dipesh chakrabarty - clothing the political man - a reading of the use of khadi-white in indian...

7/28/2019 Dipesh Chakrabarty - Clothing the Political Man - A Reading of the Use of Khadi-White in Indian Public Life

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Postcolonial Studies, Vol 4, No 1, pp 2738, 2001

Clothing the political man: a readingof the use of khadi/white in Indianpublic life*

DIPESH CHAKRABARTY

Are values in public life always a matter of conscious choice? An afrmativeresponse to this question is at least implicit in much that is written on public lifeand its requirements. I do not, as such, question this assumption. There are goodreasons for advocating consciously held values in the practice of public life inany modern country. But this paper, which is a historians discussion of valuesin Indian public life, focuses on the phenomenon of the historical survival ofshared values, beliefs and desires in what people do rather than in what they say.It is important to explain this.

India now has a recognizable public life made up of all the ingredients onewould consider standard for the construction of the public sphere: representative

democracy, right of free speech, and an active fourth estate. This public lifeproduces, in everyday discussions , its own interpretive system and categories formeasuring its own quality. One such key category, perhaps the most frequentlyused in discussions of Indian political life, is corruption. The word, like anyother moralizing category, has many meanings and associations, both consciousand unconscious. However, the purpose here is not to explore its semantic range.I simply want to begin by identifying a particular semiotic of corruption that,for Indian politicians (usually males), is something to do with their bodies. Thereis a strong Gandhian semiotic that still circulates in Indian public life and marks

the public manthe politicianout from others. The most common uniform forthe respectable public servant in India is the safari suit; for the politician,however, it has been, from the time before independence, white khadi, thehomespun coarse cotton that Gandhi popularized in the 1920s. Its symbolism, asintended in the ofcial/nationalist rhetoric, is clear. The white of khadi stands forthe Hindu idea of purity (lack of blemish, pollution), its coarseness symbolizesan identication both with simplicity and poverty; together they imply thepoliticians capacity to renounce his own material well-being, to make sacrices(tyag) in public/national interest. Khadi indicates the persons capability to serve

the country. Gandhis own gloss on khadi, provided in 1921, mobilized all ofthese meanings and added, in a characteristic nationalist touch, some essentialIndianness as well:


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a chaddar (shawl) whenever found necessary for the protection of the body Iconsider the renunciation to be also necessary for me as a sign of mourning, anda bare head and a bare body is such a sign in my part of the country. 1

He also claimed that this divestment aligned him, symbolically, with the ill-clad

masses and in so f ar as the loin cloth also spells simplicity let it representIndian civilization.2 Emma Tarlo has rightly pointed out that it would be amistake to assume that there was only one meaning of khadi and that thismeaning was available to every Indian in a transparent way. She adduces manypieces of evidence from the writings of Gandhi and his followers to suggest thatthere were confusions and criticisms about the signicance of khadi in Gandhisown time.3 Khadi, she argues, worked practically for Indias nationalist politi-cians because various kinds and designs of khadi could be used to express notonly different understandings of its meanings but to make visible social distinc-

tions as well. There is a telling and humorous story about this in the history ofthe nationalist movement in Bengal. The story involves the Bengali novelistSaratchandra Chattopadhyay and the nationalist leader Sarat Bose and theirrespective attitudes toward khadi. When he was a member of the BengalProvincial Congress Committee, Sarat Bose preferred to wear khadi that wasne, stylish and easy on the body while another member of the Committee,Anilbaran Ray, wore, as a symbol of his devotion to the cause of swadeshi(economic nationalism), khadi that was heavier, coarser and harsher and henceharder to wear. This led to substantial discussion among other members of the

committee who were often critical of Boses sartorial preferences. The story goesthat referring to this differential use of khadi among nationalists of the same rankand using the language of homeopathy which was popular with Indian national-ists, Saratchandra apparently quipped one day: You see, we have all differentkinds here. A little variety is a good thing. Anil[baran Ray] is the mother-tinc-ture [of khadi] while Sarat [Bose] is two hundred per cent dilution [in Englishin original], dont you understand?4

Today the joke is different. Achieving independence and the marginalizationof any practice of Gandhian politics have made khadi less a matter of conscious

discussion. While khadi persists, its meanings have lost the richness theypossessed in the time of the struggle against British rule. It now represents eithera thoughtless habit of the politician orif he is too conscious of his decision towear khadihis callous hypocrisy. The image of a political leader from a 1994issue of the Sunday magazine captures the close association people now seebetween the donning of khadi and the illegal acquisition of wealth.5 It documentssomething of the routine cynicism with which we now perceive the khadi thatadorns the body of the political man. Khadi, once described by Nehru as thelivery of freedom and by Susan Bean (to whom I owe this quote from Nehru)

as the fabric of Indian independence, now stands unambiguously for thereverse of its nationalist denition. The khadi clad politician is usually seentoday as corrupt khadi itself being perceived as a dead giveaway a uniform


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renunciation and now as corruption and thievery. Given the volume of illegal

(monetary) transactions in Indian public life, this interpretation is more thanreasonable. The khadi and the ochre robe donning politicians in India routinely

go through the motions of making public their annual incomes, the value of theirestates (much was made of this after Mrs Gandhis death), or announce, on

assumption of ministerial ofces, that they will accept as salary only Re 1 amonth. The hypocrisy of the gesture is only too transparent. Therefore we cannot

contest the semiotic that allows us to interpret khadi as shameless hypocrisy. I

agree with that reading. Yet that reading does not explain why khadi or at leastthe colour white remains the most visible aspect of an Indian male politicians

attire. The question is: Why does such a transparent gesture of hypocrisy persisteven today? Why do politicians behave in ways which fool nobody? In other

words, if we assume that the hypocrisy of khadi is visible to everybody, then its

(effective) purpose cannot be to deceive people into thinking well of the wearerof it. What has been read as a transparent gesture of hypocrisy must then,

because of its persistence, be amenable to another reading, one that does not seehypocrisy as the only function of this gesture. I will, therefore, read the Indian

politicians uniform, khadi, as if it were not meant to convince. The object of itscommunication may be entirely different and may not have to do with theconscious transaction of purposes.

Let us clarify this point. Of course, it is true thatin the same way that we

are always half conscious of things we do through habitwhen a politician

wears khadi he is aware of what he is doing. But we do not consciously controlall the messages we communicate through everything we do. Consider the Hindu

action of worshipping a god or goddess. There are many rituals involved in a

puja (worship) in which we participate without being aware of either their literal

or scriptural meanings. They may not even have meanings that we can verbalize.

We do not know or control the ideas and messages we collectively communicateto each other through the practice of such rituals even though it would bereasonable to assume that certain messages are indeed communicated. One may

view the ritual wearing of khadi by male Indian politicians in a similar manner:

not as a conscious ploy of hypocrisy (for that interpretation, while reasonable,does not explain why hypocrites wanting to hide their insincerity, would opt for

an action that screams out to people exactly the message they are trying to avoid)but as a series of messages circulating in our public life without anybody

consciously intending to communicate them. This can only happen if a largeenough number of people have certain unconscious or unarticulate d desires

already invested in khadi or in the colour white donned by a politician. In otherwords, j ust as one can decode a social or cultural convention to read certain

statements belonging to the culture, one can similarly decode the convention by

which khadi becomes a male political dress. Social conventions and habitualpractices may be seen as highly condensed statements of certain social desires


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conduct of collective public life of a societyare buried in the circulation ofkhadi in Indian political life?

Khadi is the excuse here for thinking about alternative construction s of thevalues of public life in Indian modernity, and in particular about ways in whichheterogeneous possibilities are both opened up and closed off in the modernity

that colonial rule gave to India as a part of its legacy. What is of interest hereare alternatives to the kinds of public life that both capital and lately multina-tional capital have helped us to think. While speaking of alternatives, we do nothave an as-yet-unrealized or even an unrealizable future in mind. We are talkingabout alternative practices of modernity as they are lived out now, at thismoment of history. These alternatives, as we imagine them, are not autonomousof or separate from mainstream politics. We can only describe them through anact of reading certain everyday practices constitutive of the mainstream. Whatmakes this exercise legitimate is the fact that existing interpretations of why somany Indian male politicians wear khadi or white are inadequate as alreadyexplained. What is argued here is that while khadi may legitimately be read asmerely an Indian instance of a problem that is a universal feature of modernpoliticsthe corrupt politicianits continuous use by men in Indian public lifealso sustains another reading, one that addresses desires for alternative construc-tions of the public sphere, constructions that illustrate the heterogeneity ofcultural practices that give Indian modernity its sense of difference.

If there is to be a condensed imagination of alternative public life to be readthrough the khadi clad politician today, it cannot but be an imagination stronglytied to Gandhian politics. Here, one last word of qualication is in order. Thoughmuch of what is discussed here could be extended to women active in public life,this paper mainly concentrates on the gure of the male politician. There are tworeasons for this: (a) though there is a history of women politicians wearing khadior cotton saris in political life, studying their case would require us to focusmore attention on differences between how men and women operate in thesphere of politics in India, and (b) the majority of Indias dominant politiciansare still, alas, male. Also, as will become clear in what follows, a critical partof the argument connects khadi to an analysis of the cultural location of themiddle class male body under British rule in Indian public life. The body refersto an abstracted, generalized body. But the body discussed here is male. For thevaried ways in which Gandhi used and exposed his body as a symbol in thenationalist movement simply would not have been available to an Indian womanin quite the same manner.

The body of the public man: the colonial context

There is a reason for beginning with the question of the body. For the use of thebody was central to the way colonialism operated, because the British were theones who rst introduced the idea that the body and character were intimately


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life in India reected that relationship. In creating a public culture based on thetheme of racial superiority, however, the British conated two themes, charac-ter and physical strength. They claimed to have an excess of both incomparison to Indians.

The idea of character itself, it seems to me, was connected to the theme of

corruption in late eighteenth century political thought. One has to remember thatthe rapacious practices of the employees of the East India Company in the mid-and late eighteenth century at the time of Lord Clive were always rationalizedin England as the enfeebling effect of Indian culturethe practices of baksheesh,nazar and other kinds of interaction that the British saw as grafton thecharacter of the Englishman in India.6 Lord Cornwalliss appointment in the late1780s as the Governor-General of Bengal was made on the assumption that onlyblood that was both blue and English was capable of maintaining character inpublic life in the face of all the temptation to corruption that India provided tothe European fortune seeker. This was soon to evolve into a colonial doctrine:that the English/British body in India must be seen as the seat of such characterand that in such an embodied practice of superiority lay the everyday guaranteeof the permanence of British rule. The projection of European physical superior-ity came to be seen as essential to the exercise of authority in public life incolonial India. One aspect of this superiority was the assumed greater strengthof the male European body. Numerous anecdotes and other kinds of evidenceattest to this. Stories of Indians being forcibly prevented from sharing the samepublic space with Europeans in Indiasuch as a train compartment or the whiteareas of a cityabound in nationalist memories of British rule. 7 They formed agenre of their own in our school texts. The whole history of modern physicaltraining in India is rooted in the nationalist construction of modern imperial ruleas an experience in direct physical humiliation.8 The body was thus central to theprojection of European political strength in India.

The study of history, biography and literatureforms of modern knowledgeintroduced early by the Britishhelped to popularize in India this connectionbetween character, the body, and modern public life. The Hindus had notradition of writing secular histories, while the Muslims had the art of historicalchronicling, it did not amount to studying history in the post-Renaissance senseof that activity. The British introduced this particular imagination and genre ofwriting to India. The early histories of India written by European missionaries,administrators and educators were often judgments of the character of old Indianrulers. For reasons of convenience, this process will be illustrate d with someexamples from the history of Bengal before discussing Gandhi again. That thelast independent nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daulah, was a venal, corrupt andproigate characterwhose defeat at the hands of the British therefore was amatter of natural justicewas regarded for a long time by Bengali historians,who began by translating European texts, as the chief moral lesson of oureighteenth century history.9


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hero of his epic poem in blank verse, Meghnadbadh Kavya (1861)a somewhatoutlandish effort since the Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata arenot quite based on the idea of the hero that marks European epics. As thefollowing quotation from a later Bengali literary critic shows, the consumptionof Meghnadbadh Kavya has also been in terms of appreciation of characters:

Ram and Laksman are two of the noblest gures in Indian mythology, but inMadhusudans poem they are utterly devoid of valor and honor In the Ra-mayana, Meghnad is killed in the battleeld and in fair ght, but in Madhusudanspoem he is unarmed and engaged in worship in a temple when Laksman appearsclad in celestial armor and kills him in cold blood We wonder whether we arereading a heroic or a mock-heroic poem.10

Biography, of course, was another important area of writing which was meantto instill in young Indian men (and later women) the idea of character. The rst

such attempt to disseminate biographies of eminent public men among Indian/Bengali schoolboys was a book called Jibancharit (1849) by the nineteenthcentury Bengali social reformer Iswarchandra Vidyasagar. The book was atranslation of a popular Victorian text by Robert and William Chambers,Exemplary Biography. It promoted the ideas of discipline, formation of regularhabits, punctualit y and obedience. Being a translation of European material,however, it led to the criticism that Indian boys needed Indian examples tofollow, and there was a series of attempts by Indian authors to indigenize theeld of modern biography.11

Finally, there was the question of physical strength, the training of the bodyto be strong, a subject increasingly popular in nationalist discourse in the secondhalf of the nineteenth century. One whose statements inscribed this message intonationalist memory was the nineteenth century nationalist Hindu monk, SwamiVivekananda who, as is well known, asserted that young Indian boys would dothemselves a service if they concentrated more on playing football (soccer) thanon reading the Gita. For the Swami, the absence of physical health was an indexof social degradation. As Tapan Raychaudhuri puts it:

Vivekananda identied better food as one cause of the westerners generally better

health. Climate and better living conditions were other contributory factors. But themost important reason, in his understanding, was the practice of late marriage. Itexplained why in Europe a man was still considered young at forty and afty-year-old woman not described as old. By contrast, a Bengali was past his youthat thirty.12

There was, however, a critical difference between British imperial and Indiannationalist understanding s of the category character as applied to public life.Whereas the British saw it as something embodied and therefore inheritedtheruling race argumentnationalists saw it as a universal and hence translatableidea, a collection of precepts and techniques that could be learnt, and thereforemade into an object of pedagogy. Vidyasagars Jibancharit, for instance, saw


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The body and Gandhis destruction of the private

Gandhis understanding of the body of the public man cannot be discussed inisolation from this colonial dynamic. It is easy to see that his early experimentswith meat eating were fundamentally inuenced (if not inspired) by a nationalist

question that troubled many Asian cultures in the nineteenth century: Were theEuropeans stronger because they ate beef? (Indeed, so many non-Europeannationalist s have asked this question and thereby promoted the eating of beefthat one might be tempted to ask: Is the cow the worst victim of Europeanimperialism?) Gandhi thus refers to one of his rst sins of meat eating (heactually ate goat meat on this occasion):

A wave of reform was sweeping over Rajkot at the time when I rst came acrossthis friend. He informed me that many of our teachers were secretly taking meat andwine. He also named many well-known people as belonging to the same

company and he explained it thus: We are a weak people because we do noteat meat. The English are able to rule over us, because they are meat-eaters. Youknow how hardy I am, and how great a runner too. It is because I am a meat-eater.Meat-eaters do not have any boils or tumours, and even if they sometimes happento have any, they heal quickly.13

Gandhi quotes a doggerel of the Gujarati poet Narmada that was popularamongst us schoolboys. The doggerel captures the colonial nationalist under-standing of the role of the body in the construction of political power:

Behold the mighty EnglishmanHe rules the Indian smallBecause being a meat-eaterHe is ve cubits tall.14

Many of the colonial, indeed modern, concerns about character, however, wereto remain with Gandhi. He accepted and advocated the need for discipline andintegrity in public life. Observers have commented on the determination withwhich he submitted himself to the tyranny of the clock. His management ofpublic money with scrupulous honesty owes something to modern notions of thepublic and of the accountability of the public man.15 His life-long interest in bothpublic health and civic consciousness marks him out as quintessentially mod-ern.16

But the critical move that set him apart from both imperialists and (other)nationalists was the way he eventually came to separate the question of characternot so much from the body, as we shall see, but from the issue of sheer physicalstrength where both the imperialists and many of the nationalist s had locatedit. Instead, Gandhi grounded the question of the character of the public manin what is regarded today as the issue of sexuality, in overcoming the powerof the senses. This is what gives the Gandhian political body its specialcharge.


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passive) lust. Non-violence involves love towards all, and depends critically onones capacity to destroy self-love. Ones sexual desires are at the core of onesself-love; therefore, non-violenc e requires a joyful acceptance of celibacy.Gandhi often made a model, for both men and women, of the ideals of sacriceand suffering: Hinduism will remain imperfect as long as men do not accept

suffering [and] withdraw their interest in the pleasures of life.18 There was,to his mind, a direct relationship between this withdrawal from pleasure andswaraj (self-rule, Gandhis word for freedom):

The conquest of lust is the highest endeavor of a mans or a womans existence.And without overcoming lust, man cannot hope to rule over self; without rule overself, there can be no Swaraj No worker who has not overcome lust can hope torender any genuine service to the cause of the harijans [Gandhis name for theso-called untouchables], khadi, cow protection or village reconstruction. Great

causes like these call for spiritual effort or soul force. Soul force comes onlythrough Gods grace and never descends upon a man who is a slave to lust. 19

Sexuality appears as a complex theme both in Gandhis life and in descriptionsof it, including his own. Kishwar provides an effective feminist critique of hisviews on women. That Gandhi was haunted by his own sexuality is a point madeby many observers, particularly those looking at his life from a psychoanalyticalangle, the most famous being Eric Eriksons Gandhis Truth.20 Gossip colum-nists and authors of sensationalist histories have been fascinated by his descrip-tions of his experiments in old age to test his self-control. It is now somewhatcommonplace to nd Gandhi obsessed with sexuality. Madhu Kishwar repeats acommonly held opinion in saying: There are obsessive and repeated referencesto lust in his autobiography.21 I am not concerned with the clinical accuracyof these statements, for I am not competent to judge what constitutes obses-sion. Besides, it is clear from the available literature that Gandhis ideas onsexuality and celibacy were inuenced by many different sources. There were atwork Indian-Hindu practices and ideals of asceticism and abstinence (brah-macharya), of sacrice (tyag), and other such notions. As Gandhi himself wroteon the technique of fasting in a chapter on brahmacharya in the autobiography:it may be said that extinction of sexual passion is as a rule impossible withoutfasting, which may be said to be indispensable for the observance of brah-macharya.22

What I intend to do here is to move away from the question of whether or notGandhis detailed discussion of the problem of his sexuality constitutes,clinically speaking or otherwise, an obsession on his part. That is not relevantto the attempt here to read in the Gandhian representation of the body a semioticsystem of (alternative) modernity. For the purpose of the analysis, I will read asconfessional what is commonly seen as obsessive in Gandhi. Once this isdone, we will be able to see in clearer outlines the alternative conceptions of


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of Augustine or Rousseau. Not only does he adopt from certain monastic strandsin Christianity the idea of a universal love that could be fostered by destroyingall traces of self-love (sexuality) in oneself, he also uses a Christian confessionaltechniquecentral as Foucault would remind us, in the construction of themodern subjectto narrate himself in the public sphere (his autobiography was

written in part to ll the pages of his weekly magazine, Navajivan ). One couldindeed read his obsessive descriptions of his guilt-ridden sexual experience asso many confessions of his sins.

But there remains a very interesting difference between a Christian con-fessional autobiograph y and Gandhis. On this difference hinges a critical part ofmy argument. A confession, argues William Spengemann in discussing Au-gustine, makes the work of self-on-self visible to a higher self, an all-knowingGod. Confessions are narrations of self-knowledge addressed to a being whoknows everything any way.23 Gandhis confessions are interestingly not calledthat; rather they are described as the provisional results of on-going experiments.The addressee of Gandhis narration, the higher being to whom the work ofself-of-self is being revealed, is thus no all-knowing self, the word experimentcarrying within itself an inexorable connotation of openness and uncertainty.Gandhi is quite clear about the point that God is not the addressee of hisautobiography; in this sense his autobiography is not his confessions. There aresome things which are known only to oneself and ones Maker, he writes andadds: These are clearly incommunicable. The experiments I am about to relateare not as such. But they are spiritual, or rather moral.24 In thus shifting theaddressee from the register of Christian Godhood, Gandhi converts the con-fessional into a mere technique and orients it to a secular engagement, the taskof building a modern public life.

In so doing, however, Gandhi constructs a new modern subject of political andpublic life, one who has been neither theorized nor deconstructed in Europeanthinking. The gaze that Gandhi invites on himself, the gaze to which he makeshimself exposed, is relentless. Watch me closely, was his instruction to thosewho wanted to study him. He deliberately shunned any idea of privacy. Whenthe anthropologist Nirmal Bose sought his permission to study him closely in the1940s, Gandhi said: one should actually see me at work and not merely gatherfrom my writings. On another occasion, the instruction was even more forth-right:

You have drunk all that I have written But it is necessary that you shouldobserve me at work I have called you to my side. You must examine if it wasdictated by self-interest. Self-interest may be of two kinds, one is entirely personal,and the other is in relation to what one stands for Examine my motivescarefully.25

Gandhi thus shunned the idea of privacysleeping naked and completelyasexually with others was one of his experiments in this regardnothing in his


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emergence of a modern whose difference from the European/Christian modernis measured precisely by this statement. The interiority of the European modernsubjectthe interiority that pours out in novels, autobiographies , diaries andletterscontained within itself a secularized version of what one once confessedto God.26 The European modern is born on this condition that the private be

narratable and in that sense the private self of the European exceeds ortranscends the body. The European private, one might say, is a deferred public.Give it time, and the private of the European becomes available for publicconsumption in many different forms of narration or representation. The Gand-hian private is non-narratable and non-representable. It is not that it does notexist but it is beyond representation and it dies with the body itself. In onestroke, as it were, Gandhi thus collapsed the distinction between the private andthe public on which the theoretical side of the political arrangements of Westernmodernity rests.

Conclusion

The Gandhian modern was thus in a relationship of both afnity and tensionwith the modernity of the citizen of European political theory. With the latter,the Gandhian modern shares a concern for public health, freedom of speech andinquiry and civic awareness. Yet it does not fulll the condition of interioritythat the discourse of rights both produces and guarantees for the citizen of themodern state. There are three lines of tension that are easily detected: First, theidea of a completely narratable public life and a completely non-narratableprivate one corresponds to the idea of a completely transparent governmentwatch my motives carefully, as Gandhi said. The modern state, however,cannot ever full this requirementnational security, political intelligence,etc., are its watchwords. Second, the moral claim to representation does not gowith the idea of politics as a profession. The Mother Teresas are not politiciansin our everyday understanding, whereas in Gandhian modernity such a distinc-tion would be difcult to sustain. Third, the relationship between the Gandhianconstruction of the public sphere and the logic of capital accumulation is notstraightforward, for if public life valorizes renunciation as a supreme value, howwould one write acquisitiveness into a universal model of the human being?

I read khadi that adorns the body of the hypocritical Indian politician as acondensed statement of this tension between a untheorized and increasinglyunacknowledged subject of colonial modernityto which we now apply thecollective appellation Gandhiand the actual rapacity of Indian capitalism. Forour capitalist practices promote values quite the opposite of those whichGandhian politics taught us to desire. Those desires have receded but notdisappeared from Indian public life. We do not think about them but we, in amanner of speaking, practise them, however perversely, when our politicianscontinue with the collective habit of sporting khadi or some metonymic substi-


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of rituals as empty. The fallacy here is of the same order as the one SlavojZizek discusses in his book The Sublime Object of Ideologyreduction ofideology to conscious intentions and beliefs. Zizek argues against the idea thata belief is something interior and knowledge something exterior. Rather, hesays, it is belief, which is radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective

procedures of people.27 The point is repeated in his discussion of the law:Belief, far from being an intimate, purely mental state, is always materializedin our effective social activity: belief supports the fantasy which regulates socialreality.28

What appears in Zizek as theory may be recognized as a home truth of theHindu tradition. Within that tradition, the so-called rituals have never beenempty, for they have always been nonsubjectiv e and non-intentiona l means ofcommunication. There is thus a question of (practised) belief involved in thewearing of khadi. This question is both logically and culturally valid, though thereduction today of the Gandhian alternative to what looks like an empty ritualis understandable, for the qualities that Gandhi demanded of the public man donot, as I have explained, sit easily with the logic of capital accumulation. Thecondition of Gandhis success was colonial rule. The very fact that the actualinstruments of government belonged to the colonizers except during moments oflimited devolution of power, allowed Indian nationalists to fabricate for them-selves arenasoutside the sphere of formal institutional politicswhich couldact as the theatre for the self-expression of the Gandhian modern. With the dawnof independence, Indian capitalism and democracy have developed their owndistinctive characteristics, different from both the tenets of Gandhian politics aswell as those of European classical writings on either of these phenomena.29 Yetthe survival to this day of the Gandhian uniformfor all the historical mutationsit has undergonecannot be explained as just an empty or hypocritical ritual, forwe would then have to think of the Indian voters as enormously gullible. I havetherefore read it as the site of the desire for an alternative modernity, a desiremade possible by the contingencie s of British colonial rule, now impossible ofrealization under the conditions of capitalism and yet circulating insistentl ywithin an everyday object of Indian public life, the (male) politicians uniform.I do not think that khadi convinces anyone any longer of the Gandhianconvictions of the wearer but, if my reading of it has any point to it, then itsdisappearance, were it to happen, would signify the demise of a deeper structureof desire and would signal Indias complete integration into the circuits of globalcapital.

Notes*

We gratefully acknowledge permission to republish from the Journal of Human Values, Vol. 5, No. 1, where

this article first appeared


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4Gopalchandra Ray, Saratchandra [in Bengali], Calcutta: Mitra O Ghosh, 1966, vol. 2, p. 143.

5Front cover of Sunday, Calcutta, 27 November 3 December 1994.

6See Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, on this question.

7There is some discussion of the issue in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal

18901940, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, ch. 4.8

See the discussion in John Rosselli, The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism inNineteenth-Centur y Bengal, Past and Present, 1980, 86, 121 48, and in Dipesh Chakrabarty, The

Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal, HistoryWorkshop Journal, 1993, 36, p. 1 34.

9The tradition goes back to one of the earliest Bengali tracts of history, Banglar itihas (1848) written by the

nineteenth century social reformer Vidyasagar. The text was a direct translation of John Clark MarshmansOutlines of the History of Bengal for the Use of Youths in India, published earlier in the century.

10J.C. Ghosh, Bengali Literature (1948), New York: AMS Press, 1978, p. 145.

11See the discussion in the preface by Asitkumar Bandyopadhyay to Vidyasaagar rachanabal i [in Bengali],Debkumar Bosu (ed), Calcutta: Mandal Book House, 1966, vol. 1, pp. 36 37.

12Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal, Delhi:

Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 306.13

M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments with Truth (trs. Mahadev Desai) (1st ed.1927), (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 13 14.

14 Ibid., p. 14.15

See Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition, Berkeley: University of California Press,

1968.16

See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizens Gaze, Economic and Political Weekly,7 14 March 1992, pp. 541 548.

17Madhu Kishwar, Gandhi on Women, Economic and Political Weekly, 12 October 1985, 20 (40&41).

18Gandhi cited in Kishwar, ibid., p. 1693.

19G.D. Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 4, 63 cited in Kishwar, Gandhi on Women (n. 17 above), p. 1755.

20Eric Erikson, Gandhis Truth, New York: Norton, 1969.

21Kishwar, Gandhi on Women (n. 17 above), pp. 1754, 1755.

22Gandhi, An Autobiography or the story of My Experiments with Truth (n. 13 above), p. 157.

23

William C. Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre , NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1980, p. 5.24

Gandhi, An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments with Truth (n. 13 above), p. x.25

Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi, Bombay: Orient Longman, 1974, pp. 20, 67 68.26 See the discussion in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Postcoloniality and the Artice of History: Who Speaks for

Indian Pasts?), Representations, Winter 1992, 1, pp. 1 26.27

Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology London: Verso, 1989, p. 30.28

Ibid., pp. 36 37.29

For a beginning on these questions, see Sudipta Kaviraj, Filth and the Public Sphere: Concept s and

Practices about Space in Calcutta, Public Culture, Fall 1997, 10(1), pp. 83 114.


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