across cultures, and social groups and even exists in the animal kingdom.

There is a virtual compendium of facts and statistics about bisexuality on the net for anyone who cares to educate themselves on the subject, and Wikipedia is as good a place to start as any.

It informs us for instance that “Harvard professor Marjorie Garber said most people would be bisexual if not for repression, religion, repugnance, denial, laziness, shyness, lack of opportunity, premature specialisation, a failure of imagination.”

Or that Dr Joseph Merlino, psycho analyst and editor of Freud at 150: 21st Century Essays on a Man of Genius, said “Freud maintained that bisexuality was a normal part of development... He found (such) people (who) were totally normal in every other regard except in terms of their sexual preference. In fact, he saw many of them as having higher intellects, higher aesthetic sensibilities, and higher morals.” Human sexuality is a vast and fascinating subject and it is surprising that it is not offered as a course in most universities across the world. Be that as it may, suffice to say that we do know that societal prejudice religion and manmade laws have inadequately tried to repress, suppress, legislate and pigeonhole it with little and mostly unhappy consequences.

So was Gandhi bisexual? It seems unlikely that an individual as passionately (and often painfully and obsessively) wedded to transparency, truth and self awareness would care to hide this aspect of his life. From his correspondence with Kallenbach which I have read there does seem to be a special affection and even love — but whether it was platonic, idealistic, sexual or emotive, who is to say?

In any case, is there much shame in belonging to a community that includes civilisation’s heavy hitters such as Graham Greene, Havelock Ellis, Simone de Beauvoir, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Frieda Kahlo, Hans Christian Anderson, Leonard Bernstein, Harold Nicholson, Alfred Kinsey, Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Spender and Evelyn Waugh? (This list which is biased towards the arts would include equally substantial individuals from the world of business and government, were it not for societal prejudice I am sure.) Vikram Seth — self confessedly bisexual — in his paean to bisexuality wrote “In the strict ranks of Gay and Straight/ What is my status: Stray? Or Great?”

As far as I’m concerned, Gandhi, who stood for civilization’s highest ideals such as non-violence, compassion, humanity and inclusivity, will be great, no matter what lay beyond that loin cloth.

Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer