Revisiting Gandhi in the Age of Masculinity and Majoritarianism

In his classic of political psychology, Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (1983), Ashis Nandy argued that colonial culture assumed a fundamental binary of masculinity / femininity, entailing a series of oppositions – strong / weak, male / female, adult / child, colonizer / colonized, British / Indian, ruler / ruled, majority / minority. This rigid framework had no place for complex, hybrid or fluid identities. 
 
It was Mahatma Gandhi who disrupted this binaristic scheme through a psychologically astute deployment of androgyny in his anti-colonial politics of non-violence. He strategically fused masculine and feminine elements in his personality -- drawing on androgynous references widely available in traditional Hinduism -- eventually leading the way to decolonization.  
 
In contemporary India, Hindutva -- modelled on colonial ideology -- reinstates hyper-masculinity and majoritarianism to mainstream politics. Colonial binaries, now grafted on to communal discourse, show Muslims as violent and powerful, and Hindus as non-violent and effete – a historical wrong that has to be righted by reversing the roles of the two religious groups. 
 
The paper focuses on how Hindutva targets specifically those elements whether in Gandhi ('the father of the nation') or Ram (divine king and ideal sovereign of the Hindu epic) that are perceived as effeminate and androgynous and the return of colonial ideas about gender and power in these times of religious nationalism and populist majoritarianism in India."

Ananya Vajpeyi is a Fellow and Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. She is also a Research Consultant with the Nilgiri Archaeological Project at the University of Ghent, Belgium, and a Visiting Professor at Ashoka University.  
 
She is the author of the award-winning Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India (Harvard University Press, 2012), as well as the co-editor of Minorities and Populism: Critical Perspectives from South Asia and Europe (Springer, 2020).