Close encounters of an imperial kind: Gandhi, gender, and anti-colonialism

Abstract

The colonial encounter was arguably an early instance of transnationalization that had lasting and significant effects on the organization of gender and sexuality in the subcontinent, and on the current gender dynamics of transnationalization. This paper will examine the juxtaposed dynamics of imperialism, nationalism, and the Gandhian enterprise under the colonial encounter. It will argue that this dynamic impacted severely on the practices and meanings of self-definition—individual, communal, and national—and elaborated them with an almost libidinal intensity in the fields of gender and sexuality, bringing sexual politics into policy and embodiment into theory and practice. The paper will outline the modes of masculinity that were generated, operationalized, transmitted, and embodied through this dynamic and will show how in the course of this encounter, this particular historical moment was indexed in a multiplicity of ways. To do this, I map out the distinctive gender politics that was mobilized by imperial coloniality, by Gandhi and by the politico-historical developments that are now almost emblematic of national and communitarian identity politics within the modern Indian nation-state. While doing this, the paper will trace the links that Gandhi made between sexual practices and national destiny, and elaborate the gender politics of such sexual experimentation.