Postcolonial Studies, Vol 4, No 1, pp 27 38, 2001

Clothing the political man: a reading of the use of khadi/white in Indian public life*
DIPESH CHAKRABARTY

Are values in public life always a matter of conscious choice? An af rmative response to this question is at least implicit in much that is written on public life and its requirements. I do not, as such, question this assumption. There are good reasons for advocating consciously held values in the practice of public life in any modern country. But this paper, which is a historians discussion of values in Indian public life, focuses on the phenomenon of the historical survival of shared values, beliefs and desires in what people do rather than in what they say. It is important to explain this. India now has a recognizable public life made up of all the ingredients one would consider standard for the construction of the public sphere: representative democracy, right of free speech, and an active fourth estate. This public life produces, in everyday discussions, its own interpretive system and categories for measuring its own quality. One such key category, perhaps the most frequently used in discussions of Indian political life, is corruption. The word, like any other moralizing category, has many meanings and associations , both conscious and unconscious . However, the purpose here is not to explore its semantic range. I simply want to begin by identifying a particular semiotic of corruption that, for Indian politicians (usually males), is something to do with their bodies. There is a strong Gandhian semiotic that still circulates in Indian public life and marks the public manthe politicianout from others. The most common uniform for the respectable public servant in India is the safari suit; for the politician, however, it has been, from the time before independence, white khadi, the homespun coarse cotton that Gandhi popularized in the 1920s. Its symbolism, as intended in the of cial/nationalist rhetoric, is clear. The white of khadi stands for the Hindu idea of purity (lack of blemish, pollution), its coarseness symbolizes an identi cation both with simplicity and poverty; together they imply the politicians capacity to renounce his own material well-being, to make sacri ces (tyag ) in public/national interest. Khadi indicates the persons capability to serve the country. Gandhis own gloss on khadi, provided in 1921, mobilized all of these meanings and added, in a characteristic nationalist touch, some essential Indianness as well:
I know that many will nd it dif cult to replace their foreign cloth all at once In order, therefore, to set the example, I propose to discard at least up to the 31st of October my topi (cap) and vest, and to content myself with only a loin cloth and
ISSN 1368-879 0 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/01/010027 12 DOI: 10.1080/1368879012004685 2 2001 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies

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a chaddar (shawl) whenever found necessary for the protection of the body I consider the renunciation to be also necessary for me as a sign of mourning, and a bare head and a bare body is such a sign in my part of the country.1

He also claimed that this divestment aligned him, symbolically, with the ill-clad masses and in so far as the loin cloth also spells simplicity let it represent Indian civilization.2 Emma Tarlo has rightly pointed out that it would be a mistake to assume that there was only one meaning of khadi and that this meaning was available to every Indian in a transparent way. She adduces many pieces of evidence from the writings of Gandhi and his followers to suggest that there were confusions and criticisms about the signi cance of khadi in Gandhis own time.3 Khadi , she argues, worked practically for Indias nationalist politicians because various kinds and designs of khadi could be used to express not only different understanding s of its meanings but to make visible social distinctions as well. There is a telling and humorous story about this in the history of the nationalist movement in Bengal. The story involves the Bengali novelist Saratchandra Chattopadhyay and the nationalist leader Sarat Bose and their respective attitudes toward khadi . When he was a member of the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee, Sarat Bose preferred to wear khadi that was ne, stylish and easy on the body while another member of the Committee, Anilbaran Ray, wore, as a symbol of his devotion to the cause of swadeshi (economic nationalism), khadi that was heavier, coarser and harsher and hence harder to wear. This led to substantial discussion among other members of the committee who were often critical of Boses sartorial preferences. The story goes that referring to this differential use of khadi among nationalists of the same rank and using the language of homeopathy which was popular with Indian nationalists, Saratchandra apparently quipped one day: You see, we have all different kinds here. A little variety is a good thing. Anil[baran Ray] is the mother-tincture [of khadi ] while Sarat [Bose] is two hundred per cent dilution [in English in original], dont you understand? 4 Today the joke is different. Achieving independenc e and the marginalization of any practice of Gandhian politics have made khadi less a matter of conscious discussion. While khadi persists, its meanings have lost the richness they possessed in the time of the struggle against British rule. It now represents either a thoughtless habit of the politician orif he is too conscious of his decision to wear khadi his callous hypocrisy. The image of a political leader from a 1994 issue of the Sunday magazine captures the close association people now see between the donning of khadi and the illegal acquisition of wealth.5 It documents something of the routine cynicism with which we now perceive the khadi that adorns the body of the political man. Khadi, once described by Nehru as the livery of freedom and by Susan Bean (to whom I owe this quote from Nehru) as the fabric of Indian independence, now stands unambiguously for the reverse of its nationalist de nition. The khadi clad politician is usually seen today as corrupt, khadi itself being perceived as a dead giveaway, a uniform of the rogue, as something like the hypocritical gesture of one who protests too much. A reading of khadi thus already exists in terms of the semiotic of corruption in modern Indian public life. It is one that once read khadi as purity and 28

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renunciation and now as corruption and thievery. Given the volume of illegal (monetary) transactions in Indian public life, this interpretation is more than reasonable. The khadi and the ochre robe donning politicians in India routinely go through the motions of making public their annual incomes, the value of their estates (much was made of this after Mrs Gandhis death), or announce, on assumption of ministerial of ces, that they will accept as salary only Re 1 a month. The hypocrisy of the gesture is only too transparent. Therefore we cannot contest the semiotic that allows us to interpret khadi as shameless hypocrisy. I agree with that reading. Yet that reading does not explain why khadi or at least the colour white remains the most visible aspect of an Indian male politicians attire. The question is: Why does such a transparent gesture of hypocrisy persist even today? Why do politicians behave in ways which fool nobody? In other words, if we assume that the hypocrisy of khadi is visible to everybody, then its (effective) purpose cannot be to deceive people into thinking well of the wearer of it. What has been read as a transparent gesture of hypocrisy must then, because of its persistence, be amenable to another reading, one that does not see hypocrisy as the only function of this gesture. I will, therefore, read the Indian politicians uniform, khadi , as if it were not meant to convince. The object of its communication may be entirely different and may not have to do with the conscious transaction of purposes. Let us clarify this point. Of course, it is true thatin the same way that we are always half conscious of things we do through habitwhen a politician wears khadi he is aware of what he is doing. But we do not consciously control all the messages we communicate through everything we do. Consider the Hindu action of worshipping a god or goddess. There are many rituals involved in a puja (worship) in which we participate without being aware of either their literal or scriptural meanings. They may not even have meanings that we can verbalize. We do not know or control the ideas and messages we collectively communicate to each other through the practice of such rituals even though it would be reasonable to assume that certain messages are indeed communicated. One may view the ritual wearing of khadi by male Indian politicians in a similar manner: not as a conscious ploy of hypocrisy (for that interpretation , while reasonable, does not explain why hypocrites wanting to hide their insincerity, would opt for an action that screams out to people exactly the message they are trying to avoid) but as a series of messages circulating in our public life without anybody consciously intending to communicate them. This can only happen if a large enough number of people have certain unconscious or unarticulate d desires already invested in khadi or in the colour white donned by a politician. In other words, just as one can decode a social or cultural convention to read certain statements belonging to the culture, one can similarly decode the convention by which khadi becomes a male political dress. Social conventions and habitual practices may be seen as highly condensed statements of certain social desires and ideals (it is not required by this theory that anybody has to consciously feel these desires or think these ideals). What is suggested here is that one may do something similar with khadi and ask: what kind of statements about desirable forms of public lifewhich is what, broadly speaking politics is, rules for the 29

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conduct of collective public life of a societyare buried in the circulation of khadi in Indian political life? Khadi is the excuse here for thinking about alternative construction s of the values of public life in Indian modernity, and in particular about ways in which heterogeneous possibilitie s are both opened up and closed off in the modernity that colonial rule gave to India as a part of its legacy. What is of interest here are alternatives to the kinds of public life that both capital and lately multinational capital have helped us to think. While speaking of alternatives, we do not have an as-yet-unrealized or even an unrealizable future in mind. We are talking about alternative practices of modernity as they are lived out now, at this moment of history. These alternatives, as we imagine them, are not autonomous of or separate from mainstream politics. We can only describe them through an act of reading certain everyday practices constitutiv e of the mainstream. What makes this exercise legitimate is the fact that existing interpretation s of why so many Indian male politicians wear khadi or white are inadequate as already explained. What is argued here is that while khadi may legitimately be read as merely an Indian instance of a problem that is a universal feature of modern politicsthe corrupt politicianits continuous use by men in Indian public life also sustains another reading, one that addresses desires for alternative constructions of the public sphere, construction s that illustrate the heterogeneity of cultural practices that give Indian modernity its sense of difference. If there is to be a condensed imagination of alternative public life to be read through the khadi clad politician today, it cannot but be an imagination strongly tied to Gandhian politics. Here, one last word of quali cation is in order. Though much of what is discussed here could be extended to women active in public life, this paper mainly concentrates on the gure of the male politician. There are two reasons for this: (a) though there is a history of women politicians wearing khadi or cotton saris in political life, studying their case would require us to focus more attention on differences between how men and women operate in the sphere of politics in India, and (b) the majority of Indias dominant politicians are still, alas, male. Also, as will become clear in what follows, a critical part of the argument connects khadi to an analysis of the cultural location of the middle class male body under British rule in Indian public life. The body refers to an abstracted, generalized body. But the body discussed here is male. For the varied ways in which Gandhi used and exposed his body as a symbol in the nationalist movement simply would not have been available to an Indian woman in quite the same manner. The body of the public man: the colonial context There is a reason for beginning with the question of the body. For the use of the body was central to the way colonialism operated, because the British were the ones who rst introduced the idea that the body and character were intimately connected. The Gandhian understandin g of khadi has to be placed squarely within the semiotics of the body in British colonial rule in India and the possibilitie s they unfolded. Colonial modernity was fundamentally concerned with domination. The British use of the body in constructing a modern public 30

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life in India re ected that relationship . In creating a public culture based on the theme of racial superiority, however, the British con ated two themes, character and physical strength. They claimed to have an excess of both in comparison to Indians. The idea of character itself, it seems to me, was connected to the theme of corruption in late eighteenth century political thought. One has to remember that the rapacious practices of the employees of the East India Company in the midand late eighteenth century at the time of Lord Clive were always rationalized in England as the enfeebling effect of Indian culturethe practices of baksheesh, nazar and other kinds of interaction that the British saw as grafton the character of the Englishman in India.6 Lord Cornwalliss appointment in the late 1780s as the Governor-General of Bengal was made on the assumption that only blood that was both blue and English was capable of maintaining character in public life in the face of all the temptation to corruption that India provided to the European fortune seeker. This was soon to evolve into a colonial doctrine: that the English/British body in India must be seen as the seat of such character and that in such an embodied practice of superiority lay the everyday guarantee of the permanence of British rule. The projection of European physical superiority came to be seen as essential to the exercise of authority in public life in colonial India. One aspect of this superiority was the assumed greater strength of the male European body. Numerous anecdotes and other kinds of evidence attest to this. Stories of Indians being forcibly prevented from sharing the same public space with Europeans in Indiasuch as a train compartment or the white areas of a cityabound in nationalist memories of British rule.7 They formed a genre of their own in our school texts. The whole history of modern physical training in India is rooted in the nationalist construction of modern imperial rule as an experience in direct physical humiliation.8 The body was thus central to the projection of European political strength in India. The study of history, biography and literatureforms of modern knowledge introduced early by the Britishhelped to popularize in India this connection between character, the body, and modern public life. The Hindus had no tradition of writing secular histories, while the Muslims had the art of historical chronicling, it did not amount to studying history in the post-Renaissanc e sense of that activity. The British introduced this particular imagination and genre of writing to India. The early histories of India written by European missionaries, administrators and educators were often judgments of the character of old Indian rulers. For reasons of convenience, this process will be illustrated with some examples from the history of Bengal before discussing Gandhi again. That the last independent nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daulah, was a venal, corrupt and pro igate characterwhose defeat at the hands of the British therefore was a matter of natural justicewas regarded for a long time by Bengali historians, who began by translating European texts, as the chief moral lesson of our eighteenth century history.9 The consumption and production of modern Bengali literature, rst drama and then novels, were deeply in uenced by the idea that the function of literature was to reproduce variety in human character. A rather telling example of this is the nineteenth century Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutts search for a 31

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hero of his epic poem in blank verse, Meghnadbadh Kavya (1861)a somewhat outlandish effort since the Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are not quite based on the idea of the hero that marks European epics. As the following quotation from a later Bengali literary critic shows, the consumption of Meghnadbadh Kavya has also been in terms of appreciation of characters:
Ram and Laksman are two of the noblest gures in Indian mythology, but in Madhusudans poem they are utterly devoid of valor and honor In the Ramayana , Meghnad is killed in the battle eld and in fair ght, but in Madhusudans poem he is unarmed and engaged in worship in a temple when Laksman appears clad in celestial armor and kills him in cold blood We wonder whether we are reading a heroic or a mock-heroic poem.10

Biography, of course, was another important area of writing which was meant to instill in young Indian men (and later women) the idea of character. The rst such attempt to disseminate biographies of eminent public men among Indian/ Bengali schoolboys was a book called Jibancharit (1849) by the nineteenth century Bengali social reformer Iswarchandra Vidyasagar. The book was a translation of a popular Victorian text by Robert and William Chambers, Exemplary Biography. It promoted the ideas of discipline, formation of regular habits, punctuality and obedience. Being a translation of European material, however, it led to the criticism that Indian boys needed Indian examples to follow, and there was a series of attempts by Indian authors to indigenize the eld of modern biography.11 Finally, there was the question of physical strength, the training of the body to be strong, a subject increasingly popular in nationalist discourse in the second half of the nineteenth century. One whose statements inscribed this message into nationalist memory was the nineteenth century nationalist Hindu monk, Swami Vivekananda who, as is well known, asserted that young Indian boys would do themselves a service if they concentrated more on playing football (soccer) than on reading the Gita. For the Swami, the absence of physical health was an index of social degradation. As Tapan Raychaudhuri puts it:
Vivekananda identi ed better food as one cause of the westerners generally better health. Climate and better living conditions were other contributory factors. But the most important reason, in his understanding, was the practice of late marriage. It explained why in Europe a man was still considered young at forty and a fty-year-old woman not described as old. By contrast, a Bengali was past his youth at thirty.12

There was, however, a critical difference between British imperial and Indian nationalist understanding s of the category character as applied to public life. Whereas the British saw it as something embodied and therefore inheritedthe ruling race argumentnationalists saw it as a universal and hence translatable idea, a collection of precepts and techniques that could be learnt, and therefore made into an object of pedagogy. Vidyasagars Jibancharit , for instance, saw nothing problematic in presenting to Indian school boys an assortment of characters drawn at random from world history. Thus, schools became a critical site for acquiring charactertexts, classes, sporting grounds and gymnasiums became arenas where character was both discussed and imbibed. 32

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The body and Gandhis destruction of the private Gandhis understanding of the body of the public man cannot be discussed in isolation from this colonial dynamic. It is easy to see that his early experiments with meat eating were fundamentally in uenced (if not inspired) by a nationalist question that troubled many Asian cultures in the nineteenth century: Were the Europeans stronger because they ate beef? (Indeed, so many non-European nationalists have asked this question and thereby promoted the eating of beef that one might be tempted to ask: Is the cow the worst victim of European imperialism?) Gandhi thus refers to one of his rst sins of meat eating (he actually ate goat meat on this occasion):
A wave of reform was sweeping over Rajkot at the time when I rst came across this friend. He informed me that many of our teachers were secretly taking meat and wine. He also named many well-known people as belonging to the same company and he explained it thus: We are a weak people because we do not eat meat. The English are able to rule over us, because they are meat-eaters. You know how hardy I am, and how great a runner too. It is because I am a meat-eater. Meat-eaters do not have any boils or tumours, and even if they sometimes happen to have any, they heal quickly.13

Gandhi quotes a doggerel of the Gujarati poet Narmada that was popular amongst us schoolboys. The doggerel captures the colonial nationalist understanding of the role of the body in the construction of political power:
Behold the mighty Englishman He rules the Indian small Because being a meat-eater He is ve cubits tall.14

Many of the colonial, indeed modern, concerns about character, however, were to remain with Gandhi. He accepted and advocated the need for discipline and integrity in public life. Observers have commented on the determination with which he submitted himself to the tyranny of the clock. His management of public money with scrupulous honesty owes something to modern notions of the public and of the accountabilit y of the public man.15 His life-long interest in both public health and civic consciousnes s marks him out as quintessentiall y modern.16 But the critical move that set him apart from both imperialists and (other) nationalists was the way he eventually came to separate the question of character not so much from the body, as we shall see, but from the issue of sheer physical strength where both the imperialists and many of the nationalists had located it. Instead, Gandhi grounded the question of the character of the public man in what is regarded today as the issue of sexuality, in overcoming the power of the senses. This is what gives the Gandhian political body its special charge. Let us summarize the Gandhian argument about the relationship between the body and nonviolence. I am indebted in my understandin g to feminist writer Madhu Kishwars essay, Gandhi on Women.17 Aggression, according to Gandhi, is inseparably connected to male (since Gandhi saw female sexuality as 33

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passive) lust. Non-violence involves love towards all, and depends critically on ones capacity to destroy self-love. Ones sexual desires are at the core of ones self-love; therefore, non-violenc e requires a joyful acceptance of celibacy. Gandhi often made a model, for both men and women, of the ideals of sacri ce and suffering: Hinduism will remain imperfect as long as men do not accept suffering [and] withdraw their interest in the pleasures of life.18 There was, to his mind, a direct relationship between this withdrawal from pleasure and swaraj (self-rule, Gandhis word for freedom):
The conquest of lust is the highest endeavor of a mans or a womans existence. And without overcoming lust, man cannot hope to rule over self; without rule over self, there can be no Swaraj No worker who has not overcome lust can hope to render any genuine service to the cause of the harijans [Gandhis name for the so-called untouchables], khadi, cow protection or village reconstruction. Great causes like these call for spiritual effort or soul force. Soul force comes only through Gods grace and never descends upon a man who is a slave to lust.19

Sexuality appears as a complex theme both in Gandhis life and in descriptions of it, including his own. Kishwar provides an effective feminist critique of his views on women. That Gandhi was haunted by his own sexuality is a point made by many observers, particularly those looking at his life from a psychoanalytica l angle, the most famous being Eric Eriksons Gandhis Truth.20 Gossip columnists and authors of sensationalis t histories have been fascinated by his descriptions of his experiments in old age to test his self-control. It is now somewhat commonplace to nd Gandhi obsessed with sexuality. Madhu Kishwar repeats a commonly held opinion in saying: There are obsessive and repeated references to lust in his autobiography .21 I am not concerned with the clinical accuracy of these statements, for I am not competent to judge what constitutes obsession. Besides, it is clear from the available literature that Gandhis ideas on sexuality and celibacy were in uenced by many different sources. There were at work Indian-Hindu practices and ideals of asceticism and abstinence (brahmacharya ), of sacri ce ( tyag ), and other such notions. As Gandhi himself wrote on the technique of fasting in a chapter on brahmacharya in the autobiography : it may be said that extinction of sexual passion is as a rule impossible without fasting, which may be said to be indispensabl e for the observance of brahmacharya .22 What I intend to do here is to move away from the question of whether or not Gandhis detailed discussion of the problem of his sexuality constitutes, clinically speaking or otherwise, an obsession on his part. That is not relevant to the attempt here to read in the Gandhian representation of the body a semiotic system of (alternative) modernity. For the purpose of the analysis, I will read as confessional what is commonly seen as obsessive in Gandhi. Once this is done, we will be able to see in clearer outlines the alternative conceptions of public life that Gandhi articulated and of which khadi now acts as an extremely condensed statement. Gandhis is, in fact, the only confessional autobiograph y ever to be written by a prominent Indian public leader and shares much in common with the tradition 34

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of Augustine or Rousseau. Not only does he adopt from certain monastic strands in Christianity the idea of a universal love that could be fostered by destroying all traces of self-love (sexuality ) in oneself, he also uses a Christian confessional techniquecentral as Foucault would remind us, in the construction of the modern subjectto narrate himself in the public sphere (his autobiograph y was written in part to ll the pages of his weekly magazine, Navajivan ). One could indeed read his obsessive descriptions of his guilt-ridden sexual experience as so many confessions of his sins. But there remains a very interesting difference between a Christian confessional autobiograph y and Gandhis. On this difference hinges a critical part of my argument. A confession, argues William Spengemann in discussing Augustine, makes the work of self-on-self visible to a higher self, an all-knowing God. Confessions are narrations of self-knowledge addressed to a being who knows everything any way.23 Gandhis confessions are interestingly not called that; rather they are described as the provisional results of on-going experiments. The addressee of Gandhis narration, the higher being to whom the work of self-of-self is being revealed, is thus no all-knowing self, the word experiment carrying within itself an inexorable connotation of openness and uncertainty. Gandhi is quite clear about the point that God is not the addressee of his autobiography; in this sense his autobiograph y is not his confessions. There are some things which are known only to oneself and ones Maker, he writes and adds: These are clearly incommunicable. The experiments I am about to relate are not as such. But they are spiritual, or rather moral.24 In thus shifting the addressee from the register of Christian Godhood, Gandhi converts the confessional into a mere technique and orients it to a secular engagement, the task of building a modern public life. In so doing, however, Gandhi constructs a new modern subject of political and public life, one who has been neither theorized nor deconstructed in European thinking. The gaze that Gandhi invites on himself, the gaze to which he makes himself exposed, is relentless. Watch me closely, was his instruction to those who wanted to study him. He deliberately shunned any idea of privacy. When the anthropologist Nirmal Bose sought his permission to study him closely in the 1940s, Gandhi said: one should actually see me at work and not merely gather from my writings. On another occasion, the instruction was even more forthright:
You have drunk all that I have written But it is necessary that you should observe me at work I have called you to my side. You must examine if it was dictated by self-interest. Self-interest may be of two kinds, one is entirely personal, and the other is in relation to what one stands for Examine my motives carefully.25

Gandhi thus shunned the idea of privacysleeping naked and completely asexually with others was one of his experiments in this regardnothing in his life was to be hidden from public gaze. Everything was open to observation and narration. It was not as if there could not be a private Gandhi, but whatever it was it was not for narration to others: things which are known only to oneself and ones Maker are clearly incommunicable . Gandhi marks here the 35

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emergence of a modern whose difference from the European/Christian modern is measured precisely by this statement. The interiority of the European modern subjectthe interiority that pours out in novels, autobiographies , diaries and letterscontained within itself a secularized version of what one once confessed to God.26 The European modern is born on this condition that the private be narratable and in that sense the private self of the European exceeds or transcends the body. The European private, one might say, is a deferred public. Give it time, and the private of the European becomes available for public consumption in many different forms of narration or representation. The Gandhian private is non-narratable and non-representable . It is not that it does not exist but it is beyond representation and it dies with the body itself. In one stroke, as it were, Gandhi thus collapsed the distinction between the private and the public on which the theoretical side of the political arrangements of Western modernity rests. Conclusion The Gandhian modern was thus in a relationship of both af nity and tension with the modernity of the citizen of European political theory. With the latter, the Gandhian modern shares a concern for public health, freedom of speech and inquiry and civic awareness. Yet it does not ful ll the condition of interiority that the discourse of rights both produces and guarantees for the citizen of the modern state. There are three lines of tension that are easily detected: First, the idea of a completely narratable public life and a completely non-narratable private one corresponds to the idea of a completely transparent government watch my motives carefully, as Gandhi said. The modern state, however, cannot ever ful l this requirementnational security, political intelligence, etc., are its watchwords. Second, the moral claim to representation does not go with the idea of politics as a profession. The Mother Teresas are not politicians in our everyday understanding , whereas in Gandhian modernity such a distinction would be dif cult to sustain. Third, the relationship between the Gandhian construction of the public sphere and the logic of capital accumulation is not straightforward, for if public life valorizes renunciation as a supreme value, how would one write acquisitiveness into a universal model of the human being? I read khadi that adorns the body of the hypocritical Indian politician as a condensed statement of this tension between a untheorized and increasingly unacknowledged subject of colonial modernityto which we now apply the collective appellation Gandhiand the actual rapacity of Indian capitalism. For our capitalist practices promote values quite the opposite of those which Gandhian politics taught us to desire. Those desires have receded but not disappeared from Indian public life. We do not think about them but we, in a manner of speaking, practise them, however perversely, when our politicians continue with the collective habit of sporting khadi or some metonymic substitute for it. This cultural statement, however, does not belong to the order of intentional or conscious transactions. To read khadi as a conscious statement of intent can only lead us, as mentioned earlier, to see it as ritualistic andhypocritical. That reading is not invalid but it carries a post-Protestant understandin g 36

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of rituals as empty. The fallacy here is of the same order as the one Slavoj Zizek discusses in his book The Sublime Object of Ideologyreduction of ideology to conscious intentions and beliefs. Zizek argues against the idea that a belief is something interior and knowledge something exterior. Rather, he says, it is belief, which is radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective procedures of people.27 The point is repeated in his discussion of the law: Belief, far from being an intimate, purely mental state, is always materialized in our effective social activity: belief supports the fantasy which regulates social reality.28 What appears in Zizek as theory may be recognized as a home truth of the Hindu tradition. Within that tradition, the so-called rituals have never been empty, for they have always been nonsubjectiv e and non-intentiona l means of communication. There is thus a question of (practised) belief involved in the wearing of khadi. This question is both logically and culturally valid, though the reduction today of the Gandhian alternative to what looks like an empty ritual is understandable , for the qualities that Gandhi demanded of the public man do not, as I have explained, sit easily with the logic of capital accumulation. The condition of Gandhis success was colonial rule. The very fact that the actual instruments of government belonged to the colonizers except during moments of limited devolution of power, allowed Indian nationalists to fabricate for themselves arenasoutside the sphere of formal institutiona l politicswhich could act as the theatre for the self-expression of the Gandhian modern. With the dawn of independence , Indian capitalism and democracy have developed their own distinctive characteristics, different from both the tenets of Gandhian politics as well as those of European classical writings on either of these phenomena.29 Yet the survival to this day of the Gandhian uniformfor all the historical mutations it has undergonecannot be explained as just an empty or hypocritical ritual, for we would then have to think of the Indian voters as enormously gullible. I have therefore read it as the site of the desire for an alternative modernity, a desire made possible by the contingencies of British colonial rule, now impossible of realization under the conditions of capitalism and yet circulating insistently within an everyday object of Indian public life, the (male) politicians uniform. I do not think that khadi convinces anyone any longer of the Gandhian convictions of the wearer but, if my reading of it has any point to it, then its disappearance, were it to happen, would signify the demise of a deeper structure of desire and would signal Indias complete integration into the circuits of global capital.

Notes
*

We gratefully acknowledg e permission to republish from the Journal of Human Values, Vol. 5, No. 1, where this article first appeared. 1 Gandhi cited in Susan Bean, Gandhi and Khadi , the Fabric of Indian Independence , in Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider, (eds) Cloth and Human Experience, Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1980. 2 Ibid. 3 Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, chs. 3 and 4.

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Gopalchandr a Ray, Saratchandra [in Bengali], Calcutta: Mitra O Ghosh, 1966, vol. 2, p. 143. Front cover of Sunday , Calcutta, 27 November 3 December 1994. 6 See Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, on this question. 7 There is some discussion of the issue in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890 1940 , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, ch. 4. 8 See the discussion in John Rosselli, The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Centur y Bengal, Past and Present, 1980, 86, 121 48, and in Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal, History Workshop Journal, 1993, 36, p. 1 34. 9 The tradition goes back to one of the earliest Bengali tracts of history, Banglar itihas (1848) written by the nineteenth century social reformer Vidyasagar. The text was a direct translation of John Clark Marshmans Outlines of the History of Bengal for the Use of Youths in India, published earlier in the century. 10 J.C. Ghosh, Bengali Literature (1948), New York: AMS Press, 1978, p. 145. 11 See the discussion in the preface by Asitkumar Bandyopadhya y to Vidyasaagar rachanabal i [in Bengali], Debkumar Bosu (ed), Calcutta: Mandal Book House, 1966, vol. 1, pp. 36 37. 12 Tapan Raychaudhuri , Europe Reconsidered : Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 306. 13 M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiograph y or the Story of My Experiments with Truth (trs. Mahadev Desai) (1st ed. 1927), (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 13 14. 14 Ibid., p. 14. 15 See Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. 16 See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizens Gaze, Economic and Political Weekly, 7 14 March 1992, pp. 541 548. 17 Madhu Kishwar, Gandhi on Women, Economic and Political Weekly, 12 October 1985, 20 (40&41). 18 Gandhi cited in Kishwar, ibid., p. 1693. 19 G.D. Tendulkar, Mahatma , vol. 4, 63 cited in Kishwar, Gandhi on Women (n. 17 above), p. 1755. 20 Eric Erikson, Gandhis Truth, New York: Norton, 1969. 21 Kishwar, Gandhi on Women (n. 17 above), pp. 1754, 1755. 22 Gandhi, An Autobiography or the story of My Experiments with Truth (n. 13 above), p. 157. 23 William C. Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography : Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980, p. 5. 24 Gandhi, An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments with Truth (n. 13 above), p. x. 25 Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi, Bombay: Orient Longman, 1974, pp. 20, 67 68. 26 See the discussion in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Postcoloniality and the Arti ce of History: Who Speaks for Indian Pasts?), Representations , Winter 1992, 1, pp. 1 26. 27 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology London: Verso, 1989, p. 30. 28 Ibid., pp. 36 37. 29 For a beginning on these questions, see Sudipta Kaviraj, Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Space in Calcutta, Public Culture, Fall 1997, 10(1), pp. 83 114.
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