An Untouchable in Search of an Asketic Gandhi

This chapter explores the imaginary possibility of a dialogue between M K Gandhi and Michel Foucault’s ideas on political subjectivity vis-à-vis the question of postcolonial power. The argument is that Gandhi’s discussion of a specific type of political self-fashioning in Hind Swaraj (1909) encapsulates the idea of “ascetic” that Foucault elaborates in The Hermeneutics of the Subject (1982). What further mediates this dialogue is the representation of Bakha, a fictional character in Mulk Raj Anand’s novel, Untouchable (1935). This Gandhi–Foucault engagement helps us to understand how Bakha’s meeting with Gandhi in the novel takes us to a new horizon of “postcolonial political.”