decolonIzIng mAstery 45Gandhi from the vantage point of a literary scholar, one cannot ignore the
implications of this metaphor, how the metaphor itself reveals something
vital about Gandhian politics. Satyagraha is a weapon used against the
(colonial) master, a weapon necessary to undoing the hold of the master
over Indian subjects. Gandhi did not see a tension between the language of
weaponry and his politics of nonviolence because for him love could not be
altogether extricated from violence. In Faisal Devji’s provocative reading of
Gandhi and violence, he argues that Gandhi’s movement in fact “had noth-
ing to do with avoiding violence” (2012, 7). Far from shunning violence,
Devji argues, Gandhi appropriated and sublimated violence “by inviting
and directing it through a series of political experiments, both theoretical
and practical” (8). If Gandhi in effect courted violence in order to convert
it within the colonial context, he did so in ways that were often contradic-
tory. One struggles to account for a particular logic or pattern in Gandhi’s
engagements with violence, which are united, Devji argues, by a set of prin-
ciples but are often difficult to reconcile.
In their recent work on Gandhi in South Africa, Ashwin Desai and
Goolam Vahed argue against the dominant narrative of Gandhi as “a great
inventor of the new tactic and philosophy of nonviolent popular politics
and as a pioneer of anti- colonial nationalism” (2016, 25). Rather, Desai
and Vahed argue that Gandhi’s political imagination remained bound by
a desire for equality within empire. They read Gandhian tactics as shaped
by “a conservative defence of class, race and caste privilege” (25). Given
Gandhi’s popular legacy, it is almost unfathomable to think that in 1906,
during the Zulu rebellion against debilitating taxes in Natal, he went to war
as a stretcher- bearer on behalf of empire. This war produced very few Brit-
ish casualties, while “three thousand five hundred Zulu were killed, seven
thousand huts were burnt, and thirty thousand people were left homeless”
(20).^12 Desai and Vahed ask us to remember Gandhi before India, a Gandhi
that does not square easily with his legacy. What was at stake for Gandhi
in participating actively in the violence of war? Desai and Vahed argue
that Gandhian politics in South Africa remained locked within a desire
for Indian recognition from Britain at the expense of other disempowered
groups: “Gandhi sought to ingratiate himself with Empire and its mission
during his years in South Africa. In doing so, he not only rendered African
exploitation and oppression invisible, but was, on occasion, a willing part
of their subjugation and racist stereotyping” (22). This picture of Gandhi