Gabriel, Karen, Dr.

By Katherine Harrison on 23 Apr | 0 comments

I am a Reader (Associate Professor) with the Dept. of English, St. Stephen's College, Delhi University, and also Senior Fellow with the Centre for Women's Development Studies, New Delhi. My research interests tend to be around the relationships between gender, sexuality, culture, representation and nation, areas that I have published in as well.

GEXCEL PROJECT:
Resisting Men: Gandhi, Gender and Anti-colonialism

The process referred to as globalisation or transnationalisation, has historical roots in the multi-layered, complex mechanics of the encounters of imperialism and colonialism. This study proposes that, to understand the gender dynamics integral to transnationalisation, it is necessary to examine the processes of gendering inherent to imperialism and colonialism, and the gendered legacies of those encounters. Specifically, in order to understand how masculinities are generated, operationalised, transmitted and embodied within specific hegemonic formations, it is imperative to trace the gendered processes that shaped those formations in the first instance.

To elaborate and illustrate these propositions, this study will firstly, review the colonial encounter between Britain and India and the ways in which that encounter was gendered, focusing specifically on new and emergent forms of the equation of masculinity with power. Arguably, the masculinities that colonised men were to aspire to were, in effect, the ideological conduits for the transmission and appropriation of power structures (bureaucracy, etc) and of their material props (technologies). Within the hegemonic formations of colonialism then, emergent types of masculinity served to perpetuate the fundamental invariance of the hegemony of men, even as the process of encounter itself continued to generate newer, indigenous masculinities, as colonised patriarchal formations came under pressure to transform.

Secondly, the study will examine the unique case of Mohandas Gandhi, in his attempts to grapple with the transformations in gender and power relations that were being effected under colonialism. Gandhi’s invocations of asceticism, poverty, Truth, Non-Violence, etc. seemed to invert the hegemonic equations of masculinity with power, but, as the study will argue, it remained a contest between and within masculinities; it was neither an affirmation of women, nor a successful challenge to the process of transmission and appropriation of the structures of power. While it sought to embody the reconfigured masculinity – through specific bodily practices, but also through bodily dislocations (variously from wealth, luxury, urban areas, violence) – it failed to extend that program of embodiment into a dismantling of masculine hegemony. The study will attempt to explain this failure in terms of (a) the persistence of patriarchal principles in Gandhian thought; and (b) the spread of the political organisation of the nation, post-colonially and transnationally, as itself a form of the persistence of the hegemony of men. By doing so, the study will attempt to indicate the ways in which contemporary transnationalisation continues to perpetuate male hegemony, even as it modifies and transforms.

Thirdly, the study will look at the transformations in the meanings of Gandhi and Gandhianism, as not a hegemonic but an iconic ideological constellation, within contemporary manufacturings of political significations, in national and international discursive spaces. It will look at the continuations and modifications in this figure, as it is appropriated and tailored to legitimise radically right-wing nationalist programs and positions within India, and contrarily, to articulate positions of dissent from globalising hegemonies, transnationally.