decolonIzIng mAstery 49and state injustices. The force of satyagraha was therefore to be found ex-
plicitly in its determined refusal to enact violence against others by aiming
toward complete mastery over oneself. For Gandhi, satyagraha was fun-
damentally an act of love aimed toward the “so- called enemy,” to illustrate
the error of the adversary’s ways. This was the critical method Gandhi em-
ployed to show the British colonizers the error of their ways, but Gandhi
also did penance for the acts of Indian political leaders and fellow ashram
inmates who had, to his mind, strayed from the proper path. To love one’s
perceived adversaries it was essential to show them kinship and to persuade
them that their ways were misleading or unjust. Violence directed at an-
other betrayed this aim, and so the satyagrahi embodied the violence he
refused in the political realm.
If other human groups become complex sites for understanding Gand-
hian philosophy, so too does the nonhuman world leave open questions
about Gandhian ethico- politics. Gandhi’s key concepts—swaraj, ahimsa,
brahmacharya—fundamentally implicated the animal.^15 Gandhi signals
this repeatedly across his writings, for instance when he queried the seem-
ingly arbitrary limits we attach to our spiritual and political imperatives.
He called on Indians to query when they would know they had reached the
limit of swaraj, urging them to consider whether treating the untouchable
castes of India as “blood brothers” was enough. He asked them to consider
extending this limit to include their animal brethren, positing that humans
and animals share the same soul (1976, 19:518). Humans and animals were
bestowed with the same life force, and true swaraj could not therefore be
confined by a commitment to humanity. Swaraj properly achieved would
produce a limitless openness toward all other beings—beings that were
vitally linked to humans. Yet even while he insisted on the animal’s place
within ethics, he repeatedly returned to the exceptional status of the human
by situating it at the top of a species hierarchy. Gandhi insisted on our need
to avoid a life that was “animal- like,” insipid, and improper (1993, 317). In
this sense, while he advocated for a radical openness toward animals, he
did so through a deeply anthropocentric and paternalistic frame that could
not reconceive of human/animal relations beyond a hierarchical formula-
tion. Humans should “serve” animals that were intimately tied to them, a
service that was required because of the animal’s “lower” status.
While humans held an ethical commitment to animals, the animal as-
pects of human life needed paradoxically to be tamed in order to effec-