Efficacies of Political Action: Physical Culture and the Kinesthetic Politics of Gandhian Nationalism

Abstract

Somatic self-preparation and auto-transformation were indispensable to Gandhi’s vision of the nonviolent movement. Foregrounded in his public writing in Gujarati and English, Gandhi constructed the project of organizing political resistance by braiding together forms of physical culture and military maneuvers while still retaining a commitment to nonviolence. He and other Gandhian leaders prescribed certain physical practices in an effort to organize the nationalist movement and produce moral and physically capable social and political subjects. By interpreting the linked themes of physical culture, physical labor, and military drill extant in Gandhi’s writing, I underscore the important place they occupied as Gandhi outlined his program of nonviolent political mobilization. Physical culture informed Gandhi’s strategies of organizing political resistance in the early twentieth century particularly because the creation of the Indian nationalist movement depended on the deployment of a set of efficacious techniques that would cultivate and mobilize specific kinds of social and political subjects, or so he hoped. These subjects were intended to be physically and morally prepared to undertake political resistance nonviolently. For Gandhians, they would be lauded as a paragon of leadership within Indian society who could also “serve” as prefects that would be charged with the responsibility of creating a stable and moral social life in India.