Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies
Chapter 4 Khadi and the Political Man
· Chakrabarty is interested in examining the Indian politicians body (normally a male) and the historical background behind the construct of the body, the khadi, and modern corruption in India
· Originally, the khadi came out of Gandhi’s interest in abandoning British dress in order to claim a more Indian nationalistic feeling.
· However, he emphasizes that there are never single readings of any text and that there are long historical meanings connected to even things seemingly as simple as clothing.
· He explains a story of two Bengal Provincial congress Committee members and how one wore a stylish khadi while the other wore the khadi as a symbol of devotion to economic nationalism – the stylish one got made fun of.
· Now, the khadi represents either thoughtless habit or callous hypocrisy.
· “The khadi-clad politician is usually seen today as ‘corrupt,’ khadi itself as a dead giveaway, as the uniform of the rogue, as something like the hypocritical gesture of one who pretests too much” (53).
· If this is the only reading, than why is the khadi still so popular (or at least the color white) in India today?
· He wants to read it in another way, as if the khadi is as if it wasn’t mean to convince.
· When someone wears this clothing, they are not always aware of the meanings connected to it.
· He is interested in alternative readings of texts in order to understand the heterogeneity of cultural practices that makes Indian modernity different.
· The body was incredibly important during colonial times- there was a connection between character, the body, and modern public life.
· Physical strength was seen as important and a trait associated with British. Gandhi was even tempted into eating goat meat in order to become stronger.
· Gandhi moved the issue of character from physical strength to piousness and control of the body.
· For him, nonviolence was connected to the body. Aggression was connected to male lust, while nonviolence needed love (the destruction of self-love/sexuality).
· Ghandhi wrote the only confessional autobiography by an Indian politician.
· Rather than looking at the confessional as being the self explaining itself to an all-knowing god, Ghandi experimented, and was open and uncertain.
· He wanted to build a modern public life.
· He also shunned the idea of privacy. A politician should be open for all to see.
· “The Gandhian private is nonnarratable and nonrepresentable. Not that it doesn’t exists, but it is beyond representation, and it dies with the body itself” (62).
· There are three lines of tension – 1 – transparent government needs to both publically and privately open, 2- the moral claim to representation should go with the ideal of politics as a profession, 3- there is a tension between renunciation and capital accumulation.
· He reads the khadi as a condensed statement of the tensions between colonial modernity and capitalism.
· The khadi still represents a specific Indian modernity that is important in distinguishing it from European capitalistic ideologies.
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