42 chApter one
would liberate Indian subjects not only from colonial rule but from its re-
liance on the more primordial disease of modern civilization. Swaraj was
thus critically also an invitation to freedom for India’s English masters.
The pursuit of self- rule was therefore not merely targeted toward the lib-
eration of Indians and other global subjects living under colonial rule but
was an act of utopic mobilization in which both colonizers and colonized
would become liberated. The gateway to true liberation was, for Gandhi,
absolute discipline over oneself, and he sought “complete independence”
not merely from British rule but from any external power whose influence
could lead him away from the proper path of “truth.” Elaborating this no-
tion of “truth” at the center of Gandhian thought, Partha Chatterjee writes:
“To Gandhi... truth did not lie in history, nor did science have any privi-
leged access to it. Truth was moral: unified, unchanging and transcenden-
tal. It was not an object of critical inquiry or philosophical speculation. It
could only be found in the experience of one’s life, by the unflinching prac-
tice of moral living” (1986, 97). If truth was that which one discovered for
oneself through a relentless pursuit of moral living, this meant also that it
could not be squared with “the dominant thematic of post- Enlightenment
thought” (97). Gandhi’s truth, then, resided in a politics of experimentation
that could never be foreclosed, and that was thus fundamentally incom-
patible with dialectical reason. This formulation of truth, founded on an
uncertain practice of experimentation, might offer us the most powerful
method by which to exceed mastery’s hold in the everyday production of
the human through neocolonial politics today.^10
While Gandhi’s formulation of his practice remains structured by log-
ics of (self-) mastery, his experimental practice in fact functions against
mastery’s definitive foreclosures. This is most apparent—perhaps paradox-
ically—in his attempts to explain brahmacharya, a practice of self- mastery
in which one “controls his organs of sense in thought, word, and deed”
(1998, 24). Gandhi took the vow of brahmacharya in his pursuit of truth,
and confesses that its definition is one that he himself does not under-
stand completely: “The meaning of this definition became somewhat clear
after I had kept the observance for some time, but it is not quite clear even
now, for I do not claim to be a perfect brahmachari, evil thoughts having
been held in restraint but not eradicated. When they are eradicated, I will
discover further implications of the definition” (1998, 24). Since Gandhi