48 chApter one
Yet another footnote contextualizing this passage informs readers that
“in 1921 Gandhi apologised to the Assamese for listing them among the
‘uncivilised’ tribes of India” (44n71). In his apology, Gandhi calls his error
“a grave injustice done to the great Assamese people, who are every whit
as civilised as any other part of India” (44n71). He proceeds to explain that
his “stupidity” in characterizing the Assamese as uncivilized was informed
by his reading of an English account of the Manipur expedition by Sir John
Gorst. Because Gandhi admits that he was “an indifferent reader of his-
tory,” he suggests that he retained this historical account of the Assamese
as jungli (wild/uncivilized) as historical fact, and subsequently “committed
it to writing.” This is a fascinating moment in which conquest is explicitly
informed and delegated by a specifically Western history, a moment that
reveals how Gandhian philosophy could not be dissociated from the colo-
nial frame against which it positioned itself. It also illustrates how, through
reading and writing practices, particular subjects become enfolded in or
excluded from the realm of civility and thus subjected to masterful forms
of action against them.
Gandhi’s Animals
Mastery in Gandhian discourse slips between the internal and the exter-
nal, between the colonizer and the colonized, between the individual body
and the body politic, and, critically for Gandhian ethics, also between the
human and the animal. Gandhi explained that the life of the satyagrahi
is one governed by the discipline of the body and the soul (1976, 16:63).
This form of discipline required both a pacification of the human’s “animal
passions” and an overcoming of the “enemy within” (Gandhi [1932] 2004,
5). It was by turning away from “the imagined enemy without” and turn-
ing toward the “enemy within” that Gandhi understood the social enact-
ment of love. Such love required an overcoming of aspects and qualities of
the human that signaled for him its unenlightened status. Sexual drives,
among other yearnings, would need to be unremittingly tamed for the en-
lightened subject to emerge. Specific aspects of oneself as an uncontrolled
animal being, therefore, would have to be mastered in order to pave the
way toward a decolonized society. The effect of the satyagrahi was a politics
of the unmasterful persuasion of the other, a practice that embodied forms
of masterful violence against the self in order to do penance for individual