Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (17 page)

In an age when the concept of Platonic love gains little credence, selectively chosen details of the relationship and quotations from letters can easily be arranged to suggest a conclusion.
Kallenbach, who was raised and educated in East Prussia, was a lifetime bachelor, gymnast, and bodybuilder, “having received physical training at the hands of Sandow,” as Gandhi himself later boasted. This was an allusion to
Eugen Sandow, a strongman still celebrated as “the father of modern bodybuilding,” who turns out to have been a contemporary of Kallenbach’s in what was then called Königsberg (and is now the city of Kaliningrad in a Russian enclave on the Baltic fastened to Poland). Gandhi was preoccupied throughout his life with physiology, especially as it pertained to appetites, but never, it hardly needs saying, with bodybuilding. His taut torso—he’d weigh in later at 106 to 118 pounds, depending on how recently he’d fasted, on a frame of not quite five feet seven inches in height—would eventually become better known than Sandow’s. But in his heyday, it was the overdeveloped strongman who was the international pinup, the precursor of Charles Atlas and Arnold Schwarzenegger
(becoming enough of a household name to pop several times into Leopold Bloom’s mind in Joyce’s
Ulysses
).

The son of a timber merchant, Kallenbach had served a year in the German army and then trained as an architect in Stuttgart before arriving in Johannesburg in 1895 at the age of twenty-four.
He’d thus been in South Africa for nearly a decade when Sandow, who’d been discovered and turned into an international star by Flo Ziegfeld, brought his act, a form of male striptease, to Johannesburg in 1904. It’s hard to imagine Kallenbach, who’d yet to meet Gandhi, bypassing the chance to become reacquainted with his fellow Königsberger.

If not infatuated, Gandhi was clearly drawn to the architect. In a letter from London in 1909, he writes: “
Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in the bedroom. The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed.” Cotton wool and Vaseline, he then says, “are a constant reminder.” The point, he goes on, “is to show to you and me how completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance.” What are we to make of the word “possession” or the reference to petroleum jelly, then as now a salve with many commonplace uses?
The most plausible guesses are that the Vaseline in the London hotel room may have to do with enemas, to which he regularly resorted, or may in some other way foreshadow the geriatric Gandhi’s enthusiasm for massage, which would become a widely known part of the daily routine in his Indian ashrams, arousing gossip that has never quite died down, once it became clear that he mostly relied on the women in his entourage for its administration.

Two years later, the lawyer Gandhi drafts a mock-serious agreement for his friend to sign, using the teasing pet names and epistolary salutations that Gandhi, easily the wittier and more humorous of the two, almost certainly coined. Kallenbach, two years the younger, has come to be addressed as “Lower House” in the parliamentary sense (a jocular allusion, it seems, to his role as the source of appropriations). Gandhi is “Upper House” (and therefore gets to vote down excessive spending). Lower House can pronounce on matters of physical fitness and everything that’s literally down-to-earth on the communal settlement, known as Tolstoy Farm, they’d by then established. Upper House gets to think deep thoughts, strategize, and direct the moral development of his other half in this touching bicameral relationship.
In the agreement dated July 29, 1911, on the eve of a trip Kallenbach is about to make to Europe, Upper House makes Lower House promise “not to contract any marriage tie during his absence” nor “look lustfully upon any woman.” The
two Houses then mutually pledge “more love, and yet more love … such love as they hope the world has not yet seen.” By then, except for time subtracted by Gandhi’s jail terms in 1908 and trip to London in 1909, the two had been together more than three years.

Remember, we have only Gandhi’s letters (invariably starting, “Dear Lower House”). So it’s Gandhi who provides the playful undertone that might easily be ascribed to a lover, especially if we ignore what else his letters contain and their broader context. Interpretation can go two ways here. We can indulge in speculation, or look more closely at what the two men actually say about their mutual efforts to repress sexual urges in this period.

A 1908 letter from Kallenbach to his brother Simon in Germany, shortly after Gandhi moved in with him, shows that he’d been under his lodger’s influence for some time. “
For the last two years I have given up meat eating; for the last year I also did not touch fish any more,” he writes, “and for the last 18 months, I have given up my sex life … I have changed my daily life in order to simplify it.”
Later it is Kallenbach who points out to Gandhi the insidious tendency milk has to enhance arousal. Gandhi, ever the extremist in dietary experiments, extends the prohibition to chocolates. “
I see death in chocolates,” he lectures Polak, who isn’t in this period involved in the food trials that Kallenbach readily undergoes. Few foods are so “heating,” meaning likely to stimulate forbidden appetites.
He sends Kallenbach a verse on nonattachment to “bodily pleasures.” We have bodies, according to this message, in order to learn “self control.”

The Jewish architect from Kaliningrad on the Baltic and the Bania lawyer from Porbandar on the Arabian Sea first lived together in Orchards, one of Johannesburg’s older northern suburbs, in a house called the Kraal,
a Dutch word originally for homestead, now broadly applied to rural African enclosures. The inspiration for the design was African as well. Kallenbach took the rondavel—a round thatched structure with thick clay walls, sometimes whitewashed—as his prototype for 15 Pine Street, where he cohabited with Gandhi for a year and a half; it still stands (and was recently purchased by a French company with plans to turn it into a tourist attraction, yet another Gandhi museum). It’s actually two rondavels, cleverly joined and set back behind a high fence with a sign, omnipresent these days on the walls and fences of the northern suburbs, warning intruders of an “armed response.” Obviously, the warning isn’t Gandhian. When he discovered that Kallenbach had
appointed himself bodyguard and started packing a revolver after the Pathan attack, Gandhi insisted he get rid of it.

The couple then moved to an area called Linksfield, where Kallenbach was building a bigger house called Mountain View, over which Gandhi had predictable misgivings. One of his self-imposed missions in this period was to drill his housemate in the discipline of self-denial. He nagged him to rid himself of a new car and live up to the vow of poverty both had taken by slashing his personal spending. “My hope is that we will not this time have aristocratic simplicity but simple simplicity,” he writes before work on the new house has actually begun. For a time in 1910, they live on the building site in a tent. What he really wants, it emerges, is for Kallenbach to shut down his architecture practice—just as he at this point is preparing to give up the law—and return with him to a shared life of service at Phoenix. “It appears,” Gandhi writes hopefully in a laudatory profile of his companion in
Indian Opinion
, “that Mr. Kallenbach will gradually give up his work
as architect and live in complete poverty.”

Kallenbach professes to be tempted, but he’s not yet sold. His office remains open and active. At one point he competes simultaneously for commissions on a new synagogue, a Christian Science church, and a Greek Orthodox one. Tolstoy Farm, all eleven hundred acres of it, which he purchased, is the big spender’s way of proving he’s serious about voluntary poverty. Both he and Gandhi write to the dying Tolstoy to tell him of their plans. The farm meets an immediate need confronting Gandhi. He now has a place to house the families of passive resisters who have gone to jail as part of the fading satyagraha campaign, a place where he can also train new resisters. Also, it’s a place where he can test the pedagogical and small-economy precepts he’d just propounded in the most important piece of sustained argument he would ever write, a tract called
Hind Swaraj
. The title translates as “Indian Self-Rule” or, more loosely, “India’s Freedom.” Gandhi dashed it off in ten days on a ship called the
Kildonan Castle
, sailing home in 1909 from his last futile attempt at lobbying in Whitehall.

In the form of a Socratic dialogue, this powerfully original little book encapsulates in one place his disappointment in the imperial system, the West in general, and modern industrial societies everywhere; also his rejection of violence as a political tactic; and his romantic feeling for the Indian village, of which he had, until then, little firsthand experience. His blanket rejection of modern ways includes modern medicine,
lawyers (like himself), railroads (on which he’d rely for the rest of his life), and parliamentary politics (which Indian nationalists wanted for themselves). Capping its complicated and eclectic provenance is the surprising discovery that its immediate inspiration came not from Tolstoy or Ruskin but from the prolific Anglo-Catholic man of letters
G. K. Chesterton, who, in a column in
The Illustrated London News
that Gandhi happened to see in London, asked what a real Indian nationalist, “an authentic Indian,” would say to an imperialist trying to establish British-style institutions and ways of thought under the Raj.

“
Life is very short; a man must live somehow and die somewhere,” the English writer’s authentic Indian declares in response to this rhetorical question. “The amount of bodily comfort a peasant gets under your best Republic is not so much more than mine. If you do not like our sort of spiritual comfort, we never asked you to. Go, and leave us with it.” In
Hind Swaraj
, the character Gandhi inhabits, called “the Editor,” steps forward as that authentic Indian. Chesterton hasn’t given Gandhi new ideas but has shown him how the ideas he has been gradually gathering to himself can be made to define a persona. What he does in these pages, he will soon do in life; the Editor will become the Mahatma who, twelve years later, in his first noncooperation campaign in India will act out one of the book’s themes. “
The English have not taken India,” the Editor declares. “We have given it to them.” His answer is to “cease to play the ruled.” This is more than a foreshadowing of Gandhi’s later campaigns. It’s a declaration of their basic theme.

Although written as he sails to Cape Town from a failed mission to London bearing on Indian rights in the
Transvaal, the words “South Africa” never show up in
Hind Swaraj
. In his own mind, he has already started to repatriate himself to India, where the tract was promptly branded subversive and banned. It’s actually more subversive of the pre-Gandhi Indian national movement, with its Anglicized leadership and imported values, than it is of British colonial rule. “
Those in whose name we speak we do not know, nor do they know us,” its author, who has spent fewer than five of the previous twenty years in India, boldly asserts, implicitly setting a challenge for himself. But his critique can also be applied to the movement he has led in South Africa generally, particularly
Natal. An explicit part of the purpose of Tolstoy Farm is to enable Gandhi and Kallenbach—the first person to be shown the manuscript of
Hind Swaraj
—to close the social gap among Indians that he has finally come to recognize. Six months after he returns from London, Gandhi drafts the first of his informal contracts with Kallenbach, setting
up what amounts to a basic law for the new community. “
The primary object of going to the Farm so far as K. and G. are concerned,” this document decrees, “is to make themselves into working farm hands.” Nearly a year later, in May 1911, with the farm up and running, Gandhi tells Polak: “
I should like to slip out of the public gaze … to bury myself in the farm and to devote my attention to farming and educating.” The farming gives him a new appreciation for the aptitudes of Africans and Indians, like the indentured, who work the land. “
They are more useful than any of us,” he writes in
Indian Opinion
, making an explicit contrast between field laborers and a second generation of white-collar Indian clerks that’s starting to criticize his leadership. “If the great Native races should stop working for a week, we should probably be starving.”

But it’s the school he runs six afternoons a week and every evening into which he pours most of his energy in the latter half of 1911. “
That is my predominant occupation,” he writes to Kallenbach on September 9. The enrollment is small. Gandhi has one dietary requirement that helps keep it low. Students must commit themselves to a
saltless diet, for he has discovered that salt “
makes us eat more and arouses the senses.” Two decades later, in a notable demonstration of ideological flexibility, he’d declare salt to be one of life’s necessities, making it the focus of his single most successful exercise in militant nonviolence, the
Salt March of 1930.
Now, when he eases up on his stricture against salt at Tolstoy Farm, allowing it back into the diet in modest amounts, enrollment shoots up to twenty-five, eight of them, he notes proudly, Muslims. The curriculum includes a course in sandal making. Gandhi had sent Kallenbach to a Trappist monastery near Phoenix to learn the craft; the architect then taught the lawyer, and the lawyer then taught the students. Soon they’d turned out fifty pairs, he reported, one of which he sent to his political sparring partner Jan Smuts.

Tolstoy Farm, with Gandhi serving as schoolmaster and chief medical officer, was now for a time the foreground of his life; the fading
satyagraha campaign against the racial legislation of the Transvaal receded into the background. Gandhi carried on a desultory negotiation with Smuts, now minister of defense and also mines in the new Union government, but his focus was on developing a curriculum using Indian languages and texts, as well as on diet and nature cures as wholesome alternatives to aggressive modern medicine. Kallenbach is more involved in these “experiments” than political foot soldiers like
Thambi Naidoo or Polak who lead conventional married lives. His commitment to Gandhian values, as they evolve, seems wholehearted, not selective.
He is more than an acolyte, less than an equal. Never, as far as we can tell, does he present an intellectual challenge to the spiritual explorer who has become his companion.