INTRODUCTION

Any scholar embarking on a study of Gandhi's thought must seriously consider Narayan Desai's view (himself a Gandhian and an ashramite) that Gandhi's life and thought are intertwined and inseparable, such that the spiritual or religious Gandhi is inseparable from the political one. Desai's opinion that ‘Gandhi cannot be properly understood in parts. He must be studied in totality’ reminds us that Gandhi embodied the message of truth and ahimsa (non-violence) by the way he lived his life. In his biography on Gandhi, Desai warns us of the ineluctable move to study and thereby create two diametrically opposed Gandhis – the idealist philosopher and the activist politician. Understanding Gandhi's thought thus poses an immense challenge if one wishes to simultaneously examine both the Gandhi that led the Indian masses to freedom from colonial rule and the Gandhi of spinning, fasting, celibacy and silence. As we know, Gandhi's politics brought together the divided elite politics of the Indian National Congress (hereafter, the Congress) and popular uprisings of the masses, particularly the rural peasantry, in the Indian subcontinent. His politics thus simultaneously sought to reach two audiences – the elite and the masses – through two separate registers of ‘communication and persuasion’. While Gandhi's writings – speeches, articles, books, interviews, and so on– attended to the elites, to the peasant, words when written appeared ‘a taking away of language rather than a giving’. Gandhi therefore resorted to the use of other elements in the complex and wide semiotic register available in rural India, which included ‘the symbolism of a whole range of non-discursive and non-modern ways of making meaning – from prayers to silences to dress to food, which for all their non-wordiness represented ideas and persuaded people by techniques that had been deployed for their persuasion for centuries’.