Gandhi: Antiliberal or a Departure within Liberalism? (Reflections on Self-making as Political Technology)

<strong>Centre for the Study of Social Systems School of Social Sciences</strong> <strong>CSSS Colloquium</strong> <strong>Prof. Manas Ray</strong> (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta) a talk on <strong>Gandhi: Antiliberal or a Departure within Liberalism? (Reflections on Self-making as Political Technology)</strong> Date: <strong>October 8, 2015</strong> <strong>Abstract: </strong>Ever since M K Gandhi attained international visibility as the leader of Indian masses in the 1920s, he has enjoyed an iconic presence for his anti-western – and, therefore, anti-liberal – views. Man of mud-packs and prayer meetings, he rejected machines, especially heavy machines, held deeply esoteric ideas about the body along with dietary and sexual practices (which would include a strong thrust on celibacy), believed in no division between the personal and the political, was strongly against majoritarian views of democracy, regarded religious truths over and above all other claims on public life, held the Indian village as the repository of ancient wisdom which, he thought, should guide us in our contemporary strives and was singularly in favour of ahimsa as a divine, spiritual disposition to attain political and social goals. All these made him a prefect (a touch hyperbolic) example of an eastern sage vis-à-vis the man of reason and science of the West. As against such prevalent notions of Gandhi's anti-westernism, the paper tries to argue that Gandhi was a deeply modern and democratic thinker, not in spite of but to a large extent because of such positions as enlisted above. I would like to submit that the fact that Gandhi made religion the highpoint of his politics did not take him away from liberal modes of subject formation. Far from being contradictory to western canons of liberalism, Gandhi's thinking bears close resonance with Kant's notion of ethical sovereignty and with pastoral understandings of governance that inform liberal technologies of citizen formation. The paper will try to compare Gandhi's lectures on the Gita with Weber's reading of protestant ethics and also to understand the special meaning he gave to suffering and to such rituals as fasting and observance of silence for his ethico-political project. Bio Data:Manas Ray teaches Cultural Studies and Sociology at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. He convenes two MPhil/PhD courses– "Modernity and the Making of the Social" &amp; "Biopolitics, Ethics and Subjectivation". He has published in a wide variety of areas including continental political philosophy, critical legal theory, cultural lives of Indian diasporas, and memory and locality of post-partition Calcutta. An anthology of his essays on indenture, diaspora and displacement – Displaced: Lives on the Move -- is forthcoming from Primus Books (2016). He was the editor ofStudies in Humanities and Social Sciences (the journal of Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla) between 2009 and 2011. He has been coordinating the Cultural Studies Workshop, an annual interdisciplinary pedagogic workshop run by the CSSSC for most of its life across two decades.