the lAnguAge of mAstery 75flect “higher mathematics or philosophy,” it cuts directly to the “souls” of
the people, and by articulating those subjectivities it can lead toward other
forms of critical discourse. As we shall see imminently, Gandhi shares this
conception of a debased language that can be mobilized and revitalized.
Memmi concludes his meditation on the role and necessity of language
reclamation by turning to the construction of a “whole and free man” who
at last speaks his own revitalized language: “Having reconquered all his
dimensions, the former colonized will have become a man like any other.
There will be the ups and downs of all men to be sure, but at least he will
be a whole and free man” (1991, 153). If native language reclamation is an
act that Memmi insists will redirect the colonized subject away from the
“permanent duality” created by his bilingualism, he does not pose this act
of reclamation outside colonial discourse. Rather than to embrace his lost
dimensions and to enable the emergence of other forms of (human) being,
the colonial subject must instead “reconquer” them. Here, the language
Memmi uses to think about the primordial dimension of language recla-
mation and revitalization gives way to a colonial mindset in which par-
ticular (male) subjects continuously engage in a linguistic practice of con-
quest. This language reveals the abiding structure of mastery at work in
the formal colonial relation and in the act of decolonization. Becoming “a
whole and free man” remains in Memmi’s thought bound to conquest, and
through acts of self- conquest (as we saw in the previous chapter through
my discussion of Gandhi), mastery is reoriented against a colonized subject
that has already experienced the force of mastery by another. His fantasy
is that conquest—which I have argued necessitates splitting—can lead to
wholeness. As such, he imagines that colonial language’s mastery over the
colonized subject can give way to another form of conquest in which the
colonized man becomes “whole and free” through the masterful reclama-
tion of those “dimensions” taken from him through colonial violence.
Gandhi’s (Inter)National Languages
The urgent need to restore native languages to colonized subjects is like-
wise prominent in Gandhian thought. While he would insist that the ques-
tion of language was not as critical as that of truth and nonviolence—in
other words, that swaraj (self- rule) could be attained even if the English
language prevailed (as it has) in India—it is clear that Gandhi could not