He says if the book has what reviewers claim then it is plain 'stupid.' 'Gandhi always talked of complete love but it was of platonic kind,' he says. Kakar remembers finding references to Kallenbach during his research but not the way the reviewers have portrayed it. The chapter in no way concludes that he was a racist or offers any suggestion of it.' Psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar, one of the first to write on Gandhi's sexuality in 'Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality' and later in 'Mira and Mahatma', is yet to read the book but has gone through an ocean of archives on Gandhi and says he never discovered anything that the reviewers claim the book consists of.

'The word 'racist' is used once to characterise comments by Gandhi early in his stay in South Africa, part of a chapter summarising his statements about Africans and his relations with them. The word 'bisexual' nowhere appears in the book.' He also denied having called Gandhi a racist. Lelyveld told TOI, 'I do not allege that Gandhi is a racist or bisexual in 'Great Soul'. But as the Daily Mail's review of the book created a storm in cyberspace, there was a barrage of protests not just from Gandhians who said this was 'blasphemy', but from the book's author himself who denied having suggested anything of the sort. When reviews of Pulitzer prize winner Joseph Lelyveld's 'Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India' hit the newspapers in England and US claiming that the book says Gandhi was a bisexual and had a German-Jewish bodybuilder lover in Hermann Kallenbach it created immediate sensation.

NEW DELHI: Thousands of books have been written on Mahatma Gandhi with each new one claiming to have discovered an unknown facet of his eventful life.

Great soul by joseph lelyveld