The Perverse Core of Gandhian Anti-Colonialism
There are three points that I want to reflect upon concerning Gandhi’s anti-colonialist praxis. First, there is his preference for the village. Second, there was his insistence upon Satyagraha (what the West refers to as pacifism or non-violence). Third, there was Gandhi’s intended reformation of the Caste system. I believe that, when taken together, these characteristics lead us to suspect within Gandhi’s activism a structure of perversion. I then want to distinguish Gandhi’s perverse conformity — his perverse stance vis-a-vis the colonial law — from that of Ambedkar, whose voice, which was often in critical opposition to Gandhi’s perspectives on the Caste system, was largely neglected or ignored by the European left (including revolutionaries, radicals, and liberals).
Gandhi recognized the importance of retaining the structure of the Indian village as a core feature of Indian modernism. He is quoted as saying that the village is ‘the soul of India.’ This should not be interpreted as an Oedipal fantasy of a return to pre-colonial harmony because the village remained fundamentally a part of Indian society even during colonization. Thus, it is perhaps more accurate to claim that one can take India out of the village but you cannot take the village out of India. The Indian village is structured by low level power dynamics which are dispersed across a multiplicity of villages. And Gandhi recognized that the village came already with its own inherent antagonisms and power dynamics. This is a fundamentally different attitude than those of European nationalists who often fantasize about a ‘time before’ which was so much better than the ‘current time.’ Thus, when Prime Minister Modi and the Hinduvta movement fantasize about a ‘time before’ it is because they are not Indian — they are, rather, part of the same structures that govern the European mindset.
Gandhi’s position on non-violence, known as “satyagraha,” was always distinguished from its rendering by Europeans. Gandhi was quite clear on this point: “I have drawn the distinction between passive resistance as understood and practiced in the West and satyagraha […] the expression ‘passive resistance’ ceases even to be synonymous, as passive resistance has admitted of violence as in the case of the suffragettes and has been universally acknowledged to be a weapon of the weak.” Gandhi links ‘passive resistance’ to the sort of Nietzschean attitude of ressentiment, or to the hysterical structure which does not recognize its complicity in the structure of power. Yet, Gandhi is here referring to the suffragettes and the Western movements of non-violence as if they could be compared as arising from the same context. This is not the case. There is at least one point of similarity: both ‘passive resistance’ and ‘satyagraha’ are complicit in the overarching structures which gave rise to them. For India, satyagraha seems perverse precisely in that it aims to be an instrument of the Other’s enjoyment. Or, put differently, Gandhi aims to ‘concert, not coerce,’ the law. In this way the movement lines itself up masochistically to receive the punishments that would reveal truth to the Other. And not only would it reveal truth to the Other, it would also, more importantly, demonstrate the true face of the Other as the agent of a cruel and unjust law.
The difference between hysteria (as we see in the Suffragette movement) and perversion (as we see in Gandhi’s movement) is that the former forces a confrontation with the Other which they know to exist. The consequence of the former is that there is a production of a new body of knowledge, a new domain of servitude within the master’s discourse: now more people are capable of voting, and hence, in the final instance, instead of eradicating representative democracy it has merely been expanded and made more enticing. As for the latter — perverse Gandhianism — there is the forcing of an exposition of the Other as an arbiter of the law. Since the village structure does not provide a central potency of the law then it must be produced. The paradox is therefore that it is the blunting of the law which propels Gandhi’s movement to produce a potency of the law. Thus, it is not that Gandhi and his movement introduce an anti-colonialist position within India — and this is an argument made very well by Ambedkar, but rather that India was constitutively already and always anti-colonialist. This is what led Ambedkar to conclude that the decolonization of the British from India would have happened whether or not Gandhi intervened; moreover, it is possible that it would have happened quicker and to a greater effect. After all, it is clear today that the British — as a culture — haven’t left India.
One of the key differences between Gandhi and Ambedkar was their notion of the class system. Whereas Gandhi prioritized the nationalization of India and opted only for the ability of migrated across the castes, Ambedkar argued that the caste system was part of the fundamental antagonism of India and must be confronted directly — and that it must take priority over the nationalization of the country. The difference of position outlines something important: whereas Gandhi aimed to conceal the lack in the Other through satyagraha, Ambedkar aimed to operationalize the lack in the Other. These strategies are different from other religious narratives. For example, Christians recognize the ‘dark night of the soul’ as the moment of suffering before a great transformation of belief; Islam recognizes ‘jihad’ as a struggling that occurs not as an elevation of belief but rather as a constitutive component of belief, a way of straightening the curved path; Gandhi saw ‘satyagraha’ as a way to become the object of the Other’s law, and; Ambedkar saw in Buddhism a Marxist element which exposed the lack in the Other through acceptance of the class and caste-struggle.
European forces colonized India through a structure that placed authority — what Lacan labelled “S1” — in a couple with knowledge (“S2”). As a part of their colonization efforts they produced fictions of a pre-colonial past which established Oedipal fantasies of a ‘time before’ to which political projects might wish a return. These colonial fantasies were offered to the Indian intelligentsia and built up within Indian society through museums and encyclopedias. Yet, within India, indifference to authority coupled with efforts to produce an authority, have demonstrated an altogether different ‘spirit’ of being. Compare, for example, European traffic with Indian traffic. Whereas the former consists of clear external symbolic rules — traffic lights, traffic signs, a grammar or syntax for driving which produces order among the vehicles — the latter consists of blunted symbolic rules: if traffic lights do exist, they are believed to be ‘suggestions.’ The swarm of traffic negotiates their path in real-time, or else, finally, to conceal the lack in the Other, one imposes severe authority structures — lockdowns, etc — that are nonetheless ineffective and unsustainable.
