It has come as something of a surprise to many that Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography of Gandhi — Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (Knopf) — seems to be causing considerable offense in Gandhi’s homeland, largely because of Lelyveld’s discussion of Gandhi’s relationship with a German-Jewish architect named Hermann Kallenbach. Indian cabinet members have publicly condemned the book, and Great Soul has already been banned in Gujarat, the state where Gandhi was born and raised.
The surprise comes largely because Americans often forget just how capacious freedom of speech is in America. It is unlawful in many Western European democracies to publicly extol Hitler, for example, or make disparaging remarks about somebody’s religious beliefs. We frown on such practices here, of course; but they do not lead to prosecution and imprisonment. Similarly, it is something of a shock to learn that the world’s largest democracy (India) can be notoriously censorious: The Satanic Verses, which earned Salman Rushdie a death sentence from Iran for supposed offense to Muslims, was banned in India.
