(Reviewer: David Saks, Vol. 68, No. 1, Pesach 2013)
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi – generally referred to by the august title of ‘Mahatma’ (Great Soul) – was unquestionably one of the towering personalities of the last century, not only for the pivotal role he played in the Indian independence movement but as a political philosopher, human rights icon and, if one might put it that way, revolutionary lifestyle guru.
Interestingly, after India itself, South Africa may have the most persuasive claim to him as being one of its own. After all, Gandhi lived in the country for nearly twenty years, and to a considerable extent that experience was a formative one in his becoming the thinker, leader and philosophy that he did. It was in South Africa that he conceived his famous philosophy of non-violent political resistance to colonialism and political oppression – Satyagraha – and adopted the strict asceticism that subsequently governed his own life. The ideas that were nurtured and developed in Natal and the Transvaal, on the kibbutz-like working settlements of Phoenix and Tolstoy Farm and the various premises he occupied in Johannesburg were destined to reverberate around the world.
During Gandhi’s years in South Africa, most of the white Europeans who came to befriend and assist him were Jews. They included his spirited secretary Sonja Schlesin, the journalist and political activist Henry Polak, Gabriel Isaac and, above-all, the architect Herman Kallenbach. All were not mere sideline supporters but were intimately involved both in Gandhi’s personal life and in his struggle against anti-Indian discrimination.
Soulmates: The Story of Mahatma Gandhi and Herman Kallenbach, by Israeli artist, writer and researcher Shimon Lev is to date the most probing, systematic and scholarly investigation of the Gandhi-Kallenbach relationship. It is further the first to examine that relationship from Kallenbach’s point of view rather than from a Gandhi-centric perspective. Through it, one recognizes that Kallenbach’s role in Gandhi’s development was more than that of an acolyte and signer of cheques but that, just as his own life was radically transformed by Gandhi’s influence, so was Gandhi himself much affected by their extraordinarily intimate association.
Kallenbach and Gandhi were both in their early thirties and recent immigrants when they fi rst met, probably sometime in 1903, but there the similarities seemingly stopped. Kallenbach was a wealthy, successful architect enjoying the hedonistic lifestyle of the archetypal ‘swinging bachelor’. Gandhi, by contrast, was ‘ascetic, frugal, focused on religion, morality, and truth, a family man who was shortly to take a vow of celibacy, and dedicated to a public mission of social reform’ (p3). Appearances, however, were deceptive. Kallenbach was at bottom a profoundly idealistic man already engaged, through among other things his participation in the local Theosophical Society, in a quest for deeper spiritual truths. His friendship with Gandhi really commenced through that Society, where the latter gave a series of lectures on Hinduism. As it developed and deepened, it came to encompass the broader struggle for Indian rights, in which Kallenbach was a devoted participant. With Gandhi no longer able to maintain what had been a successful legal practice because of his political activism, Kallenbach’s fi nancial support became crucial. It was he who purchased what became Tolstoy Farm some twenty kilometer outside Johannesburg, to serve as the headquarters and living base for Gandhi and other satyagrahas (passive resisters). Kallenbach himself lived, in the same frugal conditions, on the farm and walked to his offices every day.
The Indian passive resistance campaign culminated in the epic ‘Great March’ on 9 October 1913, when Gandhi led 2000 striking Indian miners from Newcastle to the Transvaal in protest against the legal restrictions on Indians. This was the high point of Kallenbach’s involvement in the Passive Resistance struggle. Lev writes: “His organizational and financial abilities, devotion to Gandhi, status as spokesman to the white population and position of leadership in the Indian community gave him a good deal of authority with Gandhi who, as he wrote to his sister, ‘did nothing without my advice’” (p85). Kallenbach, Polak and another Jewish campaigner, Gabriel Isaacs, were among those arrested for their part in the protest.
Lev describes in detail the day-to-day nature of Gandhi and Kallenbach’s life together prior to moving to Tolstoy Farm. They lived together for eighteen months at the Kraal on Pine Street (adjoining today’s Pine Street synagogue) and for seven months sharing an isolated tent in Mountain View on Linksfield Ridge. He comments: “Dwelling together in a ‘living laboratory’ entailed internal examination and constant reflection while maintaining a strict ascetic lifestyle and practicing a highly demanding level of self-discipline, processes during which the two underwent significant mental and spiritual changes”. It was here that Gandhi’s formative early writings on his satyagraha philosophy were composed, and where he and Kallenbach together conceived and gave practical expression to the ideals of “simple living, manual labor, self-sufficiency and non-violence” (p13). Clearly, therefore, the title ‘Soulmates’ is a well-chosen one.
So close was the Gandhi-Kallenbach friendship, which included living together in the same house and even sharing a room for lengthy periods, and so effusive (from Gandhi’s side) the expressions of attachment that it has inevitably given rise to speculation about a possible homosexual relationship. Lev argues that this was most unlikely. Gandhi had adopted what would be a life-long practice of strict celibacy some years before and, as his own correspondence reveals, Kallenbach decided to follow suit. The strictly ascetic lifestyle followed by the two men completely precluded acts of sexual gratification, homosexual or otherwise. Lev is probably correct, though, to suggest that the relationship had its homoerotic aspects.
In light of how minutely every aspect of Gandhi’s life has been subject to academic scrutiny, the relative lack of attention paid to his relationship with Kallenbach, in particular those years when they lived alone together, is puzzling. Part of the answer, as Lev explains, is that Gandhi’s letters to Kallenbach remained exclusively in the private Kallenbach Archive in Haifa, Israel, until 1994, when they were finally published.
Most of Soulmates deals with the South African period of the Gandhi-Kallenbach relationship, roughly spanning a decade from 1903 to mid-1914 when the two embarked together for the United Kingdom. What separated them on their arrival was the outbreak of World War I. As a German national, Kallenbach was interned for the duration, and by the time of his release, Gandhi was much embroiled in the great challenges and complexities of the Indian independence movement. Kallenbach returned to South Africa, resuming with continued success his architectural practice and second career as a real estate entrepreneur. He and Gandhi continued to correspond, their letters being infrequent but nevertheless expressing a ‘mutual longing’ (p113) to be reunited. When the two friends next met in May 1937, it was in India, under very different and far less straight-forward circumstances. Here we come to the problematical question of Gandhi’s attitude towards Zionism. In public at least, he was unsupportive of the movement, yet at the same time, Lev observes that he never rejected it outright, and at one time seriously considered trying to mediate between Jews and Arabs and encouraged Kallenbach’s own involvement in his people’s cause (it was on his recommendation that Kallenbach ultimately left the bulk of his fortune to Keren Hayesod, whose South African board he had joined in 1925. Kallenbach’s fi rst visit to India was made at the request of future Israeli prime minister Moshe Sharet, who urged him to exert his influence with Gandhi to obtain his, and thereby India’s support for the Zionist movement. By this time Kallenbach, increasingly driven by his fear and anguish over the worsening situation of European Jewry, was much involved in Zionist activities. In neither this, not his subsequent visit in 1939, however, did he achieve much success. Gandhi was by now a world statesman, and probably could not risk alienating India’s huge Muslim population by endorsing the Zionist enterprise. Despite this, the evident love and mutual esteem that existed between Kallenbach and Gandhi does not seem to have been diminished, and remained in evidence until the very end. Kallenbach died in 1945, having by then learned that the fate of European Jewry had exceeded his worst fears and without having witnessed the almost simultaneous emergence of the independent states of Israel and India.
Like Helen Suzman, Arthur Chaskalson, Lionel Bernstein and one or two others, Herman Kallenbach merits an especially honored place among South African Jews who fought for justice and freedom in their country. A man of deep humanity, integrity and nobility of character, he not only exerted himself to the utmost on behalf of South Africa’s oppressed Indian community and later on behalf of his own distressed people, but was instrumental to a considerable extent in the launch onto the world stage of one of history’s most remarkable human beings. Up until now, for various reasons, he has been a comparatively neglected figure, even in historical writing dealing solely with the Jewish community. Shimon Lev’s fine study should go a long way towards correcting this.
Soulmates: The Story of Mahatma Gandhi and Herman Kallenbach by Shimon Lev, Orient Black Swan, New Delhi, 2012, 166pp, pictures, index, bibliography.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
David Saks is Associate Director of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies and editor of Jewish Affairs. His essay ‘Right-hand Man of the Mahatma’ appeared in the Autumn 1998 issue of Jewish Affairs.
