44 chApter one
satyagrahi found that he had been misled in his pursuit of truth, only he
(and his fellow satyagrahis) would have suffered through the enactment of
satyagraha (1976, 16:63).
Gandhi’s popular legacy as a renowned advocate of peace becomes
quickly complicated, however, through a careful reading of his work.
Claude Markovitz suggests that the critical contrast between Gandhi as
icon and Gandhi as “blood- and- flesh individual” is the result of “selective
memory” (2004, 163– 6 4). Such memory is crafted both by Gandhi’s own
practices of historical self- representation and through political discourses
in South Africa, India, and beyond that have employed his legacy selectively
toward mobilizations for peace.^11 What this selective memory relies on is
a popular conception of an unfailingly nonviolent humanity, in effect for-
getting the ways that Gandhi himself was at times a proponent of violence,
and that his trajectory toward swaraj was replete with violent practices. He
understood that violence was not only inescapable in human life but also
that at times taking violent action would be the best course toward avoiding
greater violence. Violence was not only necessary but highly contextual and
at times ethically imperative. Roy points us to “the complexity of Gandhian
nonviolence, and his awareness not only of the proximity of violence and
nonviolence but also of the coimplication of the nominally nonviolent in
structures of violence” (2010, 105). Violence and nonviolence for Gandhi
were intimate, collaborative, and far from antithetical. Because in Gand-
hian philosophy love was often “obliged” to fight (1976, 16:63), Gandhi did
not eschew it completely, framing life as itself dependent on requisite forms
of violence. He cited, for example, the necessary act of drawing breath that
required the ingestion of microorganisms, and the need for the human use
of disinfectants that would kill harmful germs (1976, 31:488).
Beyond these requisite forms, he also framed violence as something that
was at times ethically imperative. To kill someone who sought to do ex-
tensive harm to others, for instance, could be deemed a necessary act of
violence. In this respect, violence emerged as something contingent and
contextual, something that could work in the service of nonviolence. While
Gandhi insisted that “non- violence is the supreme dharma” (1976, 14:299),
violence was so often at stake in his own pursuit of ahimsa (nonviolence).
Indeed, the practice of satyagraha was for him “India’s distinctive weapon”
(1976, 16:64), a vehicle that was driven by a politics of love and nonviolence
but was also bound to violence through the language of weaponry. Reading