Mahatma Gandhi, India's apostle of peace whose 135th birth anniversary was being marked Saturday, had an intense secret friendship with a British admirer, according to a new book.
"Mira and the Mahatma," by Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar, explores what appears to have been a close but platonic relationship between Gandhi and Madeline Slate, daughter of a British admiral, who left Britain in 1925 at the age of 33 and travelled to India to be with Gandhi, then 56.
The book, which has stirred controversy among Gandhi's legions of admirers, describes the relationship as a "violent and passionate disturbance" in the life of a man who had opted for celibacy and was busy seeking to wrest India's freedom from British rule.
While the book, published in India by Penguin, is a fictionalised account of the friendship, Kakar said it relies heavily on 350 letters from Gandhi to Slate from 1925-1930 and 1940-1942 that are in the Nehru Memorial Museum Library in New Delhi.
He said Slate's letters to Gandhi, however, were lost as the Indian leader had the habit of recycling every piece of paper to use it to write on.
Kakar said he believed Slate was "in love with the spiritual side of Gandhi.
"There was no physical consummation of love between the two or even the mention of 'I love you'," Kakar told AFP.
The book has outraged Gandhi admirers who say it distorts the relationship between Slate and Gandhi.
It "was totally spiritual - as between a teacher and a disciple which others can not understand. It was not on a human plane," said Nirmala Deshpande, 75. "The book is based on total untruth."
Between criss-crossing the country on his crusade to win independence, finally achieved in 1947, Gandhi wrote letters and notes to vast numbers of people including Slate, who lived at his commune at Sabarmati in western India's Gujarat state.
He renamed Slate "Mira" - the mythical shepherdess and lover of the Hindu god Krishna.
"You are on the brain. I look about me and miss you, I open the charkha (spinning wheel) and miss you..." Gandhi wrote to Mira during one of their many periods of separation.
In another letter, he said he loved translating Indian hymns into English for her.
"In translating the hymns for you, I am giving myself much joy. Have I not expressed my love, often in storms than in gentle, soothing showers of affection?" he wrote.
At one time, when Gandhi was about to begin a week-long fast, he gave her a note that read: "Mira, I shall not see you for a week. I shall miss our evenings together but I must not get attached to them."
Kakar said he believed Gandhi felt uncomfortable with the strength of his feelings for her.
"I think when she got too near him, it caused him stress. He looked at her as a danger. He was very, very close to her. He missed her when she was away. But as far as I know, there was nothing sexual," he said.
Gandhi married at the age of 13 but is reputed to have decided in his mid-30s, after siring four sons, that sex was at the root of all impulses that must be mastered to pursue a godly life and to have opted for celibacy.
The book is the second to be released about Gandhi recently. Another, "Gandhi's Prisoner? The Life of Gandhi's Son, Manilal," written by his great-granddaughter Uma Dhuphelia-Mesthrie in South Africa, portrays the world's famed preacher of non-violence as an iron-fisted father to his son.
Slate was away from the commune when Gandhi was shot dead in 1948 by a Hindu fanatic and left India in 1958. She settled in a town near Vienna and refused to speak to anyone about Gandhi, believing his legacy had been forsaken.
She devoted herself instead to her passion for Beethoven and died in 1982.