ABSTRACT
No other thinker from within the ranks of decolonization has presented as
robust and radical a critique of medicine as has Mohandas Karamchand
Gandhi. Gandhi’s well-known opposition to medicine appears in capsule
form in Hind Swaraj, his ‘cranky’ 1910 polemic against modern civiliza-
tion.1 A rich thematics of illness and therapeutics can, however, be traced
elsewhere in his oeuvre. And yet, barring a few important exceptions,
Gandhian scholars have not given this broader text of his critique of medicine
the analytic centrality it deserves.2 Within the framework of postcolonial theory as well, the specifics of Gandhi’s critique of medicine in modernity
have not generated wide interpretive interest. One has only to recall post-
colonial critics’ engagement with Frantz Fanon’s diagnoses of colonialism’s
productivity in the realm of pathology, and western medicine’s perverse
implication in that process, to recognize the relative critical neglect of
Gandhi’s position on comparable matters.3 Arguably, Gandhi’s claims about
medicine’s chronic incompatibility with the ethical and political well being
of humanity are at once more far-reaching and more radical than Fanon’s compelling yet ultimately ambivalent critique of colonial medicine.4 Unlike
Fanon’s, Gandhi’s indictment stems from more than just his discontent with
medicine’s misappropriation as a mode of colonial power. Shaped by a
bioethical commitment to self-liberating forms of ascesis, a far more deeply
rooted antagonism frames the latter’s critical stance on the professional
practice of medicine.5 Gandhi’s zest for ethical self-cultivation grounded in
the body transforms illness as well as therapeutics into lay ascetic domains.
In this context, internalized presuppositions about human life and well being, manifest in the expert interventions of institutionalized medicine, find
their limit in a self-conscious ascetic disregard for life unlimited.