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Conclusion Post-Gandhian Somatics Auto-Urine Therapy The Gandhian Legacy and the Physiology of Self-Rule In this book I have attempted to use the body to read against both the idealism and the materialism of culture and history. As such, the perspective I have taken focuses on practices and the consequences of practice rather than on the logic of ideology or reason. In some sense, the rationale for taking this perspective stems from two congruent propositions: first, that a focus by almost all scholars on what might be called Gandhi's political philosophy, his philosophy of action, his religious beliefs, and his program of social reform, has distorted the underlying basis of his embodied practice ; second, and more generally, that culture as a construct of the present is a complex myth that is rooted, with a high degree ofcontingency , in the past. Hence an analysis of "culture" that takes the past into serious consideration is, more likely than not, liable to produce critical history. What this means is that it is very difficult to gain an analytic perspective on the present, given that that analytic perspective entails a fundamental and unrelenting skepticism regarding the fixity of cultural reality. It is, perhaps, for this reason that the previous chapter ends-with a "thud," as one insightful reader of an early draft put it-with Gandhi's assassination and Gama's problematic death in 1960. But what of the present? What of the Gandhian legacy? On the train from Delhi on July 1, 1999, I was talking with a Conclusion 147 young man, aJain going to perform obligatory rituals in Haridwar. This young man owns a fairly successful computer repair and assembly company in the capital and is also an active member of the RSS-the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Association of Volunteers, a militant pro-Hindu organization)-and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (a militant Hindu organization). He is extremely proud of the fact that with his active support these organizations were able to collect ten thousand liters of blood to support the troops fighting Pakistani infiltrators along the line of control near Kargil in Kashmir. "More blood than they bloody well knew what to do with," he laughed. He is a self-proclaimed skeptic and has nothing good to say about politics or diplomacy but is, through his training with the RSS, along with an intensive course in est-about which he could not say enough good things- committed to selfdevelopment , personal growth, public service, and social reform. As an RSS volunteer he did not advocate nonviolence-the double negative is imperative. "Can you imagine," he pointed out with a sense of self-confident cynicism, "a Jain who advocates violence? Do you know what I would propose as a solution to the problem of Pakistan? Get eighty crore Hindus, most of them from Bihar, take them to the border, and have them shit and piss all at one time! Can you imagine the stink? All those Biharies in one place, shitting and pissing. I tell you, Pakistan would be washed away in a river offilth. I tell you," he continued, now warming to his subject, "this is a perfectly Gandhian solution. Shitting and pissing are natural acts, and there is nothing violent involved in shitting and pissing. And then when it is all over, the land will be fertile and those who are left can spend their time harvesting crops rather than fighting." Looking back over the past fifty years since Gandhi's death it would be hard not to be cynical about many things. One might well ask, in the wake of orchestrated communal violence at the disputed mosque in Ayodhya- "after which nothing will be the same," said the businessman sitting across from me on the train- and the atomic tests at Pokharan, upon which the RSS organizer modeled his vision offecal annihilation, whether or not Gandhi's ideas, leave aside his body, have any meaning whatsoever in India at the end of the millennium. As the computer technician on the train said, "we Indians made Gandhi into a Mahatma, now it is time to bury the old man. There is enough pigeon shit on his statues in any case." 148 Conclusion It is very easy to be pessimistic. But ultimately pessimism, like hope and faith, is a state of mind, and this is a book about the body. By holding onto this fact it may be possible to find in the present a "state of body" that...

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