BHRIGUPATI SINGHan Editor and a Reader. (Gandhi translated Plato’sApologyinto Gujarati a few years
earlier, a fact probably significant for his use of the dialogue form.)Hind Swarajwas
addressed mainly to expatriate Indians, particularly those living in London who were
advocating the use of violence in the struggle against the British.
This might be a familiar sound, to hear an Indian bring up the name of Gandhi,
participating in something like a critique, say, of ‘‘the West,’’ in whatever form, by invok-
ing what is assumed to be familiar or near, itself supposed to be a function of identity by
birth. My move here is quite the opposite, based more on what Nietzsche calls the throw
of the dice. As an undergraduate in Delhi University, in admiration of older but still quite
young leftist student unionists, I learned to say, with some conviction: ‘‘Gandhi was the
pet dog of imperialism,’’ a phrase handed down to us from decades-old Indian Commu-
nist Party pamphlets. Gandhi successfully earned the distrust of both the left and the right
in India, and he was finally assassinated by a member of the Hindu right, an offshoot of
the political parties that were in power in the central government of India until April
- In my own case, suffice it to say that had it not been for Deleuze writing on Nietz-
sche, for Cavell reading Nietzsche reading Emerson, and for Emerson appearing in the
preface of Gandhi’s text, I would have putHind Swarajdown in a matter of minutes. And
since the ‘‘I’’ in this text refers less to an individuality and more to a conglomeration of
milieus, forces, and affects, we might take philosophy to be a realm where private acts
take on public significance.
Let us insert this book a little further into the resonating series outlined above. Gan-
dhi’s critique of ‘‘the West’’ is reasonably well known, as that of a society based primarily
on relations of force (could we call this, as Deleuze does, a Newtonian or thermodynamic
image of thought?) and on a vision of human nature based on selfishness or rational self-
calculation (‘‘rational choice’’). However, finding oneself at a loss, enchained, the move
away from despair and resentment, or more accurately, from Nietzsche’s termressenti-
ment, is enabled by the premise ofHind Swaraj: this is a critique that begins from oneself,
above all, in an attempt to invent a form of political association that does not yet exist.
‘‘The people are missing,’’ as Deleuze would say. How does one analyze oneself when it
is not simply a matter of an ‘‘I,’’ but rather of numerous potential selves? What we find
here is an analysis too ‘‘untimely’’ to be called sociological, being instead a diagnostic
account of the presently available technologies and modes of being in the world:Hind
Swarajhas chapters on ‘‘Lawyers’’ (Gandhi himself, as is well known to Indian school-
children, was trained as a lawyer in England), ‘‘Doctors,’’ ‘‘Education,’’ ‘‘Machinery,’’ and
‘‘Railways.’’ Why would such exegesis be necessary in an anticolonial manifesto? The
method, in this case, offers a striking parallel to Nietzsche’s conception of the philosopher-
physician, a ‘‘doctor’’ of civilizations (which reappears in Deleuze as the problem of ‘‘the
critical and the clinical’’), attempting to perform what Gandhi names ‘‘surgery of the
soul,’’ which takes the form of diagnosis (symptomatology) and therapy. While the condi-
tions of external subjection, say that of colonialism, are not inconsequential, the key
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