Only one word, properly altered: Gandhi and the question of the prostitute1

1. This paper is an attempt to respond to some questions asked by students—especially Papori Bora, Emily Rook-Koepsel, Priti Misra and Julietta Singh—during my Spring 2005 course on Gandhi at the University of Minnesota. I thank them for the gift of their scepticism. I also thank Leela Gandhi, David Hardiman, Qadri Ismail, Thomas Pantham, Akhileshwar Pathak, Simona Sawhney, Sanjay Seth, Rajeshwari Sundar Rajan, Mrinalini Sinha, Tridip Suhrud and Babu Suthar for discussions of the paper. I especially thank Vinay Gidwani for giving me meticulous and extensive comments on an earlier version. The very prose of his comments has often become part of this version.

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Notes

1. This paper is an attempt to respond to some questions asked by students—especially Papori Bora, Emily Rook-Koepsel, Priti Misra and Julietta Singh—during my Spring 2005 course on Gandhi at the University of Minnesota. I thank them for the gift of their scepticism. I also thank Leela Gandhi, David Hardiman, Qadri Ismail, Thomas Pantham, Akhileshwar Pathak, Simona Sawhney, Sanjay Seth, Rajeshwari Sundar Rajan, Mrinalini Sinha, Tridip Suhrud and Babu Suthar for discussions of the paper. I especially thank Vinay Gidwani for giving me meticulous and extensive comments on an earlier version. The very prose of his comments has often become part of this version.

2. The Gujarati text uses both ‘sudhaarva’ and ‘badalva’ to translate ‘alter’. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 2nd edn (henceforth CWMG), vol. 18, 28 May, 1919, p 69; Akshardeha [collected works in Gujarati], vol. 15, p 317. All my citations of Hind Swaraj are to the editions published as part of the English CWMG and the Gujarati Akshardeha. To help readers working with other editions, I have usually indicated the relevant chapters also. I provide citations from both the Gujarati and English texts, and unless otherwise indicated I cite first from the language in which it was originally written.

3. Hind Swaraj [henceforth HS], Akshardeha, vol. 10, p 23; CWMG, vol. 10, p 255.

4. HS, Akshardeha, vol. 10, p 23; CWMG, vol. 10, p 255. In cases where the writing was originally in Gujarati, as with Hind Swaraj, I have provided my own translation. In cases where there is a significant difference in translation, I have also provided Gandhi's translation.

5. HS, Akshardeha, vol. 10, p 23; CWMG, vol. 10, p 255.

6. Gandhi consistently translated aadhunik sudhaara or aajkaalnu sudhaara as ‘modern civilisation’. But a more common meaning of sudhaara, then as now, would be reform. By the late nineteenth century, as now, sudhaara had overwhelmingly come to mean social reform, and one could be for or against sudhaara. In this essay, I will not explore Gandhi's concept of ‘modern civilisation’, but it should be evident that the phrase cannot be understood here in its usual commonsensical sense.

7. Gandhi's English translation goes: ‘That which you consider to be the Mother of Parliaments is like a sterile woman and a prostitute.’ HS, Akshardeha, vol. 10, p 23; CWMG, vol. 10, p 256.

8. A caveat too may be in order. What will and should be abundantly evident in what follows is the unavoidable traces of my obligations to the many thinkers who have written specifically on Gandhi, and those who have stayed with the questions that are the concern of this essay. But I have not explicitly acknowledged these obligations for two reasons. First, such explicit referencing would involve a violence towards Gandhi's thought, which would then be even more likely to be understood by analogy to these thinkers. Second, a responsible accounting of either my obligation to them or their thinking would require an engagement with these thinkers far more sustained than I can attempt within the limits of this essay.

9. HS, Akshardeha, vol. 10, p 23f; CWMG, vol. 10, p 256.

10. HS, Akshardeha, vol. 10, p 24; CWMG, vol. 10, p 256. [CWMG: ‘It is not possible to recall a single instance in which finality can be predicted for its work’.]

11. The relation of human rights, so central to this conception of liberal democracy, to a thinking of the proper is too complex an issue for me to address here. But could it be that the concept of human rights is an attempt to produce, through the state, a conception of the human that can take the place of the swa?

12. HS, Akshardeha, vol. 10, p 28; CWMG, vol. 10, p 261.

13. HS, Akshardeha, vol. 10, p 24f; CWMG, vol. 10, pp 256, 257.

14. On too quick a reading of Gandhi's writings, it might seem that the mother is an even more powerful organising thekaana than the dhani. Thus, even in the passage in HS (cf. note 5), the veshya seems to be contrasted to the mother. And Gandhi did celebrate the mother as a figure who exemplified love and suffering, even himself adopting that persona. Thus the title of Manu Gandhi's autobiography—Bapu, my mother. But motherhood as a political principle involved a male figure, the brahmachari or celibate. It is surely not accidental that Gandhi insisted that it was his ‘celibacy’ that allowed women to trust him and regard him as a mother.

True, significant differences remain between Gandhi's mother and the restrained mother of mainstream nationalism. The latter was pre-social and needed protection from the English. Gandhi's mother, in contrast, is quite active: she has a thekaana and brings things to their proper places.

15. HS, Akshardeha, vol. 10, p 24f; CWMG, vol. 10, p 255.

16. HS, CWMG, vol. 10, p 257 (cf. the passage corresponding to note 11).

17. HS, Akshardeha, vol. 10, p 31; CWMG, vol. 10, p 266.

18. HS, Akshardeha, vol. 10, p 53; CWMG, vol. 10, p 294.

19. HS, Akshardeha, vol. 10, p 25; CWMG, vol. 10, p 258.

20. HS, Akshardeha, vol. 10, p 29; CWMG, vol. 10, p 263.

21. Both this revisionist formulation and most criticism of it is conducted within the problematic of agency. By insisting that the colonised participated in their own colonisation, by insisting on the miscibility of colonialism with both a precolonial past and with the colonised, the wound of colonialism is naturalised and denied, and colonialism is made an extension of what preceded it. (Because this mitigation of colonial domination stresses also the agency of the colonised, it has predictably found enthusiasts in a liberalising middle-class India looking for a prehistory to Indian agency.) Conversely, many of those who fiercely attack such revisionist formulations understand the wound of colonialism as a loss of agency—which, as I shall be suggesting, is not Gandhi's argument.

22. HS, Akshardeha, vol. 10, p 32; CWMG, vol. 10, p 267.

23. HS, Akshardeha, vol. 10, p 33; CWMG, vol. 10, p 268.

24. Gandhi was hostile to the idea of both women and Dalits undertaking satyagrahas against their subordination; he tried rather to bring about reforms among the dominant to redress their problems.

25. I discuss Gandhi's category of obligation in ‘A Politics without Measure’, forthcoming in Manu Bhagwan (ed.), The Dynamics of Diversity: Nationalism and the Politics of Identity in South Asia.

26. Cf. the passages corresponding to notes 11 and 18.