decolonIzIng mAstery 39lent practice was vital to true liberation. This meant, as Roy aptly illustrates,
that Gandhi’s own body and its self- staging would become vital to his pro-
jection of an explicitly anticolonial masculinity. While Fanon’s masculine
colonized body was one always tensed by and against the force of coloni-
zation, and in need of release from that tension, Gandhi’s own slim, scantily
clad figure—one that leans toward effeminacy—would come to signal a no
less embodied but very different representation of masculinity positioned
against colonial force.
If Gandhi’s body has become emblematic of “passive resistance” to colo-
nial rule (a term that Gandhi himself renounced because in fact the practice
of satyagraha was better translated as “love- force” or “truth- force,” which
was in no sense “passive”), it remains a body that recasts the “look” and
register of masculinity itself.^8 Indeed, as Roy argues, Gandhi’s own adop-
tion of a nearly naked aesthetic aligned him with debates about respectable
women’s attire in public places (2010,^ 85– 8 6). As both Kishwar and Roy
illustrate, Gandhi was in so many respects aligned with women’s issues and
saw women as vital allies in his movement toward a mass mobilization of
anticolonial social transformation. But within the practices of self- mastery
that Gandhi saw as so vital to the production of truly liberated subjectivi-
ties, women play an odd role. Gandhi’s commitment to brahmacharya—a
term that translates as “celibacy” but exceeds the sexual connotations of
this term—necessitated for him practices of testing his self- control. Some-
what scandalously, such tests included lying in bed beside female followers
and ashram inmates to ensure that he would not become aroused by them.
Joseph Alter begins an essay on celibacy and sexuality in North Indian
nationalism by declaring, “It is well known that Mahatma Gandhi felt that
sexuality and desire were intimately connected to social life and politics,
and that self- control translated directly into power of various kinds, both
public and private” (1994, 45). But if Gandhi could claim to have mastered
his sexual desire, he certainly struggled across his life with its alimentary
corollary, struggles that Roy reveals cannot be extricated from the female
figures that in his autobiography appeared never to waver in their practices
of abstinence.
Drawing on Derrida’s reading of the biblical story of Abraham and
Isaac,^9 Roy turns to the figure of Sarah as mother who is explicitly absented
from the story. Thinking through the gendered valences of sacrifice in The
Gift of Death, Derrida asks: “Does the system of this sacrificial responsibil-