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Chapter 1 Gandhis Body, Gandhis Truth It is easier to conquer the entire world than to subdue the enemies in our body. And, therefore, for the man who succeeds in this conquest, the former will be easy enough. The self-government which you, I and all others have to attain is in fact this. Need I say more? The point of it all is that you can serve the country only with this body. -Letter to Shankarlal Banker, 1918, CW 15:43 It is impossible for unhealthy people to win swaraj [self-rule]. Therefore we should no longer be guilty of the neglect of the health of our people. - "Implications of Constructive Program," 1940, CW 72: 380 A multitude of scholarly works have analyzed and reanalyzed Mohandas K. Gandhi's epic life and work from numerous angles.! In spite of this focused attention, or perhaps on account of it, the Mahatma remains something ofan enigma: a genius, to be sure, and one inspired by a kind of transcendental moral conviction, but an enigma nevertheless on account of how he conceived of morality as a problem in which Truth and biology were equally implicated. ("Truth" is capitalized when it specifically denotes Gandhi's sense of an absolute, ontological principle.) As he put it, "morals are closely linked with health. A perfectly moral person alone can achieve perfect health" (CW 2:50). Following a statement such as this, my purpose in this chapter is to work toward an analysis of Gandhi's genius by focusing on that which appears most enigmatic 4 Rethinking the Mahatma about his program of sociopolitical action: his somatic concerns and his faith in the biomoral imperative of public health. A number of early scholars, most notablyJoan Bondurant (1965: 12), took for granted that Gandhi's concern with satyagraha (truth force) was quite distinct from his personal preoccupation with diet, sex, and hygiene (see Ashe 1968:94-95; Payne 1969:465).2 Following on this, many studies have focused on politics, ethics, and morality , while only a few relatively marginal texts have been concerned primarily with sex (see also Gangadhar 1984; Paul 1989; van Vliet 1962). Almost none deal with questions of health. The problem , however, is that in reading Gandhi's autobiography, among any number of other primary texts, one is immediately struck by the fact that a distinction cannot be made between his personal experiments with dietetics, celibacy, hygiene, and nature cure and his search for Truth; between his virtual obsession with health, his faith in nonviolence, and his program of sociopolitical reform. Recognizing this, a number of scholars have worked toward what might be called a resynthesis of Gandhi's life by means of psychoanalytic and symbolic interpretations (Erikson 1969; Kakar 1990; Nandy 1980, 1983; see also Wolfenstein 1967; Lorimer 1976). In his book Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, for example, Sudhir Kakar provides a psychoanalytic reading of Gandhi's sexuality (1990: 85-128). Kakar's analysis is noteworthy, for he explains Gandhi's preoccupation with celibacy in terms of a Hindu psychology of sublimation that is congruent with Freudian theory (1990: 118). While there can be little doubt that Kakar is right about the symbiotic relationship between Gandhi's passionate self-discipline and his desire to desexualize women by feminizing himself, his focus on symbolism- both Hindu and Freudian-leads to a mistaken conclusion about the relationship between nonviolence and sexuality (see also Nandy 1983). Kakar's psychoanalytic reading presents particular problems with regard to the critical issue of Gandhi's experimentation with food, which he interprets as a symbolic displacement of Gandhi's preoccupation with genital sexuality . "Page after page, in dreary detail, we read about what Gandhi ate and what he did not, why he partook of certain foods and why he did not eat others, what one eminent vegetarian told him about eggs and what another, equally eminent, denied. The connection between sexuality and food is made quite explicit in Gandhi's later Gandhi~ Body, Gandhi~Truth 5 life ... [and] ... we must remember that in Indian consciousness , the symbolism of food is more closely or manifestly connected to sexuality than it is in the West" (1990:91; my emphasis). While Kakar is right about the symbolic significance offood, the structure of his argument reinforces a false dichotomy between the "dreary detail" of nutrition on the one hand and the expressive power of analogic meanings on the other-a structural logic that shifts attention almost immediately away from the colonial context ofembodiment...

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