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Gandhi's Body, Gandhi's Truth: Nonviolence and the Biomoral Imperative of Public Health Author(s): Joseph S. Alter Source: The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 55, No. 2 (May, 1996), pp. 301-322 Published by: Association for Asian Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2943361 . Accessed: 12/03/2011 01:02

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Gandhi's Body, Gandhi's Truth: Nonviolence and the Biomoral Imperative of Public Health

JOSEPH S. ALTER

It is easier to conquer the entire world than to subdue the enemies in our body. And, therefore, for the man who succeeds in this conquest, the former will be easy enough. The self-government which you, I and all others have to attain is in fact this. Need I say more? The point of it all is that you can serve the country only with this body.

(Letter to Shankarlal Banker, 1918, CW 15:43)

It is impossible for unhealthy people to win swaraj (self rule). Therefore we should no longer be guilty of the neglect of the health of our people.

("Implications of Constructive Program," 1940, CW 72:380)

Introduction

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of scholarly works which have analyzed and reanalyzed Mohandas Karmachand Gandhi's epic life and work from numerous angles. In spite of this focused attention, or perhaps on account of it, the Mahatma remains something of an enigma: a genius, to be sure, and one inspired by a kind of transcendental moral conviction, but an enigma nevertheless on account of how he conceived of morality as a problem in which Truth and biology were equally implicated. As he put it, "morals are closely linked with health. A perfectly moral

Joseph S. Alter is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pitts- burgh.

The research upon which this article is based was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Institute of Indian Studies. I am grateful to both these institutions. I would like to thank my colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh, in particular Robert Hayden and Fred Clothey for their comments and suggestions. Nicole Constable read a number of drafts and has significantly improved the end product. Finally, I am indebted to Anand Yang and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful criticisms and very helpful suggestions.

Quotations from the collected works of Mohandas K. Gandhi are cited in the text by the abbreviation CW. Complete bibliographical information is given in the List of References under the entry Gandhi.

The Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 2 (May 1996):301-322. C) 1996 by the Association for Asian Studies, Inc.

301

302 JOSEPH S. ALTER

person alone can achieve perfect health" (CW 2:50). Following a statement such as this, my purpose in this essay is to work toward an analysis of Gandhi's genius by focusing on that which appears most enigmatic about his program of sociopolitical action: his somatic concerns and what I am calling his faith in the biomoral imperative of public health.

A number of early scholars, most notably Joan Bondurant ([19581 1965, 12), took for granted that Gandhi's concern with satyagraha (militant nonviolence) was quite distinct from his personal preoccupation with diet, sex, and hygiene (see also Ashe 1968, 94-95; Payne 1969, 465). Following on this, many studies have focused on politics, ethics, and morality while only a few relatively marginal texts have been concerned primarily with sex (Gangadhar 1984; Paul 1989; van Vliet 1962). Almost none deal with questions of health. The problem, however, is that in reading Gandhi's autobiography, among any number of other primary texts, one is immediately struck by the fact that a distinction cannot be made between his personal experiments with dietetics, celibacy, hygiene, and nature cure and his search for Truth; between his virtual obsession with health, his faith in nonviolence, and his program of sociopolitical reform.

Recognizing this, a number of scholars have worked toward what might be called a "resynthesis" of Gandhi's life by means of psychoanalytic and symbolic interpretations (Erikson 1969; Kakar 1990; Nandy 1980, 1983; see also Wolfenstein 1967; Lorimer 1976). In his book Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, for example, Sudhir Kakar provides a psychoanalytic reading of Gandhi's sexuality (1990, 85-128). Kakar's analysis is noteworthy, for he explains Gandhi's preoccupation with celibacy in terms of a Hindu psychology of sublimation which is congruent with Freudian theory (1990, 118). While there can be little doubt that Kakar is right about the symbiotic relationship between Gandhi's passionate self-discipline and his desire to desexualize women by feminizing himself, his focus on symbolism-both Hindu and Freudian-leads to a mistaken conclusion about the relationship between nonviolence and sexuality (see also Nandy 1983). Kakar's psychoanalytic reading presents particular problems with regard to the critical issue of Gandhi's experimentation with food, which is interpreted by him as a symbolic displacement of his preoccupation with genital sexuality.

Page after page, in dreary detail, we read about what Gandhi ate and what he did not, why he partook of certain foods and why he did not eat others, what one eminent vegetarian told him about eggs and what another, equally eminent, denied. The connection between sexuality and food is made quite explicit in Gandhi's later life ... [and] . . . we must remember that in the Indian consciousness, the symbolism of food is more closely or manifestly connected to sexuality than it is in the West.

(1990, 91; my emphasis)

While Kakar is right about the symbolic significance of food, the structure of his argument reinforces a false dichotomy between the "dreary detail" of nutrition on the one hand and the expressive power of analogic meanings on the other-a structural logic which shifts attention almost immediately away from the colonial context of embodiment and power to a clinical search for the psychological truth about Truth.

Even less explicitly psychoanalytic studies seem to favor psychology or spirituality as the best analytic medium through which to make sense of Gandhi's more enigmatic experiments (Parekh 1989). Baldly put, the logic is something like this: the only way to reconcile an obsession with sex and food with religion and politics, even in a cultural rather than purely biographical context, is by getting inside the man's head.

GANDHI'S BODY, GANDHI'S TRUTH 303

Alternatively, the argument goes, Gandhi's enigmatic genius only makes sense in terms of a symbolic interpretation, or a deep cultural reading, of the specific-and problematically authorized-social and historical contexts in which his ideas developed. For example, it is clear that Bhikhu Parekh regards brahmacharya as a spiritual project with only derivative political value, rather than as a physical exercise in biomoral reform. This leads him to arrive at the following judgmental conclusion: "Gandhi's theory of sexuality rested on a primitive approach to semen. Much of what he said about its production and accumulation is obviously untrue. By itself, semen has no 'life-giving power' either, and Gandhi was wrong to mystify it" (1989, 182).

The problem with this statement is that it betrays an underlying analytic faith in an epistemology wherein that which is physical becomes powerful and meaningful only through the agency of metaphysical transformation; a transformation in which Gandhi's gross body, and all it denotes-particularly with regard to extreme experiments (Parekh 1989, 190-91)-can only be read either as profound asceticism, unique biography, or a modern political farce.

While exceptional, Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph's classic analysis of Gandhi's life also places too much importance on the psychology of desire and power in Hinduism and not enough on the biomorality of health in early-twentieth-century India ([19671 1983; see also Morris 1985). More recently Caplan (1987) and Kishwar (1985) take a similar perspective on the modernity of tradition with regard to gender in the Gandhian project. While subtle, sympathetic, and clearly attuned to questions of power, these readings of Gandhi's sexuality do not adequately take account of the fact that along with religious traditions, questions of morality in colonial India also denoted a particular logic of modern public health.

However valuable these psychological and sociopsychological interpretations are-and my intellectual debt to Kakar, Nandy, and Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph should be clear-my argument is that they are predicated on a false assumption about the relationship between physiology, biography, tradition, and social action. To understand why Gandhi was preoccupied with the problem of celibacy, dietetics, and health, one must first of all take seriously the notion that eating and sex do not require meta-interpretation. In the context of colonialism there is a direct relationship between self-control and politics rather than one mediated either by subconscious symbols or some other set of cultural meanings encoded in myth, ritual, and spirituality on the one hand or early childhood on the other. To be sure, the cultural environment in which Gandhi lived is still all important. As Richard Fox has shown (1989), however, this culture-as with all others-is a context wherein shifting meanings were encoded in the practice of everyday life (see also Nandy 1980, 71, 83). Gandhi's Truth is, therefore, essentially transnational. His experiments were explicitly syncretic, with specific reference to the work of Havelock Ellis (1910; [19381 1946), Bertrand Russell (1928), Henry David Thoreau (1895; CW 12:24-25) and Paul Bureau (1920; CW 31:103-5, 135-40, 183-86, 218-62, 286-88, 309-12), among many others.

What I am arguing is that Gandhi's concern with his body (CW 1:82-86, 166; 11:494, 501-10; 12:79-80, 97) cannot simply be understood as an obsessive compulsion to exercise self-control in the interest of public service by tapping into the spiritual power of shakti. A reading of Gandhi's writing on health in general, and such specific topics as smoking on the one hand (CW 4:427-28; 5:105; 6:270; 11:480; 19:285)-his astonished outrage at hearing that someone was making and selling "Mahatma Gandhi Cigarettes," for example (CW 19:216)-and temperance on the other (CW 1:166; 4:338; 11:480; 18:400-1; 19:260-61, 285, 450, 462, 468, 470,

304 JOSEPH S. ALTER

480, 555-56) shows that nonviolence was, for him, as much an issue of public health as an issue of politics, morality, and religion. To read ahimsa simply as practical philosophy, political theory, ethical doctrine, or spiritual quest is to misunderstand the extent to which Gandhi embodied moral reform and advocated that reform's embodiment in terms of public health-a kind of health which may be understood as inherently political, spiritual, and moral in the context of late imperialism.

The Key to Health I had involuntary discharge twice during the last two weeks. I cannot recall any dream. I never practised masturbation. One cause of these discharges is of course my physical weakness but I also know that there are impure desires deep down in me. I am able to keep out such thoughts during waking hours. But what is present in the body like some hidden poison, always makes its way, even forcibly sometimes. I feel unhappy about this, but I am not nervously afraid.

(CW 40:312; in Parekh 1989, 186; cf. CW 33:414; 34:196-97, 372-74)

Reading a "confession" such as this, written in a letter to an anonymous correspondent in 1928, one is made aware of the remarkable extent to which Gandhi's eminently public persona was worked out in terms of what appears to be private, personal self-reflection (CW 30:142, 319).1 While working toward reform on a national scale, Gandhi often delineated the problem of action in terms of a discrete microphysics of self-discipline required of those involved. Even when writing about national and international events he seems to have been preoccupied with himself, with his subjectivity in the context of dramatic sociopolitical change. If not always autobiographical, Gandhi's writings are almost always self-centered, if I may use the term nonpejoratively.

It is important, however, to take a step back from candor and intimacy and look at the larger picture, and to this end it is relevant to consider one of Gandhi's few "book-length" publications, Key to Health ([19481 1992; CW 76:411-12; 77:1-48). Written in Yeravda jail between September and December 1942, this book was a shortened version of his 1913 collection of essays entitled "General Knowledge About Health" (reprinted as The Health Guide 1965). First published in South Africa, translated into a number of Indian and European languages, it became, as the author himself put it, somewhat incredulously, "the most popular of all my writings" (1992, v).

However genuine the Mahatma's surprise may have been, it forces one to recognize the inherently public, missionary nature of his advocacy for national and, indeed, international health. Even though many of Gandhi's experiments were conducted on himself, many more were implemented as what amounts to small-scale public health measures in his ashrams (CW 11:128, 131, 157-58, 191; 12:269-71; 31:156; 32:51- 52; 54:2, 213, 301-2, 321; 55:161).2 In other words, the picture which emerges from

'Along with his candid discussions of night discharge, Gandhi wrote publicly and frankly about the failure of his intestines, for example (CW 26:144) and, when suffering from appen- dicitis, malaria, and piles, his biomoral compromise with Western medicine (CW 15:73; 23:191, 262; 29:211; 30:126, 316-17). In fact, given his definition of Truth, there was nothing about his life, or his body functions, that was private.

2Immediately after a lengthy summary of the development of his thinking on dietary experiments, Gandhi wrote in his History of the Satyagraha Ashram, "the reader has perhaps

GANDHI'S BODY, GANDHI'S TRUTH 305

the "dreary details" is not so much one of pedantic obsession as one of complex reform strategy, for the key, in the Key to Health, does not unlock the mysteries of a great mind so much as the potential of a great nation. This is equally true of the very popular, three-edition, often reprinted Self-restraint vs. Self-indulgence ([19271 1958; cf. CW 33:184-86). Despite its nominal suffixal priorities, the work inscribes sexuality onto a public rather than private domain, where the problem is demographic and cumulative rather than biographic and reflexive. Even the journal title Young India-from which many of the articles in the volume are taken-denotes an imagined celibate nation.

It is noteworthy that in his preface to the second edition of Self-restraint vs. Self- indulgence, Gandhi expresses "joy" not only in the fact that the first edition was sold out one week after publication, but that it spawned enough correspondence from interested readers to warrant a second printing. Gandhi was interested in the success of his own experiments primarily to the extent that others might learn from them and subscribe to a regimen of self-discipline. He wanted to engage young Indians on a level that would lead to self-control rather than mandate institutional reform through policy. He wanted to persuade people to change their way of life in order to rebuild India. The extent to which Gandhi took this project seriously-and that it was taken seriously by many readers-cannot be doubted.

Let young men and women for whose sake Young India is written from week to week know that it is their duty, if they would purify the atmosphere about them and shed their weakness, to be and remain chaste and know too that it is not so difficult as they may have been taught to imagine.

(1958, 31)

This remark comes, notably, in Gandhi's extended discussion of Paul Bureau's book L'indisciPline des moeurs (1920), translated by Dr. Mary Scharlieb as Towards Moral Bankruptcy (1925), which ends with a strong appeal for French moral nationalism. Gandhi punctuates his comments with a transnational admonition: "Let the Indian youth treasure in their hearts the quotation with which Bureau's book ends: 'The future is for the nations who are chaste' " (1958, 40).

Gandhi's obvious admiration for Bureau, and also for William Loftus Hare, whose treatise on the enervating physiological effects of sex, entitled "Generation and Regeneration" (1926; CW 31:311) is reprinted at the end of Self-restraint vs. Self- indulgence, stems in part from the fact that what they said about the body was scientific. Bureau's and Hare's biologically based moral theories provided Gandhi with the same kind of authoritative argument for celibacy that Henry Salt's A Plea for Vegetarianism (1886; see also 1899), Howard Williams's The Ethics of Diet (1883), and Anna Kingsford's The Perfect Way in Diet (1881; see also 1912) provided for not eating meat (Gandhi 1949, 8-12).

Gandhi's attitude toward the West-as quite distinct from what he thought about "modern civilization" which had come to characterize the West (CW 9:479; 19:178; 40:125)-is of particular relevance to understanding how he came to imagine the problematic relationship between sex, national identity, and the moral politics of

now seen that the Ashram set out to remedy what it thought were defects in our national life from the religious, economic and political standpoint" (CW 50:192). Significantly, Gandhi sought to implement a program of dietary reform and healthy living in villages through his constructive program (CW 75:41-4).

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nonviolence. Referring in one instance to "the strong wine of libertinism that the intoxicated West sends us under the guise of new truth and so-called human freedom" (1958, 39), Gandhi was often explicitly critical of certain aspects of "civilized" Anglo- European culture, as in his mercilessly sarcastic account of an American boxing match (CW 10:294-95).3 However, he wrote:

the West is not wholly what we see in India.... Throughout the European desert there are oases from which those who will may drink the purest water of life. Chastity and voluntary poverty are adopted without brag, without bluster and in all humility by hundreds of men and women, often for no other than the all-sufficing cause of service of some dear one or of the country.

(1958, 31)

Referring to a range of "eminent" "sober voices" from the West (1958, 39), and choosing to locate an incipient biology of pragmatic social justice demographically in the margins of Europe, Gandhi then proceeds to criticize the classical Hindu spirituality of ascetics as "an airy nothing" (1958, 31; cf. 46; see also CW 27:152- 53, 288). In this regard I think it is of great importance to note the precise impact that Henry Salt's book had on Gandhi's vegetarianism. Before reading Plea for Vegetarianism, Gandhi's vegetarianism was purely personal.

I had all along abstained from meat in the interests of truth and of the vow I had taken, but had wished at the same time that every Indian should be a meat-eater, and had looked forward to being one myself freely and openly some day, and to enlisting others in the cause. The choice was now [after reading Salt's book] in favour of vegetarianism, the spread of which henceforward became my mission.

([19491 1987, 5; my emphasis)

There is, in other words, more to vegetarianism than meets the eye, more than personal choice involved, and also something quite different from the brahmanical rationale for purity and spirituality (CW 29:418-20). Through his affiliation with the London Vegetarian Society (CW 1:25-37, 64-67, 81-89; see also 50:191) and his association with Dr. Josiah Oldfield among others (CW 6:23, 33), Gandhi came to a rather unique realization that a science of diet provided the means by which to effect moral change on a large, demographic scale (CW 48:326-29). In this regard it is interesting to note that one of Gandhi's earliest experiments with the biomorality of public health pitted the biology of race against a dietetics of vegetarianism. Confronted with racial prejudice in South Africa, Gandhi set about trying to convert meat-eating boorish school children into "civilized" vegetarians whose subsequent reverence for life and compassion for living things would break down racial prejudice (Devanesan 1969, 321-22). A similar logic may be seen at work in his role as South African agent for the London Vegetarian Society, and his professed "missionary zeal" toward the introduction of vegetarianism in Natal so as to bring British Whites "closer" to Indians (CW 1:87-89, 164-67, 180-86, 288).4

3It is also worth quoting Gandhi's response to an "ignorant," "virulent," and "offensive" racist attack against Asiatic morals written by a Western commentator whose "very civilization ... makes for ignorance, inasmuch as its exacting demands upon the frail physical frame render it well-nigh- impossible for any dweller therein to have any but the most superficial knowledge of things in general" (CW 11:192-93).

40n a smaller scale the connection between morals, ethics, and health comes across clearly, albeit inverted, when Gandhi, studying a book written by an American on eyesight disorders,

GANDHI'S BODY, GANDHI'S TRUTH 307

One may move directly from this point to a consideration of Gandhi's advocacy for universal celibacy, for he did not believe, simply, as Parekh suggests, that "a few score brahmacharis like him would be capable of transforming the face of India" (1989, 181). Gandhi's imagination-like that of Bureau and Hare-was at once much more utopian and also much more pragmatic. He wanted nothing less than a nation of sober celibates who would embody a new moral order, and not just a cadre of "great souls" who might inspire contingent enthusiasm (1958, 112, 143). In a pivotal article published in Young India in 1920, Gandhi-inspired, as he often was, by numerous letters on the subject-pointed out that he must raise the issue of celibacy in public at "this the most critical period of national life" (cf. CW 30:235). He then proceeds to make a case for why it is necessary to make celibacy an integral part of national reform:

We have more than an ordinary share of disease, famines and pauperism-even starvation among millions. We are being ground down under slavery in such a subtle manner that many of us refuse even to recognize it as such, and mistake our state as one of progressive freedom in spite of the triple curse of economic, mental and moral drain.

(1958, 70)

In Gandhi's view there was an intimate connection between colonial economic and military policy and health, since the former "reduced [India's} capacity to withstand disease" (1958, 71). Writing in the context of the debate over birth control (CW 26:299, 544), two statements by the Mahatma mark out the biosocial parameters of reform, and clearly indicate the scope of his vision. Writing in 1906, he riles against traditional Hindu family values:

We sing hymns of praise and thanks to God when a child is born of a boy father and a girl mother! Could anything be more dreadful? Do we think that the world is going to be saved by the countless swarms of such impotent children endlessly multiplying in India and elsewhere?

(1958, 54)

In 1913, he targets rapid postpartum intercourse:

thanks to the prevailing ignorance about this state of affairs, a race of cowardly, emasculated and spiritless creatures is coming into existence day by day. This is a terrible thing indeed, and each one of us needs to work tirelessly to prevent it.

(CW 12:136)

Then, in 1920, he articulates, if one may adapt Hare's title, a regenerative alternative to kinetic sexual degeneration.

I have not the shadow of a doubt that married people, if they wished well of the country and wanted to see India become a nation of strong and handsome well-formed men and women, would practice self-restraint and cease to procreate for the time being .... it is our duty for the present moment to suspend bringing forth heirs to our slavery.

(1958, 73)

finds a "potent sentence" that reads "a lie heats the body and injures eyesight." Gandhi comments on this by saying, "[iut is true if you would give an extended meaning to the term 'lie'.... but the body is injured in every case" (CW 54:56). Hence, telling the truth is not just right, it is essential to good health; un-truth is embodied.

308 JOSEPH S. ALTER

In advocating this kind of radical abstention in order to build up "strength and manliness" through a struggle against desire (cf. CW 33:433), Gandhi found an ally in William R. Thurston, a major in the United States Army, who, "through personal observation, data obtained from physicians, statistics of social hygiene, and medical statistics," showed that unrestrained sexual intercourse caused women to become "highly nervous, prematurely aged, diseased, irritable, restless, discontented and incapable of caring for [their] children ... [and] ... drainfed] [men] of the vitality necessary for earning a good living" (CW 37:305-7; cf. 315-17).5

Public Health

Without denying the contingent legitimacy of analyses which seek to rationalize the Mahatma's radical program in terms of a psychological reading of both biography and culture, I think it is possible to better understand the implications of Gandhi's personal convictions by looking at his experiments in the context of colonialism's impact on subject bodies.

While more than receptive to Western "fads" such as vegetarianism and nature cure, Gandhi was dogmatically critical of allopathic medicine and regarded biomedicine as dangerous, in part because he saw it providing violent, symptomatic cures for specific illnesses rather than holistic therapies to remedy poor health (CW 9:479; 11:435, 449; 12:51, 97; 19:357). Gandhi's conviction was clearly apparent in his criticism of the public health policy of smallpox vaccination (CW 12:110-12, 115-17; 30:356; 42:471).6 As he put it, rather caustically, in a letter to Maganlal Gandhi:

What service will an army of doctors render to the country? What great things are they going to achieve by dissecting dead bodies, by killing animals, and by cramming

5Gandhi did not seem to have very much to say on the enervating effect of sex and reproduction on women. In a letter to K. S. Karnath, however, he wrote "In the male the sexual act is a giving up of vital energy every time. In the female that giving up commences only with parturition" (CW 34:196). He did point out, however, that menstruation was a period of time during which it was possible for women to regain strength. "A woman who spends the period in the right manner gains fresh energy every month" (CW 54:388; cf. 55:210). Nevertheless Gandhi's conception of the physiology of self-control was male by im- plication, if not in fact. Although he clearly meant to include both men and women in his program of moral reform-and made the point explicitly numerous times-only on relatively few occasions did he make note of female celibacy per se (CW 50:423), and then mostly with regard to widows (cf. CW 23:523; 33:47; 79:133). In a telling comment, when asked directly about what the physiological differences between men and women might be with regard to the kind of work people were asked to do, Gandhi pointed out, in effect, that the differences were only skin deep. "Whatever differences you see can be seen, as it were, with the naked eye.... Are these differences not plain enough to be clear to you?" (CW 50:256).

61t should be noted that although Gandhi was fairly strict in his resistance to vaccination, he was, in other respects, a pragmatist. For example, when explaining to Akbarbhai Chavda how to deal with an epidemic and treat people for diarrhoea and fever, he emphasized the importance of natural therapy and hygiene, but wrote: "To meat-eaters you may unhesitatingly give meat soup.... This is not the time for doing our religious duty of propagating vegetar- ianism. Soup is bound to be useful where milk is not available" (CW 78:374).

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worthless dicta for five or seven years? What will the country gain by the ability to cure physical diseases? That will simply increase our attachment to the body.

(CW 10:206)

Gandhi was also critical, therefore, of a lifestyle which depended on medical intervention-an undisciplined lifestyle of gastronomic excess in particular, but also erratic habits in general which in his view caused illnesses (CW 4:373). In "General Knowledge About Health," published serially in 1913, he writes: "To)ur subject is not how to exist anyhow, but how to live, if possible, in perfect health" (CW 11:465). As a system in tune with the natural order of things, nature cure came to be regarded as a preemptive form of public health, in addition to being a science of healing.7 Claiming that he himself had never had "the time to make a systematic study of the science [of nature cure] (CW 55:98), Gandhi's expansive, and expanding, ideal for public health was reflected in his "recruitment" of Hiralal Sharma, a nature-cure physician, to work at the ashram in the early 1930s. Writing to Dr. Sharma, he said:

I would like to find in you a kindred spirit given up wholly to truthful research without any mental reservations. And if I can get such a man with also a belief in the Ashram ideals, I would regard it as a great evenr....

I would ask you, therefore, to approach the Ashram with the set purpose of discovering the means of preserving or regaining health in the ordinary Indian climate.

(CW 54:292)

In his recent book Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (1993), David Arnold makes passing reference to Gandhi's radical position on health care, correctly situating his criticism of Western medicine in the context of colonial hegemony (1993, 285-88). Arnold makes the important point that Gandhi understood the connection between medical systems and political freedom in terms of a scientific discourse about subject bodies, and not just as a struggle for control of health care policy as such. However, Arnold does not take full account of the fact that Gandhi's explicit "ideological" critique of hospitals and doctors emerged from a pragmatic, scientific sociobiology, the scope and procedure of which was itself implicated in the colonial project at large. Even though doctors were often "the main target of Gandhi's attack" (Arnold 1993, 287), as we have seen he was not particularly sympathetic toward a population who collectively ate and drank its way into hospitals and into a kind of slavery which extended beyond medicine. The question, then, is what was Gandhi's alternative to both traditional and modern medicine in the context of colonial public health? I think it is fair to assume that Gandhi's response had to be on par with the degree of medicine's somatic penetration, its increasing pervasiveness in the empire, and the degree of biomoral degeneracy in India; the response had to be worked out in terms of a discrete, modern, scientific sociobiology. This is, in effect, what the Key to Health is about.

Since the key to health was nature cure, Gandhi was profoundly skeptical of traditional ayurveda (CW 19:358) because it placed the agency of healing outside the reach of every man; because it had become an elite, upper-caste urban system of

7Although Gandhi's own experiments were conducted mostly on himself while living in ashrams, he was at various times and to various degrees under the care of Dr. Dinshaw Mehta. In 1944 Gandhi encouraged Dr. Mehta to establish a nature-cure clinic with inpatient facilities on the same terms for rich and poor alike (CW 77:335-36; 78:34-36).

310 JOSEPH S. ALTER

medicinal healing (CW 11:434; 26:388-89; 27:222-23; 35:458); and because, as he put it rather cryptically to the physician Vallabhram Vaidya, "Ayurveda has not yet become a science. In a science there is always room for progress. Where is any progress here?" (CW 76:257)8 What Gandhi wanted, above all, was a system of health care which was eminently "public" in the somewhat new way in which that term had come to signify the homespun nation as a rural whole.9

In many ways Key to Health anticipates McKim Marriott's inspired analysis of India through Hindu categories (1990). As with Marriott's cubic scheme of elemental integrated property flow, Gandhi was primarily concerned with the balanced integration of the five elements: earth, water, ether, fire (or sun), and air (1948, 30- 45). It is ironic, however, that Gandhi's scientific theory of healing was not derived from Hindu therapeutics at all, but-with yet another refreshingly Occidentalist reading of the West-from Juste's naturopathy and Kuhne's hydrotherapy (CW 11:493; 12:73-75, 79-81). It is worth looking in some detail at what he said about the healing properties of various elements in the context of his ideas about public health and nonviolence.

Gandhi advocated the use of an earth poultice to cure snake bites, headaches, constipation, boils, skin rashes, and typhoid fever (CW 35:447, 450, 460). He went into considerable detail on how to prepare a poultice. The cloth had to be sterilized, of certain dimensions, and of a fine, soft weave. The earth itself could be neither sticky nor gritty; it could not come from a manured field. The best earth was fine-grained alluvial clay and had to be sterilized by heating. It could be used again and again. Earth could also be eaten in order to relieve constipation. The dosage was small, however, and Gandhi cautioned that his advocacy was based on Juste's claims and not on personal experience (1948, 33).

Quite apart from the symbolic meaning of earth in Hindu cosmology-and earth in ayurvedic pharmacology-is the fact that in his serial essay "General Knowledge About Health" (CW 12:79-81) Gandhi developed a rational justification for earth's applied use as a grassroots therapy for self-healing. Earth therapy was a home remedy as intrinsically natural-and, I would argue, as inherently important to him and his

8After about 1925 or so, Gandhi's sharply critical perspective on ayurveda seems to have been tempered somewhat (CW 30:12; 33:290; 34:199; 72:275; 76:201). In 1944 he also decided to try allopathic medicine on himself for the treatment of hook-worm and amoeba (CW 77:295-96, 400), but due to a very adverse reaction, he went immediately back to nature cure (CW 77:400; 79:1, 2, 6, 9, 17, 42). In the same year he reflected on his own health saying "I wish I could have faith in homeopathy and biochemic medicine, but I do not" (CW 77:295; cf. 54:305, 431). Earlier he pointed out: "Personally I would prefer homeopathy any day to allopathy. Only I have no personal experience of its efficacy" (CW 55:56). Even so, in the early 1930s, Gandhi seems to have changed his perspective somewhat and spoke of sub- suming allopathy within the purview of nature cure (CW 54:306). But then in 1945 he wrote, somewhat ambivalently, to G. D. Birla, "I have not got myself involved in ayurveda in an unscientific way. Such as it is it is all we have. It would be well if we could take ayurveda to the villages" (CW 79:16-17).

9For example, following on his criticism of Vallabhram Vaidya, Gandhi wrote:

Identifying of plants for its own sake is not part of dharma. Therefore, render what service you can through such knowledge.... You should show, if you can, that indigenous medicine is simple, inexpensive and capable of giving relief to 99 patients out of a hundred. If you feel that this cannot be done, then you should give up the profession.

(CW 76:161-62)

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national ideals-as the principle of self-government, self-reliance, and home rule. Swadeshi, as he pointed out, in the larger context of serious debates about the diet of incarcerated satyagrahis in South African prisons (CW 8:121, 155; cf. 12:239), "means a reliance on our own strength ... the strength of our body, our mind and our soul" (CW 9:118; 30:15).

Although it may seem surprising, Gandhi regarded air as the most important element in the natural pharmacopoeia (CW 11:454; 12:62-63), as more important to health and strength than either food or water. Writing in 1913, he made an explicit correlation between the need for fresh air and the development of good Indian character in South Africa (CW 11:430, 465). On the question of breathing, he placed greatest emphasis on the fact that air had to be fresh and taken in through the nose (CW 12:62-63).1o Inasmuch as possible, he argued, one should live and work in a well-ventilated environment where poisonous atmospheric gases get dissipated (CW 11:131). Because air comes in close contact with blood in the lungs, one must learn the "art of breathing" through the nose since this both filters and warms the air before it comes into contact with blood. "It follows," Gandhi pointed out, "that those who do not know how to breathe should take breathing exercises" (1948, 4). By this he meant basic, simplified procedures of yogic pranayama, "which are as easy to learn as they are useful" (1948, 4; CW 11:449; cf. 30:551; 31:188, 353). These exercises, rather than gross muscle building, he pointed out, were responsible for creating the kind of expansive physique of men like Sandow, the famous British physical culturist (CW 11:464), the "natural" physique of robust Zulus (CW 29:12), and, closer to home, the "Herculean" physique of Professor Ram Murti Naidu (CW 28:181). It is significant, in this regard, that the critical point of exercise was not to build up strength per se, but to stimulate normal breathing and establish control over the senses. Whereas organized sports-and wrestling in particular-were regarded as somewhat contrived and frankly excessive (CW 12:22, 23; 34:99), agricultural work, manual labor, and walking were considered to be highly efficacious (CW 11:131; 12:23, 24-25; cf. 33:378) as "work for the sake of the body" (CW 32:211), which helped in the development of brahmacharya (CW 32:159)." In other words, health was quite different from strength (CW 24:117), and it was to the end of better health and greater self-control that he admonished children in the ashram to breathe plenty of fresh air, practice pranayama, and get regular, moderate exercise (CW 54:435). Responding to questions on the place of celibacy in education, he said "though a body that has been developed without brahmacharya may well become strong, it can never become completely healthy from the medical point of view" (CW 36:457). Speaking to the members of the Rashtriya Yuvak Sangh (National Association of Youth) in 1942, and half-jokingly accusing the young boys present of having bodies like his, "completely devoid of muscle," Gandhi put it this way:

'0ln advising Balbhadra on how to exercise, Gandhi wrote, for example, "[w1hen you go out for a walk, run for some time. While you do so, keep your mouth shut and breathe through nostrils" (CW 44:245).

"Gandhi's notion of bread labor in fact brings the issue of diet, exercise, and celibacy into a single, unified frame of reference. "Bread labour [which in its pure form is agricultural work alone] is a veritable blessing to one who would observe non-violence, worship Truth, and make the observance of brahmacharya a natural act" (CW 44:150). "The law of bread labour [is] that that man [is] entitled to bread who worked for it . . . . and if this was literally followed there would be very little illness on earth and little of hideous surroundings on earth" (CW 48:415). Speaking on the ideal of agricultural labor, he pointed out that "[ilf a farmer so desires, he can with the slightest effort become a yogi" (CW 42:131).

312 JOSEPH S. ALTER

Try to follow my ideals as far as you can. For that we should have a good physique. We have to build up our muscles by regular exercise. But that should not be done to indulge in violence. To become a Sandow is not our ideal.... Our ideal is to become tough labourers, and our exercises should be toward that end.

(CW 76:158)

It is interesting to note that although Gandhi was not in the least concerned with "brute strength" and did, in fact, juxtapose the concept of soul force with physical might (CW 18:58; 19:285; 40:271; 71:72; 74:82; 75:258), he became, particularly after 1918, increasingly critical of the effete, passive, impotent nonviolence of religious "sentimentalism," and aware of the need to define "militant" nonviolence in terms of "manliness," "virility," and "a strong physique" (CW 18:505; 24:118).12 Inaugurating a modern school of Indian physical education in Amravati, Gandhi wrote: "I have travelled all over the country and one of the most deplorable things I have noticed is the rickety bodies of young men" (CW 32:444). The moral work of nonviolent reform, he said more than once, required "bodies of steel" (CW 15:55; 26:143; 76:76) and not "feeble physiques" (CW 12:24; 32:444). Thus, breathing was of critical importance in effecting proactive, nonviolent self-control (CW 22:392; 31:67), and was far more important than, and indeed a subtle alternative to, the kind of gross, "might-is-right" physical strength which he felt was being developed in some regional gymnasiums (CW 24:529; 25:135; 26:144). He made this point a number of times when inaugurating gymnasiums (CW 34:411; 71:135), and installing the stalwart image of Lord Hanuman therein, by drawing cautionary attention to the fact that the patron deity's physical strength was primarily a manifestation of his devotion to Ram and a derivative consequence of celibacy, not an end in itself. As to the ends, he wrote in 1927: "May you therefore be like [Hanuman] of matchless valour born out of your brahmacharya and may that valour be dedicated to the service of the Mother Land" (CW 33:142). In 1928 he reiterated this theme, emphasizing Hanuman's association with the wind, saying, "t[wle therefore worship Hanuman and instal him in gymnasiums because though we do physical exercise, we are going to become servants-servants of India, servants of the world, and through these means, servants of God" (CW 36:182, my emphasis).

Since the specific mechanics of breathing fresh air-of pranayama-were integral to building "matchless valor," it followed that in his discussion of less vigorous public health regimens Gandhi advocated sleeping naked under a sheet-and a blanket in cold weather-outdoors. In no case was one to cover one's head while sleeping. If one's head got cold, a separate covering could be worn, but in no case was the nose to be covered so as to avoid breathing stale, contaminated air (1948, 5).

Along with his advocacy for simplified pranayama, Gandhi placed great faith in Khune's method of hydrotherapy (CW 12:67-75; cf. 50:38 1; 54:32, 228) and claimed that Khune's book on naturopathy had been translated into a number of Indian

'2Lest there be any doubt, Gandhi never regarded the body as an object of beauty or something upon which to place any positive moral value. In the Key to Health (1948) and "General Knowledge About Health" ([19131 1958-80) the body is described with unambiguous loathing as a bag of filth and the incarnation of hell, among other things (CW 12:166). As Gandhi pointed out in a speech to the All-India Teachers Training Camp in 1944, "[plhysically [man] is a contemptible worm" (CW 78:321). For Gandhi the body was simply a tool: a very useful and valuable tool which could be "used for its own destruction" (CW 34:543), in order to achieve greater things. To do this, however, it had to be kept strong, healthy, and under control.

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languages and enjoyed great popularity in Andhra (1948, 33).13 He felt, based on a "fairly large scale" experimental population of at least 100 patients, that hip baths proved very effective in treating constipation, hyperpyrexia, and general fever (CW 12:97-99). As he did with earth and air therapies, Gandhi went into considerable detail on the elemental mechanics and constituent properties of water therapy: temperature of water, how to get the water to the right temperature, depth of water, position of tub, length of time to sit in the tub, how to position one's feet outside the tub, and the necessity of keeping the extremities warm while the hips were submerged. All of these rules are based on scientific experimentation and rational proof (CW 12:73-74). Most significant, however, in the context of the present discussion, is what Gandhi had to say about Kuhne's advocacy for the sitz or friction bath.

The organ of reproduction is one of the most sensitive parts of the body. There is something illusive about the sensitiveness of the glans penis and the foreskin. Anyway, I know not how to describe it. Kuhne has made use of this knowledge for therapeutic purposes. He advises application of gentle friction to the outer end of external sexual organ by means of a soft wet piece of cloth, while cold water is being poured. In the case of the male, the glans penis should be covered with the foreskin before applying friction.... This friction should never cause pain. On the contrary the patient should find it pleasant and feel rested and peaceful at the end of the bath.... Insistence on keeping the sexual organ clean and patiently following the treatment outlined above will make the observance of brahmacharya comparatively easier.

(1948, 36)

As in the case of fresh air therapy, the relationship between maintaining good health and celibacy are clearly articulated here. It is also important to note, however, that in Gandhi's view not only health, as such, but common ailments like constipation in particular (CW 12:103) were directly linked to the physiology of sensual arousal. Moreover, this logic worked both ways making it possible for Gandhi to attribute his bouts with pleurisy, dysentery, and appendicitis to "imperfect celibacy" (CW 24:117). Even though Gandhi expressed some ambivalence about expounding the purely health benefits of brahmacharya (CW 12:45; 22:391-92; 36:456-57), and most certainly did not regard it as just physical (CW 22:43; cf. 10:205; 50:211-12), it is clear that good health was a necessary condition for self-control (CW 80:62) and that there was scientific justification for this argument (CW 26:449; 31:353) as well as empirical evidence by way of references to bodily labor, pranayama and brahmacharya in the Gita (CW 32:150, 159, 242). Writing to Krishnachandra in 1940 he pointed out that "brahmacharya and ahimsa would have no meaning in absence of the body" (CW 73:252).14

13Most likely Gandhi had in mind the work of Hanumanthrao, a reformer who was "trying to popularize [nature cure] in villages" (CW 30:171).

14In a letter to Darbari Sadhu, Gandhi explained in some detail why it was important to embody celibacy in terms of action, even while recognizing that brahmacharya itself was a transcendental ideal:

Just as man dissipates his physical strength through ordinary incontinence, so he dissipates his mental strength through mental incontinence, and, as physical weakness affects the mind, so mental weakness affects the body.... You seem to believe in the heart of your hearts that physical activity prevents or hinders us from watching the progress of our inward purification. My experience is the opposite of this.

(CW 50:410)

314 JOSEPH S. ALTER

Recognizing the integral relationship between celibacy, nonviolence, and health, Gandhi turned, in conjunction with pranayama, to yoga asans as "a possible cure [for] the evil habit of self-abuse among students" (CW 33:243; cf. CW 32:242-43, 244, 245, 268-69). Primarily through correspondence with S. D. Satavalekar (CW 33:215, 223, 236-37; 34:42) and Swami Kuvalyananda (CW 31:427; 33:454, 484; 34:16- 17, 69, 71-72, 100, 250; 36:472), two experts in the field, he experimented on the health value of various exercises. He came to the conclusion that although yoga was not a panacea-and could, in fact, be harmful if all it succeeded in doing was check the flow of semen and not develop strength to resist the violence of desire (CW 33:215)-it proved effective as a regimen of general fitness (CW 52:82; cf. 73:359), was helpful in treating some diseases (CW 10:317; 52:208), and was a practical means by which young men in particular could exercise self-control (CW 30:193; 54:435). Gandhi also came to regard it as a nonviolent means of physical training which would enable satyagrahis to tolerate extreme cold and heat, stand guard for hours, withstand beatings, and nurse others (CW 73:67-69).

Significantly, as Gandhi's experience with yoga evolved and his understanding of ahimsa developed, he became more convinced that nonyogic forms of physical fitness were at least incipiently violent. Writing to Prithvi Singh, a reformed revolutionary who founded the Ahimsak Vyayam Sangh (Nonviolent Exercise Association) (CW 71:98; 72:276, 371-72; 73:235; 74:43) in order to "train strong and vigorous bodies for nonviolence," Gandhi pointed out that for a satyagrahi who was willing to die for what he believed "there [would] be no need for exercise or any other kind of training. The training in exercise is for those who have not freed themselves from fear" (CW 74:82; cf. 72:328). Yet Gandhi, at other times, seems to have had an underlying admiration for certain aspects of regimented training, as in his commendation of Manikrao's program of mass drill exercises, and his translation of P.T. (physical training) drill terminology into Gujarati (CW 71:54).15 In light of Gandhi's rather ambivalent attitude toward physical fitness, it is noteworthy that, quite apart from the utilitarian exigencies of "bread labor" and manual work mentioned above, he seemed to regard spinning as a kind of pure, practical, productive form of exercise which was described, at least in one instance, as involving drill-like regimentation and self-control (CW 25:189). He also prescribed spinning as a form of therapy for young men who found it difficult to abide by brahmacharya (CW 34:372-74; 35:414). In a letter to Harjivan Kotak in 1927 he wrote with telling, but uncharacteristic, hyperbole: "Fix your thoughts exclusively on khadi; countless men may be wedded to her and yet she always remains a virgin. And a man who takes her alone as a wife will still be an inviolate brahmachari" (CW 35:325).

In keeping with his approach to celibacy, vegetarianism, yoga, and spinning, Gandhi's discussion of mud packs, hip baths, friction baths, and bed clothes is worked out as a rational science of moral health. It is precisely the scientific, experimental nature of naturopathy which makes it possible for Gandhi to develop a rational plan for health which is, at once, national-and, indeed, transnational-and also strictly self-oriented. It is a plan which works on the logic of what might be called a sociology of individual increments, and elemental configurations, in which the geopolitical state of the nation gets reimagined one patient at a time.

As with the individual, so with society. A village is but a group of individuals and

'5During imprisonment in South Africa Gandhi also reflected on the health value of regimented exercise for prisoners (CW 8:159-60; cf. 9:203).

GANDHI'S BODY, GANDHI'S TRUTH 315

the world, as I see it, is one vast village and mankind one family. The various functions in the human body have their parallel in the corporate life of society. What I have said about the inner and outer cleanliness of the individual, therefore, applies to the whole society.

(CW 78:320-21)

This perspective is reflected nowhere more clearly than in Gandhi's discussion of food and of food's intimate relationship to self-control. As he pointed out numerous times, controlling one's palate was intimately associated with controlling desire (CW 40:67; 44:79-81; cf. 50:209; 54:213) and-standard vegetarianism aside-a moderate, unspiced, minimally cooked, and quickly prepared meal of simple, unprocessed, natural food was the dietary basis for brahmacharya (CW 15:46; 34:92; 35:394), and probably the single most important variable in redefining the scope of public health.16 As he put it, reflecting on the nation as a whole from the perspective of his diet in jail in the early 1930s, "I am convinced that if we plan our diet on a scientific basis and eat moderately, nobody would fall ill" (CW 52:36). Writing only a few days later he pointed out that "[tihose who understand the value of self-control will find nothing but interest in the experiments about diet" (CW 52:&3).17 Characteristically, Gandhi paid close attention to detail in his discussion of food, pointing out, for example, that because people tend to use bread to sop up lentil gravy they get lazy about proper mastication. Since the digestion of starch begins in the mouth, he argued, starches should be eaten dry so as to ensure vigorous mastication and the proper flow of saliva (1948, 11).18

Gandhi's elaborate treatment of dietetics has been collected in a volume entitled

'6For example, in reply to a question posed by one of the ashram inmates regarding the time it should take to eat a meal, Gandhi wrote. "Ordinarily, twenty or thirty minutes should be regarded enough for those who have good teeth and who eat rotis, dal, rice and vegetables" (CW 50: 17-23).

17In a striking example of the extent to which food production, consumption and elimination were all equal parts of Gandhi's project, an extract from a letter to Raojibhai M. Patel is noteworthy.

I have often explained that care of the latrine and of the kitchen are aspects of the same task. If either of them is imperfectly done, bodily health would suffer. I have also shown that scavenging and cooking involve important moral and scientific principles. A cook doing his or her duty religiously will not only cook the food well but will also observe the principles of good health, that is, of brahmacharya. And a scavenger doing his or her duty religiously will not merely bury the night-soil but also observe the stools passed by each and inform each person about the state of his or her health. We have with us neither such an ideal scavenger nor such an ideal cook, but I have no doubt that the Ashram should produce a crop of them.

(CW 42:103; see also 12:6; 29:415; 78:320; 79:158)

Clearly these ideas were also directly linked to concerns with sanitation and public hygiene (cf. CW 11:428, 469; 73:378; 75:156).

"8The extent to which Gandhi was concerned with the precise details of health was not limited simply to diet, nature cure, yoga, and other more or less clearly defined domains of health. He responded to a question from Chhotubhai Patel on dental hygiene, for example, by saying: "One should not brush the teeth with a babul stick after a meal, but one must clean them with a finger and gargle well" (CW 54:3).

Similarly, he gave elaborate advice-almost 600 words worth in one case-on how to wash clothes in order to get them perfectly clean (CW 54:382).

316 JOSEPH S. ALTER

Diet and Diet Reform ([19491 1987), published posthumously by the Navajivan Trust. Reading through this volume, which puts together Gandhi's own writings on the subject with those of various correspondents to Young India and Harijan between 1929 and 1946, one gets a clear sense that Gandhi was looking for the key to national nutritional health by reprinting, for example, the League of Nations Health Committee report on minimal daily requirements of energy, fat, protein, minerals and vitamins ([19361 1949, 94-96); evaluating the health value of vegetable lard and olive oil in relation to pure ghee ([19461 1949, 76-78; CW 30:332, 466); criticizing the adulteration of the latter with the former ([19461 1949, 79); commenting on the pros and cons of skimmed milk in the context of selling whole milk diluted with water ([19401 1949, 68-69); republishing favorable reports on the nutritional composition of peanuts ([19351 1949, 56-57), neem leaves, tamarind, lemon seeds, guavas, and mangos ([19351 [19461 1949, 61-64), rice, wheat and gur ([19341 1949, 43-45); and criticizing the practice of polishing rice ([19351 1949, 45), the displacement of gur with refined sugar ([19351 1949, 47), the use of commercialized buffalo milk ([19351 1949, 67-68), among numerous other things (see CW 11:493- 510).

I think it is clear that Gandhi was in search of a reformed national diet that would be "regulated scientifically" (CW 75:411), such that "[elveryone would get pure milk, pure ghee, sufficient fruit and vegetables" (CW 75:6). In an article entitled "National Food," he lamented the fact that Tamils, Gujaratis, Bengalis, and Andhrans did not take to each others' "mode of cooking," but concluded that

it is necessary, therefore, for national workers to study the foods and methods of preparing them in the various provinces and discover common, simple and cheap dishes which all can take without upsetting the digestive tract.... What can be and should be aimed at are common dishes for common people.

([19341 1949, 28-29)

Although well aware of the problems inherent in putting a radical program of diet reform into practice on a national scale, I think the underlying logic of Gandhi's utopian vision of public health points toward a daily minimal requirement which is also the optimum of collective national strength. Thus in 1935 Gandhi published the findings of Dr. Aykroyd, the Director of Nutritional Research at Coonoor, who claimed that a well-balanced diet need not cost any more than 2 annas per day, or Rs. 4/- per month: sixteen ounces of soya bean, six ounces of buttermilk, two ounces of arhardal, an ounce of jaggery, and so forth, in smaller and smaller increments, of spinach, amaranth, potatoes, colacasia, and coconut oil, thus tabulating a perfect, cost- effective, simple diet.

Colonialism, Science and National Health

With only a slight shift in perspective one might rightly conclude that Gandhi was not so much obsessed by sex and food as by a discourse of science which allowed sex and food to become social, moral, and political facts of life, as well as biological ones. As I have shown, time and time again one reads in this regard, not about hermeneutics or philosophy, but about experiments and the attendant authority of objective science as a way of knowing the Truth about society through self- examination. Science in general, but experimentation in particular, was a peculiar

GANDHI'S BODY, GANDHI'S TRUTH 317

discourse in the transnational context of late imperialism, but Gandhi was clearly convinced that detached, compassionate objectivity provided the means by which to get at Truth (CW 1:82-86).'9 Reflecting on the utopian scope of possible research on health from the vantage point of his own limitations, he wrote, "if those who have independent experience and have some scientific training would conduct experiments in order to find physical and spiritual values of different fruits, they would no doubt render service in a field which is capable of limitless exploration" (CW 34:185).

Any number of clear examples of Gandhi's meticulous, scientific logic may be found with regard to the relative merits of pulses, eggs, salt, brown bread, fruits and nuts, for example (CW 11:493, 502; 14:170; cf. 12:424-25; 33:379; 34:120-21; 35:479-80), but writing on the subject of fasts in 1924 (CW 29:315-19; cf. 34:185; 36:158), and reflecting on the nature of his search for Truth, Gandhi remarked that "[{life is but an endless series of experiments ... in my experimentation I must involve the whole of my kind...." (CW 25:199).20

For Gandhi science was convincing, at least in part, because of the degree to which it made possible a means for rethinking the problem of social scale- impoverished villages, racist school boys, endemic promiscuity, and overpopulation- outside a framework of tradition or history. Science was a means by which to translate the traditional roots of charisma, as well as experiments with Truth, into modern public health for "the whole of [his] kind." I say modern public health, rather than enigmatic faddism, for it is hard to imagine Gandhi's agenda for national moral reform as simply anachronistic, given his virtual disregard for the authority of anything, God notwithstanding, other than direct, contemporary personal experience-systematic, trial-and-error, ashram-as-laboratory, publish-your-results, empirical experience which could locate Truth precisely outside the murky interstices of modernity and tradition (CW 35:305).

In this regard it is important to consider Gandhi's rather unique attitude toward famine relief in India, clearly an issue which involved food, but less in terms of gross nutrition for the mass of starving aid-recipients than in terms of the particular biomoral agency of food and food transactions in the nationalist struggle. Writing for the Indian Opinion in March 1908, Gandhi placed the blame for the Indian famine

19Although linked, indubitably, with Europe-and to an intellectual legacy going back to the Enlightenment and beyond-science derives modern authority from its putative objectivity. Its position, as a way of knowing, lies outside of ideology, history and culture; it is putatively immune, that is, from hegemony, while still clearly implicated in a complex genealogy of power/knowledge. While working to "escape" both tradition and modernity, Gandhi could not avoid the entanglement of this genealogy.

20As he put it in a speech at the opening of Tibbi medical college-somewhat self- consciously given his view on institutionalized medicine-"I would like to pay my humble tribute to the spirit of research that fires the modern scientists" (CW 19:357-58; cf. 26:299). And again, speaking to students at the inauguration of the Khadi Vidyalaya in 1941, he said, "[mlake your mind and intellect scientific, so that you ... will search for new things for the betterment of the country" (CW 74:203). An analogous point is made in a letter to Jamnadas Gandhi, while reflecting on why it might be necessary to go against conventional wisdom, tradition and religious teaching and give up milk. "The best test is this: Does the thing appeal to reason, leaving aside the question whether or not it was considered in the past" (CW 12:147; cf 15:32, 43, 46, 71, 74; 28:240).

Appealing to reason, and reflecting on the relative merits of various dairy products, Gandhi responded to a simple query by D. B. Kalelkar by saying, "as regards [the question of) cow's milk, I want to write not a letter, but a book for you (CW 30:333; 74:247, 360-61; cf. 55:210, 214).

318 JOSEPH S. ALTER

"with us [the Indians], our chief fault being that we have very little truth in us" (CW 8:157). He then chastised the Natal Indians for their "habit of deceitfulness" and general lack of honesty. Following on this he built up to his main point.

Some readers may wonder what the connection is between fraudulent practice . .. on the one hand and famine on the other. That we do not perceive this connection is in itself an error.

Our examples [of deceit and corruption] are only symptoms of a chronic disease within us.... It would be a great and true help indeed if, instead of sending money from here or being useful in some other way, we reformed ourselves and learnt to be truthful.... [Glood or bad actions of individuals have a corresponding effect on a whole people.

(CW 8:157)

And so, based on his faith in the efficacy of naturopathy in particular, and what might be called the political demography of public health and self-discipline, Gandhi pointed out that it was only possible to treat a disease of the body politic by first healing oneself. "How can we help?" he asked rhetorically in response to reports of the 1911 Indian famine where "hundreds of thousands" were starving in Gujarat. "The first way is to restrain our luxurious ways, our pretensions, our pride and our sharp practices and crave God's forgiveness for the sins we have committed" (CW 11:182). Saving, collecting, and then sending money to the famine stricken was obviously a pragmatic issue here, as was faith in God, but underlying both of these, I would argue, was Gandhi's growing awareness of how, to put it graphically, middle- class constipation in the Transvaal, and the systematic cure and prevention of constipation among other things (CW 12:102-4), was part and parcel of famine relief in Gujarat. This kind of thinking on the biomoral imperative of public life and personal health is clearly apparent when, in early 1921, Gandhi reflected on the relationship between the consumption of liquor and mass starvation as both were implicated in "self-purification" and noncooperation.

To become one people means that the thirty crores must become one family. To be one nation means believing that, when a single Indian dies of starvation, all of us are dying of it and acting accordingly. The best way of doing this is for every person to take under his charge the people in his immediate neighbourhood.

(CW 19:285)

Seeing here the precise intersection of science, public health, and moral political action, brings us directly to the question of satyagraha, militant nonviolence.

Gandhi himself was not completely satisfied that either the indigenous term or its somewhat oxymoronic English gloss really captured the essence of his experimental program. For this reason he disavowed the gloss "passive resistance" as denoting narrow-minded weakness and violence by default. The term satyagraha was Gandhi's invention based on the conjunction of two words: satya, meaning truth, and agraha meaning firmness. The connection between satyagraha and brahmacharya is critical, and in his autobiography Gandhi pointed out that the latter provided the means- the only means-for realizing the former.

Writing in his autobiography, Gandhi locates a discovery of celibacy's power in the midst of the Zulu rebellion's violent face-to-face carnage, and his role as sergeant major in a voluntary ambulance corps assigned to provide medical services to the wounded rebels. These "rebels" were not so much soldiers, or even men who had been wounded in battle, as peasant sympathizers who had been either taken prisoner and

GANDHI'S BODY, GANDHI'S TRUTH 319

whipped on grounds of suspicion or else those who were "friendly" but had been shot by accident. These were men upon whom the violence of empire did not impinge even with the dubious legitimacy of war. The violence took shape as a result of what Gandhi characterizes as the more vivid horror of a hamlet-to-hamlet "man-hunt" (1957, 315), "where there was no resistance that one could see" (1957, 314). For most of the Zulus who needed treatment the main problem was not in the magnitude of their injuries, but in the convergence of violence and racism. Through passive neglect Zulu wounds were left to fester, and Gandhi's task, as an Indian, was to nurse the "rebels" back to health-to heal wounds inflicted by mistake in a much larger context where violence was unmistakably embodied. Walking across the "solemn solitude" of the sparsely populated veld, following on the tracks of mounted infantry from one danger spot to another, Gandhi came to the following conclusion about celibacy:

I clearly saw that one aspiring to serve humanity with his whole soul could not do without it. It was borne in upon me that I should have more and more occasions for service of the kind I was rendering, and that I should find myself unequal to the task if I were engaged in the pleasures of family life and in the propagation and rearing of children....

Without the observance of brahmacharya service of the family would be inconsistent with service of the community. With brahmacharya they would be perfectly consistent.

(1957, 316)

While it may at first glance seem incongruous, I think it is perfectly logical for Gandhi to discover the anatomy of militant nonviolence in a context where the brutality of Empire took such unspeakable form. One is apt to lose touch with the sheer physicality of violence, as it were, and become numb to the working of terror and hate when it is not experienced first hand. Celibacy emerged, therefore, as the only possible response to the horror of violence which Gandhi saw because it cross- cut that problematic space between ideology and biology which terror so clearly brought to light.

Aside from the fact that one can see, in countless letters written throughout his life, Gandhi's virtual obsession with hands-on healing (CW 11:351-56; 12:146, 269- 71; 28:78-79; 29:199; 30:99; 31:341, 394; 52:106; 80:160, 330-31)21-with the alleviation of suffering, that is-the relationship between violence and health becomes all the more apparent when looking at Gandhi's later life.22 Amidst a rising tide of communal violence in Noakhali and elsewhere, and the impending partition of India and Pakistan, Gandhi often put himself directly into situations of violent confrontation. In part he sought to bring his charisma to bear in order to restore peace, and, as Parekh has pointed out, the events in Noakhali in particular resulted in a great deal of soul-searching on Gandhi's part. His response was characteristic, for in searching to find out why "the spell of ahimsa" was not working, why Hindus and Muslims continued to kill one another, Gandhi experimented by sleeping naked with

2"Gandhi was quite aware of his enigmatic reputation, and in a letter to the ailing Prabhashankar Pattani referred to himself-tongue in cheek while making reference to the yogic physician Swami Kuvalyananda and to an anonymous water therapist-"as ... also ... one of [those] quacks" (CW 37:364).

22Speaking on the subject of nonviolence and healing others, Gandhi pointed out that it would be one's moral obligation, and an exercise in selfless service, to nurse anyone, even the likes of General Dyer, back to health (CW 19:179).

320 JOSEPH S. ALTER

his grandniece in order to test the full extent of his self-control-to both discover and deploy the ultimate power of nonviolence (CW 79:212-13, 215, 222, 238). Writing after a silence of three months in the first of a series of five articles on brahmacharya, published in the Harijan between June 8 and July 27, 1947, Gandhi explains himself: "To resume writing for the Harijian under these adverse conditions would be ordinarily considered madness. But what appears unpractical from the ordinary standpoint is feasible under divine guidance. I believe I dance to the divine tune. If this is delusion, I treasure it" ([19471 1958, 165). But then, rather than talk of God and divinity in the face of impending violence, Gandhi confines himself to a topic "of eternal value": celibacy. Paraphrasing the Gita, he describes at length the character traits of a perfect celibate: health, longevity, tirelessness, brightness, steadfastness, and neatness ([19471 1958, 166); a description which is articulated, in the earlier epic, on the battlefield just before another terrible war of brother against brother.

Like the Zulu rebellion, the violence leading up to the partition of India and Pakistan demanded, in Gandhi's view, an embodied response which would substantiate, and not just theorize or even operationalize, Truth. But what comes out most strongly in the five essays on brahmacharya is not the insight they provide into the soul of a great man, but their public character as discourse on national health. In writing about sex amidst violence on a horrible, subcontinental scale, Gandhi was not just trying to find the power within himself to make a difference, he was articulating the means by which national health could be achieved in the same enigmatically personal terms in which violence itself was manifest. Just as society was degenerating into the mindless brutality of communal rage, of neighbor killing neighbor, so the nation had to be regenerated one person at a time. One drop of vital fluid conserved, one might even say-in terms of hydraulic ratios and metaphors of opposing flow- for every sixty drops of blood spilled. Writing two months before Independence, and one week after spelling out eleven modes of integral discipline to "conserve and sublimate the vital fluid, . .. one drop of which has the potential to bring into being a human life" Gandhi put it this way: "The first thing is to know what true brahmacharya is, then to realize its value and lastly to try and cultivate this priceless virtue. I hold that true service of the country demands this observance" ([19471 1958, 166; see also CW 35:305). And this, keeping in mind the complex metaphors of production, reproduction, suffering, and public service, was very hard work: "A man striving for success in brahmacharya suffers pain as a woman does in labor" (CW 32:214).

I do not think, in expressing these views-or the seemingly fantastic, parallel sentiment that a nation becomes immortal when the death of any one is felt by every one as the loss of an only son (CW 16:230)-that Gandhi was so much a prisoner of some kind of transcendent, humanistic hope, as a unique product of imperial times, times in which the nature of hope itself-and humanity as such-needed to be recast. Looking toward the future of India, Gandhi escaped from the iron cage of rationality and blind faith into a science of his own creation which held out the possibility, at least, for public health to have a cumulative effect; for an anatomy of charisma to also be the simple arithmetic of demographic reform.23

23As Gandhi put it, in a directly related context, there was social, economic, and moral power inherent in the geometric growth from a base of two million spinning wheels, to a final goal of one for each of India's fifty million families (CW 19:557; cf. 26:213). National self- purification on a scale "so high that we would regain that birthright of ours which we have

GANDHI'S BODY, GANDHI'S TRUTH 321

What makes this project seem enigmatic is the fact that Gandhi defined the problem of violence, and the goal of nonviolence, in terms which are at once global and intimate, imperial and personal, as well as biological and moral. In seeking to address this problem he refused to locate the Truth of nonviolence on any level of analysis which only rationalized and did not also embody that relationship. In other words, a complex myth of science-which was itself incarceratory on the level of self- knowledge while delimiting the terms of empowered freedom-made it possible for Gandhi to escape from the confining limits of abstract hope into the patient praxis of decolonizing bodies.

lost" was also made possible when and if "crores of people" were to wear khadi (CW 21:370- 71). Economics aside, it is important to note that in Gandhi's view the wearing of foreign cloth was a "a kind of disease," (CW 22:45), and wearing khaddar was not just homespun politics, it was a natural cure or tonic (CW 30:17; cf. 12:38-39), if not, by any means, a panacea (CW 23:459). Significantly, spinning also gave "one the peace of mind [needed) for observing brahmacharya" (CW 27: 141; 30:450-52).

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