46 chApter onein South Africa, participating in the subjugation of non- Indian marginal
communities, is one that confronts with great unease the legacies of Gandhi
that dominate in popular and political discourse. If it has become almost
an intellectual fashion of late to rehistoricize Gandhi and to draw out some
of the most deeply unsettling aspects of his history, politics, and practice,
this fashion signals a felt urgency to think critically about our legacies
of nonviolence—ones that relied on the violent extermination of certain
populations toward the recuperation of others. Such “inconvenient truths”
(24) about Gandhi include his engagements in the war against the Zulus in
South Africa when he was a mere three years away from the writing of Hind
Swaraj, the doctrine of Indian self- rule that he would famously craft over a
period of days on a return journey from England to South Africa on board
the Kildonan Castle in 1909.^13 He was very close, in other words, to launch-
ing an explicit treatise on Indian independence, on the necessity of swaraj
and nonviolent resistance to the British control of India as he participated
in the violence against indigenous peoples in South Africa.^14
Across Gandhi’s political career, there would continue to be commu-
nities, groups, and bodies whose conquest became crucial to the achieve-
ment of the mahatma’s “greater” political aims. In the section of Hind
Swaraj titled “The Condition of India,” the Editor overturns Gandhi’s early
political thinking about the strength of Indian bodies as the gateways to
Indian independence. The Editor asserts of the pursuit of swaraj: “Strength
lies in the absence of fear, not in the quantity of flesh and muscle we may
have on our bodies. Moreover, I must remind you who desire Home Rule
that, after all, the Bhils, the Pindaris, the Assamese and the Thugs are our
own countrymen. To conquer them is your and my work. So long as we fear
our own brethren, we are unfit to reach the goal” (1997, 45). Referencing
here a host of groups perceived as “uncivilized” and thus expressly perilous
to the mobilization of the nation- state, Gandhi insists that it is the job of
those seeking swaraj through practices of self- restraint and self- sufficiency
“to conquer them.” In the English translation of the text, the phrase is sup-
plemented with a clarifying footnote: “ ‘To conquer them’: in the Gujarati
text this reads ‘To win them over’ ” (1997, 45n71). This translation is re-
markable in its discursive shift from the Gujarati sense of persuasion to
the overt subjugation at work in the English translation. The fact that such
a slip happens within English—the language of the colonizer—is a prob-
lematic I will return to in the next chapter. Critical here is how the valence