38 chApter onement is a “sterile woman” insofar as it “has not yet of its own accord done
a single good thing” and is like a prostitute because “it is under the control
of ministers who change from time to time” (32). Gandhi later declared that
he stood by every word of Hind Swaraj with the exception of his use of the
term “prostitute”—a word that offended the “fine taste” of a female English
friend and that he therefore regretted using (Skaria 2007, 219).
The link here between sterility and prostitution is fascinating in its own
right, not merely because it reveals a striking (but not altogether unex-
pected) patriarchy at work in Gandhian metaphorics but because it links
the biological capacity for reproduction with the social production and
function of sex labor. If the corporeal is tied to the social in Gandhi’s mas-
culinist politics, the female slides between the biological and the social, but
she does so as an errant subject.
Gandhi proceeds from this unabashed evocation of the British Parlia-
ment as a failed or fallen woman to a declaration that the fundamental
problem of the Parliament is that it is one “without a real master” (1997, 32).
Perceived as the height of civilization, the Editor explains that Britain is in
fact diseased and suffering from its commitment to the pursuit of modern
civilization, a commitment that lends itself directly to colonization. Follow-
ing Gandhi’s logic, the colonial master is one born from an improper, mas-
terless nation- state, and his actions are the actions of a master who himself
has not been subjected to a “proper” form of state mastery.^5 The develop-
ment of a properly masterful governing body in Gandhian terms would
thus necessitate a rescue from its thoroughly gendered insufficiencies.
Over the course of his autobiography, Gandhi’s anticolonial politics are
crystalized through the transformation of his own anticolonial masculinity.
Parama Roy (2010) offers a rich and persuasive account of Gandhi’s com-
plex staging of anticolonial masculinity, particularly through the lens of
the mahatma’s alimentary politics.^6 As a youth, Gandhi believed that India’s
freedom from British colonial rule would happen through the embodied
transformation of Indian subjects. According to his early logic, because
large constituents of Indian subjects were vegetarian, they had bodies that
were too weak to fight their carnivorous masters. The young Gandhi held
firmly to the belief that meat eating was the gateway to national liberation,
to literally overthrowing the British through what Roy calls “culinary mas-
culinity” (2010, 81), and to claiming India as a self- ruled nation- state.^7 He
would famously come to reverse this logic, believing instead that nonvio-