(Michael Connellan, writing in the Guardian, carefully explained that Gandhi felt women surrendered their humanity the minute men raped them.) He operated under the assumption that men couldn't control their basic predatory impulses while simultaneously asserting that women were responsible for-and completely at the mercy of-these impulses. During his years in South Africa, he once responded to a young man's sexual harassment of two of Gandhi's female followers by forcibly cutting the girls' hair short to make sure they didn't invite any sexual attention. Photo via Wikimedia CommonsĪround this same time, Gandhi began cultivating the misogyny he'd carry with him for the rest of his life. Some South African activists have thrust these parts of Gandhi's thinking back into the spotlight, as did a book published this past September by two South African academics, but they've barely made a dent on the American cultural consciousness beyond the concentric circles of Tumblr. He lamented that Indians were considered "little better, if at all, than savages or the Natives of Africa." In 1903, he declared that the "white race in South Africa should be the predominating race." After getting thrown in jail in 1908, he scoffed at the fact that Indians were classed with black, not white, prisoners. He referred to them using the derogatory South African slur k affir. To him, as he expressed quite plainly, black South Africans were barely human. Gandhi lived in South Africa for over two decades, from 1893 to 1914, working as a lawyer and fighting for the rights of Indians-and only Indians. In the decades since his assassination in 1948, the image of Gandhi has been constructed so carefully, scrubbed clean of its grimy details, that it's easy to forget that he predicated his rhetoric on anti-blackness, a vehement allergy to female sexuality, and a general unwillingness to help liberate the Dalit, or "untouchable," caste.
This is to say nothing of Gandhi's bigotry, which we didn't touch in our household. My family adored him, though we never really bought into the idea that he single-handedly orchestrated India's independence movement. As a consequence, my parents raised me with an intimate understanding of Gandhi that teetered between laudatory and critical.
My grandfather took the lessons he'd learned in jail to begin an ashram in the bowels of West Bengal. My maternal grandfather went to jail with Gandhi in 1933, so I grew up knowing this myth was cobbled together from half-truths.
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