There is a house in Johannesburg — low-slung, thatched, African in its bones — that a German-Jewish bodybuilder built for the man he loved. He designed it around the life they wanted to live together: simple, physical, spiritual, devoted. He called it Satyagraha House, after the concept his beloved was inventing. They lived in it together for two years. The man he built it for was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The man who built it was Hermann Kallenbach. You can rent a room there now, if you like. The museum on-site says the two men lived ‘a life of simplicity, physical exercise, meditation and chastity.’ Not a word about love.
That silence is the subject of this piece.
I. THE LETTERS
Between 1905 and 1945, Kallenbach kept a collection of over 1,500 documents — letters, photographs, memorabilia — that traced the arc of his life’s most consuming relationship. After his death, the archive passed to his family. It sat with his grand-niece, Isa Sarid, until historian Ramachandra Guha found it in her home. In 2012, it was about to go to auction at Sotheby’s in London when the Indian government intervened, purchasing it for approximately £700,000 in a private transaction before the hammer could fall.
The man who authorised that purchase was Narendra Modi — then Chief Minister of Gujarat, now Prime Minister of India.
This is the same Narendra Modi who, a year earlier in 2011, had personally led the charge to ban a book for suggesting that Gandhi had loved Kallenbach. The book was Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India. Lelyveld, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the New York Times, had written with care and nuance about the depth of Gandhi’s relationship with the architect. The Gujarat legislature voted unanimously to ban the book. Modi called it “perverse in nature.” He blogged that Lelyveld had portrayed Gandhi with “abnormal and outrageous mentality.”
One year later, the same man spent £700,000 of public money to make sure those letters would never fall into private hands.
He banned a book about the letters. Then he bought the letters. The state wanted the archive not to open it, but to keep it.
At the National Archives exhibition that followed, curators put 75 of the 1,500 letters on display. Officials were careful. “Sources said none of the letters perceived controversial have been put on display,” one wire report noted. Raj Bala Jain, part of the Archives team that had studied the full collection, said: “I did not find even a single letter with sexual overtones. Friendship can be misinterpreted. I think Gandhi was very normal and above such things.”
Gandhi was, in her reading, “very normal.” This is the highest praise the nation-state can offer its founding father: that he was normal. Straight. Uncomplicated. Brahminically appropriate.
Let us look, then, at what normal produced.
II. WHAT THE LETTERS SAY
Gandhi met Kallenbach in Johannesburg in 1904. Gandhi was 35 and already something — a lawyer, an activist, a man becoming his own idea. Kallenbach was wealthy, German-born, trained in architecture in Munich and Stuttgart, a bodybuilder who had found in Gandhi’s emerging philosophy a mirror for some hunger he carried. They became, quickly and completely, each other’s.
Gandhi would later write to him: “Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in the bedroom. The mantelpiece is opposite the bed.” He wrote that cotton wool and vaseline were “a constant reminder” of Kallenbach — a phrase that has exercised scholars and scandalised politicians, the vaseline suggesting, to some, intimacy of a particular kind. He wrote: “How completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance.”
They addressed each other as Upper House and Lower House. Gandhi signed letters “Sinly yours” — a private contraction, a warmth compressed into grammar. He asked Kallenbach to vow not to “look lustfully upon any woman” and confided: “I cannot imagine a thing as ugly as the intercourse of men and women.” They pledged to give one another “more love, and yet more love … such love as they hope the world has not yet seen.”
Gandhi’s children called Kallenbach “Uncle.” The two men were inseparable for a decade. Kallenbach built the Tolstoy Farm — a commune where Gandhi experimented with communal living and resistance. He built Satyagraha House. He destroyed his own correspondence with Gandhi at Gandhi’s request — and Gandhi destroyed Kallenbach’s letters in return. What survives are Gandhi’s outgoing letters alone: one voice of a conversation, speaking with a tenderness that a nation has spent decades learning not to hear.
When Gandhi returned to India in 1914, Kallenbach tried to follow. He was prevented from boarding the ship — a German national, he was technically an enemy alien at the outbreak of the First World War. Gandhi left without him. They corresponded for decades more. As late as 1933, Gandhi was still writing. The separation marked him. Scholars who study the arc of Gandhi’s politics note that it was precisely after leaving South Africa — after leaving Kallenbach — that Gandhi began to harden certain positions, to perform certain austerities, to press the project of brahmacharya into increasingly punishing territory.
The question the nation refuses to ask is not ‘was Gandhi gay?’ It is: what did losing this love do to his politics?
III. THE BINARY WE INHERITED
Sexuality, in the modern Western architecture that now governs how we speak of these things globally, is a sorting mechanism. You are straight or you are gay. You are one or the other, and whichever you are, you are it fully and permanently. History is then audited against this taxonomy: figures from the past are assigned to one column or the other, celebrated or condemned accordingly.
This is an extraordinarily impoverished framework, and it is also an extraordinarily recent one. The very concept of homosexuality as an identity — as a kind of person you are, rather than an act you might perform — is a product of late-19th-century European sexology. Before that, across most of human history and across most of the world’s cultures, desire was understood differently: as a force that moved through persons, not a category that defined them.
Gandhi lived in the hinge-moment of this shift. The Victorian British colonial order he worked against — and, in some ways, absorbed — was busily constructing the architecture of sexual normalcy that would be exported to its colonies and coded into their laws. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalised same-sex intimacy until 2018, was a British colonial import. The empire that Gandhi resisted was simultaneously the empire that imposed the sexual binary on the subcontinent.
Gandhi himself had no clean word for what he felt for Kallenbach. He had the Sanskrit vocabulary of brahmacharya — celibacy as spiritual practice, as political discipline, as the sublimation of eros into force. He took his celibacy vow in 1906, the same period he was deepening his relationship with Kallenbach. He would later say, in his autobiography, that taking the vow had been the necessary foundation for launching satyagraha — that the discipline of the body was the prerequisite for the discipline of resistance. The vow and the love arrived together. They were not opposites.
One scholar puts it precisely: Gandhi “repudiated sex, which he saw as a finite game”, but “was a consummate player of sexuality who delighted in the infinite pleasures of touch, companionship, and the eroticism of longing and withdrawal.” He made very little distinction, in the texture of his intimate life, between men and women — and yet he was not, by modern categorisation, either straight or gay. He was something the modern binary cannot hold.
To ask “was Gandhi bisexual?” is to import a 21st-century passport into the 19th century and demand it be stamped. The more honest question is: what kind of love did Gandhi and Kallenbach have, what did it make possible, and what was lost when we decided we could not afford to know?
IV. THE NATION NEEDS A FATHER
Every nation-state requires a founding mythology, and the founding mythology requires a certain kind of man at its centre. For modern India, that man is Gandhi — the Mahatma, the Great Soul, the Father of the Nation. The role demands specific qualities: celibacy (suggesting transcendence of the bodily, the feminine, the carnal), heterosexuality (even if renounced, structurally implied by the arrangement with Kasturba), upper-caste Hindu virtue, sacrifice.
This template is, of course, Brahminical. It is the ancient script of the twice-born male: either in sanctified householder marriage, or in the higher renunciation of the ascetic who has transcended the householder stage entirely. Both positions require heterosexuality as the default condition, even when renounced. The celibate Brahmin is not celibate because he is indifferent to women — he is celibate despite his attraction to women, which makes the sacrifice legible. A man indifferent to women, or drawn instead to men, does not fit this schema. He is not legible as a renunciant. He is legible only as a pervert.
This is the trap Gandhi is held in. The nation needs him to have renounced heterosexual desire, not to have experienced something else altogether. It needs his celibacy to be a victory over the norm, not an expression outside it.
Modi banned a book about Gandhi’s love for a man. Then he spent £700,000 to own the evidence. The censor and the collector are the same person.
The irony that cracks this open is Modi himself. Here is a man who has built his political identity on the restoration of Hindu male power — muscular, wrathful, modelled on the angry forms of certain warrior gods, unchallengeable in his dominion. His Hindutva project is explicitly about recovering a masculinity it claims was lost: to Mughal conquest, to British colonialism, to the soft pluralism of Congress-era secularism. The BJP circulates images of Ganesha with a six-pack. This is not incidental aesthetics — it is political theology.
One scholar writing on the 2011 controversy observed that what likely worried Modi about the Lelyveld book was “the impression that Gandhi, under the sway of a bodybuilder, was not a ‘normal’ male.” In denouncing the book, Modi positioned himself as the defender of Gandhi’s manhood — ensuring India’s founding father had “liked to penetrate and dominate women as much as any of Modi’s male supporters.” The vulgarity of that framing is not incidental. It tells you everything about what kind of India is being constructed.
And yet: the man being used to restore India’s heteropatriarchal masculinity is the man who never sexually desired his wife again after the age of 37 — who built his primary emotional and intellectual life around a German-Jewish man he called his Lower House — whose most intimate correspondence was with that man for decades — and whose politics were arguably shaped by what that love made him, and what its rupture cost him.
Gandhi is the wrong avatar for Hindutva. He is the founding father Modi is trying to replace, even as he claims to honour him.
V. WHAT THE LOVE MADE
This is the question we are denied by the archive’s careful management: what would it mean to read Gandhi’s politics through his love for Kallenbach?
The years in South Africa — the years with Kallenbach — were the laboratory years. Satyagraha was invented there. The experiments in communal living, in simple diet, in the discipline of the body as political instrument — all of these emerged in the years when Gandhi was living with Kallenbach, building with Kallenbach, corresponding daily with Kallenbach. The philosophies we associate with the great liberation struggle were forged in the context of this intimacy.
Kallenbach was wealthy and gave much of it away to Gandhi’s causes. He was physically powerful and chose nonviolence. He was European and chose to subject himself to the discipline of an Indian activist’s vision. He was, in Gandhi’s eyes, an embodiment of the possibility Gandhi was trying to make legible: that power could be surrendered, that strength could serve peace, that a man of the world could choose simplicity. Kallenbach was a living argument for what Gandhi was trying to prove.
And then Gandhi had to leave him.
What Gandhi became after Kallenbach — the increasingly austere, increasingly punishing, increasingly authoritarian manager of his own ashram and his own disciples — is one way to read that rupture. The brahmacharya experiments grew stranger and more coercive in his final years. His relationship with Kasturba, whom he had married at thirteen in an arrangement neither of them chose, was one of public sainthood and private erasure; she nursed him through illness after illness and died in British custody while he remained alive, a fact Gandhi mourned with characteristic ambivalence. His tenderness, it seems, went elsewhere — toward Kallenbach, toward Mirabehn, toward various “spiritual wives” and devoted disciples.
We are not saying Gandhi was gay. We are not saying he was bisexual. We are saying he was a man of enormous erotic and spiritual complexity whose primary love was with another man — and that denying this, sanitising this, archiving it carefully out of public sight, is not an act of respect for Gandhi. It is an act of violence against him. And it is an act of violence against our ability to understand how love shapes politics, how intimacy shapes philosophy, how the body — regardless of what we do or do not do with it — is always political.
VI. THE QUEERNESS INDIA CANNOT CLAIM
India is, and has always been, a queer land.
This is not a provocation. It is a historical and theological statement. The subcontinent that produced the Kamasutra — which devotes an entire chapter to same-sex love between women and describes the tritiya-prakriti, the third nature, with matter-of-factness — is not a land that was naturally straight until corrupted by modernity. The Khawaja Sira tradition of South Asia, from which this magazine takes its original name, is older than the Islamic courts that gave it its Persian vocabulary and older still than the British courts that tried to criminalise it. Shiva is Ardhanarishvara: half man, half woman, the synthesis held up as divine, not deviant. The erastes and eromenos of ancient Greek culture have their South Asian analogues in the guru-shishya relationships that structured knowledge and devotion for centuries.
The queerness of India is not in spite of its traditions. It is embedded within them. What is colonial is the heteronormativity — the Section 377, the “unnatural offences” language, the rigid binary that mapped onto caste and upper-class respectability politics and produced the version of Indian sexuality that BJP Hindutva now tries to claim as ancient and essential.
Gandhi navigated all of this while also embodying some of its worst tendencies — his early racism in South Africa is documented; his views on caste were deeply complicated; his celibacy experiments, viewed through a 2025 lens, raise serious questions about consent and power. He was not a saint. The problem with making him one is that it forecloses every honest conversation about what he actually was and what his actual life can teach.
A Gandhi who loved Kallenbach and was shaped by that love is a far more useful founding father than the two-dimensional ascetic on the currency note. He is a man who understood, from the inside, what it means to desire across lines the world has drawn. He understood how desire can become discipline, how longing can become politics, how the body’s refusals and surrenders are never merely personal.
The man Modi most fears is the man Modi claims to venerate. Gandhi — complicated, tender, queer in his loves, Brahminical in his failures — is the founding father Hindutva cannot survive.
VII. THE ARCHIVE AS ACT
The letters are in New Delhi now, in the National Archives, purchased with public money, displayed in careful selections, curated into safety. The catalogue is available. Some 75 of 1,500 items have been seen by the public. Officials continue to deny that any screening took place, while acknowledging, in the same breath, that only a sample is on display.
This is how a nation manages its discomfort: not by burning, but by filing. Not by destroying, but by owning. The archive is not an act of preservation. It is an act of containment.
Kallenbach’s family kept these letters for decades. They kept them because he had kept them — because he had understood, with the particular devotion of a man who has loved someone at the size Gandhi demanded to be loved, that the correspondence mattered. That it said something true. That it deserved to exist in the world.
The Indian government spent £700,000 to make sure that what it said would be controlled.
What might we learn if we read them whole? What might we understand about the architecture of a liberation movement if we understood the architecture of the intimate life that housed it? What would it mean to teach Indian children that their founding father experienced love that the nation still cannot name?
It would mean, perhaps, that India’s founding story is queerer than its current government can afford. That the man on the wall — the bald, wire-spectacled, dhoti-clad saint of the secular republic — was also a man who kept another man’s portrait opposite his bed and wrote to him that he had taken complete possession of his body.
It would mean that Gandhi was human.
It would mean that being human — complicated, desiring, refusing easy categories, loving across the lines the world draws — is not a diminishment of his legacy.
It would mean that the most honest thing we can do for a man who spent his life insisting on truth is to stop lying about who he was.
❧ Caravanserai ❧