RE-DEDICATION OF DOWSON'S GRAVE

I will be speaking at the re-dedication ceremony for Ernest Dowson's grave, which has been restored by public subscription.  The ceremony will be at 2pm on August 2 at Ladywell Cemetery.  The subscription and re-dedication have been organised by Philip Walker.

Like all those pursuing fame in the 21st century, Dowson now has his own website www.ernestdowson.com, and his own Facebook page, with many friends.

 Jad is featured in BBC's Rude Britainnia, talking about Victorian sauce

RUDE BRITANNIA – BAWDY SONGS, LEWD PHOTOS AND THE MOST HAND WRINGING MORAL MELODRAMAS OF VICTORIAN VALUES!

 EPISODE TWO – TUESDAY 15TH JUNE – 21.00 BBC4 (and repeated subsequently)

The second episode of Rude Britannia reveals how a popular culture of rudeness managed to survive and even thrive in the long era of Victorian values from the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837 until the nineteen fifties.

Published on 25 March 2010 by Quercus at £20. 

Launched at a talk:

'A semi-repressed sex maniac'? - Gandhi's experiments in chastity  
Given by Jad at the Institute of English, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

COMMENTS ON  GANDHI: NAKED AMBITION
'I have just finished reading Gandhi: Naked Ambition by Jad Adams (Quercus). I confess when it landed on my table, I did not want to read it. What is there about Gandhi that we do not know? At the best, it could be the personal opinion of the author, who had per force to rely on the published material.

What provoked me to read it was the sub-title Naked Ambition. It was deliberately provocative. So was the introduction in which he drew attention to a couple of contradictions in statements made by the Mahatma. Then I could not stop till I reached the last page. I realised that the author, who is a historian and a biographer, is also a television producer. He knows the art of holding a reader’s interest.' - Khushwant Singh in THE TRIBUNE (and syndicated)

'Readable and provocative…Adams strips away Gandhi’s saintly aura and explores the duality between his grand vision of an independent India and his fastidiousness with regard to his vegetarianism, clothes and sexual abstinence. Gandhi may have secured independence, have been India’s most famous leader and promoted principles of non-violence that have retained their global appeal, but Adams suggests that Gandhi’s preoccupation with sex, a cultivated pauperism and emphasis on personal perfection were wasteful, indulgent distractions.'  FINANCIAL TIMES

'An engrossing biography…Adams's intent is to separate the myth from the man. He has some sobering insights to offer…Adams has made substantive use of the copious paper trail Gandhi left behind and delved deep into his confessional prose.' THE INDEPENDENT

'Adams focuses not on the idealised apostle of peace, but Gandhi the man who spent much of his life refining his eccentric theories of chastity, vegetarianism, bowel movements and how best to conserve his sperm which he saw as a vital fluid.' TIMES OF INDIA

'There have been enough hagiographies of this great, peculiar, wilful figure, and after his death there was a concerted effort to erase some embarrassing truths from the Gandhi legend.  This is a vividly human, even funny book.'  DAILY MAIL

'Recounted briskly and concisely by Jad Adams who is experienced enough to know what to omit and what to emphasise…Adams certainly does not pull his punches, and as a result the Gandhi that emerges from his rounded and provocative study is a much more vivid personality…a no-nonsense biography.'  THE HERALD

'Jad Adams' critical and irreverent biography of the great man explains his various experiments with celibacy, chastity, brahmacharya and sexuality' DAILY NEWS ANALYSIS (Mumbai)

Indian coverage has included a number of features on different aspects of the book.  The Times of India ran a full page on 3 May titled The Mahatma in the Bedroom. Mid Day newspaper from Mumbai on 8 April 2010 ran: Gandhi's Naked Truth?  British historian Jad Asdams' book Naked Ambition offers an explicit account of Gandhi's sexual experiments with his followers' wives and his teenaged grandnieces.:  (www.mid-day.com/  (put Jad Adams into the search engine to call up the story.)  The Mail Today in Delhi ran two pages on 11 April: http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=1142010; Open magazine ran a piece: www.Openthemagazine.com/shorts/smallworld/2010-04-17#1; Daily News Analysis also did a piece: www.dnaindia.com/.../report_my-interest-is-in-gandhi-s-life-jad-adams_1380112.

 
In the UK:

There was a two-page feature in the British Independent by Jad on 7 April 2010 title 'Gandhi: Thrill of the Chaste': www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainmentbooks/featuresgandhis-sex-life-1937411.html

A two page feature in the Daily Mail on 10 April 2010 titled 'Sexual Torment of a Saint'

A five-page article by Jad in the April edition of History Today, titled ‘A Man Out Of Time?

An article by Jad in the June edition of BBC History Magazine titled ‘Dandy Gandhi to Naked Fakir.’ 

An article in The Oxonian on 10 May titled 'Elephant Traps in the Hunt for Gandhi' on sources used for the book.  www.oxonianreview.org

There has been an interview on Talk Radio Europe and an interview on BBC Asian Network on Tuesday 20 April.  Radio interviews for stations Ireland, in Colombia and Australia. 

A Message from Jad Adams

I am pleased that there has been so much interest in my book in India, where it is distributed by Penguin India.  Many Indian journalists have called me.  Many of the questions have been similar so I am noting my responses to some of them.

Why did you write this book?

I am a historian and a biographer of a number of world figures.  I have particularly concentrated on political radicals and nationalists in my work.  I was pleased to be invited to write about Gandhi because his life is so multi-faceted – his political, spiritual and personal life all have interest; he lived in three different continents; and people still invoke his legacy.

Why do you feel there is a need of another book?

All great figures deserve a number of biographies, giving different views of the same person.  A multiplicity of biographies is, in fact, evidence of the enduring interest of a historical character. How many of the nineteen viceroys who ruled India during the time Gandhi was alive are still worth writing about?  In contrast, the interest in Gandhi will endure and people will continue writing about him on into the future.

Why explore Gandhi from a sexual angle?

The book does deal with Gandhi's sexuality, but as part of an attempt to understand his entire personality.  Different things possessed him at different times in his life.  When he was in London as a student it was vegetarianism (not sex or politics) that interested him.  In South Africa his attempts to remain chaste and his creation of ideal communities was more important to him than his work for Indian traders.  Back in India he was preoccupied with Indian nationalism and his ashrams for the 1920s and 30s.  At the end of his life, his sexual experiments preoccupied his thinking.   My interest is in the whole of his life, his political, spiritual and family life as well.  In my book I give what I hope is a rounded picture of Gandhi, not concentrating on sex, but not ignoring it either. 

Do you fear a backlash from Indian government or from Indian public?

I trust to the good sense of the people of India who will read my book before condemning it, and will see the serious intent behind it and the respect I have for its subject.

GANDHI: NAKED AMBITION

A revealing new biography of the most influential individual in modern Indian history.

The pre-eminent political and spiritual leader of India’s independence movement, pioneer of non-violent resistance through mass civil disobedience, honoured in India as ‘father of nation’, Mohandas K. Gandhi has inspired movements for civil rights and political freedom across the world. 

This book delineates Gandhi’s searing ambition, involving the relentless creation of an image from London dandy to naked wise man; his ruthless sacrifice of his family for his principles; and the tragedy of partition in which he became not the father of India, but of Pakistan, through his refusal to accept a constitutional settlement

Gandhi: Naked Ambition sees Gandhi as a guru in the style of later popularisers of Indian ideas such as the Maharishi and Osho; and shows how he operated a similar control over every aspect of the lives of his followers.   This book is able to offer the most explicit account yet of Gandhi’s sexual experiments with the wives of his followers and his teenage grand-nieces.  

Jad Adams traces the course of Gandhi’s multi-faceted life, and the concomitant development of his religious, political and social thinking.  Gandhi’s life is explored over seven tumultuous decades: from his comfortable upbringing in a princely state in Gujarat; via his training as a barrister in London to his early civil rights campaigns in South Africa; his leadership role in the Indian National Congress and unsuccessful struggles to unite the interests of Muslim activists and orthodox Hindus; through the campaigns of non-cooperation and civil disobedience in the 1920s and 1930s that made him a world icon.  

Jad Adams explores the many contradictions of this most complex of men: a lifelong pacifist whose treatment of his wife and sons bordered on cruelty; a self-denying ascetic who preached the virtues of chastity in marriage yet experienced a high degree of intimate physical female contact; a political radical whose resistance to racism and appreciation of the value of all religions strike a thoroughly modern note, but whose vision of India was the almost medieval one of a village nation sustained by farming, spinning and weaving.

Using material only recently made available, Jad Adams’ accessible and challenging biography reveals the man behind the Mahatma.

Jad Adams was one of the winners of the international Bridport Prize for poetry and stories in November 2005, for his story The Loves of Michaelis, one of a series of stories about life on a Greek island.