General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Will "Margie" accuse the Dalai Lama of being a "groomer"? [View all]shrike3
(5,370 posts)Hard to know with Ghandi because there was a lot of character assassination coming from the British side. I take some of what I read with a grain of salt.
Here's a bit from NPR re Ghandi:
There's no way around it: Gandhi was a racist early in his life, says his biographer Ramachandra Guha.
"Gandhi as a young man went with the ideas of his culture and his time. He thought in his 20s that Europeans are the most civilized. Indians were almost as civilized, and Africans were uncivilized," Guha, 61, told NPR in an interview in May at his home in Bengaluru, India.
"However, he outgrew his racism quite decisively, and for most of his life as a public figure, he was an anti-racist, talking for an end to discrimination of all kinds," he said.
That included gender discrimination. Gandhi championed women in politics. But he was also obsessed with his own celibacy. In his late 70s, before he died at 78, he slept naked with his grandniece when she was in her late teens. He said he wanted to test his willpower to abstain from sex.
Nowadays, most people would call that abuse. Some question whether the young female was capable of giving consent as a minor to a man who was so revered and so much more powerful than she.
In 1962, when British filmmaker Richard Attenborough began researching what would become his 1982 Gandhi film, he asked Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, how he should portray his late colleague. Nehru famously replied that Gandhi was "a great man, but he had his weaknesses, his moods and his failings." He begged Attenborough not to turn Gandhi into a saint. He was "much too human," Nehru said.