[imagesource: here]

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, sometimes referred to as Mahatma Gandhi, is one of those historical figures that people like to pull out of the archives for a quote or two when they’re trying to look deep or informed on Facebook.

The widely peddled narrative about the man is that he was a lawyer, anti-colonialist, nationalist, and political ethicist who employed non-violent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India’s independence from British Rule.

That’s mostly correct – he went on a series of hunger strikes and did play a key role in ending colonialist rule in India, but as with all historical figures that isn’t the whole story.

It’s a lot more complicated, and as VICE‘s Mayukh Sen, whose grandfather went to jail with Gandhi in 1933 points out, it’s a narrative “cobbled together from half-truths”.

 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.

In other words, he wasn’t entirely convinced that all Indians should be liberated.

Oh, and here’s Gandhi on black South Africans:

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. To him, as he expressed quite plainly, black South Africans were barely human.

He referred to them using the derogatory South African slur k__affir. 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”.

So much for political ethics and decolonisation, then.

His rampant racism wasn’t the only thing that he had going for him. He was also a notorious misogynist.

He operated under the assumption that men are incapable of controlling their natural predatory instincts, and that women were responsible for, and completely at the mercy of, these impulses.

For example, while in South Africa, he responded to one man’s sexual harassment of two of his followers by cutting the girls’ hair short so that they wouldn’t invite unwanted sexual attention. He also believed that “women surrendered their humanity the minute men raped them”.

Then there’s this:

According to Rita Banerji, writing in Sex and Power, Gandhi viewed menstruation as the “manifestation of the distortion of a woman’s soul by her sexuality.” He also believed the use of contraceptives was the sign of whoredom.

Gandhi decided to deal with his so-called natural impulses by taking a vow of celibacy. Before you mistakenly think that this was the tiniest of redemptive actions, keep in mind that he used women, including some underage girls like his young niece, to test his sexual patience.

He would sleep naked next to them in bed without touching them, making sure that he didn’t get aroused. In other words, these women and girls were props used to train him to stay celibate.

When he wasn’t using underage girls to test his sexual urges, or accusing women of inciting uncontrollable passion in men, Gandhi routinely beat his wife Kasturba (below).

“I simply cannot bear to look at Ba’s face,” he once gushed about her, because she was caring for him while he was sick.

“The expression is often like that on the face of a meek cow and gives one the feeling as a cow occasionally does, that in her own dumb manner she is saying something.”

When Kasturba became ill with pneumonia, Gandhi denied her penicillin, even though doctors said it would cure her. She died from the illness in 1944. A few years later, he happily took quinine to treat his own malaria and survived.

That should be enough to get your blood boiling, but if you’d like to read more, head here.

The Washington Post and The Guardian also have a fair amount to say about his legacy.

As George Orwell wrote in his 1949 essay Reflections on Gandhi: “saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent”.

If only that was the case.

[source:vice]