decolonIzIng mAstery 41who is sacrificed in sacrificing oneself to an ideal of vegetarian purity. How
is one to assess, for instance, the vegetarian sacrifice of the public man or
mahatma in relation to the vegetarian sacrifice of the child or the woman/
wife/mother?” (113). Gandhi characterizes woman as “the embodiment of
sacrifice and ahimsa” (114). But in this narrative (as in others), Kasturba
comes clearly to lack the “heroic status and purity of sacrifice” (114). Here
she serves as a proper figure of the Hindu wife’s dharma in sustaining the
life of her husband, all the while confirming “her status as one who is not
entitled to offer sacrifice in her own right. Sacrifice is... an entitlement,
even a property right, so that the sacrificer proper is ready not just to sacri-
fice himself but, perhaps just as importantly, to sacrifice others” (114). Roy’s
reading of Gandhi’s gendered embodiment and sacrifice emphasizes how
within his thought women play an absolutely vital role in his self- staging
and vision for political mobilization, while revealing that sacrifice is a prop-
erly masculine realm, one through which female agency is concurrently
sacrificed.
The Potential of Self- Mastery
Fanonian and Gandhian thought—as divergent as they appear—rely, then,
on particularly gendered alliances, exclusions, and erasures in order to
stage their political projects. Women emerge in the narrative accounts of
these anticolonial leaders as indispensable supporters and as subjects that
need to be cast off from the properly male realm of decolonization. The
scholarship that has taken up the status of women in anticolonial thought
paves the way toward a thinking of other less explored figures of anticolo-
nial discourse that are similarly caught up in and refused by the masterful
aims and practices of decolonization. I will turn to some such figures—
the indigene, “uncivilized” groups, the animal, the cripple, and nature—to
dwell on the relations between anticolonial masteries and colonial violence
in the making of particularly masculine decolonized subjectivities.
As Ashis Nandy argues, in Gandhian thought “freedom is indivisible,
not only in the popular sense that the oppressed of the world are one but
also in the unpopular sense that the oppressor too is caught in the culture
of oppression” (1983, 63). Gandhi wrote at length about how modern civili-
zation created sick societies from which colonization was born. Through-
out Hind Swaraj, he dwells extensively on how his path toward freedom